There were certain things that had to be done each year as well; otherwise the holiday wasn’t complete. There was an old barn at the back of the house, with a rope we used to swing on; we would go there at the first opportunity and enjoy the creepy darkness and mustiness. (It reminded us of Maria Marten and the Red Barn—one of the plays I knew from the club at home about the famous murder in the 1800s of a country girl by her squire lover in a barn). When we had grown up a little and Auntie Maggie had moved into a new council house across the road, there were four walks that must be taken each holiday: up the hill to the common, along the road to Farnham one way, to Aldershot in the other direction, and down the hill for the really long trudge to Crooksbury Hill and Frensham Ponds. Frensham was all of six or seven miles away, but we thought nothing of it. At least, Mum and I and Roger didn’t, but my cousin hated walking, and grumbled all the way. Frensham meant a swim and a bus most of the way back. Crooksbury Hill you can actually see from Weybourne, and when we got back from there we used to say to each other, ‘Look, that’s where we’ve been—all that way.’ There were shorter walks too: of an evening across the fields, for lemonade outside the Six Bells Inn; or along the rough farm track and across a humpback bridge over the railway to where a lovely old couple called Bill and Annie Walker had a cottage with a well in the garden where we’d stop for a drink of their water.
On the whole, Weybourne didn’t mean incidents so much as atmosphere; it was walks and flowers and green grass and fresh air and picnics. It was people: a real aunt and uncle, plus a crowd of friendly adults we always knew—in the fashion of the day—as aunties and uncles. It was like having a huge family in the country, and a whole circuit of houses to visit. There were the usual cuts and bruises, the quarrels and the getting into trouble, which are part of childhood, but I remember Weybourne mostly as a place of calm pleasures and small but intense excitements.
The one major excitement befell my brother Roger, not me, and happened a little later. He would have been about twelve, which would have made me nine. There was a pub called The Elm Tree, and near by a real elm, an enormous one on a crossroads. Roger was standing under this tree one day when he saw, careering towards him down the lane, a big metal army wagon with two huge bolting horses at the head of it. They appeared to be coming straight at him, so naturally he dodged round the tree, only to find when he emerged from the other side of the trunk that the runaway horses and the wagon still seemed to be heading for him. Wherever he put himself, the horses were apparently bent on getting Roger. The driver had completely lost control—in fact by this time he might well have jumped or been thrown off—so obviously the thing was lurching from side to side so much that it gave the impression of being all over the place. Roger can never remember how long he kept up this scuttling backwards and forwards around the tree, though at the time it felt like ages. But within what must in reality have been only a few seconds, the horses had rushed past him and they ended up by going through the window of the frail little shop, Mason’s, where we bought our sweets. Roger was probably a bit shaken for a while, but nothing upsets you for long at twelve and afterwards it made him feel rather proud and manly. (Not long after this Roger and I became much closer—which we hadn’t really been as small children—when we started ballroom dancing together in our teens. We used to practise in the clubs.)
Otherwise Roger’s memories of Weybourne are not as vivid as mine. The annual visits went on until I was almost out of my teens, but I was the one who kept going back long after that—until Auntie Maggie moved right away, in fact. Throughout my childhood I always told myself that nobody could have been more miserable than I was at the end of every August. My gloom would get deeper and deeper as we came closer to Waterloo, and would reach its lowest—almost despair—on the final bus ride back to East Ham. ‘Why have we got to come back to all the streets and houses? Why can’t we always live in the country?’ I’d ask my mother. And my mother, who always said she wouldn’t want to ‘shut herself away’, as she called it, in some village, probably dismissed it as end-of-holiday grizzling. But I was in deadly earnest, which is why I live in the country now, in Sussex. The dream that I had as a little girl, to never have to leave the country, eventually came true for me. I realize, of course, that I’m able to live in the country because of the career I chose—or perhaps I should say because of the career that chose me—and I was deep into that even before Roger thought the horses were after him.
CHAPTER TWO One-&-six for an Encore
People find it hard to believe that I started singing regularly in the clubs when I was seven, but there’s nothing strange about it at all, really. With the club life practically in my blood, with a tradition of party singing deeply ingrained in the whole family, and with my own voice already—so I’ve been told—distinctive in some uncanny way, finding myself singing songs to a real audience, with just a piano for accompaniment, felt almost as natural and inevitable as growing up. I look very serious and grown-up in the photographs from the time, dressed in silk and satin dresses with ruffles which my mother designed and made herself. In one—I must be about seven—I am dressed as a fairy wearing a dress with a sequinned bodice and have a huge net skirt!
The costumes, along with everything else in my early career, were largely down to my mother’s influence: she wanted me to perform. I have to say now that I didn’t particularly enjoy singing. The idea came from the family—it certainly didn’t come from me. For me it was a case of ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington’. But I had no choice. It was my mother who saw that I started doing formal concerts. And, to my amazement, I got paid for it, although obviously I didn’t see the money myself.
It didn’t happen entirely automatically, of course; somebody had to provide the first push. That came from a man named Pat Barry, who was a male ‘soubrette’ on the working men’s club circuit. ‘Soubrette’ is an odd kind of word, but it used to be bandied about in the business. Originally it meant a girl who sang and danced. By the time the concert parties and then the revues had come along, the word had taken on the meaning of a young female member of the cast who could sing and dance and act, and was therefore useful in several ways. Pat Barry’s talents were singing and tap dancing and clog dancing. A sort of jack-of-all-trades for the stage, then.
Pat knew the family, he’d heard me sing at parties and he thought that I was good enough to appear as an act; and he not only persuaded my mother and father that I ought to go on, but—being an all-rounder himself and keen on the idea of having at least a second accomplishment to call on—he told me I ought to learn to step dance as well. So once a week round at his house he’d teach me to dance on a proper little slatted step-dancing mat on the kitchen floor—a roll-up mat of wooden slats on straps that your shoes would ‘clack’ against. I was tall and leggy as a child and, although that first big illness seemed to have left me unable to run far without getting out of breath, I was acrobatic and nimble enough, and did pretty well. But for me, singing—with all the appropriate actions—was to be the main thing, and the club would bill me as a ‘descriptive child vocalist’.
The clubs themselves were part of a network of entertainment of which, unless you grew up in it, you could be completely unaware. There have been working men’s clubs in practically every industrial and thickly populated working-class area since the end of the nineteenth century, and the East London clubs I started in were just a few out of literally hundreds of such places. The old Mildmay Club at Newington Green was one of the best known.
I appeared many times at the Mildmay, with its large hall where the rows of chairs had ledges on the backs of them to hold glasses of beer, and where the chairman and committee of the club sat in front of the stage at a long table. That