Not that Kinda Girl. Lisa Maxwell
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say anything to my face. Maybe the others clocked my background, but I was protected from name-calling and nasty comments because all the scary kids liked me, which meant no one else gave me any trouble. I was tiny, but I had this really tall friend called Delphine. Her sister Jackie could beat anyone up, including the boys. My loose tongue and ability to mimic people meant I was always taking the mickey, but I managed to duck out of trouble: if anyone threatened to meet me after school, I’d walk out with Delphine and the troublemakers would melt away.
Mum never admitted she was a single parent, deserted before her baby was born. At the offices where she worked she always said she was divorced or separated, and for years she told me my father had ‘died in the war’. I was too young to ask ‘What war?’ because it didn’t make any sense (there was no war when I was born, unless you count Vietnam) and what was an American GI doing hanging around South London with Mum? But it was something women always said, an excuse the previous generation had been able to use, so that’s what I told the kids at school. When I look back, I’m amazed, but they accepted it just as I did.
I found out my dad wasn’t dead from Nan, but not in a proper sit-down-and-we’ll-have-a-talk kind of way. We were in the pub when I was seven or eight and I said something about him being dead (I think a kid at school had asked me). ‘Oh, your dad ain’t dead, don’t be silly,’ said Nan casually, then turned to the barman: ‘Scotch and American and a martini, please, Jim. Oh, and can you tell the pianist to play “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New” …’
It was just slipped in: it wasn’t explained, just a quick reference before ordering the next drink. I don’t remember being shocked or the news having a massive impact, so I think deep down I probably already knew but didn’t understand. Although I carried on pretending, the story changed: instead of saying Dad was dead, now I said he left when I was very young. It was a world away from being illegitimate because at least I had a father when I was born. If I had a dad, even for a day or two after my birth, it legitimised me being on the planet.
Secrets and lies and shame have had a profound effect on me. There was a big chunk of my life that I didn’t know about – ‘Father Unknown’ – but I also knew from early on that I mustn’t ask questions. Again, I don’t know how I knew this, but subliminally someone must have made me feel it was not a good idea: we don’t talk about things that hurt. It was a defence mechanism, I guess, filtered down to Mum from Nan and Grandad’s generation, who believed you put up and shut up.
As I grew up, I became adept at not dealing with things: I simply put my head in the sand. From a young age children pick up when something causes pain, and I didn’t want to put my mum through that agony. The bits of information I was given about myself were just snippets or downright lies; you become numb to the good stuff, the bad stuff, everything … Somehow you know some of it’s not true but you also understand the reason why they’re not telling you the truth is because it’s too hard for them so you never try to unravel things. Not that I went through childhood having deep thoughts about all of this; I was enjoying myself too much.
I was a bit of a star at school: the singing teacher (Miss Stokes) really encouraged me, telling me I was a natural. She gave me the role of Mrs B in our little production about Peter Rabbit when I was about six and I remember hearing my voice singing through a microphone, a song about Mrs Rabbit going through the wood with her shopping basket – I loved it. It was a massive moment in my life, hearing my voice amplified and performing to an audience.
I was clever at school but that didn’t matter in my family, they weren’t interested in academic things. For some reason, I had a reading age of 16 at 11 years old. We all took a test to see who should be on the school team for the Panda Club Quiz, an event started by the Met Police, and I was chosen. The four smartest kids took part in this quiz with all the other schools in London and we won, which made us celebrities at school for a while – it was a really big deal, everyone was very pleased. We had to answer questions about the history of the police, which is funny because many years later I would join the Force myself in The Bill – I guess my research started early.
Breaks and lunchtimes were spent playing and our favourite games were French Skipping, with girls jumping through a large loop of knicker elastic, and Two Ball Up the Wall – I always had two tennis balls with me and was a whizz at throwing them against the wall and reciting rhymes like ‘Holy Mary, mother of God/Send me down a couple of bob’. Blasphemous, but we never thought about the meaning. We weren’t a religious family, the Maxwells, although I was sent to Sunday school at the Abdullam Mission from about seven years old. I took a shine to a dog living next door to the room where Sunday school was held. I’d knock at the door and ask if I could take Teddy for a walk. A lady in an overall, just like Nan wore, would hand him over on an old chain lead with a worn leather handle.
‘Here you are, love,’ she’d say.
‘When do I have to bring him back?’
‘When you’ve had enough.’
Off I’d skip with Teddy, who wasn’t exactly pretty. He was part-Doberman and part-Whippet, and probably lots of other things in there as well: skinny, brown and black with a strange little stump where his tail should have been. I loved walking round the estate with him, pretending he was mine.
One day Teddy made a run for it, with me desperately trying to keep hold of him, which was difficult because the leather handle had snapped and I was grasping the end of the metal chain. Then the metal hook, which held the chain to the leather, pierced the skin between thumb and forefinger: the more Teddy ran, the more it bit into my hand. The pain was excruciating and I was screaming in agony. Somehow I managed to yank the hook out and ran home, yelling my head off.
‘All right, babes, calm down,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s have a look.’
I got on top of my breath slightly and became calmer, desperately hoping Mum wouldn’t take me to hospital – I dreaded having an injection.
‘We’ve got to go, babes. You might have lockjaw.’
‘What the hell is that?’ I wailed. ‘Am I going to get a stiff head and never speak again?’
‘No, you just need a little tetanus. Let’s just get you up the ’ospidal.’
By this time I was hysterical. ‘Do I have to have a needle?’
‘No, darling, they don’t give you needles now – they give you sweets nowadays.’
So we went to Guy’s Hospital, but I soon realised I’d been tricked when two nurses held me down and a giant in a white coat came towards me with a needle like a pneumatic drill. I screamed, kicked and wriggled and tried to punch, but in the midst of this maelstrom the needle went in without me noticing it.
‘There, there, it’s all over – calm down,’ I was surprised to hear the doctor in the white coat say. And then, ‘Now, I hear you wanted sweets?’ and he waggled a bag of Jelly Tots at me. So I got the sweets but it was not the way Mum said it would be. Lying was her first line of defence under pressure and I don’t blame her because all she was worried about was getting me to hospital. I would have preferred to know what was coming, though!
In my later years at primary school I used to bunk off a bit. We’d go round to the flat of a black lad called Jimmy Paul, who had the ‘Telegram Sam’ record by T-Rex, which we would play endlessly. Jimmy scared a lot of kids – he was a good fighter with a bit of attitude, but I was his mate and so was Wendy Donovan. I really liked her clothes and she lent me her Starsky and Hutch chunky-knit cardie. When we went on our one and only school trip, a week in Norfolk, she lent me her edge-to-edge cardigan for the whole time. A really thin knit that joined in the middle, no buttons or fasteners, worn with a thin knitted belt, it was beige and came down to just cover my bum: I wore it with platform shoes.
I don’t think I knew the word ‘chic’ then, but that’s exactly what I would have used. To me, that cardigan looked like it cost a fortune. I remember that I extended the loan period, keeping it for the whole trip, and it was out of shape by the end. That trip was the first time I ever fancied a boy – Gary Weston. I showed off by dancing in front of him, wiggling my derrière.