It was the tradition in those days to enter competitions at local festivals where you would recite or perform a little piece and judges would hand out marks. I can still remember my first performance at one of these, as Gretel, at five years old. For this I wore a blue skirt with white spots on and a velvet jacket. I remember going up to the little girl playing my brother and saying, in my loudest voice, ‘Wake up, Hansel, wake up. The little dickie birds are coming!’ I can’t even recall scripts from this year so I’m amazed I can still dredge that one up!
Just thinking about that show gives me tingles because I can still recall the exact feeling of ‘This is magic.’ I was only five years old but I knew at that moment that performing was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Soon afterwards I began attending Friday acting classes after school as well. SEC’s school had a really strong reputation in those days. She wasn’t interested in producing dozens of identikit performers, one after another, like other drama schools tend to do. She used to encourage you to be yourself, which I think is actually quite rare.
I tended to focus most of my acting on whatever performances SEC was putting on and didn’t even bother auditioning for school productions, but in my last year at Mosspits Lane junior school I won the part of Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, which I think is much more interesting and dark than Wonderland. Years later I played the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland in a BBC production for the incomparable Barry Letts.
The headmaster at Mosspits was Mr Calman, an amazing teacher. In fact I saw him on a television programme about twenty years ago. He’d just been parachuted into one of those troubled schools to sort it out. That gives you an idea of how good he was. You didn’t mess with him, but by God he was supportive.
Mr Calman was in charge of the school production and he would rehearse us over and over until everyone knew their lines – like professionals. It paid off. We had a week of excellent shows. Finally it was Saturday night, the last performance of the year, and the end of a particularly hot day. Because of the weather I’d had more than enough ice cream. In fact, by the time the curtain went up I was not feeling in the best of health, so I told Miss Lyons, the headmistress, I couldn’t do it.
‘Of course you can, dear. Try not to think about it.’
Somehow I managed to get to the interval. Then as soon as I came offstage Miss Lyons rushed me outside for some fresh air, which I really needed. But then she ruined it by pulling out a hanky soaked in lavender scent.
‘This will help you,’ she said.
But I knew it wouldn’t.
The second half was easier than the first and I was actually beginning to enjoy myself. We were about twenty minutes from the end and I remember a scene with the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting next to me. I don’t know how it happened, but as I turned to speak to the Red Queen I somehow got a whiff of lavender and that was it.
I threw up – all over the Red Queen.
The next thing I knew, Mr Calman was lifting me up and carrying me through the shocked choir. It was so awful, so embarrassing. Even backstage the only thing I could hear was the same whispered gasp rushing around the auditorium: ‘Elisabeth Sladen has been sick on Edwina Cohen! Elisabeth Sladen has been sick on Edwina Cohen!’
You’ll probably be more familiar with Edwina’s later married name of ‘Currie’. We’ve never spoken about the incident but perhaps that helped give her the thick skin she needed for a life in politics.
I pretty much retired from school productions after that. The attitude at my secondary school didn’t help. I’d only been at Aigburth Vale High School for Girls a few weeks when we had our first careers session. The teacher rattled off a few suitable – to her mind – job titles, then went round the class asking for our aspirations. I’m sure she thought she was being quite progressive by even encouraging us to think about a profession. When she got to me, I said, ‘I would just like to perform.’
She decided I was a lost cause there and then, shook her head and moved on to the next girl.
Right, I thought, if that’s your opinion, you’re not going to get me.
Once I’d made the decision to devote myself to SEC, life at Aigburth Vale – or ‘Eggy Jail’ as we called it – was never going to be fun. Even so, I think the place was too big for me. I felt lost among the hundreds of grammar school girls filling its giant corridors and large classrooms. There didn’t seem to be anyone there like Mr Calman who made you feel special, or simply not another nameless pupil, and so I kept my head down, trying my best to get through the day unnoticed. I think the cheekiest thing I ever did was join in with some of the other girls when they waved at the lads at the Tizer factory across the road.
The one teacher who did show an interest in me was our elocution mistress, although I don’t think I was as 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 Doctor Who around the world would ever have guessed that both Tom Baker and I hailed from the same city as The Beatles?
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 Murder in the Cathedral, but I would just play it again and again, absolutely mesmerised by Robert Donat’s mellifluous, rich voice – I even found myself trying to copy his enunciation and intonations. I must have mentioned this in an interview once, because a fan very sweetly presented me with a copy of this recording, years later.
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.’