Not that Kinda Girl. Lisa Maxwell
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This was a scam because they never found me any work, but the photos were great and Mum used them later on when she got me into the Italia Conti.
It was Grandad who brought home one of my closest childhood friends: Pierre the poodle. He was a French poodle, hence the name, who had belonged to Grandad’s sister Sarah (famous in the family because she once lived next door to Cliff Richard) but she could no longer keep him. I was thrilled to adopt him and apparently when I was very young I said that when I grew up I was going to marry him. I have to say, the name was a bit of an embarrassment – shouting ‘Pierre’ off the balcony really wasn’t acceptable on the Rockingham Estate – so Uncle Alan quickly renamed him Pete the Poodle.
Grandad was the boss in the house: if the news was on the telly and we were talking, he only had to say ‘Shush’ and we’d all go quiet. After two or three drinks he was more sociable and he’d have a soppy grin on his face. That’s when he would say ‘yes’ to buying any toys or clothes I wanted and, boy, did I know it.
Mum and me shared our room until I was about 10: I think this contributed to the impression I had from early on that Nan and Grandad were in the role of parents. Mum never grew out of being their child because she always lived with them and it’s only recently she’s had a double bed, not till after Nan died in 2009.
Running through those years was my ongoing fear of Mum having a life outside our family: I dreaded her going on dates, I felt she was going to do all the things that had given her a ‘reputation’ in the first place – shocking, horrible things associated with my birth. I remember with horror once walking in when I was about eight and finding Mum in Nan and Grandad’s bed with a man: it was terrible. I called her a ‘slut’ and other things, words I must have picked up from what other people said about her. As far as I was concerned, she wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend or male company. The man had a beard and no one in our family had a beard. To me, he looked debauched, but then any man in a compromising position with Mum would seem that way. Much later, when I was about 14, she had another boyfriend (Bernie). I wasn’t going to cut her any slack and used to sit between them on the sofa. As Mum says, she had dates, not relationships.
I’ve got a picture from a holiday we went on to Portugal when I was a kid and Mum’s sitting on the back of a fisherman’s motorbike. I hated seeing that picture: he’s swarthy, and to me he looks like a highly sexual person. It was terrible for me because I think Mum was having a holiday romance with him and I hated that, I hated anything to suggest she was a normal, sexual being.
Uncle Alan played his part in my upbringing, too. He is only 12 years older than me (Nan’s youngest child) and in many ways I grew up thinking of him as a big brother: he used to look after me after school while Mum was working. He’d take me to Nan, who would be at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre playing bingo, trying to win food vouchers for our tea. She was no good with money and so she had to come up with creative ways to feed us all, usually involving bingo, the pawn shop or the tally man (the man who collected instalments on money she’d borrowed). Looking back, I can see she probably had a real gambling problem: money always went down the betting shop or the bingo hall and a lot of the time I was with her when she visited there. Grandad never gave her money because he knew what she did with it. She always loved horse racing and followed certain jockeys, working out the odds. At one time she worked in a betting shop and if a punter came in with a bet she knew was hopeless she’d pocket the cash and not put the bet on. Thank God it never came down on her. Later in life she’d watch the racing on telly, screaming and shouting at her horse.
I remember hiding with Nan when the tally man came round (I don’t know how she knew it was him). Suddenly there’d be a knock at the door and she knew not to answer as if she could smell him. So we’d hide and I’d have to be really quiet, like a game. If we were in the passage when he came, we’d have to get down really low because he could peer through the letterbox. When he’d gone, she’d laugh about it and get on with the rest of her day. If he caught her out and she had to open the door, it would only be a crack, a few inches. I’d be hanging round her legs, trying to see him, but she’d always push me back. I could never put a face to the tally man but the thought of him scared me: he was like a bogeyman.
I don’t think Mum or Grandad knew about the tally man or the clothing club Nan paid into; maybe it was only Uncle Alan and me who were in on it. Alan got a leather jacket from the tally man money, which he has never forgotten. Nan told us to keep it a secret.
She was always trying to get money out of Grandad, but he knew better. Whatever excuse she used, he knew it would go down the betting shop or the bingo; they rowed about it a lot. When they were cleaning offices together in the City they would take me with them. I’d sit there making false nails for myself out of Sellotape (a skill used later in life) while they cleaned. She’d be having a go at him about money. Sometimes she’d forge notes from one of the other cleaners (a man), asking to borrow a tenner until next week, and Grandad would hand it over, not realising it was going into her purse. If she had money, I’d be taken to the betting shop and had to hang around outside waiting for her, even after the age of 11 when I was in my posh Italia Conti uniform.
Feeding us all was very hand to mouth: she’d count out the money, sometimes coppers, and go shopping every day. We all ate at different times: the only time we tried to have a meal together was Sunday lunchtime but because Nan and Grandad had been in the pub for hours it was often burnt. We had a drop-leaf table under the window that would only be pulled out on Sundays or at Christmas. Normal meals after I came in from school were egg and chips or ham, egg and chips if there was more money, a bit of brawn some days. I loved fish paste and used to eat it with a spoon from the jar. Nan would sometimes make shepherd’s pie and I loved her rice pudding with a skin on top, made in a bowl that looked about 100 years old. We all loved it when Nan brought pie and mash home: there was a real ritual to ripping the paper off, carving a cross and pouring in the bright green liquor from a polystyrene cup, then smothering it in vinegar and pepper. It was a real treat, bought from Arments in Westmoreland Road, off the Walworth Road. I think we only had pie and mash if Nan won a bit on the horses.
I loved the Joseph Lancaster School. When I started there at five, the head teacher remembered Alan and said he hoped I would do better: ‘Alan came in through the front door and out through the back and was home before your nan.’ But I was a good girl: my school reports are all great except every teacher said I was very chatty (nothing much has changed). We didn’t have to wear a uniform and, as you’ve gathered, I was always fashionably dressed. Mum used to buy me clothes in Carnaby Street, the trendy place in those days, from a shop called Kids in Gear. I loved my patent leather hot pants with yellow leather braces on them. In another shop (Buttons & Bows) she bought silk ribbons, buttons and bits and pieces to sew onto my clothes to jazz them up. The shopkeeper made a dress for me, crocheted in white with red satin ribbon woven through and a matching beret. It was for the wedding of one of Mum’s friends (they weren’t having bridesmaids but they wanted me in the pictures) so I was star of the show, my favourite place.
I wore the dress to school as well: there was never any of that saving your best for weekends in our family, I was always done up like the dog’s dinner. It was part of our thing. Look at us Maxwells: we’re not failures, we’ve got all the latest gear and everything we’ve got is on our backs. A lot of working-class people are like that. Nan had a ring on every finger, she’d bung it all on: it was about telling the world we didn’t need charity. There’s a pattern emerging when I look back at my life.
I was Miss Popular at school: bright, funny and loved by everybody except those I took the mickey out of. Putting the focus on someone else’s shortcomings meant no one got round to asking me the dreaded question: ‘Why haven’t you got a dad?’ Without thinking about it, I was always trying to recruit friends: believers in Lisa Maxwell, people who would think, isn’t she great? I’m glad Lisa is on the planet! One of the reasons why I liked being well dressed was that I thought it would make people like me more if I looked as if I came from a well-off family who could afford to buy nice things. Even as a kid I was acting out the philosophy that took me through a lot of my life and stopped me ever having to face up to myself: keep busy, stay at the centre of things, have a laugh. Whatever you do, don’t stand still long enough to be alone with yourself or to let