The unhappy childhood Victoria played for laughs

ONG before she drew her first breath, Victoria Wood had an adoring female audience. “The baby’s kicking,” her expectant mother would say. “Come and put your hand on my tummy.” Victoria’s siblings, Penelope, seven, and Rosalind, two- and- three- quarters, would feel their unborn sibling beating out a rhythm with her feet. Their brother Christopher, who was 12, may have been less engrossed by another arrival.

When the time came, Helen Wood entered a nursing home in Prestwich on the northerly outskirts of Manchester.

Stanley Wood’s diary entry recorded the birth of ‘ VICTORIA WOOD, 7lbs 12ozs born @ 8. P. M.’ A proud father pronounced her “a lovely baby in every way”.

Sadly, their parental adoration for future star, with her blonde ringlets early love of performing, wasn’t to last.

Fiercely private, the comic rarely spoke of what appears to have become, at worst, their neglect of her and her siblings throughout her later childhood.

But beneath her outgoing stage persona, their actions had created deep- seated feelings of abandonment, leaving her crippled with shyness and battling with selfloathing for much of her adult life.

It was in 1958 that family life began to disintegrate, when Victoria was five and the Wood family moved from their suburban home in Bury to Birtle Edge House, an isolated, rundown former children’s home overlooking the Rossendale valley. The isolation was exactly what appealed to Helen.

“My mother couldn’t be doing with neighbours and gossip and suburban life,” said Victoria.

“Nobody came to tea at all,” she recalled.

T WAS in this unconventional home, the actress, comic and writer began to experience increasing distance from her parents, especially her mother.

Helen decided to return to education to get the qualifications she had missed out on because she was forced to leave school young, and became consumed in her own life. Victoria later reflected she “loved having babies but didn’t like children very much”.

Meanwhile, Stanley, an insurance salesman and part- time writer and musician, struggled to connect with his children. The Wood family started to lead cellular lives. Victoria compared it to living “like battery hens”.

When family members did meet, they would do so on a provisional basis, standing in a group to talk and josh, but never sitting. Stanley’s habit was to natter in doorways, as if always keeping open the option of a getaway.

“My father was lovely in a way,” Victoria would say, “but not easy to talk to. He didn’t hurt one, he just didn’t connect.”

Once, Victoria was asked if the family had rows. “Didn’t talk enough to have rows,” she replied.

Helen, although she was a keen dressmaker, struggled to keep her daughters looking neat and clean. She was summoned for a chat with the headmaster about the

A BORN JOKER: Victoria with her sister Rosalind and, right, her parents

girls’ appearance. “We were both very dirty and obviously looked neglected,” says Rosalind. Her daughters’ grubby appearance was a product of Helen’s struggles with depression, during bouts of which she would just give up on cooking and washing.

“Sometimes you’d go through the sitting room and she’d be sitting in a slump,” says Penelope.

Anne Sweeney was one of few school friends to visit Victoria there, and found the big house “rambling and neglected” but “thrillingly bohemian”.

What was most unusual of all was that “there didn’t seem to be anybody there saying, ‘ Do this, do that.’ Victoria never used to talk about her parents at all. They just seemed shadowy presences.”

Meals were often not cooked. Victoria catered for herself and, says Anne, ended up “eating quite badly”.

Victoria’s great friend, actress Julie Walters, explained the comic’s 1994 BAFTAnominated television film Pat and Margaret, which explores gulfs within families, was inspired by her mother’s treatment of her. “She said that her mum left when she was about 11,” recalls Julie. “When she left Victoria went into chaos. She felt abandoned and she couldn’t function very well.”

Intensifying Victoria’s feelings of abandonment and rejection was also the focus placed on her weight.

Helen once took her to the GP and asked for a prescription for pills to suppress both their appetites.

“I wasn’t that big, but of course once you start dieting you upset the whole thing,” Victoria once said. “I used to have a slimming tablet instead of a meal and then go [ to my room] for the good bit – four Curly Wurlys.”

When her mother did lay on meals, they might be found to feature Energen, crispy low- calorie rolls which mainly consisted of air. According to Penelope, this neglect seems to have been rooted in impatience.

“Mum wasn’t very nice to Vicky really,” she says. “I think she found it hard that she was so scruffy and lazy and sleeping and

CAMERA SHY: A young Victoria dressed smartly with mother Helen

reading all the time. I think Vicky might have been hard going for Mum somehow.”

It was made harder for Victoria that her sisters were tall, thin mods: “I felt they were better at everything… I thought if you were thin, you were happy, if you had a boyfriend you’d be happy, if you had a different family and lived in a nice, clean semi, you’d be happy.” As a result, she became scathing about her own looks.

“I wasn’t very prepossessing to look at. I was fat. I had very fat spots, like Dick Whittington’s hanky.”

Dieting became a theme of Victoria’s creative life for 30 years. She sang about it as a gloomy student in Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Fat, and it was a preoccupation in the early dramas and sketches she wrote for herself and Julie.

“This is a boutique, not the elephant house,” says Julie’s sales assistant in 1981’ s Wood and Walters, aiming a sub- machine gun at Victoria.

Not long before the series was broadcast, Victoria gave her measurements to a fashion