That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters Read Free Book Online Page A

what was said and I probably couldn’t have told you then either, overwhelmed by the terrible need to get away and cry.
    As I sat on top of the bus as it bumped and swayed its way along the Bearwood Road, the tears began and they never really let up for about a month. My parents never once challenged my red-eyed silence or my staying off work for four weeks, dragging myself around the house, my eyelids swollen and puffy, and I had no inclination to discuss it with either of them, thinking that neither would understand or realise the magnitude of my feelings. I was bewildered: under any other circumstances my mother would have harangued me for taking to my bed and not going to work, and at the time though I didn’t understand it I was grateful for her silence.
    I questioned her about it much later in my thirties, wondering whether she remembered and what on earth she had made of the whole thing.
    She said, ‘Oh yes, we knew what had happened. We guessed that you had a broken heart, but we didn’t like to say anything. We thought it best.’
    I’m not sure why I was immensely touched by the fact that they had known all along. I know that their silence was born out of an inability to deal with ‘feelings’, as it wasn’t the done thing to talk things out then, but it was also born out of recognition, sympathy and, of course, wisdom.
    The main advantage of the back bedroom was that just below the sash window there was the roof of the back place. This could be seen very clearly from both Wigorn and Long Hyde Roads, and as the Boyle family were not only devoid of motorised transport but also lacking such a roof, it was another useful source of agony to be heaped upon the unfortunate Dermot when so needed, simply by doing a bit of sunbathing. However, this was not easy nor, may I say, comfortable as not only did the roof slope at quite an angle but it was also corrugated. There once existed a photograph, long since lost, of me lying flat on my back on this roof, my eyes tightly closed, my mouth clamped shut, lips pressed together in a thin line, arms and legs straight and rigid, a picture of endurance; instead of lapping up the sun, I looked as if I was braced for a cold shower. But I’m sure that if we were able to widen the shot out to the left and down a bit, we would come upon Dermot sitting in the gutter of Long Hyde Road, eating his mother’s cake and trying not to look. The roof joined on to the garden wall, which was about six feet high and separated us from number 68. This meant that it was possible to get out of the back bedroom window, down over the roof, on to the wall, down on to the dustbin placed conveniently beneath, and out into the world. It was also possible to do the thing in reverse if, as sometimes happened, the key to the middle door hadn’t been left out amongst the jumble of junk on the shelf in the back place.
    At around sixteen or seventeen, I started going to clubs with Chris, my best friend from school. She was strikingly beautiful, with a mane of dark-brown hair and blue eyes fringed by almost doll-like thick lashes, causing male heads to whip round to look wherever we went. My mother knew nothing of our Saturday-night forays into town and thought that I was just spending the evening round at Chris’s house, watching television or listening to records. We would head to Birmingham, dressed and made up to pull, or at least impress, the thought of pulling a stranger in a nightclub being a little too scary for either of us. Once on the number 9 bus, we would go straight upstairs and, if it was free, on to the back seat. Then a small, silent ritual would follow whereby Christine would open her handbag and take out a bottle of Este’e Lauder’s Youth Dew. She would first spray both of our necks just below each ear and then, employing a huge circular movement, she would totally enshroud us in a cloud of the stuff. Next out of the bag came a little pack of Beechnut spearmint chewing gum, out of