When the Second World War started, Dad was at the Automatic. Too old to be conscripted this time, he became a member of the Home Guard. He would do a full day at Edge Lane then go straight out on the night watch. Mum hated it – ‘You never knew if he was going to come home.’
Liverpool was a prime target for the Luftwaffe’s bombs during the War because of its importance to British shipping and manufacturing, but Devon also attracted attention from marauding Messerschmitts trying to stop ships in the Estuary. Grandpa was killed in one of the attacks.
When Grandma had died a few years earlier, Grandpa decided to rent out the big house. ‘I don’t need all this space,’ he told Dad. ‘But it’s yours and Gladys’s whenever you want.’ His brother Fred’s old cleaner, Nell, and her husband had become good friends so Grandpa moved in with them and let out the house. I think his last years were very happy but nobody foresaw what would happen after he was killed.
Dad arrived in Salcombe to attend to the funeral and later to sort out the family’s financial matters. When it came to acquiring the paperwork for the house, however, he hit a snag.
‘Your father sold the house to us,’ Nell told him.
He bloody didn’t, and Dad knew it.
‘I’ll need to see some paperwork for that, Nell,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing left. Everything burned during the bombs.’
And that was that. Mum was livid. She knew that if Dad had called lawyers in the family would have kept
Even though Dad was too old to be conscripted for the Second World War, Mum still had five brothers who enlisted. Four went to sea and one joined the army. Every day while they were away, Mum and Doll used to go down to the Pierhead in Liverpool for news.
When I was little, my mum was still quite jumpy about the War. Odd little things, like a car backfiring, would set her off down memory lane. To me, it all seemed like eons ago but the older I get, the more I appreciate how close I was to being caught up in all of it.
I was born on 1 February 1946. That’s right, 1946. My daughter Sadie has a wicked sense of humour and she is forever laughing at articles that list my birth as 1948. ‘Here’s another one, Mum. Someone else who hasn’t done their homework.’ I think my agent was asked for my age once in 1970 and he gave the wrong answer and that’s the year that has appeared in every piece of print ever since. So you can see how thorough journalists can be sometimes.
My husband, Brian, really was a war baby, though – which Sadie reckons explains why he will never leave a scrap of food on his plate. ‘Dad never saw a banana until he was twenty – he’s making up for lost time.’
Mum was forty-four when I came along, and Dad two years older, which probably explains why I stayed an only child, like Dad.
Mum had planned all along to call me after her mother but when a neighbour heard her intention she said, ‘Well, you can’t have your mum in there and not Tom’s. It’s not right.’ So that’s why I became Elisabeth Clara. I wish that bloody woman had never opened her mouth – Liverpool neighbours can be very influential like that – because there was a picture of a cow called Clara on the wall at school, so of course that is what I was called. ‘Clara the Cow’ – that was me.
As for why Mum chose to spell my name with an ‘S’ and not a ‘Z’ like her mother’s, when anyone asked she just said:
‘The “S” is for “star”.’
She reminded everyone of that when she first saw me on television.
If I was a star then Mum was sunshine. She was just lovely. Every childhood memory I have of her is wonderful. Mum and Auntie Doll loved dancing as The Dolly Sisters, which was always fun to watch. And her baking days were legendary on Auckland Road, where we lived. Once every couple of weeks Mum would just devote the entire day to baking. I’d be out playing in the street and someone would say, ‘Glad’s baking.’ We had a houseful on those days.
Every weekend we would all gather with Mum’s brothers’ and sister’s families. As the youngest child I was always made such a fuss of wherever I went. I thought life was always going to be like that!
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I looked forward to bedtimes when I would have Mum all to myself. She loved to read poetry to me, or sing lullabies, which years later I found myself relaying to Sadie – although I wish my voice was half as good as Mum’s. (So does Victor Spinetti – but more of that later.)
Our house on Auckland Road had four bedrooms and I had the smallest, the box room at the front. When I was older, that room would be plastered with posters of Elvis. He was my heartthrob. I always wrote on my schoolbooks: Elvis Presley, Errol Flynn and – someone who you’d never think was a heartthrob at all, with his very pockmarked face – the Australian actor, Ray Barrett. I think he was in
One of the other bedrooms was usually inhabited by one of Mum’s brothers, Bill, when he was between commissions on ocean liners. He was always bringing me back little presents from his travels. Unfortunately, they were usually bottles of exotic alcohol!
‘Here you go, Lis, have a swig of that.’
When guests came to the house I would offer them the drinks and uncle Bill was always shocked I still had any left. I guess a sailor’s life is very different. Actually I never really drank until I was thirty.
Any spare moments were spent playing with my friends in the street. We’d all invent games or sometimes put on little dance shows. I worshipped Danny Kaye in the film
