Free That's Another Story: The Autobiography by Julie Walters

cellophane. I had never seen anything like it, but instantly knew from my giggling parents’ reaction that it was somehow lewd. There were shops selling every piece of crockery imaginable with ‘Blackpool’ plastered all over it. It was thrilling to my seven-, eight-, or nine-year-old self and I believe that at one time or another I bought all of the above, excluding, that is, the body parts.
    The very best, though, was the funfair, the terrifying, wonderful, sick-making funfair. We visited this only once during the whole holiday because it was deemed too expensive. My abiding memory is of the Mad Mouse, a small bullet-shaped carriage built to hold two people sitting one in front of the other. The track along which it went was high up over the water. It started, as most of these rides do, going teasingly slowly up a steep incline until it reached the top and the first corner, around which it would abruptly swerve at breakneck speed, making the passenger feel that the little car simply won’t make it and that the whole thing is going to career off the edge and plummet into the water below. It was heaven! After going on it the first time, I was so gloriously terrified that when the ride finally came to a standstill my right arm was paralysed. I had to go on it again, several times, to get the feeling back.
    I went back to Blackpool in 1995 when I was filming a BBC Television film called Wide-Eyed and Legless . I was thrilled to find that I would be staying at the Imperial Hotel on the front, because when I was a child whenever we drove past it my mother would suck in a deep breath, her accent becoming what she imagined to be refined, and with a wistful little laugh she would say, ‘Oh, the Imperial.’
    And my father would chime in, imbuing his voice with a deep respectful resonance, ‘Oo ah, I’d love to see inside that.’
    As I stood at reception, checking in, I felt a lump gather in my throat and at the earliest opportunity, when I found that I had a morning off, I went in search of Empress Drive. As always happens when you revisit a place you frequented as a child, everything was smaller. The street was narrower and shorter, and the houses cowered back from the road, lower and less substantial, the proud glow of immaculate seaside white now a little chipped and bashed, a little grimier, poorer, less cared for. I walked back to the hotel feeling as if the sight of that road was an assault on my little, perfect bubble of memory; but the memory is robust and the Empress Drive of the 1950s is still preserved within it, in all its bright, optimistic glory.

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    ‘A Fine Figure of a Man’ - Dad

    I notice as I write down the memories of my life that I tend to constantly refer to my mother and far less to my father. This is because my mum was the emotional driving force and centre of the family, whereas my dad tended to hover, unsure, on the edge of our life.
    Thomas Walters was born in 1909. The family lived in Ickneild Port Road in the Ladywood area, a poor inner-city suburb of Birmingham that was widely regarded as a slum. He was the second youngest of five children, comprising three older sisters, Rachel, Amy and Betty, and a younger brother, Reg. His father was killed in the First World War, during the battle of the Somme in 1916. He often told us how he was sent to the headmaster’s office and how, aged seven years, he stood there in the presence of this terrifying and often cruel man, holding the hand of his five-year-old brother, to be told, bluntly and without an ounce of compassion, ‘You’d better get off home to your mother, your dad’s been killed.’
    I think it is significant that he himself didn’t have a father for much of his growing up, for he seemed ill at ease with some of the requisites of fatherhood. Dealing with my brothers, who were lively, combative, intelligent boys, he seemed to shrink back and it was my mother who was always at the forefront when it came to family discussion, or discipline