Lisa Maxwell - Not that Kinda Girl

‘I’m sure I left the car under the kitchen window,’ said Auntie Wendy.

‘No, it’s always been by the pool, Auntie Wendy,’ I told her, all innocent.

The dog didn’t snitch but he looked a bit worried around me for a while.

We always had holidays and most years we went abroad: Spain, Italy and Portugal. Grandad paid for it all, putting money away every week. Usually it was Nan, Grandad, Mum and me, but sometimes Nan and Grandad’s friends Lil and Bill Holt came as well. They were always called Lil’Olt-and-Bill’Olt, like one word. Their daughter had a son – Gary – born in the hospital at the same time as me, so Lil was one of the first to see me after I came into the world. They were always part of our lives.

We went to Pontinental in Torremolinos a few years running – that’s Pontins, but abroad. It was two huge tower blocks, one next to the other. I loved it because they had a disco and a talent competition. It was always a big old booze-up and I was very spoiled. There were day trips to Morocco but the only one of us who would go was Grandad – the others just wanted to bake our tans. In one of my favourite pictures, he is sitting on a camel in Morocco. Years later, my friend Caroline Sargeant who lived in the block of flats opposite ours, Telford House, told me she thought we were a posh family because we always went abroad.

There was one time, however, when I really didn’t want to go to Spain. It was my last year at Joseph Lancaster and the singing teacher who I loved was putting on a production of The Wizard of Oz. Who do you think landed the part of Dorothy? I auditioned with a pretend American accent, which I’d been perfecting for years. For some reason I thought it was really cool and I would go round the Elephant and Castle asking grown-ups the time in this funny voice. I thought they would all be wondering why a little American girl was there, but probably they just thought I was a silly kid pretending. Anyway, I remember auditioning, saying ‘Where am I? This isn’t Kansas. Oh, Toto, Toto …’ – I loved Judy Garland and the part seemed made for me – I really felt this was my moment. Then I couldn’t do it because the show clashed with our trip to Pontinental. At this point I got in a real strop and told Mum I didn’t want to go, that I would stay with one of my friends to do the show. But I had to go and I cried at the idea of some other girl being Dorothy. I knew they’d give the part to a girl called Titia, who was very blonde and pretty. When I got back, I dreaded school because everyone would be talking about the show and how good she was.

It was no wonder I was the natural choice for Dorothy: from the age of eight I’d been going to stage school every Saturday. When I left Joseph Lancaster I attended full time, but that’s a story worth a whole chapter of its own.

My stage career happened almost by chance. I was lucky because among the other kids on the Rockingham Estate were the three Sargeant girls: Caroline, Lynn and Elaine. Caroline, who was about four years older than me, spoke differently to the rest of us, a bit like a BBC announcer, and Mum was very impressed. She and Nan spoke fluent Rockingham, but Mum reckoned if I ended up talking like the rest of my family then I wouldn’t get anywhere in life; if I had a posh accent it would give me a start in life.

‘Why does she talk like that, Liz?’ she asked Caroline’s mum, who was also a single mum. She went on to explain about Italia Conti.

‘My Lisa would like some of that! How do you get her in?’ asked Mum.

It seemed a charitable trust had helped out because 11-year-old Caroline had talent. The trust found a sponsor, a photographer called Alan Olley, who helped pay for her to attend the fee-paying stage school. It was the first time Mum or any of us had ever heard of Italia Conti. For years my mum called it ‘Italian Conti’ and most people round our way thought I was learning Italian. I was eight then, too young to go full time. Mum rang the school to ask about elocution lessons, but they said they weren’t doing them any more. They told her they were giving speech and drama lessons on Saturday mornings and this was just as good for teaching me to speak properly. So I was enrolled, and every Saturday morning she would take me to the school in Clapham. Her ambition, as she told me often enough, was for me to marry Prince Andrew so she needed to make sure I could talk proper and was prepared to make sacrifices.

I used to love going round to Caroline’s flat because she had The Monkees’ album and we’d mime to ‘Daydream Believer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ and put on our own plays. Because she was at Italia Conti full time, she had scripts of real plays: we especially enjoyed putting on Billy Liar because every other word was ‘bloody’ so we could swear away in her bedroom all day and say, ‘It’s all right, it’s in the script!’

Her sisters and me would play at auditioning for the lead roles, but because Caroline was the eldest and went to stage school she always won. We’d be Charlie’s Angels and she was always Farrah. Once we’d established the game, I’d play it with other kids – I remember doing it with my cousins out at Uncle Jim’s house in Buckinghamshire. That was great because then it was my game so I could be Farrah and, believe me, I was Farrah like my life depended on it. I’ve always had thin hair, so it did wonders for my confidence pretending I had this big mane to flick. We’d run around the house hiding behind rubber plants, then leap out and shout ‘Freeze!’ with our fingers shaped like a gun.

From the word go, I loved Italia Conti. We learnt to enunciate properly and memorised speeches from Shakespeare, taking exams run by the London Academy of Speech and Drama. Soon the other girls were staying on for dancing lessons after drama and I joined those classes, too: doing tap, ballet and modern dance.

I made friends straight away: Laura James was one of my best friends, Karen Halliday was another and Amanda Mealing, who went on to a big role in Holby City. We four were working-class kids, so I didn’t feel out of place. Laura and Karen knew each other as they were both from Stockwell and Amanda came from Lambeth. We all spoke pure South London, but within weeks I was talking like Princess Lisa of Rockingham with this perfect cut-glass accent.

Soon it was time to move on from primary school and all I wanted was to attend Italia Conti full time. Of course it cost money: Mr and Mrs Sheward, who ran the school, told Mum that the Inner London Education Authority normally gave four scholarships but they’d cut it down to two that year and so we had to audition. There were about 20 of us, all there with our mums, who were probably even more nervous than us. I auditioned with a modern piece, a ballet piece, a speech and a song: I didn’t have a serious acting piece so I did a poem called ‘Worms’, which was short and silly. Looking back, I didn’t do myself justice but I wasn’t at all nervous – I never had a problem walking into a room and showing off. I had three ‘parents’ putting me on a pedestal, who thought I was the bees’ knees, so my self-esteem was pretty high.

We had to wait for two weeks for the results (Mum says they were two of the longest weeks of her life). When Mr Sheward rang it was not good news: I’d come third. My friends Laura and Karen got the scholarships. I was offered a place but the fees were well beyond our means. At a meeting with Mr Sheward, he told Mum, ‘She’s one of the most talented kids we’ve come across and we have to find a way to get her into this school.’ He had a book called The Directory of Grant Making Trusts and gave her lots of numbers to ring to see if they could offer any help. They were mostly single-parent charities but because we lived with Nan and Grandad we didn’t really qualify. Nobody could help – I guess they had far more pressing problems than a kid who had a decent home but needed the money to go to stage school. I remember thinking, why does everything come down to the fact that I haven’t got a dad? Why doesn’t Mum just get the money, couldn’t someone leave it her in an inheritance or something?