Eventually realising that they were wasting their money, my parents took me out of school and placed me in the local secondary modern. The classes were huge, so I could sit at the back and do nothing, and that’s exactly what I did: nothing. My best friend was a girl called Sue Maddern, who was strong and full of self-confidence. I was bullied when I got there because I’d come from a posh school, so I teamed up with her and became a bit of a smart arse. It was self-protection: I’d never forgotten the beating I had as a 6-year-old and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. Having said that, I made a few lifelong friends there and have some good memories of those days.
While school felt like a waste of time, once I joined the local theatre club at the age of 11 I absolutely loved it. The club, which was based in the aptly named Shakespeare Street, was great fun and I couldn’t wait to go there every week. I also joined a drama class at Clarendon College in Nottingham, run by a man named Allen Tipton, who became a mentor and friend to me. He was a brilliant teacher, who got us kids organised into one production after another and managed to bring out the best in all of us. This was, coincidentally, where Robert Lindsay (who was my boyfriend at RADA) started his drama education, although we didn’t know one another there.
By the age of 13 all that mattered to me, apart from my horses, was drama. I was also a member of the Burton Joyce Players in our village and had my first female lead in their production of The Seventh Veil, based on the famous film starring Ann Todd and James Mason. I played a young girl – Francesca – a pianist, with an obsessive Uncle Nicholas (played by the vicar, who was brilliant). When she tries to run away, he smashes his cane down on her hands and virtually cripples her, so she is a broken woman.
At the same time I joined the Midland Academy, a local drama school run by a wonderful woman called Miss Audrey Albrecht. This was the beginning of my formal training, in readiness for an eventual audition for RADA. Miss Albrecht was passionate about poetry and insisted I enter all the Poetry Society as well as the many LAMDA examinations, and while this seemed like hard work at the time it stood me in great stead.
After leaving school I attended the Academy full-time, from 16 to 18, and during that time I passed numerous poetry and drama exams. I adored Miss Albrecht, who became in some ways like a second mother to me. She was firm and extremely demanding, but I never minded because she believed in me, and along with Allen Tipton she played a big part in shaping my future. At the same time, my own mother insisted I attend finishing classes, where I learnt how to sit properly and walk beautifully, how to close a door behind me without turning around, how to get out of a car elegantly with no knickers showing and, of course, how to speak properly.
With all this going on my life was incredibly full – I think maybe it was Mum’s way of delaying my interest in boys. I had the Theatre Club, Allen Tipton’s classes, school, the Burton Joyce Players and the Midland Academy, so I was almost always rehearsing for or appearing in a production. It was a wonderful grounding, and by the age of 15 I was determined to make a career on the stage. Actually, it was seeing Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music that finally nailed my decision.
The school had other ideas, though: when I told my careers teacher that I wanted to be an actress she just laughed and told me to stop living in dreamland. Who did I think I was, Doris Day? Well yes, actually. Careers advisers were like that then: they advised the boys to go into engineering and the girls to train as secretaries. They made me feel so ridiculous that I thought, OK, I will go and train as a secretary just to prove that I can do it.
Mother was ambitious for me and I’m sure she only agreed to the secretarial training as an insurance policy. She found a private course held in a large Edwardian semi. On the first morning I turned up at the address I’d been given and was shown into a room by a small, rotund lady – not very happy, really quite odd. There was a long table in the middle and six big black typewriters on either side. Three girls were already on one side, two on the other, and I was shown to the empty place. A very tall and sinewy-looking man with a face like thunder walked in, obviously in charge. He stood at the end of the table and lifted one hand up while glancing at a watch on his other wrist. As a clock chimed, he brought his hand down hard on the table, which made me jump and giggle. He then came over and without saying a word showed me what I was supposed to do, and left me to it. I remember he smelled of camphor oil, like bandages.
I started, but the big black keys were very temperamental: you’d hit them and they would shoot back or get stuck. The Lurcher look-alike came over and without looking at me uttered his only word that day: ‘Rhythm.’ Furiously pulling out all the keys now jammed in the machine, he repeated himself. I did my best to hold in a giggle but as he was walking away he turned sharply and flashed his eyes at me, which stopped me in my tracks. During the allotted two hours I’d asked to go to the loo (which was apparently not allowed), I’d asked for a drink of water (also not allowed) and now my keys were permanently stuck in a criss-crossed heap inside the machine. By this time I was hysterical with suppressed laughter and the other girls were trying hard not to join in. ‘Lurch’ was red-faced with anger and the small woman who had shown me in (presumably his wife) hustled me out of the room and sent me home, telling me as she did so that I was disturbing the other girls.
Five days later I went back for another try. The small woman opened the door and stared at me with anger in her eyes. She then told me that her husband had died due to stress and the lessons were cancelled, as if it was my fault. After that, I gave up the quest to become a secretary.
It was my one and only attempt to learn a practical skill. Afterwards I told my mother that I wanted to go to drama school and she backed me 100 percent. I’m not sure which of us was more determined that I would make it, but while I gave my all to acting, other distractions threatened to derail my efforts: boys had arrived on the scene.
I always got on well with boys and seemed to attract them, but until I was 15 I had no romantic interest in them at all. I was a bit of a tomboy and as far as I was concerned boys were pals. They could be fun, sometimes they were noisy and smelly, but mostly I just enjoyed having them around.
My closest male friend from school was Gordon Lewingdon. We got on really well and often he came round to my house. I thought of him as a mate, so it only dawned on me much later that Gordon loved me. I was horrible to him, thoughtless and mean, flirting with all the other boys from the village who used to congregate at my house, but I adored him too. Oh, the fickleness of youth! We both fooled around and kissed a bit, but nothing more – I’m not sure I knew what ‘more’ was at that stage.
Years later, when I bumped into Gordon, he agreed that I’d treated him badly. He told me he had a doll that he used to pretend was me and he would stick pins in it! He was, and still is, a lovely man and we will always be friends.
But Gordon wasn’t my only suitor (I had several) and when I was just 13 he and three other boys actually followed me on holiday to Wales. Gordon had told me that he couldn’t bear to be away from me for a whole week and I was happy for them to come along. They wanted to cycle all the way to Wales from Nottingham but their parents insisted they went part of the journey on the train. They arrived soon after my family and me, setting up tents in a nearby field, but a deluge of rain swamped their camp. Late that night they turned up at our hotel looking like drowned rats. Mum couldn’t leave them with nowhere to sleep, so she paid for a room, but put them on the train home the next day.
We were a proper gang in Burton Joyce and went everywhere together but mainly hung out at my house because I had the pool. There was Gordon, Chas, Dave, Steve, Ian and John, plus a few others over the years. Every now and then I was asked out by each of them in turn, but I wanted a gang, not a boyfriend. I’d ride my horse and my little entourage would follow on their bikes. I did go on a couple of dates with a boy