Cheryl: My Story (17 page)

‘It’s a camel, Cheryl. Camels groan,’ Ashley snapped back.

‘But what if his feet are hurting, treading through all those prickly bushes …’

‘Babe! Is there any chance you can shut up?’

I was shocked. Ashley had never spoken to me like that before, ever.

‘OK. Not a problem. Just don’t talk to me, and I’ll not speak,’ I replied.

When we got off the camel it did the loudest moan of all and I was not happy, not at all. The sun was setting and we were given strawberries and champagne along with all the other tourists, but I was still fuming with Ashley.

He took hold of my hand and pulled me towards him, and I thought for a minute he was going to do something stupid like push me down a sand dune to try and break the ice. Instead, he led me away from the other tourists and got down on one knee, right there in the sand. It took my breath away, because he looked choked with emotion. He then started crying, told me he loved me and asked, ‘Will you marry me?’

It was a really amazing, heart-stopping moment. I started crying too, and I told him ‘yes’ without having to think about it for even a fraction of a second. Ashley then put the most incredible diamond ring on my finger, and the other holidaymakers applauded, having worked out what had just happened.

We kissed, and I felt like the happiest girl in the world. I had no doubts, no worries. We were meant to be together, and right from that moment I couldn’t
wait
to get married.

When we got back to the hotel we phoned all our friends and family to break the good news. Ashley told me that a few days earlier, when he’d locked himself in the bathroom, he had in fact been phoning my dad, to ask for my hand in marriage. He’d introduced himself as ‘Ashley Cole’ as he was so nervous, which threw my dad a bit by the sounds of it, but of course he had given his blessing.

The girls were just screaming with excitement, and from the minute we put the phone down to my friends I wanted to start planning the wedding.

‘It’ll have to be next summer,’ I said, thinking about the World Cup, and the fact that Girls Aloud were planning to go on tour again in the spring.

‘That soon?’

‘I don’t see the point in being engaged for 10 years – do you?’

‘No, babe.’

That’s how it went. Ashley was happy for me to do all the planning, and I was happy to do it. I wanted a fairytale wedding, something that would be all girly and twinkly and special.

When we got back to the UK we were absolutely devastated to find there was a picture of us in
Heat
magazine. It showed us both crying, just after the proposal. It was such a private, personal moment and we’d been so overwhelmed that we hadn’t given it a second thought when one of the guides had taken a photograph of us.

We were naïve, but it was another lesson learned. It meant that when
OK!
magazine got in touch shortly afterwards and asked us if we wanted to do an exclusive deal for the official engagement pictures, plus the wedding, we decided it was best to be in control of the stories that were being put out and do the deal, rather than leave it for journalists and other people to put pictures and false information out there.

‘If you give them the story, nobody else is digging for it,’ we were advised by one of Ashley’s agents. ‘Also, you’ll get the best security you could wish for at the wedding, not to mention a fabulous set of pictures.’ He explained that, because a wedding is a public event, without proper security we would be leaving ourselves open to a repeat of what had happened with the proposal in Dubai, which we didn’t want at all.

Ashley and I reluctantly settled on a deal on the understanding that we’d spend every penny on the wedding, as we certainly didn’t want to profit from it.

I still had doubts, though and I bitterly regret not listening to my gut feeling. I should have known from experience that instincts like that should not be ignored – look what happened the night I went to The Drink nightclub with Nicola.

Anyhow, before we knew it Ashley and I were posing in the flat for glossy photos.

‘What are we doing?’ he said to me through gritted teeth as we smiled and embraced for the camera.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘None whatsoever.’

We found ourselves saying the same thing again when we turned up for a photoshoot to promote the National Lottery’s Dream Number. This was in the run up to the wedding, and again was on the advice of Ashley’s agent.

‘What do we have to do?’ Ashley said.

‘Just put on these white clothes, cross our fingers and hope the pictures turn out well,’ I laughed.

We got slated in the press for those photos, and I’m not surprised. We looked ridiculously cheesy, and you can tell just by looking at them that Ashley especially felt really uncomfortable, posing like a medallion man in a white shirt open down to the naval. I can remember him hissing in my ear: ‘Get me out of here,’ to which I replied: ‘It’s too late. Just smile.’

‘We should have just pegged it,’ we joked afterwards, but then we had to get our heads round the fact the press reproduced the pictures time and time again, complete with stories or jibes from national newspaper columnists.

I’d been labelled a WAG practically as soon as I started dating Ashley, and once we were engaged the term was used more and more. It annoyed the shit out of me, because to me it’s a derogatory term, meaning a girl who doesn’t earn her own money or have a career in her own right. It baffled me that some girls actually aspired to be labelled a WAG. ‘Where’s their pride?’ I always thought. It never occurred to me that there were also plenty of girls who would
claim
to have slept with a famous footballer, even if they hadn’t. Or, even more bizarrely, that there were people out there prepared to start a vicious rumour that Ashley was gay. Unbelievably, both of these things happened at the start of 2006 as we prepared for our wedding that summer.

First, a girl claimed she’d slept with Ashley on New Year’s Eve while I was away on a shopping trip to New York with my mam. The
News of the World
was prevented from running the story because Ashley’s lawyers got CCTV footage proving he was alone in a restaurant at the time the girl claimed he was with her.

It was horrible to have to deal with that when I was enjoying planning my wedding, but I never doubted Ashley for a second. ‘What a load of crap,’ were my exact words, as soon as I heard the allegation, and before knowing there was proof it was a load of rubbish. To me, this was simply an extension of the press interference we already had to put up with, although of course it was far worse than having a tour guide sell a picture of us, or being slated by a nasty newspaper columnist.

Ashley was very relieved by my level-headed reaction, but I just knew it was some stupid girl trying to make money or get herself in the papers. ‘You don’t have to be grateful that I haven’t gone mad,’ I said to Ashley. ‘Why should you worry about anything? We’ve proved you’ve done nothing wrong.’

Weeks later, disgusting stories started circulating about Ashley being gay and doing something sexual with a mobile phone and one of his male friends. I actually burst out laughing because it was so ridiculous, but Ashley didn’t find it funny at all.

‘For God’s sake, when are they gonna leave us alone?’ he said. It was claimed there was a video proving the allegations, and Ashley just kept saying, ‘Go on then, play the tape but don’t just write bullshit.’

‘Don’t worry, the truth will come out,’ I told him, but nothing I said calmed him down. He was absolutely fuming, and he told me he was convinced that Arsenal fans in high places were out to get him because of the ‘tapping-up’ scandal he’d been through with Chelsea. ‘They want to get me back for trying to leave Arsenal,’ he said. ‘They think I should stay there for life because that’s where I started.’

This went on for weeks, and it was hell to see Ashley suffering like that. In the end he successfully sued for harassment, breach of privacy and libel and was paid damages, but nothing could compensate for the torment he went through.

‘Concentrate on the World Cup, that’s where your energies need to go,’ I told him, because I knew that if his football suffered because of all this stress, he’d be a hell of a lot worse.

For my part, I had plenty on my plate to take my mind off what the press was saying. There was the wedding to plan, and the girls and I were filming a six-part TV series called
Girls Aloud: Off the Record
. Television crews followed us preparing for our
Chemistry
tour in the spring, which was our first UK arena tour, and we were also filmed on promotional tours to Australia and New Zealand. On top of that we travelled to China as London ambassadors with the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, we also did gigs in Ibiza and Greece, and we went to Paris to make the ‘Whole Lotta History’ video.

I look back now and I think I was so unworldly it was ridiculous. For instance, I moaned about everything from the rain to the state of the toilets in Shanghai, and I don’t think I appreciated at all what a huge honour it was to be a cultural ambassador. I’d never been to any of those countries before and I should have been saying: ‘Wow! How lucky am I?’ but it just wasn’t like that at the time.

In my head I remember lots of early morning starts, horrible jetlag, feeling totally out of my comfort zone and missing Ashley like crazy.

I was 22 years old, and I couldn’t wait to get home and get married. Our wedding was planned for 14 July 2006, just after the World Cup in Germany. Ashley let me make all the decisions about the wedding.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to get involved?’ I asked him many times.

‘No, I just want to marry you,’ he always said.

The only thing he did was taste the cake, which I thought was quite sweet. ‘You’re like a big kid,’ I teased.

I hired wedding planners and decided I wanted an angel theme, and I took advice about my wedding dress from Victoria Adcock, who did the styling for Girls Aloud. The next thing I knew Victoria was telling me Roberto Cavalli had offered to make it, and I was flying to Florence for fittings. It was insane really, looking back, but I just got on and did it.

There was only one real hiccup in the arrangements, which had thankfully happened very early on in the planning stages, in September 2005. Ashley and I had just put a very large deposit down on Highclere Castle in Berkshire, because it looked perfect for the fairytale theme I had in mind.

‘The model Katie Price is to marry Peter Andre at Highclere Castle later this week …’ I heard a newsreader say.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I was in a shoe shop in West London, and
Sky News
was on. I looked up at the TV screen and my heart sank. I phoned Ashley immediately, close to tears.

‘It’s not ’cos it’s Jordan, it’s that it won’t be special to us. This completely takes the shine off the venue for us.’

Ashley agreed, and I phoned the bank and stopped the transaction straight away, before phoning the wedding planners and sobbing down the phone.

‘What are we gonna do?’ I wailed.

‘We’ll need to find another venue soon or we’re screwed,’ the wedding planner told me plainly, and I left the shop feeling gutted. It was pouring with rain and I stood in a dirty big puddle, then I realised that I’d parked on a yellow line, thinking I would only be in the shop for a few minutes, and my car had been towed away.

‘Looking back, do you think all that was a bad omen?’ someone asked me recently.

‘Nah!’ I replied. ‘I
never
had bad vibes about marrying Ashley. I wish I was still married to him … if only things had turned out differently.’

8
‘You’ve come a long way, Cheryl!’

‘How do you cope with the scrutiny?’ I asked Victoria Beckham one evening, when we were in Germany together, supporting our men in the World Cup. We were staying in adjacent rooms at the Brenners Park-Hotel in Baden-Baden, and I was blow-drying Victoria’s hair before we went out to dinner. I’d met her several times before at different events and we got on well. Victoria is so easy to talk to and has a great sense of humour – totally the opposite of how she is portrayed in the press. We had a lot in common, with Victoria having been in a girl band too, and unlike some of the other ‘WAGs’, we were both only interested in supporting our men.

‘How do I cope? I cope because I have to, because it’s just the way my life is,’ Victoria told me.

I’d seen that it didn’t matter what anybody else around her did, Victoria was always the one who got the worst press. I remember one time she was literally pulled apart from head to toe in a newspaper article that commented on everything from her pout and her collarbones to her boobs and her bunions.

‘I’m hardened to it,’ Victoria said. ‘I know how I’m perceived is not how I am, and that’s what matters. When they say I’m too thin, I just think: ‘You know what? I’m happy to be thin. I’m into fashion and I like to be able to wear whatever I like. It’s my business, and if other people don’t like it, that’s their business.’

Ashley and I had been described as the ‘new Posh and Becks’ ever since our engagement, which I thought was a joke, but nevertheless it was so interesting to be able to talk to Victoria about her life, because to me she was admirable. She had such a lovely family, and I told her I hoped that when we had kids, Ashley and I would be able to juggle our careers and family life together as well as she and David managed theirs.