I used to love going round to Caroline’s flat because she had The Monkees’ album and we’d mime to ‘Daydream Believer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ and put on our own plays. Because she was at Italia Conti full time, she had scripts of real plays: we especially enjoyed putting on Billy Liar because every other word was ‘bloody’ so we could swear away in her bedroom all day and say, ‘It’s all right, it’s in the script!’
Her sisters and me would play at auditioning for the lead roles, but because Caroline was the eldest and went to stage school she always won. We’d be Charlie’s Angels and she was always Farrah. Once we’d established the game, I’d play it with other kids – I remember doing it with my cousins out at Uncle Jim’s house in Buckinghamshire. That was great because then it was my game so I could be Farrah and, believe me, I was Farrah like my life depended on it. I’ve always had thin hair, so it did wonders for my confidence pretending I had this big mane to flick. We’d run around the house hiding behind rubber plants, then leap out and shout ‘Freeze!’ with our fingers shaped like a gun.
From the word go, I loved Italia Conti. We learnt to enunciate properly and memorised speeches from Shakespeare, taking exams run by the London Academy of Speech and Drama. Soon the other girls were staying on for dancing lessons after drama and I joined those classes, too: doing tap, ballet and modern dance.
I made friends straight away: Laura James was one of my best friends, Karen Halliday was another and Amanda Mealing, who went on to a big role in Holby City. We four were working-class kids, so I didn’t feel out of place. Laura and Karen knew each other as they were both from Stockwell and Amanda came from Lambeth. We all spoke pure South London, but within weeks I was talking like Princess Lisa of Rockingham with this perfect cut-glass accent.
Soon it was time to move on from primary school and all I wanted was to attend Italia Conti full time. Of course it cost money: Mr and Mrs Sheward, who ran the school, told Mum that the Inner London Education Authority normally gave four scholarships but they’d cut it down to two that year and so we had to audition. There were about 20 of us, all there with our mums, who were probably even more nervous than us. I auditioned with a modern piece, a ballet piece, a speech and a song: I didn’t have a serious acting piece so I did a poem called ‘Worms’, which was short and silly. Looking back, I didn’t do myself justice but I wasn’t at all nervous – I never had a problem walking into a room and showing off. I had three ‘parents’ putting me on a pedestal, who thought I was the bees’ knees, so my self-esteem was pretty high.
We had to wait for two weeks for the results (Mum says they were two of the longest weeks of her life). When Mr Sheward rang it was not good news: I’d come third. My friends Laura and Karen got the scholarships. I was offered a place but the fees were well beyond our means. At a meeting with Mr Sheward, he told Mum, ‘She’s one of the most talented kids we’ve come across and we have to find a way to get her into this school.’ He had a book called The Directory of Grant Making Trusts and gave her lots of numbers to ring to see if they could offer any help. They were mostly single-parent charities but because we lived with Nan and Grandad we didn’t really qualify. Nobody could help – I guess they had far more pressing problems than a kid who had a decent home but needed the money to go to stage school. I remember thinking, why does everything come down to the fact that I haven’t got a dad? Why doesn’t Mum just get the money, couldn’t someone leave it her in an inheritance or something?
It wasn’t looking good but Mum was determined not to give up. She was the receptionist at Gaskett, Metcalfe & Walton, a firm of solicitors, and approached her boss, Michael Harris. Mum volunteered to work lunch hours and longer hours so that she could save the money (she had already surrendered an insurance policy to help but was worried about further payments). Michael could see there was no way she would save enough by the time I had to start and so he came to an arrangement with her: the firm advanced my fees and they stopped £25 a week from Mum’s wages to pay them back. I’m so grateful to him for help when we needed it, and later on he became a trusted friend and handled several legal matters for me.
His firm also helped Mum get more money from my dad, John Murphy, although at the time this wasn’t properly explained to me. I remember, when I was about 12, being taken to a court near Tower Bridge in my school uniform. The whole experience didn’t gel – I think I’d have rather done without the money. I didn’t like the role of poor kid outside court with a begging bowl: they needed to recast the part for another child, I thought, not one who went to stage school, had a posh accent and believed she would one day be a big success. I stood outside the court building with a strange sick feeling in the bottom of my tummy because I believed I must have done something wrong. Courts were for criminals, weren’t they?
One of the clients at the firm where Mum worked was Bruce Forsyth’s first wife, and when she heard about me going to Italia Conti she gave us her daughter Debbie’s old cape. Some of my uniform came from Dickens & Jones, the official school supplier, which to me was a really high-end shop up West and I know it cost an arm and a leg. Mum got a lot of it from a second-hand shop in Battersea, though. The cape was dark blue with a collar like Mary Poppins’s cape, a bit like the ones nurses wear; there were silver buttons each side with chains going across. Underneath we wore a royal-blue blazer and then a blue jumper and grey skirt. Later on, little kilts. In winter, I had a blue velour hat and a straw boater for summer.
But the uniform was only the start: I had to have a bag containing The Complete Works of Shakespeare, which I never used because we’d have the parts printed out on paper. I also needed loads of ballet shoes, tights, a leotard and all the other accessories a dancer has to have. Imagine me walking from Stephenson House to the Elephant and Castle tube station done up like something out of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I was so proud because it was obvious I was going to a fee-paying school.
Grandad thought Mum was mad to be paying out all that cash. ‘You’re wasting your bloody money! Why don’t you send her to Pitmans?’ he used to say. Learning shorthand would be more useful, he thought. Meanwhile, Mum fought her corner.
‘No, it’s what she wants to do,’ she insisted.
‘Are you sure it’s not what you want her to do?’ he said.
And it’s true: I was living out Mum’s dream for her, but it was also my dream, my lifeline, my chance to be someone different. Mum saw that, too: she felt that I wouldn’t end up like some of the other girls round there, marrying a gangster or a petty criminal or even becoming a single mum like her. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, we were making a point to my absent father: trying to prove he’d made a big mistake when he turned his back on us.
In those days the Italia Conti building was so imposing. Years later, when I was doing The Bill, I used to drive past it, and it doesn’t look anything special now – I guess that’s normal when you look back on things from an adult perspective. Back then I was very impressed by the vast entrance hall. On the first day, Mum and the other mothers came with us and there was a real excited buzz about the place.
I don’t ever remember not fitting in: if they’d all been talking with Geordie accents I’d have adopted one, too. As a kid I was a complete chameleon. It was a useful skill in my working life but one that came, I believe, from my upbringing: I always had to put whatever trauma we were going through behind me. Don’t think about it too much, just get on with it, was the family philosophy.
Looking back, going to stage school should have been daunting, but it wasn’t at all, and this is a testament to the self-esteem Mum had given me. As a child, you could throw me in at the deep end in any situation and I’d swim. Besides, what was there to be scared of? Laura, Amanda and Karen were going, too. That doesn’t