That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF

see your breath. Lying in a hot bath during these months meant lying shrouded in steam so thick and opaque that you could barely make out the taps at the other end. However, once a week, it was an oasis of isolation. Unlike today, when it seems that most children’s bedrooms are a haven of warmth and privacy, furnished with both a computer and a television, when I was growing up the bedroom, its hypothermic temperatures aside, was purely for undressing (in winter, pretty quickly), sleeping and dressing again. It never occurred to anyone then that people might ‘need their space’. So apart from the lavatory, where there was always the threat of someone banging on the door, wanting to get in, the only other room with a lock was the bathroom. Once ensconced in the warmth of the water, the clouds of white steam softening and for the most part concealing, albeit only briefly, the cold, functional and often messy nature of the room, a girl could be transported for at least half an hour. With its echoey acoustic, a girl could all but fall in love with her own voice and hone to near perfection her impersonations of the likes of Sandie Shaw (‘Always Something There to Remind Me’), the Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’) and the Supremes (‘Baby Love’). And then, of course, the water would become tepid and the steam would turn to condensation. I can recall the mild pall of disappointment that would descend as the bleak old bathroom would gradually reveal itself out of the mist. It was lying in this bath, aged eighteen, knowing I was to embark on a nursing course in a matter of weeks, that I felt safe enough, under cover of the hot tap running at full tilt, to say, in a small voice to the palm of my hand, held very close to my mouth, ‘I want to be an actress.’ Words I had never spoken before. To anyone.
    The scullery led in turn on to a sort of outhouse extension, which was called ‘the back place’. In the corner there was a drain and there was always a smell of soapsuds in the air from the seemingly endless rounds of washing and washing up. In winter it also smelt of geraniums and coal dust, whilst in the summer the soapy freshness of the drain often turned a tad fetid. It was built on before our time to incorporate the coalhouse and the outside toilet, the latter often being referred to by my brother Kevin, for some unfathomable reason, as the Lah Pom. I preferred the upstairs toilet and rarely used the Lah Pom as it was often home to at least a couple of large house spiders. I was terrified of the creatures. These days, having lived in the country for many years, I am less so, but back then and well into my twenties and thirties I could not bear to even look at a picture of one, let alone be in the same room.
    This is amply illustrated by an incident in 1979, when I was working on a play at the Hampstead Theatre Club and was renting a basement flat from a friend. One evening I went to run a bath only to find a spider the size of a Bentley attempting to climb up the side of it, in order to get out. After letting out an unstoppable scream and trying, without looking at it, to flush it down the plughole from whence it came followed by an unsuccessful attempt to enlist the help of a neighbour, I ended up phoning the director of the play I was doing and asking whether he would be so kind as to come and get rid of it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, never mind take a bath. After coming some way across town, and with much ribbing and hilarity, Mike Leigh humanely disposed of the thing and then went back to finish his tea.
    The back place acted as an overflow to my father’s garage, and it was here that, on coming in late at night as a teenager, I would reach up and blindly scrabble about on a dusty old shelf - amongst a jumble of plumbing items, heaps of tools, my mother’s geranium pots, a selection of old shoes and anything else that people saw fit to sling up there - in order to find the key to the middle