nice to her as I could have been. I wish I could recall her name. She used to come in and make us say things like ‘Claire has fair hair and Mary’s hair is brown’ and we’d all just parrot it back in our best Cilla Black Scouse accent and giggle at her exasperation. The silly thing is this was the one lesson that would actually have benefited my dream of acting. In order to break into the British media in those days you needed to speak the Queen’s English. No trace of a regional accent. It wasn’t like today where you sometimes think it’s the ones with Received Pronunciation who might struggle. But the reason I messed around in those lessons was because I felt that I didn’t have an accent to begin with. My cousins and uncles may have spoken with a pure Liverpudlian lilt, but my father had never lost his southern vowel sounds and Mum spoke the Queen’s English as well as anyone, and so that is how I sounded.
At the time, however, it seemed the grammar school curriculum was hell-bent on removing all trace of Scouse from our voices and I guess it worked – and not just on me. After all, how many people watching
Thinking about it, the biggest influence on my voice didn’t come from a teacher at all. In the final year, when we should have been revising for exams, girls were allowed to take their books up into an attic room at a house separate to the school. Some pupils worked diligently but generally we played poker for drawing pins and gossiped. The thing I most looked forward to was using the room’s old record player. There was only one album up there, which happened to be a performance of T.S. Eliot’s
The desire not to be at Eggy Jail manifested itself in my results, I think. I liked history, because my dad had given me an interest in it, and I loved English, but otherwise resented my time there and I’m amazed I managed to pass the six O-levels that I did. In contrast, it seemed there was always something exciting happening over at SEC, never more so than when the Royal Ballet came to town.
Every Christmas the company arrived at the Crane Theatre and invited girls from SEC to audition for roles in their new production. They weren’t exactly casting for Clara in the Sugar Plum Fairy outfit – although, as I shared the name, I dreamed that one day the role would be mine – but what young girl wouldn’t explode with excitement at the chance to dress in a beautiful frock and dance around the Christmas tree? Imagine my twelve-year-old face when SEC unveiled my costume.
‘The Great King Rat needs his little mice, Elisabeth,’ she smiled, handing over a brown suit. ‘It’s a very important part.’
Every year it was the same story. I’d queue up for one of the glamorous dresses and be given a tail and big ears instead. Always the bloody mouse!
I think I took part five years in a row. There was nothing like that excitement in the weeks building up to it, especially in my first year. I was genuinely shocked that I was still expected to go to school during the day, though.
‘But I’m dancing with the Royal Ballet tonight, Mum!’
I remember her smiling face waiting at the gate when I came out on performance night. She had my costume and dancing shoes all ready for me and some sandwiches because I’d be missing tea. I was too nervous to eat a single crumb.
It was such a different experience performing on the huge stage at the Crane Theatre rather than in our dance studio at Bold Street. In fact it was so big that I once got completely lost. There were so many legs kicking and flicking, and pirouetting and plieing, I couldn’t even see where the audience was!
The older I became, the more I began to socialise less with local school friends and more with the girls from SEC. I couldn’t have been happier than on a Saturday, going to Rodney Street, having a spot of lunch with the adorable Lizzie Gay – later we were both bridesmaids at each other’s weddings – then dancing or performing in competitions in places like Crosby in the afternoon.
Between spending time with friends like Lizzie and all my rehearsals, I didn’t have much time for boys – certainly not as much time as other girls at Eggy Jail seemed to have. My first boyfriend, though, was a friend of Lizzie’s called Dave Owen. He was so nice, and destined for a life in uniform, I thought. We used to go ice skating together and had a lot of fun but I think I was a bit mean to him, really. It was nothing personal, I just preferred to spend my time at SEC. If either of us had been told then that the next time we would meet would be on my way to an oil rig, we wouldn’t have believed it – but that was still to come.
* * *
In the 1960s you were allowed to leave school, before your exams, at fifteen, and a lot of my friends did. I couldn’t wait for the end of term so I could sign up for full-time classes with SEC, but my parents had other ideas. They wanted me to stay on in the sixth form and then possibly go on to university. Somehow we managed to come to a compromise.
‘Just stay on for one more year, Lissie,’ Dad reasoned. ‘If you still want to dance and act at the end of that, then OK.’
So that’s what I did, but the year dragged by. The highlight was being able to spend my six weeks of holidays at a special ‘summer camp’ that SEC was running. We had some amazing teachers. I remember Susan Hampshire’s mother coming along to take some lessons, and once she even brought Susan herself along. She’d just been in
And, of course, being around SEC for more than just one or two sessions a week allowed us to listen to so many more of her fantastic stories about working with the stars from the Liverpool Playhouse. The more I heard, the more I dreamed of performing there. That’s where people like Michael Redgrave were, of course, and we were all shocked to discover she’d gone out with him for a while.
Somehow I got through my lower sixth year and, aged sixteen, I signed up for three full-time years with Shelagh Elliott Clarke – and I couldn’t have been happier.
Despite what I’d told my careers mistress, I’d never really dreamed of acting for a living. I was just a child – the idea of doing anything for an actual wage hadn’t passed across my radar. I just knew it was how I wanted to spend every minute of my day – and finally, for the first time, I could do just that.
Despite her gruff exterior, SEC was born to encourage. Her mantra – which we all had to chant in unison before exams – was ‘Personality is the key to success’ and she really drove us to develop our natural abilities. Nothing pleased her more than investing time and love into a student and seeing that student flourish. She was always
