Her father, too, suffered greatly, so it was not a huge surprise when Plato eventually lost patience with the situation and left the family home. However, it made for some difficult times between father and daughter. He had met a new woman, called Mel. Plato and Mel had first met in the late 1990s. Plato wooed her using an unconventional gambit: ‘If you agreed to date me, and we dated for a year, would you marry me?’ When he told Tulisa that he was leaving Ann, it was the hardest conversation they had ever had. His daughter, who had already been through so much, was distraught. ‘I could see how sad she looked but I had just had enough,’ he said. ‘I just needed my own space.’ For Ann, and therefore for Tulisa, this parting had severe consequences. ‘My dad left home and it triggered one of her episodes,’ said Tulisa of her mother’s response. ‘One minute she’d look all mournful as if someone had died, the next she’d be angry and aggressive, smashing cupboards and shouting. I wasn’t allowed to turn on the TV because she thought it might harm us – the same with the hot water.’
Life was becoming genuinely intolerable for Tulisa. She was not even 10 years of age and yet was having to face the most difficult of experiences. To watch, at the age of nine, one’s parents split was enough in itself. However, she had also seen her mother sectioned to psychiatric care and had witnessed at first hand the erratic behaviour that had led to that move. ‘It was impossible to have a conversation with my mum because she’d drift off into her own little world, but at the same time she didn’t want me to go out and leave her so I couldn’t even escape to a friend’s house. I was like a prisoner in the flat with her. Inevitably, she went into hospital again and I stayed with my mum’s older sister, Louise. She had children of her own and it was felt she was more able to look after a young girl.’ Tulisa spoke to The Sunday Times about what life was like for her in the aftermath of her parents’ divorce. ‘Me and my mum spent a year in a one-bed council flat,’ she said. ‘There was no shower – we’d have to run across the hall, so it was far from glamorous. Don’t get me wrong, my dad did his utmost to support me. He worked, but he was never rich. Most days, I would live off £3.’
Around the same time, Tulisa changed her appearance, as she began to become aware of the attraction of boys. ‘I grew out my horrible fringe and got my ears pierced, pulled my hair back off my face, put on a shorter skirt and undid my top button – and that was it: I found I got a lot more male attention,’ she said. Not that her rebellious ways could conceal the sweet, frightened girl underneath it all. Nor could it entirely destroy her already notable spirit. Take, for instance, the impression young Tulisa first made on her stepmother, Mel. ‘She was a lovely little girl,’ Mel told the Daily Mail. ‘I remember her telling jokes, mimicking members of her family. She was a happy-go-lucky character.’ Tulisa remains a fine mimic to this day. ‘There didn’t seem to be any ill-feeling about me being in her father’s life,’ said Mel. ‘They were very close and she appeared happy to be around him, happy to be in his presence. You could see there was definitely a bond there – she adored her father. She was polite and well-mannered – very much so.’ Tulisa’s father and his new wife took her on day trips to the zoo and once for a weekend holiday in Wales. She won a singing competition at a Butlins holiday camp, performing Laura Branigan’s hit song ‘Gloria’ to great acclaim.
Plato wanted to gain joint custody of Tulisa, who he was convinced would be better off with him. So he encouraged Mel to marry him so his legal case for custody would be stronger. ‘He put the squeeze on me and said it would help his cause to have a stable environment for Tulisa to come to every weekend,’ Mel told the Daily Mail. ‘I felt I was being rushed into things, that there had been no time for the relationship to develop properly. I was only 25. But my own father had been schizophrenic and I understood the effects of mental illness on a child. I went along with it, despite huge doubts.’ She said Plato told her the day after the wedding that she would have to return to work straightaway, as she needed to bring income into the home because he ‘wasn’t built for nine-to-five.’ His bid for joint custody failed, to his devastation, said Mel.
Meanwhile, Ann’s problems continued. On one occasion, she phoned Plato and Mel to inform them that the ‘devil is climbing up the walls’. Tulisa was in the house with Ann at the time and could be heard crying in the background as her mother broke down over the phone. Ann was returned to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead but nobody knew where Tulisa was. It transpired that, in a moment of awful neglect, she had been left crying on the doorstep by the social services staff who had taken Ann to hospital. At just 10 years of age Tulisa was more alone and vulnerable than ever. She walked to the local pub where the landlord – who knew the family – took her in and called Tulisa’s aunt to come and collect her.
Tulisa had always done her best to smile through the turmoil but in the wake of that incident the brave face she tried to put on things was rarely seen. She would disappear, and then phone up asking to be collected from places as far away as Bristol. Indeed, so depressed did she become that she started to self-harm. It started when she began to cut her own arms with scissors. This became an increasingly grave problem. Before long these were not just small nicks in her arms: she was, in her own words ‘slicing up my arms’. She also used to smash her head against the wall at night with sheer frustration at her life. This was not the behaviour of a girl who was entirely happy-go-lucky. She could not have known then what joys and riches would come to her later in life. Not least because in the immediate future life was about to throw more painful trials her way. They say your schooldays are the happiest of your life. Well, don’t try telling Tulisa that. The loneliness she had felt at La Sainte Union was to be replaced by some horrific times at her next educational establishment. Indeed, after what she went through in the latter years of her schooling she would argue that schooldays can often be the very worst days of your life.
CHAPTER TWO
When she was 12 years old, Tulisa enrolled in Haverstock School in Camden. She describes it as a place quite out of the ordinary. Indeed, her immediate memories of the place are quite shocking. ‘We used to have police outside every day,’ she told The Sunday Times. ‘Whoever did what they did out of that school, bloody well done to them, because when I was there, it was horrific.’ Former pupils of the school include Labour leader Ed Miliband and 1980s football star John Barnes. However, the most important pupils in Tulisa’s mind were two who were there at the time: her cousin Dino and his best friend Richard Rawson, who are now better known as Dappy and Fazer of N-Dubz. They had first met at karate lessons when they were around the age of seven. It has become an enduring friendship. The day before she started at Haverstock, it was Dappy who took her clothes shopping, so she would fit in better. Without an elder sibling to look up to in the style stakes, Tulisa had been clothed by her mother up until then.
It was the first makeover of Tulisa’s life, though certainly not the last. First, they went to a couple of footwear stores, and emerged with a pair of Nike trainers. They then drifted through other clothes stores as they assembled a new outfit for Tulisa: a baseball jacket, a jumper from Gap and a pair of Nike tracksuit bottoms. What a fun day it was, as Dappy helped her choose the right gear. She really looked up to her cousin, who is a year older than her and had a sort of sibling role from early in their lives. The Dappy-commissioned makeover was complete when a female friend of his helped Tulisa slick her hair back. Having given Tulisa a new look for her new school, he then set to work on her etiquette. He encouraged her to play it a bit more cool but also to be more open than she had been prior to then. He wanted her to come out of her shell at Haverstock and to be accepted and popular, much like he was.
For the first eight months there she was so happy. She enjoyed the co-educational atmosphere and tried to carry herself with some of the swagger of her popular cousin Dappy. One day while Tulisa was taking a PE class a girl swiped her tracksuit bottoms from where she had left them in the changing room. Tulisa believed that the theft was
motivated by the fact that the bottoms actually belonged to her hugely popular cousin. She laughed the incident off and borrowed another pair from a friend. If anything, she enjoyed the reflected glory of being the cousin of such a popular pupil. ‘I thought it was so cool,’ she said. ‘I was going there as Dappy’s cousin. That made me cool. Automatically, the whole popular crowd embraced me. All the girls wanted to know me, because they all fancied Dappy. It was great.’ Soon, she was hanging out with the ‘cool’ kids and became one of the school’s more popular pupils. She became confident around boys and also befriended some teenagers from local estates who she would never have previously had the confidence to approach and attempt to befriend. She also began to drink alcohol and smoke cannabis – such behaviour was ‘a standard thing for everyone’ at the school, she later wrote. She convinced older girls to go into the shop for her and buy her some alcohol. Vodka, cider and beer were her usual tipples. She said she got ‘absolutely smashed’ for the first time as a 12-year-old and was soon ‘getting messy’ each weekend, including at under-18s rave parties.
It was a welcome source of escapism for a girl who, lest we forget, was still going through hell at home. ‘When I was 12 I wanted to have fun,’ she said, looking back later. ‘I didn’t want to go back to the one-bedroom council flat, crying myself to sleep at night. I became a lot gobbier and had my first boyfriend.’ Plenty of her classmates were even having sex, she said.
Tulisa claimed she knew for a fact that pupils were having sex ‘in the toilets at the age of 12 in break time’. Soon, such behaviour would provoke tensions and suspicions that would hurt Tulisa. Meanwhile, she was more interested in getting out of her head. Given the history of mental illness in her family, it was rather dangerous for Tulisa to experiment so enthusiastically with a mind-altering drug such as cannabis. Indeed, the very same issues that pushed her towards the drug also meant she should have avoided it. Episodes of users, particularly the young, developing emotional issues as a result of cannabis-use – particularly the stronger modern forms such as skunk – are reasonably commonplace. After a while, she began to have intense panic attacks, complete with terrifying heart palpitations. One day the attack was so bad that she collapsed and started to froth at the mouth before passing out. The next thing Tulisa knew she was coming-to in the back of an ambulance. This terrifying moment drew a line in the sand as far as she was concerned. She has not taken cannabis since.
However, other parts of her newfound confidence and rebellious behaviour continued. The quiet, studious girl of her earlier years was replaced by someone at ease with what she saw as the disrespectful and lazy kids at Haverstock. She has recalled how plenty of the pupils did next to no work, as they were too busy ‘screaming at each other and cussing the teachers’. She had never seen the like of this before, but she was so keen to be accepted by her peers that she joined in with this misbehaviour. She estimates that in the 18 months she spent at Haverstock she did little more than two days’ worth of actual schoolwork. Her memories of the place no doubt seem accurate to her but how fair they actually are to the school they are is open to question. The school authorities would certainly prefer to paint a more positive picture of the establishment. Dappy has also spoken disparagingly of the school, saying, ‘I ain’t gonna big up no teachers because it didn’t feel like none of them gave a damn about me’ and saying it ‘gave out no positivity’. Tulisa’s favourite moments at school included drama classes and – surprisingly – school dinners. She has always enjoyed the food that most kids dread. She also fondly remembers a school outing to the Natural History Museum in Kensington. She had been obsessed with dinosaurs since watching the movie blockbuster Jurassic Park, so she lapped up the chance to study their story at the museum.
There is no doubt Tulisa often misbehaved and slacked, though, and she looks back at this as a ‘negative way of blending in’. But some real personal negativity for Tulisa is just about to enter our story. Eight months after she first arrived at Haverstock, she began to be targeted by bullies. A brutal chapter in her school life started with a confrontation between Tulisa and a highly aggressive girl who had been led to believe Tulisa had been bitching about her. In a flash, Tulisa found herself facing more aggression than she had ever encountered before. The girl was face-to-face with Tulisa and screaming abuse at her, while brandishing a pencil and threatening to ‘stab’ her with it. In an instant, eight months of happiness and fun seemed to disappear as she faced a terrifying, threatening verbal onslaught. However, if Tulisa thought she had tasted a new low, there was to be plenty more where that came from. A process began of fellow pupils wrongly accusing Tulisa of speaking about them in derogatory terms and then attacking her for it either verbally or physically or both. Lots of these rumours concerned Tulisa having sex with boys who were already in relationships. Their girlfriends would naturally be furious and would confront her about the alleged liaison. Words and sometimes shoves or worse would be exchanged. The added hurt for Tulisa was that these rumours were always untrue – she had not slept with any guys at this stage. As she learned, the truth mattered as much in the unforgiving atmosphere of school as it does in the wild west of some celebrity magazines.
Again, Tulisa’s good looks and head-turning chest were behind much of this treatment. Girls became jealous and suspicious of her. Although most of the suspicions were unfounded, it was true that she was turning lots of young male heads. When people realised that Tulisa was often being asked out for dates by the most popular guys, a new raft of rumours would be launched to try and dissuade such advances. To make matters worse, just when she needed friends most Tulisa found that some of the people she considered in that category were not worthy of being called friends. She felt alone, frightened and cornered. After some months of this cycle of behaviour Tulisa decided she had to deal with the issue and the person she believed to be at the centre of the rumour-spreading. She confronted the girl and soon a heated argument broke out. Then the girl lost her rag and began punching her in the face. What Tulisa had not realised was that the girl was a victim of bullying as well. So patience for both girls was at a premium as they fought each other. By the time it was over Tulisa had a split lip and was bleeding from her face. Although she insisted in Against All Odds that she had landed some damaging blows to her opponent, she added that the wounds she inflicted were all hidden by her hair.
However, as far as the rest of the school was concerned, Tulisa had lost the fight and was a ‘pussy’. As her opponent was not a tough girl, this perception was dangerous as it made Tulisa seem vulnerable and weak – and therefore a target for any bully who fancied an easy ride. The problems escalated from there – with enormous seriousness. ‘I was always outnumbered,’ she said. ‘By the time I was 15, to go to my friend’s house in Kentish Town, I used to walk around with a baseball bat or a knife on me, because of the fear of being attacked by 15 girls. This was no joke. They would get a bottle, smash it on the floor and happily stab it in your face. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but it was my way of sticking up for myself. It was a dangerous cycle to be in.’ A dangerous cycle indeed. Tulisa said that the beatings she received were always severe and left her in a shocking condition: ‘Black eyes, bust lip, bottle over the head.’ She added: ‘By this time, I couldn’t go to school because I’d get beaten up.’ Why did she not report all this to the police, she was asked. ‘No, you wouldn’t tell the police,’ she explained. ‘It was against the code of street law. You couldn’t be a grass.’
Instead, she had to be creative and fast-thinking to find a way out of this brutal cycle of violence she seemed stuck in. She could not, she felt, call on the police to protect her. So she turned to a different kind of authority and courted the protection of the circle of people she considered to be the toughest in the neighbourhood. Her courtship was successful. ‘My way of getting out of things was getting in with this really hard crowd – the hardest of the hardest in the area,’ she said. ‘We were a wild bunch of girls, but I was content being prote
cted.’ Finally, she had found a way to stem the tidal wave of violent bullying she had been facing in recent months. Still, she remained vigilant. Sometimes, she later admitted, she would carry a weapon for her own protection. ‘I had to walk down the road with a baseball bat in my pocket,’ she told the Radio Times. ‘I didn’t end up having to use the bat, but I did have to punch people back.’ Arming herself was not a step taken lightly; rather, it was a reaction to some horrific and detailed threats. ‘This was a time when people were saying, “We’re going to come down with 20 people and put you in hospital”.’
Although the approval and resultant protection Tulisa received from her new friends brought great relief for her, by choosing to run with such a tough and unruly crowd she realised she had to quickly start to behave in kind in order to stay in with them. Therefore, this new association of hers sent her further off the rails in terms of behaviour. ‘Yeah, we did do naughty things,’ she said. What, specifically? ‘We did pinch a couple of handbags and get into fights. I wasn’t part of a girl gang, though. We were just a group of troublesome chicks. Obviously, we were consuming so much weed and alcohol, we were going loopy anyway.’ She later expressed regret for the stolen bags. ‘I nicked a couple of handbags and I’m deeply unhappy I did that,’ she told Now magazine. ‘But it was done to give myself power. I was vulnerable, I had no self-worth and I’d do anything to get some attention. So to those people I would say sorry.’
Tulisa - The Biography Page 2
