No Holding Back

by Amanda Holden

  Nan worked at Wall’s and, to get on her nerves, Mum used to train us to say that Nanny’s job was to put the sticks on the lollies – in actual fact she worked in the accounts department. The best thing about her job, in our eyes, was that she always had a freezer full of ice cream, which she bought wholesale and which we thought was a huge luxury. I still think Cornettos are a treat! Her own special recipe for milkshake consisted of vanilla ice cream, sugar and milk. Debbie and I were so competitive that we’d fight over everything and we even complained if one or other of us had the tiniest bit more milkshake in their glass, so Nan would measure the height of the froth in each glass with a tape.

  Every night at bedtime Nanny read us stories with warm sweet milk. She would kiss us and say, ‘I love you and don’t you forget it,’ then in a sing-songy voice call for Papa to come up and say goodnight. He would arrive and test us on the capitals of the world – I used to know them all! We felt safe, warm and happy at their house. They could be strict but we had so much respect for them.

  Nan is now in her mid-nineties and lives alone in the house she and my Papa shared all those years. I’m sure she still has that tape measure, and I’m certain that her cupboards are still stocked for World War III (though since we lost Papa in 2007, it makes me sad to see her set out breakfast – place setting, pills, vitamins and all – just for one). She’s still the life and soul of any party. I can take her anywhere. When Papa died, she told me she was living for Britain’s Got Talent and that the series was getting her through a very hard time. So I sent a car to bring her to the finals, and she came to the Dorchester afterwards and stayed up in the bar for hours drinking cocktails with me and Simon. It got to the very early hours and she said, ‘Sorry, dear, I don’t want to spoil your fun but it is five o’clock in the morning!’

  When we were little and Nan and Papa came to visit our house, Mum would make us eggs and bacon for breakfast with tinned tomatoes, which seemed so exotic. We spent every Christmas and Easter with them, too, and Nan would sneak me a sweet martini with lemonade (‘I’ll make it weak, dear!’). We’d always get a doll or toy, we’d have Christmas dinner with roast turkey and a real tree and one of our Christmas family rituals was to watch The Wizard of Oz together. Mum still does a brilliant Wicked Witch of the West laugh. (Hers isn’t far off and neither is mine – my nan, however, laughs like Mutley. We all have hideous laughs – it’s a gene thing.) Another favourite was The Sound of Music. I used to sing along to songs like ‘My Favourite Things’ and convince myself that I sounded just like Julie Andrews.

  Alongside gymnastics, I studied ballet for a while and also took it very seriously. I was constantly going over my routines and my parents were consistently encouraging and supportive, although my mum also made fun of how earnest I was. Once, I was halfway through rehearsing a dance in the living room when she ran into the room dressed in a blouse and tights with a tea towel stuffed down her knickers like bollocks to look like famous male ballerina Rudolf Nureyev. (Another time, when Debbie and I were older, we were sitting watching Top of the Pops and she and Dad burst in dressed as Meat Loaf and Cher and belted out ‘Dead Ringer for Love’. Mum was wearing a purple corduroy jumpsuit with poppers, which she ripped open as she started headbanging. That time, we sat there with blank faces like the teenagers from Harry Enfield – the only response we gave them was to sulkily ask them to get out of the way of the telly.)

  I gave ballet up in the end, because I was ‘too busy putting on my own production of Grease’, in which I obviously gave myself the part of Sandy, resplendent in my Mum’s hooped clip-on earrings. Performing helped me fund gymnastics, which was still my first love. I roped my sister in to shows in our garden at home and we’d raise money for the club. I would make little posters, cover them in cling film and me and my sister would go round the whole estate and stick them on to the ubiquitous wooden telegraph poles of the time to advertise it. (For some reason the poles would always ooze tar in the summer heat and I used to love picking it off when it had dried.) Before each performance, my mum would serve sausages on sticks and lemonade out of the kitchen window, and my friend Denise would be at the gate to punch tickets. I can only now apologise to those poor neighbours whose quiet afternoons I must have wrecked.

  Even when I wasn’t performing, I sang nearly all the time and though it was Papa who definitely fuelled my love of music, it’s always been such an important part of my life that Mum says I came out singing. I loved ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ and anything by The Carpenters, especially ‘Sing’. I had a tape recorder and stop-started my Papa’s tape recordings, writing the words down, until I knew all the lyrics from My Fair Lady and West Side Story off by heart. I made up a whole dance routine for my mum to one of her records, Frankie Laine’s ‘Jezebel’ (having no clue as to its meaning). Showaddywaddy was my favourite pop group. I loved ‘Under the Moon of Love’ and had a major crush on the lead singer Dave Bartram, to the point of kissing the TV every time he was on it. (Recently, after he read an interview in which I confessed this, he asked me to write the foreword to his book – which I did!) I watched the Brotherhood of Man win the Eurovision Song Contest in 1976 with ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ and learned their entire performance including the dance steps. Randomly I sang it in a Cockney accent. I don’t know why – it’s just the way I sang!

  My mother said she always knew I was happy if I was singing. And I sang pretty much all the time. I’d lie in bed, scratching at the woodchip wallpaper until whole areas were picked clean, sucking my middle fingers (never my thumb) and tapping my nose with my forefinger while I hummed. I also sucked the corners of clean hankies and picked at my pink blanket to make little balls – singing all the while. The few times in my life when I haven’t sung at all, friends and family knew I wasn’t happy simply because I had stopped.

  I read a lot too and was so gripped by Enid Blyton’s storytelling that I’d hide under the bedclothes with a torch, turning the pages way past bedtime. A lot of our books were second-hand (as were our toys), but that didn’t matter to me – I liked nothing better than to lose myself in an imaginary world and devoured all the Famous Five stories. (I still have my original copy of The Magic Faraway Tree, with its Land of Topsy Turvy, Land of Spells, Land of Do-as-you-Please and Land of Dreams, and every time I read it to Lexi we both love to sniff it – she loves it because she says it ‘smells of old’.) I read the whole Malory Towers series over and over, about the girls’ boarding school in Cornwall. Those books always used to lift me if I was ever feeling down.

  I had a much-loved teddy bear my grandparents gave me when I was born and a little rag doll called Scraggy Annie that I took everywhere with me. My favourite toy, though, was a rabbit in a blue skirt known as Miffy who doubled as my pyjama case. I called her ‘buddy’ because I couldn’t say bunny.

  But I was transfixed by my mum – I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world and I loved to watch her do her makeup in the mirror. I’d sit behind her and watch her every move as she applied Astral cream and foundation. Then she’d suck her cheeks in, dollop blusher from a stick on them, apply her trademark green eye shadow and then finally her favourite orange lipstick that I’d copy her puckering up for. She had long, thick, natural chestnut hair which she curled in Carmen rollers but she was forever losing the pins – it was my job to hunt for them. Once her hair was done, she piled it on top of her head. I used to say, ‘Mummy, you look like a cottage loaf with your hair like that.’

  If she was going out somewhere, she’d put on her one and only best dress, a yellow maxi dress with floaty cap sleeves bought for her by her best friend from school, Pat, when she came to visit one time and realised Mum didn’t have anything special to wear. I thought Mum looked like a movie star and when I look at photographs of her back then I do indeed see a beautiful young woman, one who was still hopeful about the future.

  My nan has good genes, too, and always smells of a comforting combination of baking, Silvikrin hairspray, Oil of Ulay (as
it was then) and Charlie perfume. I think of her whenever I smell them. (Her bathroom cabinet is still full of them. I continually buy her more expensive perfume for Christmas and birthdays, but they go back in the cupboard and out comes the Charlie!) She has the softest skin and I have watched her gracefully age from fifty, when my mum persuaded her to go ‘au naturel’ and stop dying her hair. (FYI, my mum shows no signs of giving up highlighting her own hair and is now aged sixty-four herself!)

  I liked to play with my nan’s make-up and can still remember the taste of her pink lipstick and the cold weight of her powder compact in my hand. She had a dressing-up box and she’d let us look at her small collection of jewellery. There was one brooch I especially loved that had a purple stone with little pearls around it, and in the back was a tiny plait of dark hair trapped under glass. I liked to imagine it as a secret token from a long-forgotten relative who’d cut off a lock of her hair as a keepsake for her one true love, but I’ve since been told that it is a Victorian mourning brooch and the hair would probably have been taken from someone who’d died. I find that fascinating.

  My nan and Papa were classy, and proud, and we always looked well turned out and cared for. Papa could be a bit of a tight-arse so they had separate bank accounts, as do I. (I never rely on a man for money – I would bankrupt Chris!) Nana would always be saving up for something. On ‘big’ birthdays we would always be given something that was meant to last – a ‘proper watch’ on my thirteenth birthday, for example, or a ‘decent’ suitcase on my eight eenth – and they always managed a holiday.

  I knew no matter what that I could trust and rely on them. Along with my mum, they have always believed in me and gave me the best childhood they knew how. But little did we know it was all about to get better, with the arrival of a very important new member of the family . . .

  Chapter 3

  ‘Les’ is More

  I was, unwittingly, the one to make my mum’s relationship with my dad Les public. They started dating and from then on he came to our house all the time. One morning, our milkman Graham (his best friend from school) dropped the bottles as usual on the doorstep, where Debbie and I were sitting playing with our dolls in our nightdresses.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ he asked.

  ‘In bed with her boyfriend,’ I announced.

  The news flashed round the village and soon afterwards Les moved in. He never left. Almost overnight, he brought stability and joy to our lives. I loved him completely and unconditionally from day one. I especially loved that he made Mum so happy.

  Debbie and I accepted their relationship immediately. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me and now – more than thirty years later – it still does. He says that when he first spotted what he describes as our ‘beautiful mother with her two beautiful girls’, Mum pushing us in our double buggy, he fell in love with us all instantly and sought Mum out at the pub in Bishop’s Waltham where she worked behind the bar in the evenings.

  Up until that moment, Leslie Collister had been a good-looking bachelor who had a nice life doing up cars in the local Spratt’s garage and playing football at weekends for Swanmore club. I thought he was wonderful. Not only was it good to have a man around the place but Les was a brilliant handyman who fixed all the things that needed fixing (mostly my mother!). He even mowed the lawn and brought a dog with him, a beautiful Golden Labrador called Elsa, named after the lion in Born Free. It was a question of ‘Love me, love my dog’ – so we did! On one of Debbie’s birthdays, he bought her a gift and then gave me a colouring book (‘So you don’t feel left out’) and I treasured that blue colouring book until it fell apart. One Christmas, we asked for a big white plastic Sindy house, but we didn’t have the money for one so he made us ski lodges, which were much better. They were amazing. Me and Debbie played with them for hours, doing Sindy voices while Mum and Les listened outside the door. Eventually, I sold mine – I’m still gutted about it and look back on that decision with total regret. I used the money to buy clothes at Moonaz, the local fashion boutique, which sold tie-dye skirts and cheesecloth tops – my village’s idea of high fashion!

  Seven years later, on 29 October 1982, aged eleven and dressed in a blue velvet ra-ra skirt with white tights and black patent shoes, I was the proud chief bridesmaid (even though I hated my outfit), as Les promised to love and cherish my mother ’til death them did part. They were married in the local registry office followed by a church blessing and a reception in the Jubilee Hall. Mum wore a knee-length red dress and a red hat with red feathers at the back that my nan insisted cried out for an enormous black ostrich feather, so she nicked one out of another hat in the shop when the shop assistant wasn’t looking to glue into my mum’s (even though it tickled everyone’s faces!). Although on that day Mum became Judith Collister, I never felt the urge to change my surname. Dad did offer to adopt us but in the end I think Mum thought it would be too much trouble to get Frank’s permission. Amanda Holden I was born and Amanda Holden I would remain.

  Les’s name changed though. Debbie and I obviously had some strong morals because it was only on the day that Mum and Les became ‘official’ that (despite thinking of him as our father for all the time they’d been together) we started to call him ‘Dad’! But from the moment he was Dad, Mum says we never slipped up. He was the only dad we knew and the only one we will ever know.

  Dad was conceived in the war and never knew his own father, but had a stepfather who was unkind to him. He endured unreasonable punishment and resentment from this man who wasn’t his father for years until he was finally able to escape to an aunt’s house. I think that’s why he was determined to take such good care of us. It must have been a bit of a shock to his system though – to begin with, my dad was not one for communicating. Suddenly, he found himself in a family of three girls, always giving him cuddles and loving him so openly, and my mum asking questions and prising things out of him. Then one day, when we were driving to Blackgang Chine for a weekend in the Isle of Wight, he suddenly stopped the car and said, ‘Judy, I’ll have to pull over, I can’t drive.’ He was paralysed from fear or panic or something – but whatever it was, he literally couldn’t go on. My mum still hadn’t passed her driving test at that point, but she had to drive us all home.

  After that, he became nervous and emotional, and for months refused to go out anywhere. He’d get really cold and shivery and cry, then go to bed for days at a time. He became even quieter than normal and I can remember my mum tiptoeing around him a bit. She’d get us to give him even more cuddles than normal. Looking back, he’d had some kind of anxiety attack but so little was known about mental health at the time that when he went to the doctor’s about it he was told to take aspirin! Mum says we must have loved the pain of his upbringing out of him – being in a happy family and having a stable life after his own terrible upbringing – and it manifested itself as some kind of breakdown.

  The whole episode changed him and after that he became much more forthright and outgoing, and very emotional. Very emotional! After years of living with us all he now wears his heart on his sleeve and he can barely talk to me about anything without crying. His eyes fill up all the time – he’s a wreck! Bless his heart.

  Around this time, repeated tonsillitis meant the doctors finally admitted me to hospital to have my tonsils out. I hated it there, I didn’t want to stay in for three nights and couldn’t wait to come home. Unfortunately for me, though, some of the kids in the ward were found to have some sort of hospital virus and the entire hospital was placed under quarantine. No visitors were allowed at all to begin with and then only in what looked like space suits (it was like that scene at the end of E.T. when they’re all wearing forensics) and I lay in my bed crying and crying for ten days. The mother of the infected kids tried to cheer me up by giving me a pack of Refreshers but I thought it was such a rubbish gift that it only made me cry more. While I was there, I had an encounter with a really dodgy doctor (as I realised with hindsight). I was asleep
on my tummy and woke up and found someone looking at my bum. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘My tonsils definitely aren’t down there’! (And anyway he should have been checking for foot and mouth disease, not foot and bum disease!)

  Mum had always ridden a blue and white bicycle to and from work but, with me in hospital and Dad unwell, she suddenly had to learn how to drive. She drove Dad’s car to see me after work every night with her L-plates on – and if she couldn’t find another driver to come with her, she came alone. Other times she’d bring her sister-in-law, whose daughter’s party trick was to hold her breath until she went blue, which she did repeatedly on the back seat. My mother would be a nervous wreck by the time she got to hospital and then she had to go through the faff of putting on a special suit just to hold my hand.

  When I finally left hospital, Dad’s mother Nanny Winnie did a high tea for me, including towering jellies that actually wobbled. All the kids from the street were in my house, welcoming me back. There were Jackie and Susan Cox (we played with them for mercenary reasons – they had a Sodastream!) and Jill Dark. Jill and I used to go looking for chewing gum stuck to the walls or floor and – this is so disgusting, I can hardly bear to write it – we used to pick it off and eat it. Classy!

  As the older sister, I was used to ordering Debbie around at home and was always boss of the street, but Mum said Debbie tried to take over when I went to school – sadly for her, it didn’t work. Thank God there’s only one gobshite in the family!

  We didn’t have exotic holidays when we were little, but they were always great fun. We went camping in Cornwall, or once to the South of France. I didn’t get on a plane until I was sixteen and my mum was thirty-two – until then we’d only travelled overseas by ferry. Wherever we were, I thought it was hilarious to stalk Debbie into the bushes and take a picture of her having a wee. Every holiday album has a picture of Debbie squatting in it – we have pictures of her doing it all over the UK! (Some years later Sarah Parish and I continued this tradition in Montepulciano, when I got caught short and had to go for a pee at the top of a hill. Sarah then took a picture of it flowing down the road! T.M.I!)