I did club work for something like eight years, mostly in east and north London and on the Essex fringe, but also over the river in places like Woolwich and Plumstead, which were comparatively easy to get to because of the Blackwall tunnel. Coming back from Woolwich one night we missed a bus and had to walk all the way through the tunnel, which had only a tiny pavement and wasn’t really designed for pedestrians, to pick up the tram at Poplar. And there were many other nights when I would wait at Poplar in the cold and wet, and being so tired that I’d fall asleep on the bus long before we got home. While I was still small enough, my dad would sometimes give me a piggyback home late at night, and it was wonderful to stop on the way for fish and chips and what we used to call wally-wallies, which were big dill pickles. Occasionally on the way to a club, when the shops were still open, we’d call in at the little grocer’s near the end of the road for a penn’orth of broken biscuits. These were a great bargain because biscuits came in big square tins in those days and were bought loose— any that got broken were sold off cheap, even the most expensive ones.
Nowadays if child performers earn any money the parents are able to build up the child’s bank account and put money aside for their future. But in my day they were only too glad of the money to keep the house going. Although my father had a job, when I started earning money that helped pay the food bills. In fact the money I earned more than fed me. If I had concerts on the weekend and a cabaret somewhere I could earn seven shillings and sixpence. Unless I did two places in one night, which I did regularly: then I could earn more. And if the public wanted an encore, then the men sitting around the committee table in the club would put money in a kitty—up to one shilling and six. That was useful because it paid for our fares, either on a sixpenny tram or on a shilling-all-night tram. In those days my dad was probably earning about three pounds fifty a week. So there were some weekends when I could almost make in two nights what my father made in a week.
I was not allowed to spend any of the money I earned myself. I didn’t feel good or bad about it; I didn’t think about it. I just did the concerts, knowing that whatever money I earned, it would go into the household. In my younger days going to school I would be given a penny to buy a chocolate cupcake from the bakery opposite the school, and I would have that in my break. It was a little spongey cake with chocolate melted on top, which used to go all hard and crispy—it was so nice. As long as I had my penny for the school break, I never thought to ask for anything more than that. I knew that the money made a big difference to the family as it was a lot of money in those days. You don’t analyse these things when you’re young, but we were always well fed, although not by today’s standards, maybe. The children of today just help themselves to whatever they want. You weren’t allowed to help yourself back then—we would have eaten at mealtimes but rarely between. The only time we had a bowl of oranges on the side was at Christmas. The rest of the year fruit was kept in the larder. I didn’t consider our family poor, though: we were just middle of the road. We never really went short of anything.
I was certainly never hungry. My mother was a plain cook but a good cook. Most women were in those days. There wasn’t all the fancy cooking that we do today. It was basic. We had a roast every Sunday—Mother used to make very good Yorkshire pudding—and then the cold meat on the Monday. And we always had two different sorts of potatoes: roast and boiled. I was thinking about that the other day when I was peeling potatoes: that at home on Sundays there was always a choice. They don’t do that nowadays, do they? You get either boiled or roast, but not both. Funny how things change.
All this time, of course, I was at school, and although the work I did in the clubs was mostly at weekends, the two things still managed to clash—sometimes in unexpected ways. At my junior school in Central Park Road I once asked if I could borrow a copy of the sheet music of ‘Your Land and My Land’, and when I told the teacher what I wanted it for she said, ‘Oh, you sing, do you?’ Obviously she remembered, because one morning at assembly not long after that I was suddenly called on to sing this song. I was petrified, and I had every reason to be, for as I’ve mentioned, my voice was of a rather unorthodox pitch for a little girl, so when the school played it from the original song copy, it was in completely the wrong key for me. It was a terrible mess, and although it wasn’t my fault I was crimson with shame. They must have thought, Good God! How can this child go on stage and sing!
As a matter of fact everything we sang at school was pitched too high for me. Most of the time I couldn’t get up there, and the only alternative was to go into a kind of falsetto voice, which was disastrous. The school disliked my singing voice so much that ironically I was only allowed in the front row of the choir because I opened my mouth nice and wide and it looked good.
If I was ever tired at school it was automatically put down to my going out singing late at night ‘in those terrible places’. My voice and the sort of singing I was doing were much looked down on. One teacher in particular was most unsympathetic. One day she wouldn’t let me go home early in time to get to a competition at East Ham Granada, so when we did come out of school I had to run all the way home, where my mother was waiting with my things—this was the time I sang with my doll—and then we both ran all the way there. I wasn’t much of a runner, and I arrived out of breath, just as the last competitor was coming off. I flew on, somehow struggled through my number—‘A Glad Rag Doll’—and won first prize. Ten bob, it was, and it bought me and my mum enough of that red ripply material that everybody used for dressing gowns in those days to make us a dressing gown each.
I was never keen on school—probably because I wasn’t good at any of the academic subjects. I could never spell; I couldn’t add up; I couldn’t assimilate the facts in history and geography. I never tried very hard at French; I didn’t need French, I was going to be a singer—I can actually remember thinking that. How foolish can you be? I’ve bitterly regretted my poor record at that kind of subject ever since, and it’s left me with a permanent sense of inferiority in certain kinds of company. As if in compensation, I was always good at anything with my hands—drawing, painting and sewing. Gardening too, even then; when we made a crazy paving path at my secondary school, Brampton Road School, I took charge of laying out the pieces. Maybe it’s still there. Cookery was something else I was good at, and botany, though my marks in that came mostly from my little sketches. I wasn’t a great reader, but I read quite well out loud in class—I suppose there was some kinship there with projecting a song. I tended to be good at what came easily to me, and made heavy weather of everything else, like learning songs. But I just wasn’t academic. In fact I never learned to read music, not even to this day.
The whole act of going to school was rather like learning new words, as a matter of fact, because no matter how much I may have disliked it, I never tried to get out of it; I knew it had to be done. I suffered a great deal from bilious attacks as a child, but even if I’d been up nearly all night and felt like death the next morning, when my mother would ask me if I wanted to stay at home, I’d have to explain that I had to go—I musn’t miss school. It turned out in later life that one of the things that was causing the biliousness, and the being ill after eating, say, strawberries, was a troublesome appendix, which would eventually catch up with me right on the stage of the Palladium during the Blitz. But at the time I was just another of those bilious children, with maybe that difference—that instead of using the weakness as an excuse for taking it easy, I felt I had actively to fight it. If I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I feel I’m slacking. I’ve got to deserve a rest; I feel each day that I’ve got to earn my day. My mother was the same, never still. She didn’t slow down until the mid-1970s, when infirmity forced her to (she died not many years