General Studies was a mandatory A-level subject, and Victoria’s English skills and musical talent made them natural A-level options. Years later Victoria’s own monologues would be linguistically analysed by students as part of their A-level examinations. Her third subject choice was Scripture and her decision may have been influenced by the dry, sarcastic humour of its teacher, Miss Carney. A real character, she had been a pupil at the school herself, which no doubt helped her empathise with Victoria and her classmates. She also impressed them by refusing to sing ‘Jerusalem’ at the end-of-term assemblies because she regarded it as theologically incorrect.
English teacher Mrs Jean Marshall was Victoria’s favourite. Victoria was one of a small select group to be taught A+ English by her, alongside the standard A-level course. The group was a sort of academic hothouse for those who had shown a particular aptitude for the subject. Besides her unique and inspiring approach to teaching, it was Mrs Marshall’s warm, maternal personality that most endeared her to the class. Being married, with children of her own, made her quite a rarity among the staff, and her trusting and sympathetic nature made her extremely popular with the girls. She was one of the few teachers to champion Victoria.
‘Mrs Marshall obviously appreciated Vicky’s writing and I think the two of them had a very good teacher/pupil relationship,’ said Hilary Wills.
The relationship continued after Bury Grammar, with Victoria and Jean Marshall exchanging letters for a while. They met up again once, but a planned second meeting had to be cancelled because of Victoria’s busy schedule. After Jean Marshall’s death her daughter, Sheila, allowed Victoria to choose one of her mother’s paintings.
‘My mum was in favour of those who wanted to do something different. The ones who had more about them … she always stood up for them. She’d say, “Just because they’re mischievous it doesn’t mean their heads are empty.” Victoria was a different sort of person to the others.’
Performing on stage, where Victoria could shed her own personality and hide behind a character was one thing, but, for someone so fundamentally shy, it was more of an achievement to perform as a version of herself. The recently built Sixth Form common room became her stage and Victoria entertained her peers by singing folk and show songs. She would also play the piano in assemblies if the music teacher had not arrived.
‘As she got older you noticed her talent more and she was very confident where it was the things she was good at,’ said Gail Branch. ‘She was shy but the confidence would come through when she was playing the fool or the piano. She certainly wasn’t a show-off though.’
The piano inspired a unique entry by Victoria for the school magazine. Even had it not been sandwiched between two unremarkable poems (‘Autumn’ and ‘Bluebells and Buttercups’) the quality, attention to detail and assured style of ‘A Scaly Downfall’ would have still made it stand out. In this highly descriptive work of prose, Victoria delighted in conveying the frustration of receiving a piano lesson from an elderly teacher.
Victoria would go on to gain Grade VII with Merit in Pianoforte before leaving the school, but not continuing with piano lessons beyond that was always a source of regret to her. The ability to be a brilliant jazz pianist was the one talent she would have most liked to have had.
Another famous native of Bury who did continue with lessons, and went on to make a successful career at the keyboard, was Peter Skellern. His and Victoria’s paths never crossed in their home town and it was not until years later that they met.
‘A television producer – I think it was Greg Dyke – organised a lunch for us once. He had the idea for us to play two characters in a drama series, but nothing came of it,’ recalled Skellern.
By the time they entered the Sixth Form, Victoria and her classmates had discovered there was more to sex than frogs and tadpoles. In fact, the subject had become a major preoccupation. ‘It was the main theme of conversation … only five pupils in the sixth form had “done it”, and we kept an elaborate chart of how far everyone had gone … it was a scream,’ said Victoria, who with the security of a boyfriend was able to confidently join in the discussions.
There were rumours that one girl had left the school because she was pregnant, and stories spread about the most respectable girl in the Scripture class. The teachers did not escape the gossip mill either, and there was a rumour that an English teacher who suddenly disappeared had run off with a priest.
Victoria’s final year at the school was one of her happiest. The countdown to A levels, and the fact that her best friend, Lesley, was made Head Girl, did not prevent them from having fun. It was virtually unheard of for 18-year-olds to be sent out of the dining hall, but Victoria and Lesley achieved it after being caught making a mould of the Head Girl’s medallion in the mashed potatoes.
That year’s school magazine saw Victoria writing with relish of the ‘many and various’ activities of the Literary and Dramatic Society, but it was her final contribution to the school magazine that is the most interesting. The untitled piece bears all the hallmarks of Victoria’s idiosyncratic style, and displays her typical irony and dourness. She lovingly describes the moment a beautiful young actress, spotted playing a bit part in No, No Nanette in Wigan, is about to make her West End debut and bring the house down. Her transition to stardom is humorously easy and Victoria wryly ended the piece by promising readers how next week she would tell them how easy it was to become Queen of England.
Clearly, it was the future Victoria fantasised for herself, but in her wryness she showed she was not blind to the hardships that her chosen profession would present. Without doubt the article was inspired by a description of Lynette’s moment of glory when she accepted the Seymore trophy on behalf of the Blue Door Theatre Company in the all-important competition in The Swish of the Curtain.
Victoria shared a similar sense of elation in her final performance for the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop, stunning those who thought her incapable of playing serious roles.
‘I had the main part in The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the end, just before I left to go to university. Pity you have to move on, really, but I finished in a blaze of glory.’ Joe Dawson agreed and remembered her giving a ‘very moving’ performance as Grusha Vashnadze.
By the summer of 1971 Victoria had accepted a place to study Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University. She was free at last to ‘join’ her Fenchester friends from The Swish of the Curtain as they lay in the sunshine on a day ‘between the past and the future’, wondering what was to come. For the children of Goldenwood Avenue, ‘the past was clear and colourful as a tapestry as they gazed out across the sea that was shrouded and misty as the future’.
Victoria’s future, too, was unclear, but the greyness of her past made her determined the years ahead would be brighter.
4
WHEN VICTORIA DEPARTED for Birmingham it was effectively a permanent exile. There was no regret at leaving a place that had been the scene of so much unhappiness.
As she prepared to start university, her mother graduated from Manchester University with a General Arts Degree. Once again Helen made the front page of the Bury Times – this time she was photographed in a pinnie polishing a chair from the University union that she had purchased as a souvenir. She had enjoyed being a student and was active in the drama department, making costumes and even performing in Brecht’s Baal. Helen toyed with the idea of studying for an MA or teaching Liberal Studies at a college. Instead, she became an English and Drama lecturer at Bolton Institute of Technology.
It can be assumed that Victoria looked forward to university with some optimism. Wood family life had already made her adept at independent living, and while Bury Grammar had been a largely unhappy experience, things had picked up towards the end. If she could consolidate on that, and the confidence she had gained from the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop, life might improve.
The Birmingham course covered everything from the Middle Ages to Noël Coward. ‘It was very innovati
ve,’ said Gerry McCarthy, one of Victoria’s tutors. ‘It was a course which was designed to enquire into the ways in which performance worked. It was intellectually highly structured.’
It was an experience Victoria hated.
‘I was intimidated when I got there. It was a poncey place. It was the first time I had come up against glossy looking girls from Hampstead who talked in posh voices,’ was how Victoria dismissed her fellow students. In actual fact, the other undergraduates were people like George Irving from Newcastle, working-class Londoner Terry Johnson and Leeds girl Chrissie Poulter. There was the theatrically named middle-class Southerner Fidelis Morgan, but the only student who matched Victoria’s description was Jane Wymark, who actually became a good friend.
Victoria liked to suggest she was the neglected ugly duckling of the course: the humble Northerner without pretensions who did nothing but sweep the stage on which her graceful fellow students dazzled one and all with their dramatic talents. She said she was so self-conscious she wore her treasured leg warmers beneath her trousers.
‘Everybody could act, and they could all do it better than me … or so I imagined,’ she said. ‘I’ve had this repeated pattern throughout my life of always thinking people are better than me.’
Gerry McCarthy was puzzled by Victoria’s poor self-image. ‘I wonder if she ever considered why she was admitted. There must have been several hundred people trying to get those ten or so places.’
The fundamental problem was caused by the collision of her egotism with her sense of inadequacy. She was not the best actress on the course and so, in her mind, she was a failure. By writing her rivals off as faceless, ethereal beauties she could console herself that theirs was only a superficial triumph. Setting herself apart from them could be interpreted as a manifestation of her low self-esteem. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a demonstration of a belief in her own superiority.
The lecturers too came in for criticism. Victoria claimed that they were dismissive of her, telling her she lacked the ability to be an actress and advising her to aim for a career in stage management instead. They were justified to an extent. Part of the problem was Victoria’s impatience to demonstrate her flair for writing. Instead of producing an essay on a playwright she would write a play in the style of the playwright – Joe Orton being a particular favourite. Needless to say, her puzzled lecturers were not impressed.
Gerry McCarthy had an inkling that Victoria was not going to be a typical student. ‘Whenever her name was mentioned the other lecturers sort of scratched their heads and said “Oh. Victoria”.’ He added: ‘In a way she was just one delightful quirk. She was not a good actor, but she was a really terrific act.’
By the time he came into contact with her, Victoria’s relationship with the rest of the group had deteriorated to such an extent that she exiled herself into a class of her own. ‘The thing is Victoria was always an interestingly self-critical person and I think she managed to fall out with a number of people,’ he recalled. ‘She ended up the only person who wanted to do a particular thing and she didn’t want to do it with anybody else because she’d fallen out with them.’ In their private lessons Victoria expressed an interest in studying comedy, especially Victorian farce.
The academic emphasis of the degree course disappointed Victoria, who preferred the idea of performing. It found an outlet in her frustration. ‘The performance was Victoria telling me what was happening in her life, which was good enough material,’ said McCarthy. ‘I thought she was extremely funny and rather a bright person.’ But he also detected a certain vulnerability and felt that she saw the world through the eyes of a two-year-old.
Victoria’s claim that she was overlooked in the casting of plays does have substance. Lecturer Clive Barker recalled directing a production of a Greek tragedy and being ordered to give her the leading part. He protested, but was told by his departmental heads that she had to play the role as part of the course requirement: she had not been given any parts in productions throughout the year and this was the last one.
In the play, The Phoenician Women by Euripides, Victoria was given the role of Antigone. She used a Northern accent and performed most of the play with her back to the audience.
‘Looking back on it, having seen other productions which cast very good-looking actresses as Antigone – good middle-class well-trained actresses – I had an advantage in having Victoria because Antigone is a dumpy, ill-considered girl trying to grow up … Victoria at that time was absolutely as Antigone is depicted in the play,’ said Barker.
‘I think basically what you would say about Victoria at that time was that she was trying to break out of a cocoon. Life had defined her from her shape and her looks, and I think, the family as well. I think Victoria was looking for a way out of that.
‘She was, I think, slightly in the shadow of her father who wrote for Coronation Street and various things at that time and I think she was trying to escape from that.’
He remembered Victoria as an ‘oddball’ who ‘lived in a different world to everybody else’. But he also detected an underlying strength. ‘She was a very strong character … even when she was shy and uncertain she was still strongly shy and uncertain. You can’t ignore Victoria and you never could. She was a presence.’
Her professed shyness and uncertainty did not prevent her from attending university parties, where she entertained those present with a selection of self-penned comic songs. Because of The Phoenician Women, she gravitated towards Barker. ‘She was mad,’ he laughed. ‘She ruined my social life for three years. Every time we went to a party Victoria stood beside me and told me all about her sad love life. All the stuff that she would put into the songs later – all the material was there at the beginning. She was shy but there’s some idiot feature in my make-up that lent itself to her standing next to me and telling me intimate details of her life.’
This included her fondness for the smaller of her boyfriend’s testicles – which interested her enormously and for which she felt very maternal – and the goings-on at the house she lived in on Priory Road.
Barker felt it was his unthreatening personality that drew Victoria to him. ‘You’re dealing with someone who’s safe, who’s not going to put you down, who’s not going to hurt you or harm you or attack you, so you stand next to that person.’ Because she trusted him, Victoria allowed Barker to read a play she had written, a touching cross-generational comedy about an old man and a young woman. ‘It was a very good play,’ he said. ‘The two of us were going to perform it, but never got round to it. I think she wanted to re-write it.’
He felt Victoria’s talent for writing only began to emerge towards the end of the course. On one occasion she wrote a final-year practical for another student to perform. It was about someone trying to commit suicide but getting it all wrong, which said a lot about Victoria’s outlook during that period.
It was her frustration at being overlooked yet again – after unsuccessfully auditioning for the part of Fay in Orton’s Loot – that provoked Victoria into making her mark. As compensation for losing out on the role, she was allowed to play the piano during the interval and at the end when everyone was filing out. The song, which she described as ‘very evil’, was her chance for revenge. It was all about how it should have been her on stage playing the part and it got a huge round of applause and lots of laughter every night. In terms of her career, it was a moment that was as pivotal as seeing Joyce Grenfell perform.
By 1973 Victoria’s romance with Bob Mason was over. The fact that she was in Birmingham and he was in London put the relationship under a strain, but it was Bob’s wandering eye that was the final blow. ‘He was at the Central School of Drama then and she was an actress. As different from me as can be imagined. Smart, dark and posh,’ said Victoria. She discovered the affair when she found a letter in Mason’s bag, written in a very over-the-top way by the girl he was seeing. Victoria was deeply wounded and described the betrayal as the most painful thing that h
ad ever happened to her, which was hardly surprising considering the callous manner in which she was dumped.
‘The worst part of it was at the time we split up I was putting flares in the side of his jeans and when he left he said, “You can send them on when you’ve finished.” And, what’s more, I did. Then he sent me a postcard saying “jeans very poor”. So you can see what sort of person we are dealing with here.’
Explaining his infidelity, Mason said he was confused and naive. ‘I was a working-class lad from a mill town and I was suddenly transplanted into drama school and surrounded by heiresses from Belgravia and all kinds of exciting people.
‘I wasn’t in control of what was happening to me. When you are young, you think you can behave a bit recklessly and get away with it.’
The break-up meant much more than just a failed romance. Having a boyfriend gave Victoria security and spared her from having to enter the university dating game with its risks of rejection. She had also seen Mason as a key component in the development of her career. Whenever they met they used to sit together at the piano: he wrote the lyrics, she wrote the music and together they mapped out their future. But, with just one year left at university, Victoria was alone and no closer to realising her dreams. The plunge into misery and despair put things into perspective. The shyness that had plagued her had been eclipsed by black depression, making her timidity seem inconsequential. This liberated her and enabled her to adopt a desperate remedy that would have been unthinkable before the trauma. She entered a talent show.
Her motives for entering the Pub Entertainer of the Year contest were a mixture of revenge and attempted reconciliation. She had the forlorn hope that she would win and that Mason would come and witness her triumph and regret ditching her. To increase the chance of him seeing her, she entered one of the London heats at a pub near the Victoria Palace. The piano was bolted to the floor, which meant she performed her three lovelorn songs with her back to the audience. Her revenge fantasy failed and she was placed third out of five, defeated by three enormous girl singers in hot pants and a man dressed as a skeleton who climbed out of a cardboard coffin and sang ‘’Taint No Sin To Take Off Your Skin and Dance Around In Your Bones’.
Victoria Wood Page 7
