Anne's Song (12 page)

None of it spilled directly on her but the stream of scalding tea flowed across the surface, seeping under her bare legs. The first thing I heard was a blood-curdling scream. Immediately, I grabbed her with both hands, dumped her in the sink and turned on the cold-water tap. Then I wrapped her in a blanket, ran upstairs with her and woke my mum, screaming, 'Amy's been scalded! Amy's been scalded!'

I knew she needed urgent medical attention and my dad got up and drove us to the hospital in Ilford. I held Amy in my arms. She was in shock, gently moaning the whole time, and it wasn't hard to know why. I looked at the back of her legs. The skin was peeling off in front of my eyes. It was like a living nightmare. I was convinced she'd be scarred for life.

At the hospital, one leg was bandaged from ankle to thigh, the other from ankle to knee. Then every so often, I'd have to take her back there to have her blisters burst and the wounds re-dressed. I was always full of trepidation, but Amy seemed to accept what was happening and was incredibly brave throughout the whole procedure. She hardly ever made a fuss or cried. My guilt at what had happened reduced only slightly when a doctor told me that my swift action of running cold water over the burns had almost certainly prevented Amy from suffering permanent scarring.

When Brian was twenty-seven, he got injured again and decided his playing days were over. For a season, he was hired as the team's assistant manager. Football had been his life, but he knew his career was coming to an end and it hit him hard. One day, he announced he wanted to return to live in Blackpool. Although I'd been away a lot, I'd loved the four years we'd been in Torquay – it wasn't called the English Riviera for nothing – but I didn't resist the idea of moving back north. All my family were in Blackpool, even my parents – they hadn't yet sold the house in Ilford, but they had recently moved back – and Brian's parents were in Newcastle. Amy would be starting school quite soon. In Torquay, we would have had to employ someone to look after her if I was away and Brian had continued as assistant manager of the team. In Blackpool, there was a whole support system on hand to collect her from school and so on.

For six months, we stayed in my parents' house in Waterloo Road. It was a testing time, and we usually preferred to stay in our room when we weren't out looking for a house of our own that we liked and could afford. Although my father never again made any sexual advances towards me, I was never truly comfortable in his company. We never discussed it, but instinctively neither Brian nor I let Amy out of our sight while we were living there. We certainly never intentionally left her alone with my dad, which is such a sad thing to have to acknowledge. I'm pretty certain he wouldn't have touched his own granddaughter in an inappropriate way, but merely having to consider such a possibility in relation to your own father demonstrates the way in which the legacy of sexual abuse – and this had taken place more than twenty years earlier – can continue to throw its shadow over innocent lives.

Brian was the sort of man who'd turn his hand to anything. He was very practical and would have happily taken a job in the building trade, but there was no work going. Then he started playing, just for fun, for a local amateur football team run by a man who owned a commercial estate agent's. He knew Brian was looking for a job, so he offered him one on the insurance side of the business, working with his brother. It wasn't fantastic money, but I know he was pleased to be bringing home a wage again, even though he wasn't the type of man to feel threatened by his wife earning more than he did.

By that stage, we'd found a three-bedroom semi on Falmouth Road in Blackpool, not far from my parents and my brothers and sisters. We'd both liked it the moment we walked through the front door. Nor did we have to do anything to it. It was newly decorated in a style I didn't want to change and there was a little garden at the back which was nice for Amy and safe, too. We got her into a Catholic school a walk away from where we lived and close to my parents' house, so that my mum could pick her up from school if Brian was at work and I was on tour.

Although the hit singles were now a thing of the past, we were about to have a chart-topper as part of a charity record. On 11 May 1985, Valley Parade, Bradford City's football stadium, caught fire and fifty-six fans lost their lives with over two hundred more injured. Fronted by Gerry Marsden, more than a hundred stars recorded a new version of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' to raise money for the families of the victims, and it immediately went to the top of the singles chart. I wasn't able to break open a bottle of bubbly, though, for one very good reason.

On the last leg of yet another British tour, we found ourselves in Lowestoft, and as we were about to start the gig, I began to feel unwell. I put it down to tummy ache and joined my sisters on stage at eight o'clock. Two hours later, the ache had escalated into something much more painful. By the time I got back to the hotel room I was sharing with Maureen, I was being sick, so she called a doctor, who diagnosed indigestion. He gave me some tablets and an injection to stop the vomiting. It did the trick, but only temporarily. The sickness returned a couple of hours later with a vengeance. We were due back in Blackpool for a few days' rest before travelling to Scotland for the final leg of the tour, but I never made it home. At Lowestoft Hospital, suspected appendicitis was diagnosed.

I insisted my sisters stuck to their itinerary; nothing was to be gained by them staying with me. 1 had an operation to remove my appendix and just in time, it seems. I was told that, if I'd made the journey back to Blackpool, I'd have run the risk of peritonitis setting in and that can be fatal.

Once I was strong enough to leave hospital, my father drove to Lowestoft to take me home. I would so much have preferred it if it had been Brian, but I accepted he had a living to earn. As it was, I deliberately lay on the back seat of the car, pretending I needed to sleep because I didn't want to talk to Dad. I hated being in that small, confined space with him. He was being perfectly nice to me, but I couldn't get out of my mind the memory of when we'd been in another car all those years ago and he'd suggested we could run away together.

I quickly resumed work, both at home and overseas. The tours were getting further and further away. In the end, my sisters went to Australia three times (although I didn't accompany them the first time in 1983 because that was when I'd bowed out of the group to be a wife and mother), as well as to Japan and Russia. It was exciting going away at first, although I pined for Brian and Amy. Then, after a bit, all the tours sort of blurred into one. We'd arrive somewhere, the sound system would be checked, we'd do our performance and then move on the next day to somewhere else. It was a strange existence because you never really got a proper sense of where you were. However, the audiences were always enthusiastic, which makes you feel appreciated, and the money was good. I always felt the same: six weeks is too long to be parted from the two people you love best in the world, but singing with my sisters never stopped being fun. As ever, I was being tugged in two directions.

One trip does stick in the memory, though. We toured Russia for six weeks in 1986. We were part of a cultural exchange. The UK got the Bolshoi Ballet; Russia got the Nolans. I think the UK probably got the better end of the bargain! It was an extraordinary experience, but I found it particularly hard being so far away from home because it was so difficult to find a phone with an international line. I felt more cut off than ever from Brian and Amy.

There were thirteen of us on the tour: Maureen, Bernie, Coleen and me plus our four-piece backing band and a road crew of five. We all got on with each other really well and that included me and Bernie. There wasn't much alternative. We were in a strange country sharing the same adventure. It was like stepping back in time to the last century: very rural, very primitive. I remember looking out of the bus window and seeing a woman tilling the land by hand with a ploughshare. Everything seemed to be beige or brown or black. I never saw any bright colours. Food was sparse – we seemed to live on little more than boiled eggs, cheese and cucumber – and there were no shops in the way that we were used to in the West. Everywhere you went, there were queues, and we were constantly approached by people who wanted to buy our jeans, bags, belts, CDs, you name it.

We played in giant stadiums seating anything up to 10,000 people and they were always full to capacity. In Tbilisi, Baku, Azerbaijan, the story never varied: a total sell-out, but it wasn't because we were hugely popular in Russia – as a matter of fact, we were hardly known there. It was because people were starved of Western culture and were eager to satisfy their curiosity by coming to see us perform.

I remember one leg of the tour when we had to transfer from Baku to Leningrad. The coach trip would probably take twelve hours, although we four girls had airline seats booked for a flight that would take no more than three hours. However, Coleen and I hated flying, so we gave our tickets to two members of the band and decided to travel with the rest of them in a pretty battered old bus with no toilet facilities. We made sure we packed sandwiches and bottles of water – just as well in the circumstances as we never saw anywhere en route that sold snacks.

In time, of course, we were all dying to get off the bus for a toilet break, but we didn't see any signs for a public lavatory. Eventually, we asked the driver – though our interpreter – to pull in at a small village off the main road. The interpreter approached a house, knocked on the front door and got permission from the owner to use her facilities. We were then led through the house and into the garden which was overrun with a horde of children. The owner was sitting there with a baby on her lap. She indicated a makeshift structure covered in sacking. This was the toilet. Coleen and I looked inside. There was a hole in the ground surrounded by planks of wood covered in old excrement and flies swarming everywhere. It was absolutely disgusting and almost certainly a health hazard. Coleen decided she could hold on and got back on the bus, but I just had to relieve myself so I gritted my teeth and got on with it. I emerged as quickly as possible, convinced I'd probably have picked up typhoid or dysentery in the process. Then I noticed a stream running along the bottom of the garden. Perhaps if I rinsed my hands in the water, I'd reduce the chances of contracting any infection. When I got back on the bus, I said to Coleen that at least I'd been able to wash my hands – and the crew started howling. I asked them what was so funny. 'Because we've all just peed in that stream,' piped up one of them. After that, I felt unclean until I reached Leningrad and was able to scrub my hands with soap and hot water.

There was little opportunity for us to have a social life in Russia because there weren't any clubs we could go to when we'd finished our act and, anyway, we were always on the move. Any downtime was spent in one of our bedrooms where we'd play cards, drink vodka, put on some music and have a laugh. On one particular night, we were staying in the largest hotel in Moscow – bigger than any in Europe. It was so big that each floor had its own reception area. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. There stood the floor receptionist and she ticked us off in broken English, telling us to turn off the music and return to our individual rooms. We apologised and promptly disregarded her instructions as soon as the door was closed again. Half an hour later came another knock. Again, the hatchet-faced receptionist was telling us off, only this time she was accompanied by a soldier with a rifle that he was pointing directly at us. Strange, isn't it, how persuasive someone can be from the other end of a gun?

Brian and I never discussed how often my work took me away from home. I felt self-conscious about it. Yes, I always missed my husband acutely, but
I
was the one off on the adventure, singing with my sisters, entertaining audiences.
He
was the one stuck at home on his own. I knew he minded.

Just before I'd go off on another trip, we'd perform the same little ritual.

He'd say, 'I miss you.'

'I'm not gone yet,' I'd reply.

'I know,' he'd say, 'but I know how I'll feel when you have and I miss you already.'

Of course, if he'd ever once said that he'd prefer me to leave the group, that he'd rather I were at home with him all the time, I'd have quit the Nolans without hesitation. However, money was always an issue, and so the subject was somehow swept to one side. Perhaps, too, Brian didn't want to put me in a position where I had to make the decision regarding whether or not to end my career.

As it was, I often had Amy with me so his loss was twofold, but there was a level of deep trust between us – there had to be – without which the marriage couldn't have survived. Now and again, I might mention to friends, tongue in cheek, that I hoped Brian behaved himself in my absence. Without fail, the answer was always the same and music to my ears. He never talks about anything else but you, I was told. It was all the reassurance I needed.

In the spring of 1986, the girls and I went to Australia (my first trip) and Tasmania. Sydney was everything I'd hoped it would be, a magnificent city on the sea with the opera house dominating the harbour, but, if anything, I preferred our time in Tasmania. We were performing at a major sports centre in Launceston and staying in a hotel on the complex. We were in the pool every day and then doing the show each evening for a week.

It was like a holiday except I didn't have Brian and Amy with me. I'd phone home every day – sometimes as many as three times – which again meant that I had an enormous phone bill to pay at the end of it all. The trip was as good as it could be. It could never be perfect, though, because I missed them both so dreadfully, but I mustn't be dishonest. I didn't only agree to make the trip for the money, such as it was. The fact of the matter was that the opportunity to go to Australia might never happen again and I'd always wanted to see it for myself. As usual, I was being pulled in a number of different directions.

I love travelling, but I hated having to walk away from my husband and, when I went abroad, my daughter, too. And yes, the money would come in dead handy. So what a shame it wasn't more! We'd been away for six weeks and, I suppose, after all the expenses had been deducted for our musical and crew support, we girls probably received about £300 each a week. This is not a complaint because it was a wonderful experience, but I think most people would imagine that chart-topping artists criss-crossing the globe would be fabulously wealthy as a result. That simply wasn't the case, even though £300 over twenty years ago was worth quite a bit more than it is today.

Not long after we got home, we were booked for a summer season at the Bournemouth International Centre, and Cannon and Ball were top of the bill. It was a fabulous summer. We rented a beautiful house in Bournemouth and all got along really well with Tommy, Bobby and their families. When we weren't working, we'd regularly get together for a barbecue and to play rounders or tennis. Bobby Ball and I became particularly good friends and, as show business people often do, we'd always give each other a big hug each time we met. On one such occasion. Amy, who was with me throughout the summer, saw Bobby throw his arms around me. She was five at the time and not used to seeing any man other than her dad hugging her mum. It must have made an impression on her because, the next time she was on the phone to Brian, I heard her telling him what had happened.

Brian arrived in Bournemouth the next day. God only knows the torment the poor man must have suffered on his journey. What he expected to discover when he arrived in Bournemouth must have been tearing him apart; he had a very long face when he got to the house where Amy and I were staying. It didn't take a minute, though, for me to put him right. We hugged and kissed and he was soon all smiles again. I could tell how relieved he was, and when, later that day, he came with me to the theatre and Bobby gave me a hug like he always did, Brian could see how innocent it all was. In the end, something good came out of what could have been something bad. Because of the misunderstanding which had brought him to see me, he was then able to stay for two days and we had a wonderful time.

Brian's job working in insurance was full-time and I was often away on singing engagements. This meant Brian could take Amy to school in the morning, but we sometimes relied on my mum to pick her up in the afternoon and babysit her until one of us could come and collect her. Each of us made a particular point of only ever asking my mother to look after Amy in our absence, never my father, and 1 never intentionally left Amy in his sole care, but, on more than one occasion, I'd call round to collect her and Amy would be there with my dad. That immediately worried me.

I'd say, 'Where's Mum gone?'

And he'd reply, 'Oh, she wanted to go and play bingo, so I said I'd keep an eye on Amy. Why, what's the problem?'

My heart would stop, but my father would just stare at me, daring me, I felt, to voice what possible objection there could be. I never did. Why didn't I say something to him on his own? That question haunts me to this day.

The fact that my mother would decide to go out was proof, I believe, that the thought of her husband abusing his granddaughter never crossed her mind. But it had crossed mine. I'd later ask Amy, apparently casually and in all innocence, if anyone had ever touched her or done anything to her she didn't like.

'For instance, has anyone ever touched your private parts,' I'd ask, 'one of your uncles, maybe, or your granddad?'

She'd always say no, of course not, but, if I ever found her at my parents' house with just my father, I'd have to question her about what might have happened. I worried about it all the time, and yet Brian and I didn't really discuss it properly. He only ever said one thing on the subject. We were lying in bed one day and he turned to me.

'I think you ought to go and see a psychiatrist,' he said. 'I think you need to deal with what your dad did to you.'

'But that was a long time ago,' I replied. 'I've lived with it for years and years now. It's long past.'

He didn't say anything else, but I realise now that what he was really saying was that, as I'd never confronted my father about what I suffered at his hands, counselling of some sort might lead to him being made to answer for his actions.

As it was, I think both Brian and I were not only frightened of opening a wound that might never heal, of causing a rift that could tear the family apart, but also of no one believing my story. If these horrible things had happened, why had it taken me this long to make them public? And how would I have explained to Amy that she couldn't be left at my parents' house in case my father started sexually abusing her? I appreciate that her safety should have overridden all of this, and yet still I remained mute. I've thought about this so many times down the years and I've tortured myself with why I let the situation drift on when something could have been happening to my precious daughter. In my defence, I was as insistent as I knew how to double-check that both my parents would stay in all evening if they were babysitting Amy – and mostly they did. This may sound like clutching at straws and in many ways it was. But the longer I didn't say the real reasons for my concern, the more I couldn't.

I'm certain that my father never did lay a finger on Amy, but what was I thinking? I felt I couldn't tell my mother what was on my mind because I'd decided all those years ago that I had to live with this terrible guilty secret. Anyway, if I had blurted out what I knew to be the truth, my father would have dismissed it as fanciful nonsense – something he might have convinced himself was true, for all I knew. I thought of asking Aunt Teresa to babysit Amy in future but, again, what possible reasons could I keep inventing that explained this decision to my mother? She'd have been mystified and terribly hurt.

What I should have done, of course, is taken my father to one side and told him that he was never to babysit Amy alone and that he knew exactly the reason why. I can't come up with a reasonable explanation as to why I didn't. I don't offer this as any sort of an excuse, but I was still frightened of him. He had the sort of personality that had always struck fear in my heart. I don't remember feeling like that about him before he started touching me, but, when he did and I gradually came to understand how wrong it was, it forced me to reassess him. I thought I'd known my dad and I hadn't. He was this other person with a dark side that wasn't natural. It coloured my whole view of him. He'd become like a stranger who could behave in an unpredictable way and do vile things to me.

In the meantime, if ever Amy was going to be looked after by my parents, I stressed as vehemently as I knew how that I wanted my mum to be there, I wanted
her
to be the one who tucked Amy into bed, I wanted
her
to stay at home throughout, in case Amy woke from a bad dream and needed a reassuring hug. Anyway, I told myself, with rather more conviction than I truly felt, perhaps I was worrying about nothing – but the sins of my father, it seemed, continued to cascade down the generations.

In the November of 1986, Maureen, Bernie and I were travelling home to Blackpool on the M6 after performing a gig in London, and we reached Shevington, near Wigan, at about 6.30 in the evening. Bernie was driving with Maureen sitting next to her and me in the back. It was dark and raining heavily. I was leaning forwards, chatting to my sisters. At that time, it wasn't compulsory for rear seat passengers to wear a safety belt. I have no recollection of what happened next, only that when I opened my eyes Brian was at my hospital bedside.

I later discovered that a motorcyclist had lost control, skidding from the nearside lane across both carriageways and into our path. Bernie's reactions were good and she managed to stop in time before hitting him, but the motorway had been busy with commuter traffic and the car behind ours must have been too close. In the slippery conditions, it rammed into the back of us with several more following suit. It's a wonder that nobody was killed.

Bernie and Maureen suffered whiplash injuries and delayed shock. I was severely concussed with a bad laceration across my forehead just above my right eye. It required thirteen stitches. Apparently, my only complaint was of a headache. The cut was jagged and could quite easily have left an unsightly scar but, by a stroke of good fortune, the surgeon in charge of dealing with my wound had just returned from the Falklands where he'd had plenty of practice sewing up all too many serious injuries. He did a wonderful job.

A couple of months later, our album
Tenderly
was released. Of everything we ever recorded, I felt this was the one with the most potential. It was a collection of standards, and we were each allowed to pick our favourite tracks for inclusion. I chose 'I Get Along Without You Very Well', 'As Time Goes By' and the Ella Fitzgerald classic 'Every Time We Say Goodbye'. The problem was, we didn't build in enough time in the studio, with the result that I've always felt we could have done a better job. Really great albums can take as long as two years to get just right; this was recorded in two weeks.

In January 1987, I discovered I was pregnant again. I was thirty-six and both Brian and 1 were keen to produce a brother or sister for Amy who would soon celebrate her sixth birthday. There had been one other miscarriage along the way but, unlike the second one at three months, this had been at no more than three weeks. I'd been working with my sisters in Amsterdam when I'd started to bleed profusely. A doctor was called and quickly established that I was suffering a very early miscarriage. Naturally, it left me feeling low but, since I hadn't known I was pregnant in the first place, I experienced far less grief than before.

Now, though, I was pregnant again and this time – I was determined – it was all going to be just fine. Even so, my gynaecological history was such that Brian and I told each other we mustn't build up our hopes too high. Every precaution was taken to ensure I took no risks whatever that could endanger this precious pregnancy. As before, my sisters wouldn't allow me to carry anything, and during rehearsals, they insisted I sit down as much as possible. They generally wrapped me in cotton wool.

We'd recently signed a six-album contract with National Panasonic to record popular Japanese hits, but with new-English lyrics, for release in Japan where we were still riding high. The English translations of these lyrics were so bizarre that we had trouble singing them because we kept getting fits of hysterics. Even so, that album, and the ones that came after it, all sold well in Japan.

This was the same year that we were part of a second charity record, a reworking of The Beatles' 'Let It Be', with all the funds going to the families who'd lost loved ones in the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Paul McCartney (who'd written the song in the first place), Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, Boy George and Kate Bush all sang on the record. There was very little socialising, although we did have a drink and a bite to eat afterwards. I remember chatting to Boy George who was lovely, very flamboyant, very witty, but, to be honest, I think we were a little overawed to be surrounded by so many famous faces, most of whom seemed more hip, more fashionable than us.

Our next tour was of our native southern Ireland, although we also went to the north as well. I remember feeling a bit anxious. Would audiences in the north take against us because we came from the south, or those in the south because we'd moved to England? Then there was the political situation. There were soldiers with guns in Belfast as well as on the border with the south which seemed very sad and strange. Happily, any doubts I might have had about how the audience would respond were dispelled as soon as we started performing. I can honestly say that the reaction in Andersonstown, for instance, was as good as we'd ever known anywhere in the world.