Things I Couldn't Tell My Mother: A Memoir Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘There was a lot that we kept from my mother. My dad would say to me as a teenager “Don’t tell your mother.” We couldn’t face the disapproval.’

  Sue Johnston always seemed to be disappointing her mother. As a girl she never stayed clean and tidy like her cousins. As she grew older, she spent all her piano lesson money on drinks for her mates down the pub, and when she discovered the Cavern she was never at home. The final straw was when Sue left her steady job at a St Helens factory to try her hand at that unsteadiest of jobs: acting.

  Yet when Sue was bringing up her own child alone, her mother was always there to help. And playing her much-loved characters Sheila Grant and Barbara Royle – although her mum wouldn’t say she was proud as such, she certainly seemed to approve. And in her mother’s final months, it was Sue she needed by her side.

  The relationship with your mother is perhaps the most precious and fraught of any woman’s life. When she began writing, Sue set out to record ‘all the big things, and all the small things. Everything I wanted to tell my mother but felt I never could.’ The result is a warm, poignant and often very funny memoir by one of Britain’s favourite actresses.

  About the Author

  Sue Johnston’s many much-loved roles include Sheila Grant in Brookside, Barbara in The Royle Family, Sal Vine in Jam & Jerusalem and Dr Grace Foley in Waking the Dead. Born in 1943 in Warrington near Liverpool, Sue has stayed true to her Northern roots – she has been no stranger to picket lines and is a staunch supporter of her beloved Liverpool Football Club. Sue has a son, Joel, and in 2009 she was awarded an OBE.

  To my mum and dad.

  And my son Joel – who will never read it!

  And Gemma – who will.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The names of some people, places, dates and sequences, or the details of the events, have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

  Prologue

  ENA SHARPLES ONCE famously said of her mother’s death, ‘She just sat up, broke wind and died.’ My mother would have definitely considered herself to be a cut above the fictitious Mrs Sharples and her mother. But as she lay in her bed, in the home where she’d been living for the past year, she did make one last Herculean effort to sit up, reaching out to be helped. Then she sneezed, lay back in bed, and I felt the life leave her, like someone had flicked off a switch.

  She was ninety-two. I was sixty-three. These were her final moments, but the preceding weeks and even months had been long and exhausting.

  As I reflect now, nearly four years after her death, I miss her. This may seem unsurprising; of course I should miss my mother. But things were far from plain sailing between her and me; our relationship was often difficult and fraught.

  *

  My mother began to sharply decline when I was filming Waking the Dead. Any time that I wasn’t filming I would be making my way up the M6 to be with her. Then I received a call early in September 2007 saying she had taken a turn for the worse and that I should get there as soon as I could.

  When I arrived in Warrington my mother had rallied and was sitting up in bed, alert and ready for me. She looked me up and down in my on-screen make-up and asked scathingly, ‘What have you come as? You look like a bus conductress.’

  This used to be quite a common insult when I was younger, as bus conductresses were known to wear thick pan-stick make-up. That I’d arrived to see my mum for what I thought would be the last time, only to be greeted with this, really makes me smile now. It was so typical of her. I stayed with her for a while and then reluctantly returned to filming in London.

  A few days later I had another call. The nurses said they were sure this time that this was it. On the way, I got a flat tyre but I didn’t stop. I think that I knew this really was the last time I would be making the journey. Everything and nothing was going through my mind. I was very emotional – racked with anxiety and upset, tired yet wired.

  When I arrived at the home my mother was lying in bed, looking tiny and frail. There was no caustic put down this time. She just looked helpless and fragile. She was awake and aware that I was there but quiet and restful, slipping in and out of consciousness. I took her hand and vowed to stay by her side. I would remain there for the next four days.

  This time to be with my mother was a privilege that I know many people aren’t afforded. And as fraught, surreal and sad as it was, I was mindful that I had the opportunity to say things to her that I might not have normally said. Over the years I have had more than one occasion to want to tell my mother exactly what I thought of her, and not all of it complimentary or pleasant. She had always been a difficult person to deal with – someone who, I’m sad to say, found it very difficult to show affection or warmth towards me. It seems strange to admit this and yet at the same time she was my mother and I still loved her. As close relationships in life often are, ours was complicated.

  My mother was obsessed with the notion of people getting ideas above their station. Having a daughter who was educated and followed her own path in life definitely fit into this category. There were many times when I just wanted her to be proud of me, but it seemed she never was.

  But in these, her final days, as she lay in bed and I sat in the chair next to her, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that none of the things that made me angry about her didn’t matter, but they certainly didn’t need airing now. It seemed to me to be a time for peaceful acceptance. As she became more vulnerable I felt things soften between us. I suppose it was because she needed me and I was very happy to be needed and to help.

  With all of this time to think, with nursing staff and relatives coming and going, but me as a constant in the room with my mother, I felt I needed to say something to her – for her to hear something from me that was from my heart. Something I could say with absolute honesty.

  I took her hand and said, ‘Mum, I had the best childhood I could ever have had.’

  Tears sprang to her eyes. I held her hand, which was gnarled with arthritis but she had enough strength for me to feel that she was holding on to me. Things changed as I got older, but it was true I really did have the best childhood and I needed her to know that.

  *

  Since her death, I have realised that whatever age we are, we all feel like children at times, even when there may be no one there to be a child for. Only last week I found myself hovering near the phone: I had found a recipe that I knew my mother would have liked and I wanted to tell her about it. Grief seemed to hit me all over again when I knew I couldn’t have that conversation. It was only a small thing but she would have been interested in my discovery and it made me very sad that I couldn’t share it with
her.

  My aim with this book is to look back over my life and explore what it was I couldn’t tell my mother, and why that was. But also – and more importantly perhaps – I want to set down a record of all the love and life, loss and laughs: all the big things, and the small things. Everything I wanted to tell my mother but felt I never could.

  Chapter One

  I WAS BORN in my aunty Millie’s house in Warrington during the Second World War. My mother Margaret was staying at Millie’s while my dad was away with his regiment. It is fitting that I was born in the thick of my extended family because although I was an only child I always felt part of a large clan.

  My mother and her sisters would take turns to stay at each other’s houses. The reason they gave was ‘to keep the houses aired’. It seemed that everything needed ‘airing’ in those days. ‘No wonder you’ve got a cold,’ my mother would say, ‘that top’s not even aired!’ So the houses were occupied in rotation in order to keep them aired, but I’m sure the real reason was the reassurance of safety in numbers.

  My father, Fred, was in the Royal Engineers and was stationed in Portsmouth. At around the same time that my mother found out she was pregnant with me, Dad came down with an illness. He was throwing up every morning and eventually they took him into the field hospital to have him checked over. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but then he happened to mention that my mother was pregnant. The doctor told him he knew exactly what he was suffering from: psychological morning sickness. Apparently it was quite common! While my dad was hospitalised his unit flew to Syria, where they were targeted and many of his regiment killed. Dad always used to say, ‘Our Sue saved me.’ When I was younger this was just a story but thinking about it now, it must have been quite harrowing for Dad, knowing how close he had come to death and to have lost so many of his comrades.

  My mother would tell another story of a time my father was preparing to go back to Portsmouth. He turned to wave goodbye to her through the window, not looking where he was going, and as he did he walloped his head on a lamppost. He staggered back into the house, a great gash oozing blood from his head. My mum and her sisters had no time to be sympathetic, they were too busy doubled over laughing. Poor Dad needed stitches and ended up having to stay off for another couple of days. So my dad could say that he was hospitalised twice during the war – once for morning sickness and once for walking into a lamppost!

  I often think about those years when I was first in the world and what it must have been like for ordinary people living through this extraordinary time. They were living on the edge in a very real sense. No one knew how events would unfold; all that they could do was pull together and hope for a positive outcome. My aunty Millie would always say about the war, ‘Well, we just had to get on with it,’ and she was right, what choice did people have? It seems to me that the only stories that were ever told about the war were as jokes or broad brushstrokes, never detail. The horror of war simply wasn’t mentioned, except with gallows humour. It was as if that entire generation had accepted their lot – whatever happened during the six years between 1939 to 1945 stayed in those years.

  They were an extraordinary generation, they were never indulgent or self-pitying about what they’d had to face. It does make me think that we’re so very nannied now. I don’t know how people would survive if they had to face the same thing. When the war ended, everyone was, of course, thrilled, but I can’t help thinking that after all that time living on their wits, the return to everyday life must have been a difficult adjustment, even if it meant they might get the chance to actually clap eyes on a banana!

  During the war, Liverpool and Warrington were a target for the German bombers. Liverpool, because it was a port and hub for industry and Warrington because after Pearl Harbor, when the Americans entered the war, it became an American air base. The place was swarming with GIs and my mum and her sisters would talk later about getting stockings and chocolates from the American soldiers. They spoke very highly of them, saying they were extremely courteous and generous. They used to go to the dances, but as far as they were concerned it was all very innocent. Other women did have relationships with the GIs that landed in Warrington and there was the common saying that they were Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here. But I think as far as my mother and her sisters were concerned they were just Over Here, and they were glad of the stockings.

  I arrived in the world on 7 December 1943. At that time women were expected to stay ‘in confinement’, they had to rest up in bed for several days and get their strength back after giving birth. While Mum was lying there a few hours after having me, looking at her new baby and minding her own business, the air-raid sirens began to wail. My aunties Millie and Ena came charging in and took me out of my cot, wrapped in my blanket.

  ‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked.

  ‘To the shelter, of course,’ Millie said, swaddling me and holding me tight. Millie had an Anderson air-raid shelter in her back garden that she and her sisters were well acquainted with.

  ‘She’s a tiny baby, we can’t leave her in the house,’ Ena added, matter-of-factly.

  ‘What about me?’ my poor mother implored.

  ‘You need to stay there. You’re in confinement.’

  And with that the sisters were out of the door with me bundled in their arms, while my mother had to lie there and hope that the bombs that were dropping all around paid due respect to the notion of confinement and left her alone.

  So this was my rather unceremonious introduction to the world and I was named Susan. It wasn’t the one my mother had intended for me. My mother wanted me to have her name. I was to be Margaret Jane after both her and her mother and my father was duly sent to register the birth. I’m not sure what happened between him leaving the house and getting to the registry office but with uncharacteristic bravery he decided that I should be called Susan. The name didn’t have any family connection for either my mother or father, I think he just liked it.

  So here I was, Susan Wright. Hearing my first name and my maiden name together always makes me smile. You were only ever addressed by your full name at registration time at school, or if you were in trouble. If someone shouted ‘Susan Wright!’ at me now I’d still drop everything and wonder what I’d done. My mother always referred to me as Susan, never Sue. She would shout me in for my tea when I was a little girl. ‘Susan!’ the cry would come down the street. I would, of course, always try to wring out another few twists of the skipping rope.

  One of my first really vivid memories of my mother is of me playing in the street waiting for her to return from an afternoon in Warrington. She rounded the corner and I saw her and waved excitedly. She had had her hair cropped. In those days most women we knew seemed to have a regulation perm, or their hair was rolled back and pinned around their head, a severe look that made them look older than they were.

  So to see my mum with her short hair made her seem so glamorous and I was really proud of her. She was wearing a suit, a skirt suit as Mum never wore trousers. In fact, the first pair of trousers I managed to convince her to buy was when she was in her eighties. She always said she’d feel underdressed wearing trousers.

  Mum had dark well-shaped eyebrows, which I inherited from her. She had blue eyes and a lovely nose but I inherited my dad’s! The cropped hair didn’t last long and the perm soon crept back in but Mum always looked very smart.

  My parents made a handsome couple. Dad was five foot ten and very trim; he had a bit of a swagger when he was younger. He was a great swimmer and his physique showed it. When I was a girl I found a certificate and asked my dad what it was. He bashfully told me that it was awarded to him because years before I was born he had saved a man who was drowning off Blackpool pier. The man had got into trouble and Mum piped up to tell me that Dad had jumped in with no thought for his own safety. I was proud to think that if it hadn’t been for my dad, that man would probably have died.

  Dad had huge blue eyes and fair hair. He began
to lose it as he got older and although he never had a comb-over he did have a few persistent wisps of hair that he carefully maintained. My dad, like my mother, was always very well turned out. He wore a trilby hat and a shirt and tie. I once bought him a Liverpool club tie and he was as proud as punch to wear it. Dad worked as a plumber both before and after the war. Mum had worked before she married Dad, in the box works, a box-making factory. She started as a machinist but had a shocking accident, running an industrial-sized needle through her fingers. She carried the scar until the day she died. After the accident she was moved to the assembly line, where she worked alongside her sisters Millie and Ena.

  The house where I grew up was ten miles away from my aunty Millie’s in Warrington. It was on the outskirts of Liverpool in a place called Whiston in a newly built estate, owned not by the council but by a landlord. I remember that the rent collector would come every week; we never saw the actual landlord but he was talked about in reverential tones. He had money when everyone else was on their uppers.

  The houses were all semi-detached except for the four in our row. It was as if they’d got to the last plot and thought, ‘Come on, lads, we can squeeze four in here.’ The house itself was plain-fronted, a cheap-as-chips build with a small front garden, but as my family lived on the corner plot we had a larger backyard, which gave me and my cousins room enough to play and for my father to tend to his beloved plants.

  It wasn’t just the rent collector who knocked on our door every week. The pop man would come on his horse and cart and we would hand back our bottles and get a discount on that week’s cream soda or dandelion and burdock. The rag-and-bone man would pass by on his horse and cart shouting ‘Any Old Iron’ but we could never really make out what he was saying, to us he just sounded like a strangled donkey shouting ‘Eeyore!’ The coal man would come around, heaving his sacks of coal on his shoulder. It was so cold in those days, we would wake up with icicles on the inside of the windows. When I was ill my dad would come up and put some coal in the grate of the fire in my room. I still hanker after a fire in my room like the one I had as a child. The milkman was also on a horse and cart and again we would give him back our bottles in return for that day’s milk. I’d like to say to my mum, ‘See we were green back then, weren’t we? Recycling and we didn’t even know it!’