Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (3 page)

In spite of her lofty ambitions, family life with her three brothers and one sister was pretty run-of-the-mill. All of them were given chores to do and taught to look out for each other. Life in their cramped house wasn’t exactly like an episode of the
The Waltons
, however. Far from it. The kids could be little terrors and often ran rampant around the house, proving to be something of a handful for poor Joan and Garry. ‘Our neighbours must have hated us,’ Cheryl confided on
Loose Women
years later. ‘We
were such a noisy bunch of kids.’ Joseph, the eldest, was born in 1976, Gillian came next in 1979, and Andrew followed in 1980. When Cheryl came along in the summer of 1983, four years before youngest brother Garry, the boisterous young Tweedys had found a brand new toy to play with in their little sister. And play with her they did, as Cheryl recalled in an interview with
Top of the Pops
magazine in 2003. ‘I learnt how to fight cos me brothers would joke about and hang me over balconies. I had to learn self-defence.’

Although Joan spent much of her time tending to Cheryl’s creative needs, she also had to make sure that the rest of the children didn’t feel neglected. As a busy housewife, Joan had to make sure that she found time for each of her kids. Having had her first child at just seventeen, the youthful mother had formed a close bond with her children.

‘She had to grow up fast,’ Cheryl said of her mum in the
Daily Mirror.
‘And with five of us she had to work hard.’ Life certainly wasn’t easy, and Joan struggled, but with strength, determination and the love and support of her family, she managed to muddle through the rough times. ‘Dad supported all of us because my mum wanted to bring us up well.’

Money may have been tight but Joan and Garry made sure that the children were well looked after. ‘There were five of us, so there wasn’t much money,’ Cheryl told
Top of the Pops
magazine. ‘We weren’t spoilt at all.’

Christmases were family orientated, though never very ostentatious. However, although they were on a budget, it didn’t mean festive times at the Tweedys weren’t fun. One particular Christmas Day, Cheryl and her siblings woke up bright and early to see what was waiting for them under the tree. Instead
of finding a delightful pile of shiny gifts, however, they found a mass of shredded wrapping paper strewn across the floor and their presents tossed around the room. For a moment, the little ones thought that local tearaways had crept into their house during the night to cause havoc. But when their pet pooch Monty strolled up to them sheepishly, it dawned on them that perhaps the culprit was actually a little closer to home. ‘He’d chewed off the paper and then he got told off by mum,’ Cheryl remembered in the
Top of the Pops
magazine. ‘I think he was looking for his own present – some bones. Monty was mental; the baubles on the Christmas tree just sent him mad.’

Home life might have been chaotic at times but it was a loving household, and gave Cheryl the stability she needed to be able to go off and enjoy school. By her own admission, Cheryl wasn’t the most academic of kids at Walker Comprehensive School in Newcastle. But as far as grades were concerned, she was an adequate scholar. This might have had something to do with the fact that it wasn’t always her own work that she’d hand in to the teacher. Busy being popular at school meant Cheryl didn’t always have the time to concentrate on finishing her work, so occasionally she’d have to use nefarious means to gain the adequate grades. ‘I used to look at other people’s books and copy them,’ she confessed to
Top of the Pops.
‘I didn’t get caught, though, because I was crafty. The geeks used to try to hide their work but I was friendly to them so they didn’t mind.’

If she had applied herself better at school, she might have ended up in an entirely different line of work: ‘If I’d had a sensible head on my shoulders when I was at school I’d have loved to have gone into forensic detective work,’ she revealed
during an interview on Real Radio. ‘I’d have loved it. I find it fascinating, like which way the blood is splattered and stuff.’ However, in spite of her rather dubious methods of gaining good marks, Cheryl made a good impression on the teachers at Walker’s. Dr Steve Gater, the school principal at the time, remembered Cheryl fondly in the
Mirror
as a shining light and claimed to have recognized her potential straight away. ‘It was obvious early on that Cheryl was ambitious and talented,’ he said. ‘From a young age her passions were singing and dancing. The staff didn’t anticipate how big she would become but clearly the potential was there.’

He also remembered her as a confident young girl who was never too shy to command a crowd. ‘She loved being centre stage. She stood head and shoulders above everybody else. Once she gave a speech to two hundred and fifty kids for a Christmas Box appeal and was so good that a letter of commendation was sent to her parents.’

However, Cheryl remembers her schooling a little bit differently. ‘On my reports, it would say “Cheryl has great ability, she’s capable of doing everything, but she’d prefer to talk to her friends.”’ She later told Barbara Ellen in
The Observer
that her naughty behaviour and lack of interest was such that she’d end up being punished rather severely. ‘I was awful at school,’ she declared. ‘They used to throw me out of the classroom. My headmaster once said to me: “It’ll be interesting to see what you do in your life, Miss Tweedy.”’

And it would seem that Steve Gater has kindly overlooked the times when the tempestuous Cheryl was suspended from school for getting into a couple of spats with boys. As she would prove later, the determined little lass was certainly no
pushover and if she felt she was being wronged then she’d stand up for herself. ‘I got into a fight with a guy at school,’ she told
Top of the Pops
magazine in 2003. ‘He spat at me so I slapped him and we ended up both getting suspended.’ But that wasn’t her only brush with school authorities. She also landed herself in trouble when she had a squabble with a fellow pupil on her way home after school: ‘I got suspended for two weeks for having an argument on a bus and using bad language. Someone on the bus told the school. He’d kicked me in the leg so I started arguing. He didn’t get in trouble – I wasn’t impressed.’

When she wasn’t hammering it out with the boys, Cheryl spent her time getting friendly with them. With her striking looks and wicked sense of humour, she was never short of admirers in and around school, and Cheryl always made sure she never had to make do with second best. She was able to land herself top-of-the-range school hunks to go on dates with. The relationships at school never lasted very long and she admitted that she actually preferred spending time with her girlie mates – and her mum.

‘My mam is a bigger clubber than me,’ Cheryl once boasted to
Top of the Pops
magazine. ‘She’s a real trendy mum. She drags me on the dancefloor and doesn’t stop; she’d dance on the sofas if she got the chance.’

But then Cheryl never really saw her mum as a mother figure. After all, the age gap wasn’t huge and the pair were pretty inseparable. ‘She is more like a friend,’ she said. ‘I can talk to her about anything – boyfriends, sex, you name it.’

However, this didn’t mean that Joan let Cheryl run wild. Even though they were like sisters, Joan still made sure that
rules were set in place. Joan made it clear that there were limits to what Cheryl could and couldn’t do. She wasn’t allowed to have boys stay over, nor was she allowed to go out gallivanting into the wee hours. Rebellious Cheryl wasn’t having any of it. She wanted to party and have some fun, and she wasn’t going to let rules stop her.

So, the canny lass used the usual teenage tricks so that she could meet up with her mates without her mother ever knowing. When she used to tell her mum that she was heading over to her friend Lindsay’s house for a sleepover, she’d actually meet up with a gang of girls and boys and enjoy a night out under the stars. ‘When I was about sixteen, I used to go camp out with my friends,’ she recalled in
Top of the Pops.
‘There was a tent full of boys and a tent full of girls and I’d tell my mum I’d gone to stay at Lindsay’s. ‘She’d be like, “All right, love, see you in the morning!” I’d come back the next day like an ice block and be like, “Lindsay’s mum’s got no heating.”’

But her mum soon wised up to what was going on when she finally caught Cheryl in the act. Most times when a pal came to stay, Cheryl would say goodnight to the family, then lead her friend upstairs to her bedroom, where they’d slip out of their pyjamas and into T-shirts and trackie bottoms ready to hit the town. Just in case Cheryl’s mum came to check on them before she went to bed, the pair would climb into bed and pull the blankets up around their necks so it looked as if they were sleeping. Then at around 2 a.m., when the rest of the household was fast asleep, a bunch of boys would quietly stroll up to the house and throw something at the window to alert the girls of their arrival. The naughty pair would then spring out of bed, creep through the house and dash off for a fun night out.

And most of the time, they managed to get away with it without detection. But on one occasion, their wily ways were scuppered when they were stopped suddenly in their tracks by Joan, who had heard the commotion outside. Catching them, she blew her top, as Cheryl remembered in an interview with
Top of the Pops
magazine: ‘She went mad – and nearly tore my head off my shoulders.’

Not all the male attention she received was desired, however. When she was fifteen to sixteen years old, Cheryl had a part-time job waitressing at a café called JJ’s. Though she was still at school, she’d taken the job to earn a little extra cash so that she could buy some new clothes for the singing gigs she had started taking in the evenings around Newcastle. Thanks to her dazzling smile and chirpy banter, Cheryl proved a popular worker with customers and as a result managed to make good tips. But one particular customer made her feel a little uncomfortable when he started to pay her a lot more attention than she liked. At first, the thirty-something man had seemed perfectly nice, though certainly not the kind of man Cheryl would have found attractive herself. Nevertheless, she’d flash him a bright grin and engage him in conversation, just as she did all the customers. But there was something different about this man, something strange.

‘He was fine at first,’ she recalled in an interview with
Q
magazine, ‘but then he started asking to look at my feet. I wore open-toed sandals and he said he loved my feet. He was about thirty years old and was sweaty and had spit in the corner of his mouth. I ran home and my brother came out to find him. He would have killed him!’

Fortunately other men would come into Cheryl’s life who
proved to be considerably more eligible. But as it would turn out, those relationships were never going to be easy to maintain, particularly when stardom beckoned.

Throughout her teens, gorgeous Cheryl had never been short of attention. During her school years she had dated the best-looking boys around. However, not many of her relationships were fulfilling – and she wasn’t the kind of girl who was willing to let guys take her for a ride.

Not all boys were total wastes of space, however. Some, she felt, were worth taking a chance on … for a time, anyway! One of them was plumber Steve Thornton, whom she met when she was sixteen. In an interview with the
News of the World
, he claimed that the couple had enjoyed an intense relationship after meeting at the café she was working in.

‘I was only there to collect my mates’ breakfast on the building site,’ he recalled. ‘But I knew that I was on to something when she slipped in some extra rashers and handed them over with a really knowing look.’ He went on to explain that the minute he saw her he thought she had the ‘face of an angel’ and that she was ‘always smiling’. He claimed that she flirted
with him outrageously over the counter. Not that he minded. ‘I dreamed of kissing her,’ he said, ‘and after spending a fortune on sandwiches I finally got to take her out.’

Their first date wasn’t the most romantic – a quick coffee at a local café – but they both enjoyed it. The conversation was natural and easy, and Steve knew there and then that Cheryl was potential girlfriend material. After the coffee, Cheryl invited him back to her sister Gillian’s place to watch some TV. If Steve thought ‘watching TV’ was code for something else, he was sadly mistaken. ‘It wasn’t the most extravagant of first dates,’ he told the
News of the World.
‘But when I kissed her at the end of the night everything seemed perfect.’

A simple beginning, but there was a definite spark between them and it wasn’t long before the pair started dating, enjoying nights on the town or kissing and holding hands on Gillian’s couch. Although they were taking things slowly, Steve claimed that frisky Cheryl would suggest what she’d like them to get up to, such as her dressing up as Britney, or slipping into a cowgirl’s outfit on one occasion. The relationship lasted around five months before going cold and Cheryl apparently stopped taking his calls.

Steve revealed to the
News of the World
that he was heartbroken by Cheryl’s decision. Eventually he moved on with his life, but in 2002 all the memories came flooding back when he saw Cheryl appear in the audition shows for
Popstars: The Rivals.
‘I was just sat at home on a Saturday night when they announced “Cheryl Tweedy from Newcastle”. She looked just as lovely as I remember her. I always knew that she was something special, she always wanted to get to the top and it looks like now she is getting the chance to live her dream.’

Later, Cheryl admitted she was devastated when Steve sold his story to the newspaper. However, she said she took it on the chin, admitting, ‘You just have to get a tougher skin, laugh it off.’ When the story hit the stands, though, she was straight on the phone to find out why he had done this to her. ‘I was so upset and so hurt,’ she recalled. ‘He treated me like shit the whole time I was seeing him. I rang him and said, “I want an explanation, because all I ever did was help and support you.” He started crying and said the papers had been hounding him for ten months.’