Becoming Nancy Read online

  About the Book

  For David Starr, being cast as Nancy in the upcoming school production of Oliver! is quite a shock. But David is up to the challenge. Living in a three-bedroom semi in 1970s’ working-class East Dulwich, surrounded by his somewhat colourful relatives, he is bright, smart-mouthed, fanatical about pop music and ready to shine. Rehearsals begin, and he strikes up a friendship with the handsome yet enigmatic Maxie Boswell, captain of the school football team. As their alliance deepens it appears they might become more than just good friends, but that can’t be right, can it?

  Discovering a confidant in empathetic teacher, Hamish McClarnon, and spurred on by his no-nonsense best friend, Frances Bassey, David takes on the school bully, the National Front, and anyone else who threatens to stand in the way of true love.

  Vibrant, warm, and full of life, this uproarious and touching coming-of-age novel, set against the backdrop of South-East London in the thrill of the late seventies, will transport you straight back to your first music obsession and the highs and lows of your first love.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Author’s Note

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One: Very Nearly New

  Two: Casting Aspersions

  Three: Love and Lunacy

  Four: Tossed

  Five: Rough Boys: a Naked History

  Six: A Golden Boy

  Seven: Top Hat and Tales

  Eight: Doomed?

  Nine: A Moment of Unity

  Ten: The Balcony Scene

  Eleven: A Beige Hatter

  Twelve: Whoops!

  Thirteen: A Meringue in the Offing

  Fourteen: Fags and Apples

  Fifteen: Hitting the Fan

  Sixteen: Go Up West, Young Man

  Seventeen: Love Story – without the Cancer

  Eighteen: Au Fait with Pimlico

  Nineteen: Unravelling

  Twenty: A Slow Fast Train

  Twenty-one: Parfait!

  Twenty-two: Spilling the Beans

  Twenty-three: Pod People

  Twenty-four: Becoming Nancy

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Although Becoming Nancy is inspired by some of the experiences and emotions I had as a teenager, the characters and many of the events in the story are fictitious. I was hugely inspired by the environment in which I grew up, and by my family in particular. The actions and the events described in this story, however, do not in any way reflect those of my own family.

  BECOMING NANCY

  Terry Ronald

  For Sparky

  Acknowledgements

  Love and thanks to the people who helped make this book possible.

  Pat Lomax, who took a chance on me and changed my life. Thank you doesn’t cover it. Sarah ‘turn it into a novel and we’ll talk’ Emsley, who went to bat for me. Cat Cobain, who helped me make ‘Nancy’ so much better than I ever dreamed it could be. Larry Finlay, Claire Ward, Judith Welsh, Madeline Toy and the team at Transworld for having me. Hillary Shaw, who has kept me safe for so long, and who is the most stylish woman I know. Angela, Jodie, Nikki and Grace at Shaw Thing management. To my entire remarkable family and recently acquired in-laws, especially Mum and Aunt Rose, who saved my life; my sister, Tina, and my Dad who is always there for me. My other family: Michael, Lawrence, Emma and Jo (who interfered as usual). Let’s have one more chorus of ‘Stoney End?’ Also Kenny (we really did meet Abba), Tina and Angela: come on the old girls! Dannii and Ian: long-time musical musketeers, and Daniel, for crying in all the right places. My beautiful New Yorkers, and all my friends in Blighty and Oz. Dee and Sherry, for sending Christmas when we really needed it. Mitch and Baby Dylan Terry, for the experience. Tim Edwards, for priceless help and assurance that I wasn’t wasting my fucking time. Joanna Sterling and the Meridian Writers gang for wholehearted support. The divine Kathy Lette, for telling me to go for it.

  To Mark, whom I love very much.

  This book is for any kid who ever lay on their bed staring up at a poster of Debbie Harry … and dreamed of what might be!

  Terry

  One

  Very Nearly New

  September 1979

  It’s well gone six by the time I sit back down at Mum and Dad’s very nearly new, smoked-glass kitchen table with a tumbler of milk and a mint Yo-Yo. I’m still shaken to the core. I’m finally, and unenthusiastically, confronting page thirty-eight of my sociology textbook and I’m disillusioned, but not altogether shocked, to discover that it’s no less dreary than it had been the last time I sat down and looked at it. I shove it to one side, again. I just can’t focus. I’m too excited, I suppose, or is it fraught? I’m not really sure, but I’ve chewed the collar of my school shirt till it’s soaked. I’m restless. I can’t think straight and my mind’s all full of the day. I have at least four chapters to read tonight, but so much has happened that concentration just seems futile.

  Should I pop some music on, perhaps? Yes, that’ll calm me down: help me relax. The house is far too quiet – that’s the issue, that’s why I’m fidgety and can’t focus on my bloody homework. Only it’s not. I spring up again and saunter over to the flash new space-age radio-cassette player, which, inexplicably, has had its serial number crudely scratched off and is sitting next to the smart, and also very nearly new, portable colour television set, which came without a box or any sort of brochure or instructions. They’re both sitting on top of the recently acquired dishwasher that, rather interestingly, came with a few dirty cups and plates already inside. In fact I’d venture that almost everything in Mum and Dad’s freshly overhauled and extended kitchen-diner is nearly new.

  I put in a tape and sit back down. Music: that’s better. Calm again. The whipcrack of the singer’s voice comes at me as I lean back in the chair and push my sociology folder and the tatty textbook far out of my eyeline.

  ‘Was it destiny?

  I don’t know yet.

  Was it just by chance?

  Could it be kismet?

  Something in my consciousness told me you’d appear.

  Now, I’m always touched by your presence, dear.’

  I’m moved. Jarred, in fact, by what I deem to be one of Deborah Harry’s most sublime and insightful lyrical moments: a sliver of rock genius, if you will. It’s as if she’s speaking just to me, right at this moment. My best friend from school, Frances Bassey, informed me – somewhat spitefully, I felt – this afternoon, outside the metalwork room after fifth period, that Debbie had not penned this particular verse herself per se: it had been Blondie’s mop-haired bass player, Gary Valentine, who had actually written it. Nevertheless, I thought, it had been Debbie, not Gary, who had delivered it, clad in a yellow woollen cowl-necked T-shirt dress, and corresponding thigh-high pirate boots, on The Old Grey Whistle Test last year, and that’s what chalked up points on my scoreboard.

  ‘David! David!’

  A rather shrill pitch rudely invades my thoughts, but I pretend I haven’t heard anything and go back to them.

  ‘All right, you monkeys!’ Debbie had purred at the start of the song, speaking through those superb teeth, like only Debbie does, bobbing her peroxide head and pouting that mouth as she sang, like only Debbie does, an amber stage light flashing over her shoulder as she hollered – with that smart, blissful, New York twang – the line, ‘It’s really not cheating, ye know?’ Who gave a flying fuck, I pointed out to Frances, if Gary Valentine had written the words, or in fact the New fucking Testament, for the ensuing two minutes and twenty-six seconds? It was Debbie’s presence one was ultimately touched by.

  ‘David, I know you can hear me down ther
e, so don’t pretend you can’t.’

  What on earth does she want? I decide to answer, but only half-heartedly.

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  I get up and rewind the cassette, seemingly unable to let the song, with all its apparent lyrical significance, sink and fade to nothing, and I start it again from the very top, turning the volume up loud. Then I sit back in my chair, and I ask myself, for what must be the two hundredth time today, could it possibly be true? Is it in any way feasible? And if it is true, what the hell am I going to do about it? But no answer comes – only Debbie. Oh! What simple truth she brings me now: what elation and insight she offers my poor, bewildered teenage heart. Yes, I know I’m being dramatic, I know! But it’s a big thing, it really is. And never, as far as I’m concerned, has a song spoken so poignantly to a boy so unsettled.

  ‘David, you’re not deaf; so why don’t you come when I call you?’

  Just as Debbie is about to lift me into the rapture that is my absolute favourite part of the song – the bit where she sings: ‘Floating past the evidence of possibilities; we could navigate together psychic frequencies’ – I become aware of an altogether different sort of presence hovering over my right shoulder. I knew it; she wants something.

  ‘David, could you not hear me? Yes, of course you bloody could. Now would you mind very much getting off your fuckin’ arse and running over Liptons? I want twenty Superkings and a Vitbe.’

  My mother. She can be ever so common at times.

  ‘Could I not go in a minute, Kath? I’m in the middle of my sociology homework,’ I say, not looking up. ‘I’ve got to rustle up an essay about venereal disease and what shoes one should wear if one should happen to catch it.’

  I snigger at my own joke, then beat my pencil on the table to the last few bars of the song, singing along as if she weren’t even in the room and I was entirely adrift in the music. ‘I am always touched by your presence, dear, dear, dear, dear …’ And then, finally, I look up at Mother with the most syrupy and insincere grin I can assemble.

  ‘Dear!’

  She’s smiling back at me, but is clearly unmoved, so I drop my head again, hoping she’ll get fed up and trot off to beleaguer my sister, Chrissy. No such joy.

  ‘Come on, smart arse!’ she laughs. ‘Don’t push it! You’ve been sitting there for over an hour now and I’ve not even seen you pick up a sodding biro yet, so you can go right now. And don’t call me Kath, you cheeky git, or dear for that matter. It’s vulgar.’

  I slump down on the smoked glass of the nearly new kitchen table as Mum, still glamorous in her work suit, hunches expectantly over me, brandishing a couple of dog-eared pound notes. I’m fairly certain that I detect a whiff of Trebor mint so I suspect she’s been on the Blue Nun since she got home from work; no wonder she wants a fag.

  ‘All right,’ I say, nodding wearily, and then I grab for the cash, my mother pecking me on the forehead and affording me an absurd grin before she turns and heads for the lounge to watch the back end of Nationwide. Lifting my school blazer from the seatback, I sniff at it, wincing at the smell of rain-damp cloth fused with sweat. Then, returning to my main preoccupation of the day, I ask myself: how can I really be sure? I have no idea what it feels like, so how could I possibly know? But again, there is no answer.

  ‘I’d put your blazer on if I were you, David. It’s spitting,’ Mum hollers from halfway up the passage.

  ‘Well, you’re not me, Mother, are you?’ I mutter. ‘So that’s that conundrum sorted.’

  I pull on the jacket anyway, and then I gather my sociology stuff from the table to take to my room, Mother shrieking, once more, from even further along the hall, ‘And stick all your homework upstairs; your father’ll be home in a minute. Last thing I need’s him griping about the sodding mess. And get a bottle of Cresta or something if you’ve got enough change. You and Chrissy can have that with your tea: I got some veal and ham pie from Wallis’s.’

  ‘All right!’

  I mean, should I have the sensation of being hit by something? Or of being blessed in some way by something marvellously celestial? I just don’t know. I scan the kitchen momentarily. Mum was right. Dad would, without doubt, rebuke anyone and everyone who was in earshot if the esteemed and costly ‘new kitchen’ fell anything short of pristine splendour. Of late, in fact, leaving a cupboard door ajar, or setting a cup down upon any surface that lacked the augmentation of one of Eddie’s ‘Pigeons of Great Britain’ coasters, was a crime punishable by execution, it seemed, or at least a strident and lengthy ear-bashing, often culminating in a sharp clip round the ear. Disarray hadn’t really seemed to agitate my father prior to ‘new kitchen’. The scullery had been tatty, at best, and the decrepit Formica table in ‘old kitchen’ had become a dumping ground for back issues of Family Circle, bits of fishing tackle and boxes of whatever knocked-off goods Dad had been selling that week. There was a cosy familiarity about ‘old kitchen’. You knew where you were.

  Since they’d knocked through, however, to construct and erect the magnificence that was ‘new kitchen’, Eddie Starr had insisted that his family all rise to the occasion; so thereafter, the TV Times went straight in the sideboard and the aforementioned fenced goods took up residence in the back of the pigeon loft. The upside of this, however, is that now our entire three-storey house is chock-full of the very latest gadgets, most of them courtesy of Eddie’s tepid and rather small-time underworld connections. In fact, the work surfaces in our kitchen often put me in mind of the conveyor belt on The Generation Game, laden with prizes. We’ve recently acquired, for example, a new improved Breville snack and sandwich toaster, a SodaStream, which apparently turns dull, ordinary tap water into an exciting fizzy and flavoured beverage, and a Videostar video recorder – and I’m pretty certain that we’re the only semi-detached on Chesterfield Street to have one of those!

  Dad had ranted to me only last week, when he sadistically coerced me into helping him muck out his pigeons, ‘You got to change with the times, David. It’s no good standin’ still like some of the miserable bastards I have to listen to while I’m driving me taxi, fuckin’ moanin’ about this and that changing.’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ I’d said, heaving at the smell of pigeon shit and holding a yellow Marigold up to my nose. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘I’m embracing the eighties, I am,’ he said, even though the decade was still a good four months away. ‘I’m fed up with livin’ in an untidy shit’ole! Fed up with it!’

  And I watched with some fascination as he prised a crusty lump of pigeon poop out of his thick wavy black hair.

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said.

  He’d even employed a cleaner, Moira, to come three times a week to keep things spick and span, evidently deeming Mum to be entirely incapable of holding down a job whilst concurrently retaining an adequate standard of hygiene in the family home. Mum did have a full-time job, too – and had had for years – at Freemans catalogue. This had been rather wonderful for the duration of our childhood, especially around Christmas time as my sister Chrissy and I pawed through the silky pages of shiny new toys, but, frankly, a bane once one hit puberty and had to endure endless packs of ill-fitting Space 1999 nylon underwear from the staff shop. On the plus side, though, Mother had managed to procure me a signed photograph of Lulu modelling a shrimp-coloured safari suit when she’d come to cut the ribbon on the new office a few years back.

  Truth be told, however, Mum has never been the most fastidious of cleaners, and her employment at Freemans was just the pretext she required to slack off from the dusting. So Chrissy, me and Mum herself had hailed the arrival of Moira the cleaner with a great deal of enthusiasm, despite the fact that a plethora of wigs and hairpieces rendered the woman almost impossible to identify from one day to the next. Blonde one morning, titian the next: the only way we knew it was her on most days was because of her slightly overgenerous employment of dark rouge and the terrible perfume she wore.

  Moira came on Mondays, Wednesdays and Frid
ays most weeks, and, to be honest, when I came home from school the first time she’d been I thought we’d been burgled. It turned out she’d just tidied things away, which was a revelation to all of us, especially Mum. She was nice, in a busty, brusque, straightforward sort of way, and Chrissy and I liked her because she swore lots and didn’t mind if we did the same. The major boon in having Moira, though, as far as we were all concerned, was that Eddie’s once customary and oft-heard cry of ‘Look at the fucking state of this shithouse!’ seemed little more than far-flung nostalgia these days.

  Anyway, I shall do Mum’s bidding for the time being and toddle off to Liptons. I’m certainly not going to let her wanton grocery demands, or, indeed, the spectre of my father’s manic tidiness, impair my mood. I’m happy today. Elated. Slightly confused, it must be said, and eerily nervous, but good and happy nonetheless. After I’ve changed into my best blue jeans and a Blondie T-shirt, I head for the front door, swinging it open.

  ‘Back in a jiff,’ I yell at no one in particular.

  I stride out on to Chesterfield Street, slamming the door of number twenty-two behind me. Unexpectedly, the rain-washed landscape does not appear as it had this morning. Am I imagining it, or does the air smell somehow sweeter and fresher this evening? Is the front lawn that little bit greener? So many questions today and very few answers thus far. I turn out of our front garden and pass Mrs Stirzaker next door. I don’t know if it’s just me, but she actually looks rather cheery tonight as she clumps the living shit out of her unruly daughter, Stella, and I’m pretty sure I catch her winking at me. Across the street, glum Mr Archibald is smiling and waving over at me, as well – word has it he’s not cracked a smile since the Coronation so I’m definitely not going mad, there’s something in the air. Perhaps they can tell. Perhaps it is true and it shows. But how will I know? When will I know for sure?

  Chesterfield Street, I think, is one of the nicer roads in East Dulwich, because it’s that bit wider and it has lots of trees. It’s just houses, no shops, and you can walk from one end of it to the other in about three and a half minutes. Of course, a lot of the roads in the area look very alike: Victorian semis with very shipshape front gardens. It’s not what you’d call deprived or anything – not like some parts of south-east London – nor is it especially posh. It’s just ordinary. But I like our street: it’s cheery, and the people keep their houses nice and sponge their cars down regularly. Well, most people. When I pass by my nan’s house, which is only two doors along from ours, I detect the familiar but ever-divine aroma of her special thick mince and macaroni cooking. She’s made it every Wednesday for donkey’s years.