Victoria Wood

by Neil Brandwood

  Because it was a military band there were no contests, apart from an unsuccessful audition for the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Instead, the musicians performed at Bury’s Clarence Park and took part in the Whit parade. On Christmas Day and New Year’s Day there would be charity performances in the town’s streets. Alan Haydock conducted the band when Victoria was a member. ‘Sometimes, when I stood at the front, I thought I was talking a load of rubbish and Vicky had a way of looking at you that suggested she knew what she was doing – as if she could see through you,’ he recalled.

  Victoria also projected this sense of being a removed observer at school. ‘She watched. She certainly didn’t mix in a lot,’ recalled Gail Branch. ‘I sometimes think back and remember her being withdrawn on occasions, but you didn’t ask what was up. You just didn’t. And she could definitely sulk. She’d go very, very quiet and have certain expressions on her face. I can still remember them. She’d withdraw herself. It was very much “You are not going to get through” – as if she’d built an invisible wall around herself.’

  Miss Lester, the headmistress, also remembered her watchfulness: ‘Victoria’s acute powers of observation were noticeable in all she said and did.’

  Victoria did not realise it at the time, but the misery and loneliness would be of immense value in later life. ‘I think it was all going on inside,’ she said. ‘I was biding my time. I don’t think you can write unless you’ve been in a position where you’re isolated. You can either take part in things or observe. I think if I’d been thin and gone out with boys I wouldn’t have had anything to write about. If you’re fulfilled you have nothing to say. And it’s a joy to me now that all that happened, because it got me where I am. I wouldn’t change any of it.’

  In retrospect she believed being a ‘fat, desperately shy teenager’ was the making of her. ‘If I’d have gone out a lot I’d never have learnt to play the piano. I wouldn’t have developed my talent. But at the time that was no consolation. It really hurt.’

  The pain was lessened somewhat by seeing the rise and fall of others during her schooldays. The realisation that ‘fame’ was fickle was a valuable lesson. To go the distance it needed to be cultivated, developed and respected. ‘Some girls at fourteen were terrific and by the time they were eighteen they were finished. It must be sad to be eighteen and to know all your best years are behind you,’ reflected Victoria.

  Being an observer meant she was more receptive to the minutiae of life around her, which she would unconsciously store up for use in later years. ‘I think if anything, most of my inspiration comes from … my childhood in Bury and schooldays. From stuff that’s all tucked right at the back of the head.’

  A good example of this was the school’s debating society. During Victoria’s time it was highly active with motions such as ‘This house believes that blood sports should be abolished’ being defeated and the Conservatives inevitably winning mock elections. It was not until 12 years after leaving the school that Victoria would speak in a school debate.

  ‘This House Believes’ was performed in her 1983 stage show, Lucky Bag, and saw Victoria, inspired by Bury Grammar, as a priggish schoolgirl speaking against the motion ‘This house believes school uniform should be abolished’.

  After pointing out that there is a lot of uniform in the Bayeux tapestry, Victoria’s character cites the finest schools in the country – including the one her brother attends – as examples of the positive effects of school uniform. But, she says, she has not chosen these schools for snob value; ordinary children, such as the offspring of architects, go to them. She then imagines life without school uniform and envisages parents waiting in their Range Rovers while their children dither over their wardrobes and a fourth year not knowing she is the punishment monitor because she is not wearing her red punishment tie. Warming to her subject she answers those critics who claim uniform puts financial pressure on poorer parents by pointing out that they would not be poor if they had taken the trouble to pass exams in accountancy and business management. Summing up, she says uniform promotes a sense of identity and team spirit and prevents class discrimination, before revealing that her father is now the sole supplier of uniform for the school and anyone voting for her will get a discount.

  More inspiration came one lunch break when Victoria was sunbathing on the school fire escape with Ann Sweeney. Another girl, whom they had asked to get some raspberry yoghurt or a suitable alternative, returned from the shops. She explained that she could not get the yoghurt and so she got a meat and potato pie instead.

  ‘Everybody used to eat yoghurt the whole time cos everybody was always on a diet the whole time, but they never could keep up with it,’ explained Victoria many years later. ‘They couldn’t do it for more than about three hours so they used to start off with the yoghurt and then go and have a bag of chips or whatever.’

  It might be thought that when Victoria was the only remaining child at the house, Helen and Stanley could at last pay her some attention. But they were too preoccupied with their own lives – Helen with her studies and sewing and Stanley with his job and writing. ‘Doing something creative is the only reason for my existence,’ he told the Bury Times. Victoria’s process of withdrawal accelerated.

  ‘Once my sisters left home I had three rooms, a television and a piano to myself, and I used to spend all my time there letting my brain go in all sorts of directions.’ No one would see her for days on end, but whether her parents even noticed her absence is open to question. Stanley would sometimes attempt to inject a spark of fun into the bleakness, only to be slapped down by Helen’s rebuke ‘Oh Wood, don’t be silly.’ It was typical of how their relationship had deteriorated. In the early days they would do fun things such as make a record in a booth, but during Victoria’s adolescence the rot set in and they either argued or isolated themselves. Victoria sadly joked it was only their consumption of sugar that stopped them killing each other. When the atmosphere grew tense Helen would pop a wine gum into her mouth and Stanley would chew on some Thorntons toffee.

  Victoria said: ‘I was left to my own devices so I lived in a very odd world. I don’t know whether I was obsessive because I had nothing else to do or whether I was just like that anyway … And even if I’d lived on a road and had tonnes of friends I think I would have been a bit like it. But … it was a way of filling up time as much as anything.’

  One way of filling up the emptiness was to immerse herself in literature. Reading was an obsession she shared with her mother who would descend on second-hand bookshops armed with an empty pillowcase and depart with a full load. The extra space at the roomy Birtle Edge House was quickly utilised by an ever-expanding library. ‘You couldn’t move for books,’ Victoria once said. ‘At one point you couldn’t walk down the corridor except sideways because my mother is a mad second-hand book collector. She once did a thesis on minor Victorian novels, of which there are about 29 million, most of which we had in our house.’

  Victoria would sometimes contribute to the bulging bookshelves courtesy of Bury Library. She was not a member but that did not stop her going in and stealing books that took her fancy. These thieving expeditions were nothing to do with childish thrill-seeking or bravado: they were caused by her insecurity and crippling shyness. ‘I didn’t know how you joined the library, and I didn’t know what you were supposed to do and I was too shy to ask the woman at the desk if I could join. So I used to go in and I used to sit in the reference library and read and I used to take books away in my satchel.’ In 1999 Bury Library received £100 in cash in the post along with a letter of apology.

  Books were a salvation for Victoria during her lonely childhood and she cited one as a particular favourite. She was about seven when she first opened The Swish of the Curtain. The novel, written by Pamela Brown, had inspired a teenaged Maggie Smith to choose acting as a profession and it had a similar effect on Victoria. It tells the tale of a group of stage-struck children who live in Goldenwood Avenue, Fenchester. They find
a disused chapel (in one of a number of irreverent streaks the former minister is in prison for forging bank notes) and the vicar allows them to make use of it providing they clean it up. With breathless enthusiasm the children decide to form a theatre company, writing and mounting their own productions, designing the sets and making the costumes themselves. Their goal is to become famous actors.

  ‘It was my life, that’s what I wanted to do,’ said Victoria, who cherished her battered copy of the book all her life. Like Joyce Grenfell, the children of Goldenwood Avenue set an important example. If they could write and perform their own shows then why couldn’t she? ‘I was stage-struck. Whether I was stage-struck anyway because of that book I don’t know, but I have remained stage-struck. I have remained wanting to go into a church hall and paint the chairs blue and do shows.’ The doors of Victoria’s ambition were truly opened by the exploits of the children in the novel. ‘I was lost in that world of possibility that you could take control of your own life aged eight … that was my driving force.’

  The children could be regarded as Victoria’s surrogate friends. There was even a chubby little one named Vicky, but Victoria preferred to identify with the embryo actress, Lynette Darwin. She shared the children’s aspirations and delighted in their creation of the Blue Door Theatre Company. Blue was the colour of the chapel door in the novel; it was also the colour of the door to Victoria’s bedroom. That was where she could let her mind take flight and dream of a theatrical career which would open a door into a life she could actually enjoy.

  The Swish of the Curtain provided Victoria with some badly needed joy, but even in the midst of such pleasure she found something to be melancholic about. ‘I felt terribly jealous of the author who, I think I’m right in saying, was thirteen when she started to write it and fourteen when she finished it. So when I hit fourteen and did not have a hardback best-selling children’s novel to my credit I felt really inferior,’ said Victoria. ‘I thought “Oh, that’s it now. My life is over. I’m not Pamela Brown.”’

  Throwing herself in front of a book not only helped Victoria deal with her lonely life, it also provided her with a useful tool. ‘I’ve a good vocabulary because I read all the time and that’s been very useful to me.’ Had she not entered the world of entertainment, she believed she might have become a writer.

  Reading gave Victoria more than just a good vocabulary. She thought one book, Modern Masters of Wit and Laughter, was ‘absolutely hysterical’. Aspects of Victoria’s own style can be traced back to this collection of short humorous pieces by comic writers such as A.A. Milne. She owed a particular debt to W.C. Sellars and R.J. Yeatman’s Practice and Fury of Knitting.

  For Victoria, reading was an inspiration, a refuge and a release. It was a cruel irony that one of the few things that gave her pleasure would ultimately betray her. Even while she was happily losing herself in the antics of the Blue Door Theatre Company and ‘living in a world of books’, she was unwittingly making herself vulnerable to future depressions. ‘I learned everything I knew about life from books so life was a constant disappointment.’

  ‘The 60s sexual revolution passed Bury Grammar by,’ said Gail Branch. ‘There was a lot of naiveté.’ Sex education was limited to learning about the reproduction of frogs. In the light of such ignorance it was hardly surprising that Victoria was unable to tell the police the name of what she had been told to touch by a pervert who indecently assaulted her on the way home from school. She was terrified by the encounter – rightly so, as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were preying on youngsters of a similar age not too far away – but her embarrassment at having to describe it was almost as painful for her as the assault itself. The psychological effects of the incident, along with the earlier assault in the cinema, may have left Victoria confused and even more unsure of herself.

  The school did not encourage the sexes to interact. Even during Victoria’s early years there, when the building was occupied by both girls and boys, there was strict control. The classroom doors were colour coded: pink for girls and blue for boys. The only sparks came when the adolescent boys, in a confused attempt to impress, threw fireworks into Victoria’s form room.

  Fate decreed that just as Victoria entered puberty, the boys moved into a new building of their own, which stood tantalisingly on the other side of Bridge Road. ‘We’d heard rumours that there was an offer to have the school co-ed, with the lower school in the old building and the upper school in the new building, but our headmistress said no, she didn’t want that,’ said Gail Branch. In view of Victoria’s low opinion of herself and her looks, the segregation probably made her situation slightly more bearable. She found the academic competitiveness bad enough, so to be outshone in the attractiveness stakes would have eaten further into what little self-confidence she had left. She already knew she looked unattractive and did not need the boys to remind her how she fared in comparison to her stunning classmates. It was far better to insulate herself from harsh reality by daydreaming about Paul McCartney.

  The removal of the boys meant there was no-one for the girls to develop crushes on during their day-to-day school life. Ironically for the disinterested Victoria, it was her passion for the trumpet that enabled her to cross the border into the boys’ school.

  ‘In those days you weren’t allowed to congregate with the boys – barbed wire and Dobermans! – but music lessons and rehearsals were held in their school,’ explained Hilary Wills. ‘Pat Ogden, who played the drums, was allowed to go over there too, so they were quite envied.’

  The lure of the piano proved even stronger than Victoria’s shyness and lessons recommenced when she was 13, after her parents informed her that they knew all about her furtive sessions on the piano at home. She was back at the keyboard with a vengeance. ‘I played anything, anything I could read. I was very good at sight-reading.’ The Steinway piano presented to the school in 1964 by the Guild of Parents and Friends was at her command, and Victoria played for the annual Founders’ Day service. Stanley presented her with a piano of her own on her 15th birthday, which she installed in the sanctuary of her bedroom.

  Public performances at the piano, in the school choir and in the school orchestra allowed Victoria to shed some of her shyness by losing herself in something she enjoyed and at which she excelled. A yearning to write for an audience, to show that she was something more than a fat, spotty oddity, could not be quelled by her natural timidity, and Victoria became a form representative on the school magazine committee. Although she was a member from the outset, it took three years before she had her work published in Cygnus. Perhaps encouraged by an appeal for ‘contributions of a lighter and more humorous strain’ she put pen to paper. Her first published work, simply entitled ‘An Ode’, appeared in November 1966. The 12-line poem addressed to a safety pin was hardly exceptional, but when compared to the preceding poem, ‘Protest Prototype’ – a rather worthy rant by Margaret Pannikar attacking 1960s radicalism – it was indicative of Victoria’s talent.

  By the time she had reached the Lower Vth she had gained enough confidence in her abilities to experiment. The previous summer had seen the height of psychedelia with The Beatles’ ‘I Am The Walrus’ causing widespread bewilderment. Victoria’s ‘Pardon?’ probably had much the same effect on the population of Bury Grammar. It was a fascinating stream of consciousness, deliberately devoid of punctuation, which made it clear that Victoria was not afraid to explore her creativity.

  ‘I suppose they’ll all be looking at me now,’ said an excited Victoria a month before the 1989 school reunion. Over the years she had dropped hints in various interviews that she would like to see Bury Grammar again and now the opportunity had finally arisen. But when she made a late entrance with Lesley Fitton, Victoria had no idea that she would be cheated out of revenge by her own success. So keen to avoid accusations of sycophancy and hypocrisy were her former classmates that pacts had been made beforehand to prevent her being the centre of attention. It was agreed that she should not be app
roached and conversation would only take place if she initiated it. ‘We all sort of said, “If you see her and she smiles and she says hello then say hello back”,’ said Gail Branch.

  The idea of a reunion is to catch up on each other’s lives, but what fresh information could Victoria supply? Her marriage, motherhood and career had been documented on television, in newspapers and on stage. Once again she was an outsider – this time it was her fame that excluded her. There was the discreet nod or quick glance, but the real interest lay in hearing about lives lived outside the public eye. For many of those present, it was the first time they had seen each other in 18 years. The physical changes in Victoria could be studied in any magazine rack.

  An encounter with Miss Lord, the Maths teacher, was a humbling experience. ‘Victoria!’ barked the elderly woman, ‘Come and sit down over here and tell me how your sister’s doing, because we know what you’re doing.’ It was little wonder that Victoria stuck with the security of Lesley Fitton and Patricia Ogden for the day.

  Two years later, after the experience had passed through what Victoria called her ‘barmy filter’, she used the reunion in her stage act, depicting her classmates in a humorously unflattering light.

  3

  VICTORIA REGARDED THE summer of 1968 as one of the happiest periods of her life. The sun finally came out for her, she said, and the world changed, when she joined Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop. The adored Rosalind had been a member since its creation in 1966, starring in its very first production, Our Town. Bury had nothing vaguely similar on offer so, when she was old enough, Victoria tagged along.

  Had she headed nine miles south instead of seven miles east, Victoria would have found herself learning under the direction of Mike Leigh. At that time Leigh, who grew up on the Prestwich– Salford border, had taken time out from London life to return to his roots. Between the autumn of 1968 and the summer of 1969 he devised and directed plays for the Manchester Youth Theatre, among which was Glum Victoria and the Lad With Specs, described as an exercise in alienation and not feeling wanted.