Lost and Found Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE: LOST

  1. Getting to know the family

  2. My little pony

  3. From farmyard to schoolyard

  4. An actor’s life for me?

  5. Learning to swing in the sixties

  6. A fine romance

  7. ‘I love acting. It is so much more real than life’

  8. Dreams, discoveries and disappointments

  9. ‘We may give without loving, but we cannot love without giving’

  10. Trying hard, could do better

  11. Divorce, and the kindness of strangers

  12. Picking myself up, dusting myself down and starting all over again

  13. Falling in love again

  14. La dolce vita

  15. ‘To know things as they are is better than to believe things as they seem’

  16. The joy of motherhood in a sea of despair

  17. A commercial break

  18. Keeping all the balls in the air

  19. All things bright and beautiful

  20. Another bundle of joy but it is the calm before the storm

  21. Life mirrors art

  22. ‘If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance’

  PART TWO: FOUND

  23. Marjorie

  24. Doing the right thing?

  25. ‘When I discover who I am, I will be free’

  26. Time to make it stop

  27. From Russia with love

  28. Hanging on by the skin of my teeth

  29. These things are sent to try us, but why me?

  30. Mortgage or marriage, my lover?

  31. My beloved parents take their leave

  32. I face my demons and embrace my fate

  33. Third time lucky!

  34. Back in the limelight and loving it

  35. ‘I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today’

  New afterword

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Looking back, perhaps the single biggest problem was fear. Fear of failure, fear of other people – but mostly fear of myself. It has taken many years to discover who I really am. It’s never too late to find yourself, however lost you may be …’

  In Lynda Bellingham’s blisteringly honest autobiography, the much-loved actress and Loose Women panellist reveals the truth about her life, including her search for her birth mother, only to lose her again to Alzheimer’s, and her many years married to an abusive man while playing the ‘nation’s mum’ in the Oxo adverts.

  But Lynda never lost her sense of humour, and among the darker moments she recalls hilarious anecdotes from her time on stage and screen. Lost and Found is an inspiring story of getting through the tough times with the strong spirit of a survivor, and finally finding true love.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lynda Bellingham was a regular on ITV’s Loose Women, appeared on BBC1’s 2009 Strictly Come Dancing and also played the lead role in the stage version Calendar Girls – on the West End stage and touring the country. Her television career spanned over 40 years, and included All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, Second Thoughts, Faith in the Future (Best Comedy 1997), At Home with the Braithwaites, The Bill and the much-loved role of ‘Oxo Mum’. Finding love and happiness in later life, she married Michael Pattemore in 2008, the man known to Loose Women viewers as ‘Mr Spain’.

  Lynda was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2013, and sadly passed away a year later aged 66.

  LYNDA

  BELLINGHAM

  MY STORY

  To Michael, my husband,

  and my sons, Michael and Robert,

  who saved my life

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS A crisp, clear October morning in Montreal, Canada. The sun glinted on church spires. The trees on the hills round the city were a blaze of red and gold against a clear blue sky. A young woman, clutching a bundle in her arms, climbed into a yellow cab. She seemed to be talking to herself.

  As the taxi made its way through the morning rush hour, she gazed out of the window as though seeing her life flashing past outside. Then her eyes turned down to the baby in her arms. She drank in every feature of the upturned face. She counted the tiny fingers curled round her thumb. She whispered urgently to the little face gazing at her intensely, ‘I love you, dear. Remember, I will always love you. No matter what. You will always be loved. Keep that thought with you always. I do love you.’

  The cab stopped suddenly and she struggled out and paid the driver. She turned and climbed the steps up to the front door of a large town house – a doctor’s surgery. The door opened and the young woman was swallowed up inside.

  Anyone watching the door would not have long to wait before it opened again and the girl reappeared. As she paused on the top step, it was clear she was no longer holding the baby and that her whole demeanour had changed. She seemed bereft. Lost and defeated. Her small frame seemed to have shrunk into her coat. She moved down the steps and crossed the road, looking neither right nor left, taking cover from the seasonal wind in a bus shelter. The sun was still shining but the winter wind that would soon bring the snow was teasing the litter on the street, reminding folk to wrap up warm. The young woman waited.

  A few minutes later, across the street and round the corner came a couple. He was handsome, wearing a pilot’s uniform. Tall and ramrod straight, with a classic RAF moustache. The young woman was beautiful and very elegant in a fitted suit, with a neat hat set at a jaunty angle. She had her arm through his and they were laughing. They looked happy and so full of hope as they entered the house.

  As the girl waited, pulling her coat round her for warmth and comfort, the big door opened again and the young couple emerged from the house, engrossed in the bundle held between them. The man helped his wife down the steps while she carried the baby, their faces shining with love. They walked to a car parked just round the corner and the young woman carefully handed the bundle to her husband before she got in the back, then her husband handed her the baby. She was smiling as he shut the door, first carefully arranging her coat inside. He walked round to the driver’s side and got in the car.

  As he started to move slowly out into the traffic, the young woman in the bus shelter stepped into the road and, as the car passed her, she began to run after it. The young husband caught the movement and looked back at her in his driver’s mirror. The girl was standing with her arms stretched out towards the departing car. She was howling with grief.

  I was that baby. She was my mother.

  I was lost.

  Then she was found.

  PART ONE

  LOST

  CHAPTER ONE

  GETTING TO KNOW THE FAMILY

  There was a little girl

  And she had a little curl

  Right in the middle of her forehead.

  And when she was good

  She was very, very good

  And when she was bad

  She was horrid!

  IN NOVEMBER 1948, Don and Ruth Bellingham flew back to England with their new baby girl. How excited they must have been. My dad was actually piloting the plane so it was an even more auspicious occasion. Quite early on in the flight, however, an engine caught fire and my father had to take the decision to turn round and go back to New York to land. So I was causing trouble from day one!

  In those days it was a big deal to fly the Atlantic, and I was presented with a certificate pronouncing me a member of the ‘Honourable Order of Pond Hoppers’. I
t is signed by my dad, Captain D J Bellingham, and hangs in my lavatory. This always made my dad smile, because he felt it should have been hanging somewhere more salubrious, but I would tell him that I wanted everyone to see it.

  My dad was the youngest of four boys. The other three were farmers, but my dad was able to use the Second World War as an excuse to learn to fly, which he wanted to do very much. During the war my father was posted just outside Oxford. My mother was working in a factory in Headingly, near where she lived. Their courtship was conducted in the local pub and riding their bikes down long country lanes. It was only much later, when he retired from BOAC (now British Airways), that he went back to his roots and took up farming.

  But when my parents came back to the UK in 1948, we first stayed in a little cottage on the farm owned by my paternal grandfather, at Great Kingshill, Buckinghamshire. I don’t remember much of my early days at the farm, but there are photos of me with my grandfather sitting on a large carthorse, and it was the beginning of my love for the country and life on a farm.

  We used to visit all the time after we moved to Bristol, and I have such fond memories of Sundays spent at Kingshill. My nan used to take me out to a huge cherry tree in the garden in the summer and I would help her pick cherries. We would make a picnic and have our tea under this beautiful spreading tree. Then in winter, we used to have our tea round a big table in the parlour. I always wanted to watch Robin Hood starring Richard Greene and my mother would say ‘no’ but my nan would say ‘yes’. Guess which one I listened to! My nan was quite plump and had snowy white hair. She had an aura of calm about her. She never raised her voice in anger and I was always respectful of her. She was forever working in the house. She never sat down: even when we were eating our tea she would hover to make sure we all had everything we might want.

  I used to go out with Grandad to bring the cows in for milking. I would scurry along beside him as he strode forth with a big stick in his hands. I had a little stick to match, and rather oversized wellies, as I recall. He owned a very ferocious bull that was infamous with the locals, but Grandad was frightened of nothing: I heard stories from my dad that they would let the beast out to service the cows and could only get him back in his pen again by being chased in a pony and trap by my grandfather. On several occasions disaster struck, the trap tipped over, and Grandad was deposited in the mud; twice he was actually gored by the bull. I used to stand in the bull pen and watch him pawing the ground: he really was scary, snorting and banging his horns on the railings. And that was just Grandad!

  AROUND 1950, we moved to Bristol. I must have been about two or three. It was a brand new council estate. During this time I didn’t see much of Dad as he was flying for BOAC on long-haul flights. I had Mum pretty much to myself, and it was a shock when my sister, Barbara, arrived in February 1951.

  My parents had decided to keep my adoption a secret to all but close friends and family: people just assumed I had been born in Canada while Dad was working there. So it must have been very strange for them, especially my mother, when she fell pregnant with Barbara. Of course, she had to tell the midwife eventually, because the assumption was that my mother knew what she was doing for childbirth, as she already had one child. Nothing could have been further from the truth!

  Barbara was followed very quickly by Jean in 1952. I really don’t remember being jealous, but there is a photo of me looking at Barbara in her cot with a look of horror on my face. I do recall going into her bedroom once, when everyone was downstairs, and staring at this peacefully sleeping creature in its cot, and I believe I gave her a poke or two, which resulted in waking her up, and caused her to burst into very loud screams. This, of course, brought Mother running up the stairs, to see me backing hurriedly out of the room and trying to disappear.

  Because my sisters were close together in age, it set a sort of pattern for life. Me and them. Which was slightly ironic, given that I was adopted. Yet as you will see from the early photos of us all, at one stage we looked liked triplets. But to me, the most telling photo of all shows Barbara sitting on Dad’s knee and Jean with Mummy. I am standing to the side, on my own, defiantly striking a pose. Slowly, over the coming years, I would begin to wonder: where did I fit in?

  But I had an idyllic childhood. In those early days, I was educated at home. This was quite unusual in those days and I think my parents may have got the idea from other couples who were with BOAC, who had similar problems of moving house frequently or being abroad.

  After Bristol, we went to Limerick, in southern Ireland, for a year in 1954, as my dad was training pilots at Shannon Airport. Our house was on a very new residential estate; I remember seeing ditches everywhere that were the foundations for other houses. It was a great place to play in but not much fun on my own, and I was desperate to meet and play with the local kids, who never seemed to go to school. Truancy was rife. Limerick was quite rough in those days and very anti-British. I found this out to my cost one afternoon. My dad tells the story of coming home one day and seeing me in the distance, pushed up against a wall and surrounded by a group of children who were all shouting abuse at me, while I was singing ‘God Save the Queen’ at the top of my voice. Not a good idea! I must have won them over, however, because I was invited to join the gang on a trip across the river, one day. The river in question was the Shannon, and near the estate it was very deep and fast flowing. Early on in our stay, my parents had taken me aside, and explained to me that on no account must I EVER go near the river, or on it, for any reason whatsoever. So there I was, one sunny afternoon, dressed in my favourite pink and white spotty dress, being rowed across the Shannon in a little round craft made by the locals, bobbing up and down and shrieking delightedly. I was to find out later, to my cost, that I was also very visible. I had a wonderful afternoon and returned home for my tea in blissful ignorance of what was awaiting me. I was greeted by both my parents in the front room. Had I had a nice day? I nodded. Where had I been? Around. Why didn’t I tell anyone where I was? Don’t know. Did I know that a little girl in a pink and white spotty dress had been seen on the island this afternoon? Gulp. I have never again seen my father as angry as he was that day. Obviously, he was worried and frightened for me, but he chased me upstairs to my room – where I hid under the bed, to no avail, as he grabbed my leg and pulled me out – and spanked me with a hair brush (this was the good old days). I was locked in my room for the rest of the night without any tea.

  After Limerick we went to live in Sunningdale, in Berkshire. It sounds very posh but we had to be on a route to Heathrow for Dad. I had my first taste of real school there; I was about four and it was horrible. The local primary school turned out to be a bit like Limerick: I wasn’t welcome. I sat in the classroom that first week and sobbed and sobbed. I was so frightened: the windows seemed very high up the walls; it was like a church hall with a vaulted ceiling. When we were let out for break, I suddenly found myself pushed to the ground with a big fat boy on top of me, shouting into my face. I didn’t go back.

  Instead, I was sent to the Marist Convent School for Girls. Yes, a convent! I loved it. I loved the nuns. Well, that’s not quite true: I loved one nun and hated another with a passion. We were taught by extremes: the really good and the really bad. Sister Mary Benildus was the good nun. She was the gentlest soul in the world and we adored her. In the classroom next door was Sister Louis, who also taught us. She was the classic bitter-and-twisted nun. I can only think that she must have been jealous of Sister Mary and her little band of adoring students as she gave us all endless detentions for no particular reason and plotted to get rid of Sister Mary. Which she managed in the end. We were all devastated when Sister Mary left. (Amazingly, thirty-odd years later, when it was my turn to be confronted with the big red book on This Is Your Life, my lovely mum managed to track Sister Mary down. She was working in Harrow, still as a nun, but no longer from a convent. It was so wonderful to see her again after all those years.)

  While I was at the convent, my pare
nts decided to move house, and I became a weekly border for a couple of weeks. I was very excited about the prospect of staying until, one night, one of the other girls in the dormitory came to me and insisted that I had been abandoned by my parents. I hadn’t actually been told they were moving house, but this girl had got to hear it somehow and tried to convince me they had moved away and left me behind. I would not be consoled and spent the night in floods of tears. My mum had to be summoned to the school, and explained to me that I was only boarding for a bit because they needed time to prepare the new house for me.

  Although my parents were Church of England, the convent was, of course, Catholic, and had lots of different practices, in terms of worship, that I didn’t understand. In the dormitory, for example, there was always a nun on duty, so she had a special corner that was screened off from us girls to give her some privacy. My first night I was awoken by the sound of an earnest nun going through her Hail Marys as she undressed. Each article of clothing was thrown over the screen as she finished a prayer. I remember lying there listening, in the half light, watching the shadows from the little night lights flickering on the walls. More scarily, when I went to the toilet there were statues round every corner that seemed to jump out at me: gruesome images of the Madonna holding her dead son in her arms; or Jesus on the cross with copious amounts of blood dripping from his wounds. Not great images for a young girl to fall asleep with in her head. One night, we were woken up by Reverend Mother. She had just returned from a trip to the Vatican and had pictures of the Pope to hand out to us all. We were told to keep them under our pillows.

  But these moments were a small price to pay for being in lovely surroundings with mostly lovely teachers. I went from that convent to another one called St Louis, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. That was also OK, except that, again, religion was apt to get in the way of the teaching and the good will of the nuns. The policy was that no Protestant pupil could go to the catechism classes. I went along the first time and sat enthralled at the stories being told to the children, but I was very upset by the notion that if you were born without being baptised you went to a place called Limbo, and couldn’t go to heaven. When all the children were being taught about confessing their sins, and doing penance, I was first in the queue to give it a go, but given my Protestant status was told to leave immediately and never come back. I was very disappointed, as being with nuns all the time actually encouraged me to go through a very religious period in my life. At the age of nine I think the drama of it all appealed to me, and I was very keen to change my name to Mary and become a nun. I have never completely lost my faith and still call myself a Christian.