Read Online That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters - Free Book Online
Authors: Julie Walters
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of the box and ran, cutting a swathe through the audience, children falling off boxes this way and that, out across the yard and into the back place, where I locked myself in the dreaded, spider-ridden Lah Pom.
After the children had been dismissed, my brother came to find me and having been given several assurances that he would not hit me I opened the door. He was still wearing the red lipstick but the hieroglyphics had smudged into a vague, greasy redness, which, whether he was or not, made him look very angry indeed. He said, ‘It’s all right.’ And I could see that he wasn’t in fact angry at all. ‘Why did you do it?’ His expression was one of bafflement. I had betrayed him and I guess it could be said that this was an early lesson in stage trust, but there was something else and I think it was a little touch of respect. I had rebelled and he had caught a glimpse of the future actor in me, creating the drama and grabbing the limelight.
A year or so after our flurry of garage performances a man knocked on the middle door with a script in his hand. He was from our parish church, St Gregory’s, and having told my mother that they were doing a play at the church hall, he asked whether I would like a part in it. He gave me the script, retired with my mother to the sitting room, and I scurried off upstairs to the bedroom, like a dog with a bone, to read it. I have little memory of it, except that my character had quite a few lines in the form of a single speech and the play was vaguely religious in that it was a bible story of some sort. My mother made this man a cup of tea, and by the time he had drunk it, I was downstairs again, performing my part, the script held behind my back, the speech having gone effortlessly in, purely from the thrill of acting it alone upstairs and the thought of acting it on a stage in front of an audience. When I did come to perform it, it was my brother Tommy who rushed backstage to congratulate me and to tell me, with wonder in his voice, that not only was I really good but that I was the best! It is something he has done ever since.
In between the garage and the back place was the yard, with a high wall that separated us from next door at one side and a little strip of garden running down the other. It was crossed at wonky angles by a couple of washing lines and until about 1960, when we acquired a washing machine, up against the garage was the mangle. There were many gory tales regarding mangles, mostly, I suspect, coming from my mother’s imagination, in order to keep us away from it, stories of squashed fingers and, in one blood-soaked saga, the painful loss of an entire digit. This had to be tested out and obviously the use of my own finger in such an experiment was out of the question. So with the help of a wodge of plasticine, I constructed the nearest thing to my own forefinger as was possible and put it through the mangle. The sight of it coming through the other side completely flat made my stomach give a little lurch. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are bones in a finger, of course, but the totally flattened strip of plasticine furnished my imagination for many years to come with a graphic image of my bloody, mutilated and, naturally, flat forefinger, which actually made the said finger throb.
3
‘Don’t Go Out Too Far’ - Holidays
It was in the back yard that I got my first suntan during a heatwave in 1966 when I was preparing for my GCEs. I sat out on a kitchen chair, head back, eyes closed, revising for my geography exam, the only subject that I ever really revised for. When after a couple of hours I went back into the house, I found, on looking in the mirror, that my face had turned a bright, not unattractive, brownish pink. And there began an addiction, which I still have, albeit in a less desperate form, today. It made everything look better. My hair, which was still vaguely blonde, looked blonder; my eyes looked browner, and my skin looked even in
After the children had been dismissed, my brother came to find me and having been given several assurances that he would not hit me I opened the door. He was still wearing the red lipstick but the hieroglyphics had smudged into a vague, greasy redness, which, whether he was or not, made him look very angry indeed. He said, ‘It’s all right.’ And I could see that he wasn’t in fact angry at all. ‘Why did you do it?’ His expression was one of bafflement. I had betrayed him and I guess it could be said that this was an early lesson in stage trust, but there was something else and I think it was a little touch of respect. I had rebelled and he had caught a glimpse of the future actor in me, creating the drama and grabbing the limelight.
A year or so after our flurry of garage performances a man knocked on the middle door with a script in his hand. He was from our parish church, St Gregory’s, and having told my mother that they were doing a play at the church hall, he asked whether I would like a part in it. He gave me the script, retired with my mother to the sitting room, and I scurried off upstairs to the bedroom, like a dog with a bone, to read it. I have little memory of it, except that my character had quite a few lines in the form of a single speech and the play was vaguely religious in that it was a bible story of some sort. My mother made this man a cup of tea, and by the time he had drunk it, I was downstairs again, performing my part, the script held behind my back, the speech having gone effortlessly in, purely from the thrill of acting it alone upstairs and the thought of acting it on a stage in front of an audience. When I did come to perform it, it was my brother Tommy who rushed backstage to congratulate me and to tell me, with wonder in his voice, that not only was I really good but that I was the best! It is something he has done ever since.
In between the garage and the back place was the yard, with a high wall that separated us from next door at one side and a little strip of garden running down the other. It was crossed at wonky angles by a couple of washing lines and until about 1960, when we acquired a washing machine, up against the garage was the mangle. There were many gory tales regarding mangles, mostly, I suspect, coming from my mother’s imagination, in order to keep us away from it, stories of squashed fingers and, in one blood-soaked saga, the painful loss of an entire digit. This had to be tested out and obviously the use of my own finger in such an experiment was out of the question. So with the help of a wodge of plasticine, I constructed the nearest thing to my own forefinger as was possible and put it through the mangle. The sight of it coming through the other side completely flat made my stomach give a little lurch. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are bones in a finger, of course, but the totally flattened strip of plasticine furnished my imagination for many years to come with a graphic image of my bloody, mutilated and, naturally, flat forefinger, which actually made the said finger throb.
3
‘Don’t Go Out Too Far’ - Holidays
It was in the back yard that I got my first suntan during a heatwave in 1966 when I was preparing for my GCEs. I sat out on a kitchen chair, head back, eyes closed, revising for my geography exam, the only subject that I ever really revised for. When after a couple of hours I went back into the house, I found, on looking in the mirror, that my face had turned a bright, not unattractive, brownish pink. And there began an addiction, which I still have, albeit in a less desperate form, today. It made everything look better. My hair, which was still vaguely blonde, looked blonder; my eyes looked browner, and my skin looked even in
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