Authors: Anne Nolan
That summer, Maureen and I again appeared for a season with Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball, but this time on a small tour of holiday resorts that included Scarborough, Skegness and Llandudno. On one occasion, we were joined in Scarborough by Amy and her friend Julia Duckworth who sang 'I'm In The Mood For Dancing" with us. They'd both just left school. 1 think Maureen and I were even more nervous for the girls than they were themselves, but they got through it and I felt so proud. Now my elder daughter had performed our greatest hit on stage. It was a milestone moment.
In October 1997, and without any warning, Brian's mother, Norma had a massive heart attack when she and Walter were driving in their car one day. They got her to hospital, but she never recovered and, in many ways, I don't think she wanted to. She once told me that she'd sometimes pray that she wouldn't wake up the following morning because she was always in pain. Brian was forty when she died and, although he has an older sister, Shirley, and a younger brother, Ian, he seemed to take it particularly hard.
Walter asked me to sing at Norma's funeral and I agreed at once. We chose an uplifting song called 'Going Home' and, as I sang it, I looked across at Brian. He didn't once meet my eve. He seemed lost in his own private world, blaming himself– and me, he later told me – for the fact he hadn't seen enough of his mother when she was alive. My being away would have presented him with the ideal opportunity to take the girls to see their grandparents. Once his mother had gone, he must have felt guilty, but for some reason he chose to shift some of the blame on to me.
Following Norma's untimely death, Maureen and I started working towards Amy and Julia becoming an integral part of the act. The first time we appeared for a whole show together was in Tenerife, at a golf tournament. We stayed for a week, they gave each of us a fabulous apartment and we only had to give one performance. Perfect!
The following year, the two of them appeared with us at a charity concert in Blackpool. Their nerves weren't exactly helped when compere Jim Davidson, announcing they were about to join us on stage, urged the audience to pay particular attention to Amy. 'Look out for Anne's daughter,' he said. 'She's got great tits.' Nice one, Jim! Even so, and despite this somewhat crude introduction, Amy and Julia were an instant hit with the audience, a good omen for the future.
Nevertheless, I had mixed feelings about Amy taking up singing full-time. There's a lot of rejection in this business and, as her mother, I was naturally keen to protect her from that, but she was full of confidence by now and eager to pursue her career as a performer. The year came to a close with Maureen in panto in Weymouth and me in Southport, In the end, I appeared in eighteen pantomimes, only finally putting away my poison apple a couple of years ago.
During our first year together with Amy and Julia as part of the act, we did a series of summer shows everywhere from Weymouth and Torquay to Great Yarmouth and Weston-super-Mare. Initially, we'd been worried that the two generations wouldn't gel on stage – that Amy and Julia would make Maureen and me look like a couple of old bags! – but it worked surprisingly well. We adapted our costumes so that, if Maureen and I wore a particular type of top, Amy and Julia would wear a boob tube version of it and so on.
Later on. Amy and Julia and a schoolfriend called Laura entered a competition on Richard and Judy's
This Morning
programme. They had to sing down the phone to them and then they were invited to sing on air in the studio, but they were so nervous, they didn't get beyond that point. In time, they teamed up with another girl, Marie Claire, and sang at quite a few gigs in Blackpool, calling themselves 3rd Base. They looked and sounded terrific.
It was a shame they didn't carry on with it, but they became disillusioned. They'd been invited to London to make demo discs, something that turned out to be a bit of a con. They believed they were going to be offered recording contracts, that this was going to be their big chance, but they were just being used so that the producers could let an established artist hear how a song sounded. They were never paid for this work – and, of course, it came to nothing. The music industry has changed enormously since my sisters and I first started out, with all manner of technical wizardry now available to make people sound much better than they are, but Amy can genuinely sing well without any artificial help.
One day, towards the end of the summer season of 1998, we got a telephone call. Dad had been admitted to hospital. He was now seriously ill. On our day off, Maureen and I travelled back to Blackpool to visit him. He was on a geriatric ward and, despite everything, my overriding emotion was pity. He looked terrible and so undignified. The ward was like a scene out of your worst nightmare. There were old people lying on their beds not properly covered up. Clearly, there weren't enough nurses to cope with the demands of the patients. At one point, my father spilt a cup of tea he was trying to drink and it went all over the sheets. I told the nurse, but nothing happened. So I went and offered to change the sheets myself. She said visitors weren't really meant to do that. But what was the alternative? She was rushed off her feet and Maureen and I didn't want our father lying in wet sheets. So, rather reluctantly, she let us do it. The next day, we went back to Weymouth. Then, three days later, came another call. Dad had died. The cause of death was given as progressive systemic sclerosis, a condition that attacks the lungs. He was seventy-two.
I woke Maureen with the news and then I told Amy. Naturally, she was upset at the death of her grandfather and the tears flowed freely. Maureen started crying and then I did, too, but 1 wasn't crying for the loss of the father whose sexual subterfuge had cast a shadow over my life. I was crving because I was witnessing people I loved becoming visibly upset. My tears were for them. His death, if I could have confessed my true feelings, left me completely cold, but, equally, I felt no sense of relief. All the awful things he'd subjected me to had happened years and years ago and nothing would ever change them.
Although the season would have been over at the end of the following week, we felt we couldn't complete the tour and told our producers the reason why. Ever/body was kind and understanding. We returned to Blackpool, where Dad was buried a few days later, following a service at St Kentigan's Church. It was packed. Alex read a poem composed by all the grandchildren; none of the rest of them felt strong enough to read it themselves, although they stood next to her. So did I, to show a little support and to give her a bit of confidence.
Then Maureen read the words of a Celine Dion song, 'Because You Loved Me', a special request from our youngest sister, Coleen; again, she was too distraught, she said, to read it herself. Both my brothers, Tommy and Brian, said a few words before the coffin was carried out to be cremated. Mum was too upset to say or sing anything on her own. One of his favourite pieces of classical music, Debussy's 'Clair de Lune', was played as we filed into the crematorium with Frank Sinatra's classic 'That's Life' playing as the short committal finished. The wake was held at the Tangerine Club, a favourite of my father's.
A number of friends praised me during the day for my strength at holding my emotions in check. Truth be told, it hadn't been an effort at all. The funeral had little effect on me. When I'd seen my father at the hospital for what turned out to be the last time, I had told him – along with Maureen – that I loved him, but only because that was the expected thing to do. It really wasn't how I felt. And yet, despite the secret he and I shared, I tried to remember those carefree days in Ireland when he was good and life was uncomplicated. I reminded myself, too, that he could show great kindness, but what he did to me meant that I couldn't grieve for him when he'd gone. It was too big, too fundamental, an evil to overlook.
To this day, I believe he must have had a split personality. Who in their right mind would sexually abuse their own daughter – and then carry on with the rest of their life as though nothing had happened? This is no defence of what he did, and it certainly didn't help me, but clearly he couldn't stop himself. My girls would say I'm making excuses for him, but I'm not. It's just that I'm keen that people should understand both sides of the man.
It is no exaggeration to say that my relationships with the opposite sex in general and my husband in particular were sullied by the memory of what I endured at my father's hands. Ultimately, that legacy contributed to the end of my marriage and threatened to cost me the unquestioning love of my daughters, the two people for whom I would lay down my own life.
Was he evil? Was he sick? Was he ill? I've turned those questions over and over in my mind more times than I can count, and I've at last come to the conclusion that they're irrelevant. My father did what he did and, all these years later and even though he's dead now, his actions still have the power to haunt and to hurt me. The abuser moves on. The abused has no choice but to carry the aftermath of the abuse with her for ever.
His death meant, of course, that he never had to confront the consequences of his actions. He'd got away with it – and I resented that. I also resented the fact that I couldn't grieve for the father I should have loved. His actions had denied me what should have been uncomplicatedly happy memories of him. How could I ever think of him as a proper dad after what he'd done? When I was fourteen, fifteen, I'd go to bed each night and pray that, when I woke up the next morning, he'd be dead. I feel guilty saying that now and that, in turn, makes me angry. It's a vicious circle of negative emotions and none of it was my doing or, at least, not knowingly.
If ever he should come into my thoughts, even today, absolutely the first thing I think about is the sexual abuse he put me through. I've often wondered what I'd say if he walked in the room now. Would I confront him with the unforgivable thing he did to me? I'd like to think I would, just to try to understand his motivation, but he was a powerful man and I suspect I still wouldn't say anything.
My mother took a long time to get over the death of the man she'd known since they were both twenty. One day, I found her crying in the kitchen. She started going on and on about what a wonderful man he was, what a fabulous husband and father. Suddenly I snapped. 'For God's sake, woman,' I said, 'he was a pig to you. He drank, he smacked you about, he womanised.'
She looked at me in a strange way. 'Yes, I know,' she said. 'Your father had another child, a girl, by another woman.'
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It turned out the woman, someone my mother knew by sight, had been a girlfriend of my dad's before he met my mum. We kids knew nothing of any of this, but the woman had come to our house, apparently, and told Mum that our dad had made her pregnant. The baby girl was born in exactly the same month as my mother gave birth to Denise. I thought back to those countless occasions when my father had called me a tart or a slut, simply for smiling at a boy. I remembered, too, the time he'd denigrated my friend Jacqui in front of an audience because she – a married woman of two years – was pregnant. I could feel the anger rising in me at the hypocrisy of it all. One rule for him, one for the rest of the world.
So my father had been carrying on with someone else only a few years into his marriage. Denise was my parents' third child, born just two and a half years after me in April 1952. To this day, she always maintains that my mother was harder on her than on the rest of us. Denise loved Mum unconditionally, but she sensed some sort of barrier between the two of them. Might that have been explained by my mother's mixed emotions around the time of Denise's birth? Certainly, Denise was closer to my father, perhaps closer than any of the rest of us.
For all that the simultaneous birth of my dad's illegitimate daughter must have hurt my mother dreadfully, she'd no more have walked out on her marriage than flown to the moon. And while his womanising had clearly tailed off as he'd got older, his drinking, if anything, had got worse. But couples soldiered on and weathered the bad times in a marriage back then; and I think that, despite everything he did to her, she never fell out of love with him. It does mean, though, that living out there somewhere there's presumably a middle-aged woman who's yet another Nolan sister. My brother Tommy did start trying to find her at one point not so long ago. He went on to the internet but it proved a fruitless search.
My parents had sold their house on Waterloo Road about a year before Dad died. They bought a bungalow, a walk away from where we all lived, which they felt would be easier for him with his increasing breathing difficulties. When he died, we organised the sale of the bungalow and moved our mother, now seventy-two, into sheltered accommodation under the supervision of a warden. We didn't like the idea of her being entirely on her own.
That seemed to be the right solution, but I'd drive by sometimes in the evening and I'd see her sitting at her window, staring out at nothing in particular and that made me sad. She loved TV. Why wasn't she watching it? I know the answer now: she couldn't concentrate on a programme because, to put it bluntly, she was losing her mind. We bought her videos and a mobile phone. We'd say to her, 'Mum, remember to take it with you when you go out, because then you can get in touch with us or we can get in touch with you.' But she never did. 'I don't want to waste the battery,' she'd say.
On one occasion, I went round to her little flat and she had the electric kettle on . . . on the red-hot hob. There was smoke everywhere. It was only by chance that I'd popped in to see her when I did. I'd also turn up and find the cooker on – and empty. It would worry me silly. In time, of course, we had to move her into a care home. That was in 2005. Maureen and Coleen and I would take it in turn to have her to our houses for dinner. If she was with me, I'd ask if she fancied staying over. 'Oh yes,' she'd say, 'that would be lovely.' On one occasion she fell in the street and was confined to bed. That night, I prayed as hard as I knew how that she'd make a full recovery. Just the thought of her dying reduced me to tears. What a contrast to the way I reacted when we lost our father.
I still think about whether I should have told her about the disgusting things he'd done to me, but, in the end, I'm glad I didn't because it would have put her in such a difficult position. If she'd believed what I said, she'd have been faced with two stark choices: either to report him to the authorities and walk out on the marriage or to tell me to let bygones be bygones. Either way, she'd have been heartbroken. He wasn't a good husband, I know that, but as I say, she never stopped loving him even when he hit her if he'd had too much to drink.
By the time he was ill, of course, he couldn't have lifted a finger to her in anger although he could be verbally abusive to her. He was a tidy man but a hoarder, too. It drove my mother mad. On every surface, it seemed, there were little piles of my father's mostly useless possessions. One day, my mother went to move one of these piles and my father rounded on her.
'Why do you always have to move everything?' he said. 'Why can't you just leave my stuff where it is?'
I couldn't bear it. 'Well, if you didn't leave your stuff lying all over the place,' I said, 'Mum wouldn't have to tidy up after you. And don't you ever scream at her again.'
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I felt awful. I looked at him with his oxygen mask and his canister and he struck me simply as pathetic. My words had obviously hit their target. He immediately slunk back to his chair. Even Denise, back in the days when we'd all lived together in Waterloo Road, felt the same as we all did when it came to his drinking. He'd arrive back from a football match and a heavy session in the pub and we'd all hold our breath. What mood was he going to be in? He might be full of jokes. He might be in a sarcastic, sullen frame of mind. Or he might be spoiling for a fight. You could never tell. If, by some miracle, he was sober, it felt like a wonderful bonus.
He was a complex, tortured man, someone with a terrible secret. Little wonder that I've never grieved for him. He's been dead ten years now but, if I ever think of him, any memories are tainted by what I endured at his hands. So no, I don't miss him, something I can say with no feelings whatever of remorse or guilt – and that's the only thing which does make me sad.
Years later, I told my Aunt Teresa all about it. I felt I wanted to share it with her; we're very close.
'Auntie,' I said, 'there's something I think you ought to know. I didn't wrap it up. I said, 'Soon after I first arrived in Blackpool, Dad started sexually abusing me.'
She began to cry. 'I wish I'd known at the time,' she said, 'because I'd have made sure he was sent to prison.' She was angry now. Then she said, 'Was there penetration?' So I told her, no. She got up from where she'd been sitting and came across and hugged me.
I said, 'Don't get upset, Auntie. The past is the past and it's best forgotten now. But I feel better for having told you.'
To this day, I still wonder why it took me so long to tell my friend Jacqui what had happened between me and my dad. I finally confessed a couple of years ago and she was both angry and a bit hurt, I think, that I'd kept it all to myself. It would have eased the burden to share my secret and she might have said something to
her
mum and then it would all have come out.
Maureen and I continued to perform with Amy and Julia, and we were asked to fill in for the final month of the summer season at the Grand in Blackpool. The Grumbleweeds had had to pull out when one of their number, Graham Walker, had to have an emergency triple bypass, so we were given a fifteen-minute slot. Amy and Julia were thrilled to be appearing in such a prestigious venue in their home town. We'd also do one-off corporate events as well as clubs, some of them on the gay circuit, summer seasons and then pantos every Christmas for me and Maureen and, later on, for Amy, too. However, television work had dwindled to little or nothing by then, and the offers of work were getting a bit sporadic, although, later on, we did get one job in Dubai which impressed the girls no end: we stayed in a magnificent hotel with its own beach; we went out into the desert and smoked one of those hookah pipes; we went shopping in the souk. It was fabulous.
Brian, meanwhile, frustrated at having no qualifications, sat all the necessary exams and set himself up as an independent insurance broker and financial adviser. He got work straightaway. All his previous clients followed him, not because he asked them to but because they liked dealing with him. By then, we'd remortgaged our house three times to release a bit more money. It wasn't that our lifestyle was especially lavish, but Brian didn't earn very much and, although I was pulling in more than him when I was earning, we spent every last penny and more, gradually slipping further and further into debt.
But I didn't realise the half of it. Brian was the one who knew about finances and I had left it all to him. I later discovered that he'd been summoned to court at one stage because we were behind with the mortgage and we were on the brink of having the house repossessed. He'd kept it all to himself. He was – and is – a very private man who bottles up his problems rather than sharing the load with someone else. While he was good with other people's finances, it seems that he struggled with ours.
I can't say I was angry when I eventually found out the size of our debt. So yes, we were in trouble, but that was no more his fault than mine, and he'd wanted to shield me from it. We were living beyond our means. Looking back, I'm pleased I didn't know about it, although it might have been a relief for him to have shared the problem, and it is possible that because I didn't know we were in so much trouble, I may have been more extravagant than I should have been. That might have been the point when Brian should have sat me down and explained the state of our finances. He'd needed £20,000 to start the business, £10,000 borrowed from a friend and the same amount as a loan from the bank. He used the bank loan to pay back the friend and then put up our home as collateral against the debt to the bank. Stupidly, as co-mortgagee, I'd signed the relevant forms – but then, I thought Brian knew what he was doing.
Later on, when he could no longer afford the rent for his office space, I paid to have our garage converted for him. I encouraged him to downsize in terms of his equipment; I pointed out that he really didn't need more than one desk, a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and a computer, but the sad truth is that he never once set foot in this new office. I didn't know it at the time but, on reflection, I can see he was already in the grip of the early stages of his breakdown. Then the fates intervened in a way I could never have expected and Brian really began to fall apart in earnest.
In the intervening years since I'd first found a lump on my right breast, I must have had up to fifty cysts in both breasts. They weren't alarming because they weren't malignant. All that happened was that I had to go to my local doctor to have them aspirated – that involves a needle being stuck into the cyst to draw the fluid off, which doesn't hurt in the least. In March 2000, I discovered two more cysts in my right breast. This was such a regular occurrence, I simply shrugged it off.
On this occasion, I went to my GP who examined me and aspirated the cysts, but then discovered a third, deep-rooted lump which I hadn't detected. She said she couldn't aspirate it because she could tell it wasn't a cyst, so she referred me to the hospital where I had a biopsy. Brian was with me. When I was told I could get up and put my clothes back on, I fainted. That had never happened before and I began to worry that this might be something more sinister. Back home, my breast felt tender and bruised and quite unlike any previous experience I'd had. I knew something was wrong although there were no other symptoms. I felt fit and healthy in every other way.
I returned to the hospital a couple of weeks later with Brian. The same surgeon asked me to sit on the bed in a cubicle. He put his hand on my knee, looked me straight in the eye, and came right to the point.
'I'm afraid it's cancer,' he said.
I didn't break down. I just asked him simply, 'What do we do now?'
He explained that I'd need an operation in the next two weeks to remove the lump but not the breast. Driving back home in the car, neither Brian nor I said much. I think we were absorbing the news in our different ways. But we're both very practical people. Brian had suffered a lot of injuries through playing football and his attitude was that you just got on with things as best you could, but when he did at last speak, he was tender and supportive.
As soon as we got home, I walked into the sitting room. Amy was there, waiting to hear how I'd got on.
'Well, what did they say?' she asked.
I didn't try and hide it. 'I've got cancer,' I said.
She said, 'Stop messing about. Mum.'
'I'm not,' I said. 'I've been diagnosed with cancer.'
I think because I was being so matter-of-fact about it, she wasn't as shocked as she might have been. She certainly didn't scream or cry.
Later on, when I felt she'd begun to absorb the news, I decided to have a more thoughtful chat with her. Alex hadn't yet got back from school. I was in the bath at the time ?- we never bothered with closing doors or locking them – and I called Amy to come into the bathroom.
'You know that cancer's a life-threatening disease,' I said to her, 'so I want you to be aware that I might die.' I've always spoken bluntly to the girls. 'I don't want you to be unhappy, though. Of course, I know you'll be sad – that's only natural – but please don't be sad for long. I'm almost fifty now. I've had a fantastic life. If it comes to it, I want you to think about that. I've had a better life than most people.'
And that was the truth. I'd lived more in the half-century I'd been on the planet than most people would have done in five lives. That very year, the Nolans had been voted ninth best all-time girl group in a Channel 4 poll which was a pretty good achievement. Mine had been a great life. So I wasn't being callous or blase. I just didn't want Amy to have any illusions about my getting well, imagining that everything would be all right. Of course, I hoped that would be the case, but it was far from being a foregone conclusion. I told Alex the next day as we walked back through Stanley Park where she'd been captaining her school netball team. I think I broke the news a bit more gently to her because she was younger than Amy – she was only twelve at the time – and it was a lot for her to take in. I tried to communicate the fact that cancer is a serious business but that mine had been caught relatively early and we all had to have a positive attitude about it.
When I told Mark Rattray – we were touring with him at the time – that I had cancer and was being admitted to hospital for a lumpectomy, he gave me the best possible advice. 'Right,' he said. 'Get in, get it out and get over it.' They call it tough love, don't they? But it's better than a lot of hand-wringing. There's nothing you can do about it so why not be positive?
I was admitted to the Victoria Hospital in Blackpool on 4 April 2000 and had the operation two days later, on Denise's birthday, when the lump as well as a dozen lymph glands were removed. I was very sick when I came round from the anaesthetic – they put me on a side ward to keep an eye on me – but the good news was that the surgeon told me he hadn't found any evidence that the cancer had spread. It had been caught early, apparently.
Because the lymph nodes had been taken out, I had to do exercises to get back the feeling in my arm. Then I was told I'd have to undergo a course of radiotherapy; that was a necessity, it was explained, but I had the option of having a six-month course of chemotherapy first, if I wanted. It would improve my chances of beating the cancer, but only by a further 5 per cent. I didn't hesitate. I wanted to do everything to increase my chances of staying alive.
It was pretty horrible: it made me feel so ill after each session. We were booked to do a summer season at the Grand Theatre in Blackpool, so I had my hair cut short and also bought a wig – which thankfully I never had to wear, although my own hair did get very thin. I'd have a session of chemo in the morning, go home for a rest because it left me feeling so drained, and then go to the theatre for the performance each evening.
We were also doing Sunday concerts in Skegness. I did the first two or three of those, but it proved too much. I was feeling more and more weak and listless. At the hospital they did a blood test. My platelets were low and I had to have antibiotics pumped into my stomach as well as a blood transfusion. Luckily, Coleen had agreed to learn the harmonies and the dance steps for the act when I'd first been diagnosed. She lived in Blackpool so, when I said I wanted to drop out of the summer show for a couple of weeks through illness, she offered to step in for me. What's more, she wouldn't hear of taking my fee. She did it all for free because she knew I needed the money. I can never thank her enough for that.