I caught other girls giving me sideways glances whenever I spoke. Nobody sounded like me, and I felt out of place. They were all very well put together too, in clothes that were actual makes, while mine were from C&A or the Littlewoods catalogue.
‘Cheryl Tweedy, please step forward.’ We were in a grand hall, and I was being asked to show off a little routine.
I could sense the other girls giving me funny looks and it put me right off because I was used to being super comfortable and completely fitting in, whatever I did.
‘What?’ I said when the teacher said something I didn’t quite hear. ‘Pardon,’ she corrected snootily. ‘We always say “pardon” not “what”, don’t we, gals?’
I thought to myself, ‘That’s funny, none of me teachers at school ever tell me that.’
We slept in a big dormitory and I hated it. I just wanted to go home and climb into my bunk bed. Even if Andrew was there fighting with me or trying to dangle me off the top bunk like he sometimes did for a laugh, I would have felt much happier than I did here.
I wrote a letter home and said, ‘Tell Monty I miss him.’ Really, I missed everything and everyone back home but I didn’t want anyone worrying about me. I missed the noise and the chaos in our house, I missed bumping into my aunties and uncles and cousins who all lived two minutes away from our house, and on Sunday I really, really missed having a roast dinner at my Nana’s, knowing everyone else would be there as usual. Sometimes it was bedlam, but I still would have swapped places in a flash.
One time Andrew and Gillian got caught smoking behind my Nana’s settee. They’d taken her ashtray and lit the old cigarette ends. My dad saw the smoke coming from behind the settee and went crazy. Gillian and Andrew were only small at the time so it must have been quite a few years before, but memories like that came back to me as I lay in my bed in the dormitory, feeling a million miles away from home.
I thought about my school as well. I went to St Lawrence’s Roman Catholic Primary, even though we weren’t Catholics. It was just down the road from our house and had a very good reputation; that’s why Mam and Dad sent us there. I loved it, and I’d even asked Mam if I could take my Holy Communion like the other girls because I wanted to wear the white dress and gloves. ‘You can decide your own religion when you’re old enough,’ Mam told me. Our head teacher was a nun and I felt peaceful in that school, and like I belonged. I had a go at playing the cello, the clarinet and the flute. It was fun and easy and not strict.
Mam would walk us to school every morning and I remember one day she suddenly made us stop in the street.
‘Look! There’s a hedgehog stuck down there!’
I peered down and saw this huge hedgehog completely wedged at the bottom of an open manhole. Mam made us run home and fetch a bucket and spade and rubber gloves, which we used to rescue it. We then took the hedgehog to the park to set it free. We were late for school but my mam explained what had happened and we didn’t get into trouble.
Joe was the one who usually got into trouble, not the rest of us. There’d often be a knock on the door and a neighbour would be standing there fuming and telling my mam: ‘Your son’s bashed my son.’
He was just like many of the other teenagers in the neighbourhood and Mam would wallop Joe when he misbehaved, even though she is only four-foot ten. I couldn’t remember a time when my big brother wasn’t taller than her, in fact. Mam was pretty strong for her size and we all got smacked by my mother when we were naughty, usually on the back of the legs. It always stung like mad and I remember we’d threaten to phone ChildLine whenever that happened, though we were never serious.
My dad would be more likely to shout when things went wrong, like the time when Joe broke his leg after getting drunk and falling down an open drain. Dad exploded and shouted really loudly, and I had to put my hands over my ears.
It was chaos a lot of the time, but it was home, and it was all I knew. Lying in this neat and quiet dormitory, surrounded by girls who wore Alice bands and spoke like the Queen, made it seem like Newcastle was in another world, or even another universe.
On my last day at the Royal Ballet my mam came to watch the farewell presentation. I was that happy to see her sitting there amongst all the other mothers that I couldn’t help waving and grinning at her. All the rest of the girls stood like little statues, as we’d been told to do, but I was so excited I just couldn’t help myself. Even when Mam tried shaking her head and mouthing at me nervously to stop, I carried on.
‘How could they all stand there like that?’ I asked her later that day, when we were finally heading home.
I’d skipped out of the gates as fast as I could, absolutely delighted to be getting out of that stuffy place.
‘It’s called etiquette,’ Mam said.
‘Pardon?’ I replied, not for the first time that day. I could see that word was annoying my mam but I couldn’t help using it, because it had been drummed into me all week.
‘Cheryl, if you pardon me once more I swear I’ll knock your block off,’ Mam replied. She wasn’t joking, either, but I was so happy to be back with my mam. It had felt like I’d been away forever, and I just wanted to get back to everything I knew and loved.
‘I want to give up ballet,’ I announced just a few days later, when I was eating a packet of crisps at home in front of the telly. ‘It’s not fun any more.’
‘That’s fine, Cheryl,’ Mam said. ‘If you don’t like it you don’t have to do it. That’s the end of it.’
I didn’t give up dancing altogether. I still did some other classes, but not as regularly, and definitely not as passionately.
I was in my last year of primary school by now, and so it was inevitable that my life was changing in other ways too. I was about to leave St Lawrence’s and go to Walker School. I was growing up, and it was a little bit daunting, but exciting too.
There was also another big change about to happen in my life, although this was one I definitely didn’t see coming. I was eleven years old; I can remember the day it happened like it was yesterday.
‘Tell me the truth! What the hell is happening? What’s going on?’
It was Andrew, and he’d burst in the front door in a terrible rage. I’d never, ever seen him in such a state and he started ranting and raving at my mam and dad. They both looked really worried and my heart started beating super fast in my chest.
‘I’ll explain it,’ Mam said. Her eyes looked sad and she had deep frown lines in her forehead. Dad had gone all quiet, which panicked me, as normally he’d have gone mad at Andrew for shouting and screaming like that.
The atmosphere felt much more chaotic than I’d ever known. It was like a big bomb had gone off. I didn’t know how or why, but it felt like another bomb was going to explode any moment.
‘Is Dad my real dad?’ Andrew screamed in my mam’s face. I swear the clock stopped for a second when he said that.
‘I want to know the truth – all of it!’
Andrew was shaking now, and shouting that someone had told him in the street that my dad wasn’t his real dad. He’d asked my aunty if it was true.
‘How do you know?’ my aunty had said. ‘You’d better ask your mam!’
Andrew was going so berserk that he looked like a crazy person, but however mad he looked, this was sounding horribly realistic.
I was listening to every word, trying to make some sense of it all, but I