those days there was a great deal of freedom for children. As soon as I was big enough, Nan and Mum would let me loose to play with the other kids on the estate. They’d call from the balcony when they wanted me and often it would be after dark and I’d still be running around. We used to run everywhere, hiding from each other; we’d even play on a rubbish dump. Although we never got in big trouble, we could be naughty. I remember we played Knock Down Ginger (knocking on the door and running away) on the door of a little round Irish man, who looked like a leprechaun (‘Thick Mick’) – the political correctness police would be after us today. But we never did any harm and he was lovely to us.
There was a sandpit in Jail Park, where we played endlessly. I once got a mouthful of bird pooh, which gave the other kids a good laugh. Even then, I was talking the whole time and I must have looked up with my mouth still motoring. Another time I was wearing a gold ring with a tiny diamond in it. (What was Mum thinking of, sending a six-year-old out to play like that? Typical of us Maxwells, all part of making me look high-end.) Anyway, I swapped it for a bag of Maltesers. Mum had to go round to the girl’s house to retrieve it.
My babysitter Sandra lived on the ground floor of Stephenson House: I used to play with her brother Raymond, who was a couple of years older than me, and his cousin Rachel. Raymond was mad about Elvis and we’d all be doing Hound Dog impressions on the bit of lawn at the back of his flat. I was keen on David Cassidy and Sandra took me to see him when I was about seven or eight at the Wembley Empire. Because I was only little and sitting on her shoulders we were allowed right through to the front, and he sang ‘The Puppy Song’ for me and gave me a rose. I was so in love – I remember crying and kissing the television whenever he was on. When he came back to London the next time I was so upset he was kept on a launch on the Thames to stop the fans stampeding him. He was the first person I ever saw wearing Yeti boots, and he was the coolest thing on the planet.
I rode around the estate on my bike, a red second-hand Raleigh that my mum bought from her friend Shirley Delannoy, whose name I loved because it sounded exotic and foreign. Shirley was a travel agent with bleached blonde hair. She was married to a man from Belgium so by the standards of my childhood she was exotic. It was sometimes a volatile union – they lived on the sixteenth floor of a Bermondsey tower block and she would joke that one day she would deliberately leave open the balcony door when he was out drinking in the hope that he might fall over in his drunken state.
I got another kind of education from Uncle Jim and Auntie Wendy. Jim had done well for himself, running a successful haulage company, and they had a big house with a swimming pool. He was always supportive of Mum and me and I used to spend part of my summer holidays with his family. I’d be put on a Green Line bus in London and they’d pick me up at the other end. It was there that I learnt to eat posh.
I remember four-course dinners at their house, everyone round the table. And I learnt how to eat in a restaurant – they took me for my first-ever trip to a Chinese. When I used to pretend I had a father to kids who thought my parents were divorced, all the information I gave about my imaginary dad was based on Jim.
When I was 10, Jim and Wendy took me to Devon for a holiday. I was with my cousin Samantha and there was this lovely-looking French boy playing near us. He looked like a mini Sacha Distel, with a navy blue jumper. Young as I was, my taste in boys was already refined – I’ve always liked the preppy French look (for a girl from a council flat, I have a taste for ‘a bit of posh’ in terms of looks). So Samantha and I kept smiling at this boy and eventually we got talking to him. I was a bit surprised by his high voice.
‘Lauren,’ he said, when I asked his name.
‘Laurence?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘No, Lauren – I am a girl …’
I was gutted but we still became pen pals and I think when I was writing to her I secretly imagined she was a boy.
When I was about 12, I was at Uncle Jim’s house, sitting in the front of the Jag that Auntie Wendy had parked in the drive. Their Alsatian was in the car with me and I was trying to get the Stylistics’ eight-track cassette out of their cassette player. Somehow I knocked the car, an automatic, into reverse and we started to roll backwards down the hill. I was a tiny kid so if anyone had seen this it would have looked really odd. The dog started howling – he knew this wasn’t right. We were heading towards the swimming pool but luckily I managed to grab the brake and pull it on. We stopped within a couple of feet of the pool. Thank God we haven’t hit anything, I thought, as I climbed out.
‘I’m sure I left the car under the kitchen window,’ said Auntie Wendy.
‘No, it’s always been by the pool, Auntie Wendy,’ I told her, all innocent.
The dog didn’t snitch but he looked a bit worried around me for a while.
We always had holidays and most years we went abroad: Spain, Italy and Portugal. Grandad paid for it all, putting money away every week. Usually it was Nan, Grandad, Mum and me, but sometimes Nan and Grandad’s friends Lil and Bill Holt came as well. They were always called Lil’Olt-and-Bill’Olt, like one word. Their daughter had a son – Gary – born in the hospital at the same time as me, so Lil was one of the first to see me after I came into the world. They were always part of our lives.
We went to Pontinental in Torremolinos a few years running – that’s Pontins, but abroad. It was two huge tower blocks, one next to the other. I loved it because they had a disco and a talent competition. It was always a big old booze-up and I was very spoiled. There were day trips to Morocco but the only one of us who would go was Grandad – the others just wanted to bake our tans. In one of my favourite pictures, he is sitting on a camel in Morocco. Years later, my friend Caroline Sargeant who lived in the block of flats opposite ours, Telford House, told me she thought we were a posh family because we always went abroad.
There was one time, however, when I really didn’t want to go to Spain. It was my last year at Joseph Lancaster and the singing teacher who I loved was putting on a production of The Wizard of Oz. Who do you think landed the part of Dorothy? I auditioned with a pretend American accent, which I’d been perfecting for years. For some reason I thought it was really cool and I would go round the Elephant and Castle asking grown-ups the time in this funny voice. I thought they would all be wondering why a little American girl was there, but probably they just thought I was a silly kid pretending. Anyway, I remember auditioning, saying ‘Where am I? This isn’t Kansas. Oh, Toto, Toto …’ – I loved Judy Garland and the part seemed made for me – I really felt this was my moment. Then I couldn’t do it because the show clashed with our trip to Pontinental. At this point I got in a real strop and told Mum I didn’t want to go, that I would stay with one of my friends to do the show. But I had to go and I cried at the idea of some other girl being Dorothy. I knew they’d give the part to a girl called Titia, who was very blonde and pretty. When I got back, I dreaded school because everyone would be talking about the show and how good she was.
It was no wonder I was the natural choice for Dorothy: from the age of eight I’d been going to stage school every Saturday. When I left Joseph Lancaster I attended full time, but that’s a story worth a whole chapter of its own.
CHAPTER 3
Italia Conti Girls
My stage career happened almost by chance. I was lucky because among the other kids on the Rockingham Estate were the three Sargeant girls: Caroline, Lynn and Elaine. Caroline, who was about four years older than me, spoke differently to the rest of us, a bit like a BBC announcer, and Mum was very impressed. She and Nan spoke fluent Rockingham, but Mum reckoned if I ended up talking like the rest of my family then I wouldn’t get anywhere in life; if I had a posh accent it would give me a start in life.
‘Why does she talk like that, Liz?’ she asked Caroline’s mum, who was also a single mum. She went on to explain about Italia Conti.
‘My Lisa would like some of that! How do you get her in?’ asked Mum.
It seemed a charitable trust had helped out because 11-year-old Caroline had talent. The trust found a sponsor, a photographer called Alan Olley, who helped