Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  And Helen’s reaction after viewing the documentary? ‘She just said how nice the garden looked,’ said Pam Wheeldon who, with her husband, bought Birtle Edge House in the mid-1990s when Helen moved to Skipton.

  It was not until many years later, after therapy, that Victoria was able to describe her upbringing as what it was; neglect.

  The parental indifference must have hurt and Victoria dealt with it by withdrawing. There were no attempts at gaining Helen’s or Stanley’s approval or attention. ‘I’m glad to be doing something they like, but I always did what I wanted to do … I didn’t do it for them,’ she once said. ‘I love them and I’m very proud of them, but I can’t ever remember really trying to please them.’

  Even when her youngest daughter became nationally famous, Helen refused to discuss her. She would immediately start talking about her other children whenever a rare visitor to Birtle Edge House spotted Victoria on family photographs, and would later take to hiding them in a drawer. ‘My mother won’t discuss me with other people,’ Victoria once said. ‘If someone says “You sound awfully like Victoria Wood” she might admit through gritted teeth we’re related.’

  Stanley, however, basked in Victoria’s glory and even introduced himself as her father to complete strangers at bus stops. ‘He was a frustrated entertainer. He’d done shows in the Navy and things like that. He would have loved to have done what I do,’ Victoria said. Stanley would share a double act of sorts with his daughter in the wryly ironic letters they exchanged in later life. Victoria believed he too would have achieved success as a comedian or musician if he had been of a different generation, but there was never any question of Stanley forcing Victoria to live his ambitions for him as he enjoyed his insurance work so much.

  Stanley’s creativity and industry was the more obvious influence on Victoria’s career, but Helen did contribute in part. Despite claiming to have no sense of humour, Helen was, according to Victoria, unwittingly funny and very observant, and was used as the basis for many of Victoria’s older comic characters.

  Television comedy shows were a welcome relief to the lonely, young Victoria. She claimed she ‘wasted’ her childhood slumped in front of the box, but the ideas and dreams it planted in her were a vital part of her adult success. It enabled her to see how comedy worked and, in the absence of close friends and family, it was the performers who set an example. ‘When I started watching television a lot, I wanted to do that, to “do television” as a job,’ explained Victoria, whose biggest pleasure was discovering comedy programmes.

  Comedy was something of an antidote to the grim lifestyle of Birtle Edge House. ‘I think it was more my own thing,’ Victoria said. ‘Obviously, I gradually realised how witty my father was, but humour wasn’t a particularly frequent thing. We didn’t all roll around on the floor together … so comedy didn’t feel to me a family thing, but something I was into.’

  Domestically, Victoria’s years at Birtle Edge House were lacking, but culturally there was stimulation that formed a rare bond between the family. Bolton’s Octagon Theatre was a popular destination, but seeing one of the actors greeting his wife at the station amazed Victoria – she did not think actors did such mundane things. Every Christmas there would be a family outing to the pantomime at Manchester’s Palace Theatre where the Woods sat at the back of the gods. The theatre trips were not limited to the festive season and Victoria was lucky enough to see some of the great entertainers of the day in concert. It was on one such outing that the foundations of her own career were built.

  I saw Joyce Grenfell on stage in Buxton when I was about six. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone stand on their own on stage. I didn’t realise there were jobs like that before – that one could stand on stage and speak, with no props except a nice frock, and people could die laughing. I was very taken with the idea. The idea of working alone, doing something for yourself but also for all those in attendance. I can remember much of the dialogue even now. Grenfell was terribly observant and her voice was superb. Using humour to communicate rather than attack – which I think women generally can do better than men. She made a great impression on me.

  Victoria added: ‘She did the whole two hours, or whatever, just her and the man at the piano. I was made aware that that was a job, that you could go on stage and stand on your own.’

  Grenfell’s performance that night left an indelible impression on Victoria and the gauche comedienne became a role model. ‘It had such a huge effect on me that when I was deciding what I wanted to do for a job, when I was about fifteen, I decided that’s what I would do. I wanted to stand on stage on my own doing something like Joyce Grenfell.’ The newly discovered career also matched Victoria’s psychological make-up. ‘As a very sort of isolating person I find that appealing: the idea of standing on stage and not being with other people.’

  British comedy owes a huge debt to Grenfell, not only for her own talents, but for passing the baton on to Victoria, who admitted: ‘If I hadn’t seen her it might never have occurred to me.’ The seed was planted.

  After the performance, the family momentarily tore Victoria away from her starry-eyed dreams by snapping her back to the reality of her lowly status.

  At the end of the show my sisters went round backstage to say hello to her, I don’t know why. And it was decided that I couldn’t go because I was too young, so I had to wait outside and I felt a bit miffed. And I was standing at the stage door and she came out because they told her that they had another sister and so she came out to find me and say hello. I remember her saying, ‘Is this Vicky?’

  Victoria never forgot this act of kindness and always made time for her own fans at the stage door after shows. ‘I wait until everybody’s had an autograph and everybody’s said what they want to say. It’s really, really important.’

  Grenfell died in 1979, but had she lived it is highly likely that she would have been recruited by Victoria. The two did ‘appear’ together in 1996 thanks to the South African caricaturist, Nicky Taylor. He was commissioned to design a pack of cards honouring 54 exceptional women to mark the 50th anniversary of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Victoria and Joyce were the jokers of the pack. Victoria paid her own tribute to Grenfell by incorporating a ‘Mrs Comstock’ in a 1988 stage routine about a holiday flight. It was the same name of the nice but nervous woman played by Grenfell in her monologue, ‘First Flight’.

  Besides outings to the theatre there were weekly trips to Bury’s cinemas, the Art being a Wood family favourite. Comedies such as Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man were, not surprisingly, Victoria’s favourite type of film. In fact, she would sometimes refuse to join the family if she didn’t approve of the selected film. But there was laughter to be found in even the most serious films.

  ‘They always seemed to be showing Biblical epics,’ recalled Victoria. ‘I saw a different Jesus being nailed to the cross every week.’ The memory of the Bury audience calling out ‘Don’t drink it!’ to Victor Mature during the drugging scene in Samson and Delilah still made her chuckle decades later, but not all her visits to the cinema were as fondly remembered. A man once stroked her leg throughout an entire film but she was too shy and embarrassed to complain. She was just thankful it was not a double feature.

  An attempt to alleviate the isolation of her home life and overcome her shyness came when Victoria joined Birtle Parish Church Brownies. Unlike her brother, who had worked diligently towards a Duke of Edinburgh Award gold medal, Victoria was not suited to group activities. Despite her young age, Helen expected her to press her own uniform, and the crumpled result and subsequent embarrassment may have contributed to Victoria’s short stay in the pack.

  When the family moved to Birtle, Victoria transferred to the nearest school, Fairfield County Primary on Rochdale Old Road. Her world was upturned in more ways than one as, for some reason, the classes at Fairfield were numbered in reverse order.

  ‘It was a fairly strict school, but enjoyable with a friendly atmosphere,’ said K
evin German. It did not dawn on him until the 1980s that the Victoria Wood he saw on television was the same Vicky Wood who used to play chainy, tag and bob in the playground with him and Marilyn Wood.

  Her classmates remembered Victoria as a plump, scruffy, red-faced girl who was rarely seen without sweets or her thumb in her mouth. Accounts of her personality varied, but years later the impression Victoria made was still vivid in their minds. ‘She was a bit of a loner,’ recalled Dave Roscoe, while Graham Bentley remembered her as ‘outgoing, lively and a bit of a chatterbox who had a lot to say for herself’. Graham Spencer said: ‘She was funny, but not funny ha-ha. She was a bit of a queer girl. She was very pushy and forthcoming and clever, but she wasn’t a show-off.’

  One girl in Victoria’s class lost a leg when she was knocked down outside the school. Another classmate became a transsexual. ‘He caused quite a rumpus when he went into Huntley Mount Union Club dressed as a woman,’ said Billy Armstead. ‘He joined the RAF and later had a sex change. He calls himself Rita now, I believe.’

  Victoria herself felt similarly out of place and wanted to be a boy. She felt she had nothing in common with the other girls in her class whose play consisted of pretending to be passive housewives, which made Victoria feel like she was ‘trapped with 47 middle-aged women’. Such frustrating sexual stereotyping was something that she would come up against again and again in her early days of stand-up. But her yearning to escape the limits of her own gender would later help her to develop and shape an act that she hoped would appeal to all sexes.

  Victoria said that at Fairfield her thing was ‘being clever’ and her competitive streak was already evident in the way she vied with Ann Kilgowan and Graham Howarth to be first at everything. There were also early signs of her creative talent. Janet Robinson (née Ashton), her teacher in Class Two, said: ‘Her handwriting was awful, her books were messy, but she wrote some wonderful stories. I remember an inspector, Mr Page, looking at her work and saying “Watch this girl. She’ll go places.”’

  Victoria even made a positive impression on the strict Norman Rushton, who taught her in her final year at the school. ‘We had a very good relationship. Her command of language was exceptional, she certainly stood out. Victoria worked hard and had a good imagination. She was ebullient and a real extrovert.’

  Hard-working, but by no means saintly, Victoria found herself attracted to the notorious twins, John and Robert Mahon, who were always getting into trouble. She demonstrated her affection during one outing to Bury Public Baths. John was the first boy she kissed on the lips. It was underwater and she was so excited she had to leave the pool immediately to have a sixpence cup of chicken soup.

  Her early ambition to appear on stage did not have much of an outlet at Fairfield. ‘I narrated the nativity play once, but I was never an angel or anything like that. I never even got a chance to dress up, which was a sad disappointment to me.’ Decades later she could still quote Helen’s verdict on her nativity appearance: ‘Well I hope nobody knew you were my child, you kept moving your head from side-to-side.’

  Instead, it was Victoria’s piano playing that was to provide her with her first public audiences.

  Stanley introduced her to the instrument and nurtured her interest in it. He wrote the names of the notes underneath ‘Polly-Wolly-Doodle’, a song Victoria knew, and from that she taught herself how to read music. Delighted with her enthusiasm, Stanley was determined to encourage her further and at the age of seven she began having piano tuition, as her siblings had before her. But Stanley’s good intentions had not taken Victoria’s shyness into account and the lessons only lasted for a matter of weeks.

  ‘I couldn’t cope with the embarrassment of being alone in a room with a man,’ she explained. ‘It used to make me sweat and I’d have to go and wash my hands. I stopped going in the end because I didn’t have enough social skills to handle it.’ She found the lessons extremely uncomfortable, but Victoria had become attached to the piano and had no intention of giving that up.

  I started playing on my own and I thought: ‘Well my parents will be cross if I play the piano because I’m not having lessons.’ So I used to play the piano in secret. And when they’d gone out I used to run to the piano – I used to dream about playing the piano – and then, when I heard their car come up the drive, I used to get up again and close the lid and the piano was still steaming, and I’d run into the other room and put the television on. For years I did that.

  There was no need for such secrecy at school, and from around Class Four onwards Victoria was called upon to perform recitals for her teachers and classmates. Sadly, she found herself trying to entertain an audience of one during one of the most traumatic occasions of her childhood.

  ‘I was invited to her birthday party in juniors,’ said Graham Howarth. ‘She would have been about eight or nine and she invited a group of us. The plan was to be picked up at the bottom of Castle Hill Road one Saturday afternoon. Vicky came down in the car with her dad, but I was the only one that turned up. We even drove round to Dennis Ford’s house but his mum said he was out playing.’

  Although Victoria tried to put a brave face on it, she was secretly devastated. Poignantly, the party went ahead with just Victoria and Graham, who recalled: ‘I stayed for a couple of hours and we went on the swing in the garden. We didn’t play any party games, though: you can’t really play pass the parcel with just two people.’

  The birthday party was not the only humiliation Victoria had to endure. She was too shy to react when somebody stole her bobble hat from her head, but at other times her sense of self and strength of character overcame her timidity. At the age of 14 she decided she wanted to be a boxer, but an aggressive side to her personality was already evident at primary school. Graham Howarth remembered a boy jumping on to her back as she entered a sweetshop and Victoria grabbing both his hands and flinging him over her head so he landed flat on his back. Teacher Janet Robinson also witnessed a display of fury when Victoria was accidentally humiliated in front of the entire class.

  ‘I was giving a dance lesson and told the children to sit on the floor but Victoria, who wore kilts, wouldn’t stop dancing. Ian Taylor reached up to pull her down, but her kilt came down too. She absolutely pummelled him. He was a little thin boy whereas Victoria was square. We had to pull her off him.’

  In general though, Victoria had a comparatively happy time at Fairfield, where her intelligence was recognised and there was little competition. This security would be ripped away at Bury Grammar School for Girls.

  2

  ‘WE SUFFERED IN silence. We thought everyone else was such a high flyer. I wouldn’t say Bury Grammar schooldays were the happiest days of our lives, like schooldays are supposed to be,’ said Gail Branch (née Melling). She was one of a group of women in their late thirties dining at the Crimble Restaurant near Rochdale after revisiting their past one Saturday in November 1989.

  Hilary Wills (née Pollitt) was also one of those present. ‘The funny thing about the day was that we all ended up realising we all felt exactly the same way about school. It was a pity it took so many years for us to acknowledge how miserable inside we all were. Everyone thought everyone else was fine at school.’

  Earlier that day they had been among 55 former pupils who had returned to Bury Grammar School for Girls to mark the 25th anniversary of the start of the misery.

  ‘It’s a pity Victoria didn’t come to the meal after the reunion. She would have found it very helpful,’ said Gail. Instead it took her former classmate a course of counselling to deal with ‘things that might have been bothering me about my past’ before she could finally exorcise the pain of adolescence.

  Sanctas clavis fores aperit is the motto of Bury Grammar School for Girls. The school song, the title of which was the motto, expresses the hope that besides finding the key that opens holy doors, the girls will also find a faith in the school that sends their spirits soaring. As Victoria and many of her classmates soon found out, real
life rarely lives up to expectations.

  The school was typical of most grammar schools of that era: disciplined but not excessively oppressive, and with an emphasis on academic achievement. Its failing was its inability to cater for its more psychologically fragile, insecure and timid pupils. If Victoria had expected a respite from her dismal home life, she was about to be very badly disappointed.

  She began at the school in the September of 1964, the same time that her mother embarked on an O-level course of study in English Language, English Literature, History, Geography and Social Studies at Bolton Technical College. ‘I wanted to catch up with what I had missed when I was younger,’ Helen told the Bury Times. It meant the gulf between her and Victoria would grow wider, with Helen having very little time to think of Victoria or support her during her teenage years.

  The foundations of Bury Grammar School for Girls had been laid in the early 1880s. Funding to buy and furnish a house in Bolton Street was provided by a company of local gentlemen and in 1884 Bury High School for Girls opened its doors, with Miss Jane Kitchener, a relative of the famous lord, as headmistress. The Bridge Road building which Victoria would attend was built in 1906. During her time there the school, which has had its own swimming pool since 1940, consisted largely of the daughters of the professional middle classes. They lived in fear of the teachers who patrolled the corridors in their gowns.

  ‘Those great, black-robed figures were quite daunting to a ten-year-old,’ said Hilary Wills. Gail Branch remembered feeling lost, scared and shell-shocked at being transplanted from a happy primary school to such a cold and formal institution. But the prospect of going to the school had not intimidated Victoria. Both Penny and Chris were past pupils of the Girls’ and Boys’ Grammar Schools and had enjoyed the experience. If they told horror stories about it, Victoria was not deterred and she had actually made an earlier attempt to join the school’s junior department. Rosalind Wood, too, had applied to the school but did not make the grade and so went to Rochdale Convent instead.