How I finally forgave my mother for ruining my life
By the former child star of the BBC’s Seventies hit Heidi
YET AGAIN, it’s the time of year when people are hell-bent on changing their lives. Inspirational sayings suddenly adorn fridge magnets, Twitter feeds and Facebook walls.
usually I ignore them, but recently, one caught my eye: ‘Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.’ It pulled me up sharp. as I read it, I realised that, in finishing a book my late mother had begun, this is exactly what I have done.
my mother, Sally Blake, was possibly the most respected, if unsung, perfume expert in the country; a woman whose formidable knowledge about scent was sought after by everyone from professional perfumiers to Hollywood directors.
Yet for the last eight years of her life, she drank destructively, until she died, in 1999, aged just 65. For so long, I held the corrosive effects of her alcoholism responsible for the fact that, although I turned 50 last year, I have never married and have no children or property to my name.
During the years when marriage and babies moved my friends’ lives forwards, I remained at home — looking after her. I have cried very real tears over the children I will never meet, and spent sleepless nights fretting I will end my days alone in a rented flat, as she did.
I know, now, she was ill — for the worst of those years dying of a brain tumour, although nobody realised it. But it is only through immersing myself in the reams of notes she left behind for her book, Through Smoke, that I have truly been able to reflect and forgive — not just her, but myself, for the part we played in how things turned out.
Born into what she described as ‘a decayed branch of a once noble tree’ (the Wyndhams of Llandaff), my mother was beautiful, volatile and headstrong. against the wishes of her family, she married a penniless actor — my father, Gerald Blake — in 1956, aged 21.
When she gave birth to my older brother, adam, they were in panto at the Theatre royal, Lincoln. By the time I was born, in September 1964, my father was on the up at the BBC, directing Doctor Who.
He swung a mansion flat for us in regent’s park in London for a rent of just £12 a week, where they hosted parties full of actors. at one of the more raucous, my mother kicked out Trevor eve and Sharon maughan for over-enthusiastic canoodling behind a sofa.
Cut to 1977 and my father had left us to shack up with actress Jill Gascoine, whom he had directed in The onedin Line. my mother held it together. I only caught her crying once, late at night, slumped in a heap on the front door mat.
The scandal was all over the papers. Jill had moved on to play maggie Forbes in The Gentle Touch, directed by my father, the programme that made her a star.
Having just played Heidi in the 1974 BBC hit TV series, I was relatively well-known myself, so there was a great deal of media interest in our story.
THEN, Jill got a part in a West end play and fell in love with her co- star, and my father found himself out on his ear. Still, my mother held it t ogether. although she starved herself and smoked to the point of dropping to under 8 st, even then she didn’t booze to excess.
In time, as the bitterness between my parents subsided, life fell back into an old groove. my father moved into a flat round the corner and began dropping in for coffee. I got into my childhood habit of sitting on the floor at his feet, my arm hooked around his knee.
But then, in 1991, at just 62 years old, he died of a heart attack in the street. His loss hit my mother, then 57, hard. over the years, their reconciliation had been such they had even talked about retiring to Spain together.
Despite what had happened between them, my mother did not want to live in a world without him. Suicide was out of the question — so she drank instead. She started opening the Scotch for news at Ten, and would be drinking till 5am before finally passing out.
after she began slurring and falling down, I went to her doctor, but they were unhelpful. In those days, most medics were of the mindset that, if someone didn’t reach for the bottle the moment they woke, they weren’t an alcoholic. But my mother was tiny, only 4 ft 11 in. It was not so much the amount she drank, but the effect it had on her. She would get staggering drunk after just one shot.
miraculously, this was also the time she began to put her immense knowledge of the glamorous world of designer perfume down
on paper. Her obsession stemmed from meeting Mae West at the age of eight outside Piccadilly Theatre stage door, and asking for her autograph. Mae invited my mother into her limo, and the heady scent of the Hollywood star’s perfume never left her mind.
In 1968, my mother got a job at a perfumiers and took to reading around the subject and talking to experts. But she often played down her knowledge, for fear of being thought ‘trivial’.
Now, she would sit at the kitchen table in clouds of cigarette smoke, a Scotch in her hand, writing into the night, surrounded by notes and vials of long-discontinued perfumes, poring over books and sale catalogues.
Hers was a knowledge that became consulted the world over. Auction houses, master perfumiers, film directors: all knew that if they needed to know about an old, forgotten scent, Sally Blake would have the answer.
She began to plan a book about it all, and I would find old exercise books, notepads, envelopes, all covered in scribbles and anecdotes about scent.
As life went on, every day a struggle to keep up with even her peppercorn rent, the scribblings turned to bitter letters to people she felt had let her down. I destroyed as many as I could, but some got through, and more and more friends deserted her. Afraid of the dark following a series of attempted break-ins, she refused to go to bed before dawn. Sometimes she would make it to the bedroom, other times she’d fall and split her head open.
I would lie awake, listening to see if I was going to have to haul myself out of bed and see to her. More often than not, I did. I would either patch her up and put her to bed, or find a taxi to take us to hospital, before crawling to whatever job I was doing at the time.
Stress and lack of sleep affected my work — and my attitude. I lost several jobs, one after the other.
LIKE many addicts, my mother was capable of great charm. During the day, before she hit the Scotch, she was her old delightful self, if a little forgetful. One day in the late Nineties I decided to test her by attempting to throw the contents of a bottle of whisky down the sink. Frighteningly, she flew at me: happy to kill me rather than see her booze go down the drain.
That was when I realised how serious her problem was. But she remained in denial. Any time I confronted her, she would say she didn’t have a problem, and wouldn’t go to see a doctor. In her lucid moments, she would say: ‘Darling, I know I am holding you back. You should spread your wings, get your own place,’ before adding the inevit-able coda: ‘I just don’t know what I would do without your money coming in every week.’
My brother, Adam, had moved out and married years before, but boyfriends of mine came and went, my home life ‘too heavy’. When, at 34, I was finally offered the chance to rent a friend’s flat in the east end, I must say I did not hesitate to take it — though I called my mother every day and went over every weekend.
I hadn’t been there more than a couple of months when I got a call from Adam to say something was wrong: he’d called home and Mum was not ‘just drunk’ this time.
It was late, but I caught a bus across London to find her sat at the kitchen table, a gash in her head dripping blood on to the linoleum, calmly doing the Times crossword.
Somehow, I got her to St Mary’s Hospital. They kept her in. The next day, they told me they’d done a scan. They’d found a brain tumour the size of a tennis ball that must have been growing for at least eight years. My mother had four weeks to live.
Suddenly, it all made sense. All this time, she had been ill.
Although my mother had never been on time in her life, she checked out exactly four weeks to the day, on September 28, 1999.
The night before, I had gone to the hospital chapel to pray. Not to God, but to my father to come and take his little Sally away. The next day, she was gone. I was overwhelmed with both grief and relief. We tried to keep her death quiet to al l ow us to make arrange-ments, but the landlord’s agent was on my case before her body was cold. I barely had time to clear out 30 years’ worth of her belongings before it was on the market. I stuffed the ocean of perfume notes and stories into boxes. Unable to house it myself, her famous perfume collection went to her friend, the perfumier Roja Dove.
Having failed to make a life for myself, I found myself rudderless. Three years later, I suffered a massive nervous breakdown. I knew that my mother, and any chance of closure, or of salvaging our relationship, was gone.
So I drank, too, for a while. I ruined the promising career I had begun to forge as a jazz singer. Often drunk and argumentative, pro-moters stopped booking me. I moved from place to place, as rent went up and my wages stagnated, before landing an events management job in Hampshire. each time, I dragged the boxes of books and notes with me.
It was a near-miss car smash in 2012 that finally focused me. As I drove to work one day, a 40-ton articulated lorry slammed into my side. As my car spun through the air, I thought of those boxes on a bonfire if I died, my mother’s work going up in smoke. I thought: ‘If I live, I will write the book she never managed.’ Somehow, I walked away with just a broken nail.
In the many hours I have since spent tapping out her vision, chapter after chapter, I have cried. But as Through Smoke (the literal translation of profumo, Latin for perfume) takes shape, the strongest feeling has been one of joy. The joy of forgiving someone so special, who was too ill to know how to stop hurting those around her.
Working into the night, as she once did, typing up her wonderful words, I see that she has left me a very great gift — and that forgiveness is a two-way street. For life gave her much to forgive, too.