CONTENTS

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Copyright © Neil Brandwood 2002, 2003, 2006, 2016
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Neil Brandwood has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Virgin Books in 2002
This edition published by Virgin Books in 2016

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780753511244

PROLOGUE

THE CHUBBY LITTLE girl is full of anticipation as she climbs into her father’s car for the one-and-a-half mile drive down the rutted track for the rendezvous at the bottom of Castle Hill Road. Passing Gypsy Brook and Hercules Farm on the right and Harwood Fields and the disused quarry on the left, she can barely contain her excitement at the thought of what is to come.

Back at the house her birthday buffet is laid out for the party. Games have been prepared and the candles stand on her cake ready to be lit, blown and wished upon.

It is not simply her birthday that makes it such a special occasion; for the first time her classmates will be coming to her home. Its remoteness usually discourages visitors.

Just before reaching the church the girl’s father turns right at Gallows Hill. The car continues on its journey to Jericho, a name inspired by the ‘Cities of Judgement’ sermon given by the Methodist evangelist John Wesley on one of his visits.

When they reach the designated pick-up point the little girl’s joy evaporates. Only one classmate stands there – Graham Howarth. She is crestfallen; the other children must have better things to do with their Saturday.

‘Happy birthday,’ says Graham, as he gets into the car.

The girl smiles bravely, but the agony and humiliation are prolonged by her well-meaning father who decides to drive to the home of Dennis Ford, one of the absent party guests. Mrs Ford says he is out playing somewhere.

The car begins the slow climb back through the bleak landscape to Birtle Edge House.

More than 30 years later the little girl – now a woman – makes her way up the same road. This time she is in the driving seat and knows that millions of people will share her journey.

She steers the Land Rover Discovery past a recently planted wood next to the church, little guessing the congregation had considered naming it in her honour.

She is accompanied by a film crew. They are shooting a documentary on her – Britain’s best-loved comedienne. She has sold out more shows at the Royal Albert Hall than any other solo performer, an experience she described as ‘instant gratification, like having two-and-a-half thousand friends round, and you’re the funniest one in the room’. She has been voted the person most people would like as their next-door neighbour, and it was rumoured that the most famous woman in the world, Diana, Princess of Wales, wanted her as a friend.

For the past 12 years her birthday has been listed in The Times.

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‘I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we’re good at. I wasn’t good at being a child.’

Victoria Wood

WHEN HELEN WOOD gave birth to her fourth and final child in 1953 the relief she felt at the baby’s safe delivery may well have been tinged with disappointment. It was another girl.

Helen and Stanley Wood’s first child, a boy whom they named Christopher, had been born almost a generation earlier, in 1940. Penelope arrived on 2 August 1945, and Rosalind followed almost five years to the day later, on 4 August 1950.

The two slim, dainty and dark-haired Wood girls had already forged a strong bond and developed a closeness that left the newcomer to the family in an unenviable position. Three was a crowd; another sister was not required and lacked the novelty that a baby brother would have brought.

The birth of Victoria Wood on 19 May was dutifully announced in the Bury Times four days later, more as a matter of routine than of pride. It was the done thing, and Victoria’s siblings had previously been introduced to the world in the same terse few lines. The fact that Helen had yet another baby was certainly no cause for celebration, and Victoria grew up suspecting her mother wanted a career instead of her.

Victoria was the only baby born in the upstairs delivery room of Holyrood Maternity Home that day. The building stood on Bury Old Road in Prestwich, a small town five miles north of Manchester, whose most notable claim was that it had one of the largest mental asylums in Europe. The Woods’ other children had been born in less comfortable circumstances, but Stanley’s dedication to the world of insurance meant he could afford the £10 a week for Helen’s stay in the private home during her final pregnancy.

Mother and baby returned home 10 days after the birth on the day that Britain’s new queen was crowned. The coincidence influenced Helen and Stanley’s choice of a regal name for their daughter, and it was a decision that newspaper and magazine subeditors have delighted in ever since. The reign of ‘Comedy Queen Victoria’, who was often described as ‘amused’ or ‘victorious’, served as alternative headline fodder whenever the ‘Wood’ wordplay dried up.

The name was highly appropriate. Marie Lloyd, the risqué star of music hall who was known for her saucy songs and is regarded as the very first British comedienne, was actually called Matilda Alice Victoria Wood. Years later, Stanley’s daughter would joke in her own stage show: ‘They call me Vic because I’m blue and I bring tears to your eyes.’ It was a line worthy of her namesake and predecessor.

Marie Lloyd would no doubt have had fun with the name Ramsbottom. It is a word that has an irresistibly humorous ring to it and it is easy to understand why Victoria, never one to waste a comic opportunity, sometimes gave the impression that she lived in this picturesque village within the borough of Bury in Lancashire. In actual fact the first and only home Victoria knew in Bury was more than four miles away at number 98 Tottington Road. Stanley had bought the house on 22 January 1952 for £1,600. The end of a block of four spacious terraced houses set back from the road, it had the advantage of being just 10 minutes’ walk from Bury town centre while being elevated above its industrial and commercial heart.

Victoria stressed she was ‘definitely middle class’. It was a social stratum she knew intimately, having imbibed suburban mores from birth. Be it in song, sketch or stage show, the world of the middle classes dominated Victoria’s work. She delighted in and derided the culture of hostess trolleys, champagne-coloured bathroom suites and shopping trips to Benetton, and her audiences lapped up the affectionate mockery.

In 1953 Stanley’s financial circumstances reflected the growing prosperity of the country as a whole. As well as the comfortable house on Tottington Road he was able to afford his first car, an Austin Ruby. It has to be said, however, that the car was more a work necessity than a family luxury: Manufacturers Life of Canada had offices in Manchester but Stanley, who worked as an insurance underwriter, spent most of his time visiting clients at their homes and businesses.

Victoria escaped being working class by just seven years. When her parents first arrived in Bury in 1946 with Chris and Penny, life did not look promising. Having previously lodged with relatives in Manchester they decided to strike out on their own, and rented two rooms in a shared house on Walshaw Road.

‘Without wishing to sound like a Hovis advert, it was very hard,’ recalled Chris Foote-Wood. ‘We didn’t suffer in any way. We were always dry, warm and fed, but it was very spartan.’

The weekly treat came on Saturdays, when a box of sweets would be taken down from on top of a cupboard and they would each select one. Sometimes Stanley would buy a Mars bar during their Sunday walks and divide it into four on their return home.

Helen found it easier to cope with the conditions than her husband as she had experienced the hardship of growing up in Bradford, a poor area of Manchester. Her family, the Mapes, lived in a small terrace on Gibbon Street, which was where Helen, or Ellen Colleen as she was christened, was born on 14 October 1919. Her boiler fireman father, John, fought in France in the First World War but returned to Britain after being gassed. According to Chris Foote-Wood, he was incapacitated, but not enough to stop him having a large family.

Both John and Ada Mape were of Irish descent, and Chris believed the Irish influence contributed to his sister’s talent.

‘I’m convinced in my own mind that the Irish blood is a factor in Victoria’s success. There’s the dourness and stability of my father’s Lancashire side of the family and the entertainment from the Irish side.’

It was to Victoria’s credit that she never used the struggles of her relatives to add background colour to her public persona. Lesser entertainers and professional Northerners might have been tempted to treat their interviewers to moist-eyed reminiscences about their exaggerated humble origins, but the fiercely private Victoria had no truck with that. Quite the opposite in fact.

In the song ‘Northerners’ she sent up the clichés of Northern hardship by adopting the role of an unsuccessful singer who cannily swaps her skintight suits for shawls and boots and becomes a wealthy star by pretending to be Northern. Accompanied by washboard, she traded on every stereotypical image of grimness imaginable, from backstreet abortion and the outside privy, to headscarves and mushy peas.

Victoria stripped away the sentimentality even further in the sketch ‘Service Wash’ in which she played a Northern pensioner reminiscing fondly about the good old days when rugs were made by stitching mice on to sacking and you could hardly hear yourself coughing up blood for the sound of clogs.

When Observer journalist Richard Brooks made the mistake of asking whether Victoria had ever holidayed in the working-class Mecca of Blackpool as a child, her indignation of being seen as a lowly Lancashire lass revealed itself. Stung by the assumption of stereotype, she rounded on him. ‘What do you take me for?’ she barked. ‘We used to go to Vienna.’ The journalist expressed disbelief but it was true: Stanley drove the family across Europe with a Sprite Musketeer four-berth caravan in tow.

‘He just had this idea that I was from the north and would come in with clogs and a shawl and a tin bath,’ Victoria later complained of Brooks.

Even before she was born, the Woods were already upwardly mobile. In August 1947 they swapped their overcrowded lodgings on Walshaw Road for a comfortable semi of their own in Ramsey Grove. The purchase was made possible by Stanley supplementing his income with a variety of odd jobs. ‘I don’t want to go into detail, but he was very enterprising,’ said his son. Helen too, was doing her bit by taking part-time work as a telephonist and market researcher.

A modest boost to the Wood family income came in their first year at the new house, when Stanley’s 168-page naval thriller, Death on a Smokeboat, written under the nom de plume of Ross Graham, was published by Hurst and Blackett.

The novel was just one of the many works he would publish over the years. Although Stanley left school early for a job in a flour mill, an incomplete education did not seem to have disadvantaged him in matters literary. Indeed, the ever-resourceful Stanley would later use his experiences at the mill as the basis for a play. He had sold his first play at the age of 16 and was a keen theatregoer from a young age. This was largely due to the many trips he made with his mother, Eleanor, to Manchester’s Palace Theatre, Hippodrome, Theatre Royal and Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre.

His father, John, had won the Croix de Guerre in the First World War, but at the outbreak of the Second, Stanley, initially at least, reached for his pen rather than a gun. In Mrs Clutterbuck Over Europe he described how an indomitable, no-nonsense, Northern matron put Hitler in his place.

Published by Samuel French in 1939, the broad-humoured comic verse was written in Lancashire dialect. It told the tale of the comically overweight Mary Anne Eliza Jane Clutterbuck and her attempts to obtain a gas mask that would fit over her five chins. Her search took her from her home town of Tubtwistle to Whitehall and then to Hitler’s private den. As she steamrolled through bureaucracy she was constantly insulted about her weight (at one point she is advised to apply for a specially produced animal gas mask for herself, marking the envelope OUTSIZE PONY) and frustrated (there is a note on 10 Downing Street saying SPRING CLEANING. BACK NEXT WEEK). Eventually she confronted Hitler behind closed doors. After the meeting she tottered out, secure in the knowledge that her street would never be bombed, but remained tight-lipped about what took place. The only way to get something done quickly and well, she concluded, was to do it ‘thesel’.

The writing would continue throughout most of Stanley’s life. Besides the satirical lyrics he would set to popular tunes of the day for the company’s annual do, he also wrote everything from radio comedy scripts for Wilfred Pickles to plays, novels and a radio programme about the sinking of the Mary Rose. Radio was one of his favourite media but, for some inexplicable reason, he rationed broadcasts.

‘The radio was quite restricted in our household, surprisingly,’ remembered Chris Foote-Wood. ‘I don’t know why. It was a case of under the bedclothes.’ He said there was always a market for Stanley’s work and regretted that his father could not bring himself to abandon insurance to become a full-time writer. ‘I’m sure he could have been a great success but he was a family man mainly. He always thought his first duty was to hold down a regular job and look after his family. It was the psychology of the time.’

Stanley’s selfless side also emerged in his public-spiritedness. ‘He was a big organiser, a Mr Fix-It. He had fingers in every pie,’ said Foote-Wood. ‘He used to organise all sorts of events, shows and charity dos. For several years after the war he booked the Derby Hotel for a week before Christmas for a toy fair. He had contacts, God knows how. He got toy manufacturers to come along and sell their toys. It was an amazing thing.’

Besides his theatrical, literary and community interests, Stanley was also an enthusiastic musician and played the piano semi-professionally in a dance band in Manchester.

Like Stanley, Ellen, who preferred to be known as ‘Helen’, had seen her education end prematurely when she left school at 14 without any qualifications. The two of them had a mutual interest in Liberal politics, but it was at a Young Communist rally in Manchester where they first met.

Stanley was born on 1 July 1912, at 38 Lightoaks Road, a pleasant terraced house with a neat front garden on a tree-lined street in Pendleton, Salford. His father was a post office clerk and his mother also worked for the post office for a period. When Stanley was 15 they moved to a larger house at 21 Belgrave Road in nearby Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

There was no doubt that Helen Mape was definitely marrying ‘up’ when she wed Stanley on 11 July 1940 at Manchester Register Office, even though her father had by then become a mill foreman and the family were living at the more upmarket 358 Lower Broughton Road in Salford. On paper nothing could have seemed more respectable. Stanley was an insurance claims inspector and his bride was working as a clerk for a raincoat manufacturing firm. It bore all the hallmarks of an unremarkable wedding, except that Helen was already four months pregnant.

One can only guess the effect the discovery had on the young couple. The law and the health risks meant abortion was not an option, even if it had been desired. At 27 Stanley, who was still living with his parents, may have been ready for marriage, but Helen, whose ambitious streak would become apparent in time, did not necessarily share his enthusiasm.

By the time the baby was born on 15 December 1940, in St Mary’s Hospital, Prestbury, Stanley and Helen had found accommodation at 8 Heathbank Road, Cheadle Hulme. It was not home for long, as Stanley’s war obligations took the family south to Plymouth. He became a sublieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and they took up residence at 1 Townsend Villas.

Foote-Wood remembered his father telling him that he captained a destroyer, but there were no exaggerated heroics. Occasionally it would stumble across a German ship in the Channel when it was foggy and fire a few shots, but that was about as dramatic as it got.

The surprise and panic caused by Helen’s first pregnancy had understandably made the couple cautious about being caught out again. Money was tight and the upheavals caused by the war meant circumstances were not ideal for another baby. This could explain the five-year gap between Chris’s birth and Penny’s arrival at the Alexandra Home in Devonport, Plymouth, in August 1945. Although Stanley’s occupation was stated as ‘sublieutenant’ on Penny’s birth certificate, he insisted that ‘author’ was added in parentheses; writing evidently held more attraction than battle or insurance and the war allowed for some indulgence and a temporary escape from the workaday world.

The Wood’s first daughter was born at a more stable time than her brother. The war in Europe was over, and it was quickly followed by the Japanese surrender. Hostilities may have ceased but Stanley, who went on to become a divisional officer at the Royal Naval Barracks at Devonport, had to wait until he was demobbed in June 1946 before he could return to his Northern roots.

Had the family decided to stay at Townsend Villas and settle in the South it is doubtful the public would have ever heard the name Victoria Wood. Victoria herself was certain that she would not have become what she became had she not been born and raised in Lancashire. ‘I think there’s something special about coming from the North West. Most of our good comedians come from the North West,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something special about the way people talk and the attitude people have. People are very ironic there which they tend not to be in other parts of the country. I just think it’s given me a lot.’

The return to Lancashire meant a return to the world of insurance for Stanley. For some, it may have seemed a drab comedown, but Stanley, who would go on to specialise in insuring pharmaceutical chemists, derived a great deal of satisfaction from his work.

‘Why they settled in Bury, I honestly don’t know,’ said Foote-Wood. Bury is a typical East Lancashire cotton town with the motto Industry Overcomes All Things. It has the dubious honour of being Home of the Black Pudding.

The town was a coincidentally apt place for someone fresh from naval service. It was the home town of Robert Whitehead, inventor of the torpedo and the great-grandfather of the famous von Trapp children. But the town’s most famous son is Sir Robert Peel, creator of the Metropolitan Police. A tower was erected on the bleak Holcombe Hill in his honour and a statue of the former prime minister stands proudly in the town centre.

The Woods’ decision to settle in the town was most probably due to Bury Liberal Association appointing Stanley as the Liberal agent for the borough. As the agent for Bury and Radcliffe in the 1950 General Election, Stanley would need to draw on all his skills at salesmanship to persuade the electorate to share his political passion. The candidate was the Oxford-educated history master at Bury Grammar School, Colin Hindley. For once, Stanley’s persuasive charms would desert him. The Conservative candidate won with 26,485 votes, Labour polled 25,705 and Hindley received a meagre 5,662 votes – the smallest Liberal vote in Bury since 1942. Seemingly, the Bury public were more convinced by Stanley’s insurance policies than his political ones.

His reaction to the humiliating result was splashed across the front page of the Bury Times under the headline: LIBERALS DETERMINED TO MAKE A FIGHTING COMEBACK. ‘Although it has been said it was a thoughtful election,’ he said, ‘I feel we were up against a sort of cup final-cum-football pools mentality with the majority of the voters seeing it as a two-party fight.’ Stanley believed it was inevitable that in the future there would be a fairer system of distributing seats so that millions of votes would not be wasted. But his mood was buoyant and he claimed Bury’s Liberals would become more active and confirmed in their beliefs. Their attitude, he said, was: ‘When are we going to have another fight?’

He was being somewhat over-optimistic. When the next General Election was held in October 1951, confidence was so low that, for the first time in 20 years, Bury Liberals did not even have a candidate. Perhaps bruised by defeat, Stanley never stood in any elections himself. But his Liberal sympathies influenced the young Chris, who used to help him deliver campaign leaflets.

Victoria’s main memory of living at 98 Tottington Road was of sitting in bed, reading. But even at such a tender age a yearning for celebrity had already begun, and she had a feeling inside that one day she would be on stage. ‘I remember sitting in our garden on Tottington Road thinking “I want to be famous”. I can remember that from before I was five. It’s very, very clear to me,’ she said.

‘I don’t know whether it’s partly being the youngest of four and feeling sort of a bit anonymous and wanting to make my mark and feeling that I couldn’t really compete with the rest of my family – and so I had to do something different, I had to find another way through. It might be that.’ Her idea of fame meant being somebody of significance. ‘I didn’t feel important and I wanted to.’

In some families the youngest child is pampered, but that was not the case with the Woods. Victoria felt she was one of those people who was just there. Penny and Rosalind were quite happy without her company, Stanley’s spare time was taken up with writing, and Helen’s attention was focused on Chris. He had a severe bout of tuberculosis when young, and spent months in bed.

‘All I have ever wanted to do is make people laugh, probably to make people like me,’ said Victoria.

Occasionally there would be opportunities to make a mark as a youngster. Entertainment had been a part of Stanley’s childhood and it was a tradition he handed down. Chris Foote-Wood remembered having to dance, sing, recite or play the piano whenever he visited his paternal grandparents, and Victoria was also encouraged to perform.

She recalled: ‘When I was very, very little I pulled faces a lot – it was what I could do, what I was good at. They used to say, “Go in the kitchen and make up a face.” I used to go out, come back with a new expression and be very amusing to people.’

Those front room performances might have been the only concerts Victoria ever gave if one Sunday afternoon outing had ended differently.

‘I remember Victoria straying onto our land once,’ said Joan Wood (no relation) who lived four doors away at the other end of the Tottington Road terrace. ‘She was lost or misplaced. She was only a little girl when she wandered into the rough at the bottom where there were trees and rhododendrons. It was a rough patch leading down to the water. One afternoon there was a ring at the bell. It was the two elder ones and they asked could they go through to have a look because they’d lost Victoria.’

Joan’s husband, Neville, accompanied Chris and Penny down the steps and they found Victoria in the undergrowth.

‘He picked her up and twisted his knee coming back up the steps. He always joked that it was because of Victoria Wood that he had to have a cartilage operation. The cartilage used to come out but he could manoeuvre it back,’ she recalled fondly.

Joan was the only woman in the terrace who had anything in common with Helen: both women were roughly the same age and both had to contend with small children (Joan gave birth just a year before Victoria was born). But despite such apparent similarities, there was little closeness.

‘I didn’t have a lot to do with her. There was no popping into each other’s houses or exchanging Christmas cards. I used to see her pushing the pram down the road and we’d stop and talk about the children, but that was about it.’

More often than not Helen would be making her way to the embroidery shop at the bottom of the road. Needlework was a hobby of hers and she was a staunch member of the Costume Society, travelling all over the country to attend shows, events and exhibitions.

One of Victoria’s most outstanding talents was the ability to create finely drawn comic characters who remained believable in their absurdity. Explaining their origins, she said: ‘They’re not invented characters. They do exist. Maybe I remember them from my very early childhood when we lived in a street.’ Her immediate next-door neighbour on Tottington Road could have been the template for the crouched and senile Mrs Overall of Victoria’s celebrated soap opera, ‘Acorn Antiques’. Joan Wood had vivid memories of the occupant of number 96. ‘A very, very old lady called Mary Park lived there on her own. She was a little bent old thing with a bun. She’d been seen distressed on the doorstep. She should never have been there on her own. Her family had owned an antiques shop on Bolton Street.’

The fourth occupants of the row were two spinsters. Miss Gladys Craighill was the manageress of a leather stall in Bury indoor market, and Miss Mary Wolstenholme managed a gown shop in Bolton Street.

Mrs Wood’s phrasing was vaguely recognisable in some of Victoria’s characters. ‘They live in a beautiful cottage just outside Cambridge,’ she said of her textile artist son Michael (‘He’s got a piece in Brisbane Cathedral’) and his wife. ‘They’ve no children; they have rabbits.’

It was a lonely life at Tottington Road for Victoria, who did not remember having any friends or visitors. Prior to joining Elton County Primary School she believed she was the only child in Bury, and on her very first day at school she embraced a male classmate because, according to her, she had never seen a little boy before. So isolated had she been that she had little understanding of how to behave – even claiming all lost school property as her own.

No sooner had Victoria started at the school than the Woods decided to move house. A change of school at such an early age would have been an unsettling experience for most small children, but the location of Victoria’s new home would have a more profound effect on her. Ironically, the girl who grew up to be voted the ideal neighbour, had no neighbours. Initially damaging, but ultimately forming her, the isolation ruled out any hope of a normal childhood.

‘I come from a pretty ordinary place,’ claimed Victoria, but it would have been difficult for the Woods to find a more extraordinary home than Birtle Edge House. Perched high on the moors above Bury, in its lofty position it commands a tremendous view over the Pennines and across to Manchester. But the remote location also means the house is frequently enveloped by fog. In the winter it is not unusual for it to be cut off by snow for up to two weeks at a time, and when it rains the narrow road becomes a stream.

‘Northern country. Bits of moors, bits of barns, bits of factories … It wasn’t pretty country, at all … but it was space, it had space’, was how she remembered it. The town’s elders had viewed the site more positively when they decided to build Birtle Edge House half a century earlier. They deemed its ‘bracing heights’ perfect for the new Bury Children’s Holiday Home, which would provide beneficial breaks and ‘delightful holidays’ in the country for the town’s most poverty-stricken youngsters. The Home, which was later used as an observation post during the Second World War and to house Polish war refugees, was the gift of local businessman Cuthbert Cartwright Grundy, and was officially opened on 1 August 1908. It was a great civic occasion and assembled guests witnessed Warth Prize Band lead a procession of 50 poor children from Bury Ragged School.

‘We do not pretend to have solved any great social problem, but we earnestly trust that some boy or girl who shall come here will carry away with them some thought of beauty and order, given them by some wild flower, or by a bird’s sweet song, which will help them to grow to noble manhood or pure womanhood, and enable them to fill useful places in the life and work of our town,’ said Mr H. Crabtree, the secretary of the Home, in his opening day speech. When the Woods moved in exactly 50 years later one of the first things they did was rip out the overgrown rhododendrons.

The idea of a large, sprawling house on the hillside may sound idyllic, but the building cannot escape its past. Even today, when the sunshine is glinting off the white walls, and Red Admirals flutter around those rhododendron bushes which survived Helen’s hands, there is an air of institutionalised austerity about the place.

‘Underfed and delicate children will be better for coming to this home, breathing the air of these hills and having good, nourishing food,’ Mr Crabtree had said in 1908. The Wood children, by comparison, lived more frugally according to Joan Lloyd, who often saw Helen doing her shopping at Holt’s, the corner shop at the bottom of Castle Hill Road. ‘She always used to buy a quarter of ham or tongue or corned beef for all of them; I don’t know how they didn’t starve,’ she recalled. Victoria herself said the meals Helen prepared, of which Spam curry was a speciality, were ‘horrendous’.

The framed portrait of Cuthbert Grundy was not the only thing the Woods inherited when they became the new owners of Birtle Edge House. Inadequate plumbing and the absence of electricity was the legacy of the building’s past. Electricity was quickly installed, but up until 1986, when a bore hole was finally made, Stanley Wood had to walk half a mile to pump the household water supply into a holding tank.

As Bury Children’s Holiday Home, the entrance to the building was across a quadrangle. It boasted a veranda where Sunday services were held in the summer, a large entrance hall, a dining room that seated thirty, two dormitories with enough room for twenty-eight beds, a huge kitchen, a scullery and a pantry.

Helen Wood immediately set about dividing the house with hardboard walls. One of the dormitories was converted into three bedrooms for the girls, Stanley had an office and Helen had her own name-plated room which she used for sewing. The locks installed on all the internal doors for security summed up the distinctly individual lives.

‘We lived in a very strange way. We all lived in separate rooms,’ said Victoria. ‘We weren’t the most demonstrative of families. In fact, the idea was to be on your own as much as you could. We used to get our meals and retreat to our rooms.’ The living room was rarely used, its neon lights making it look, as Victoria said, ‘like Death Row’.

There were no friends or neighbours calling in, and no family get-togethers. Helen did not believe in festivities, leaving Stanley to carve the Christmas turkey. She was even against relatives visiting and as a result Victoria never knew her aunts and uncles, and remembered only her paternal grandmother. A rented television did provide a welcome focus, but Helen always insisted on sending it back in the summer because she thought it was wrong to watch it then. The field-sized garden would have been ideal for pony or dog, but there were to be no surrogate friends to keep the lonely Victoria company. ‘We’ve never been a family to keep pets,’ said Chris Foote-Wood.

As he had left home in 1958 to study engineering at Durham University, there was no time for any real relationship to be forged between him and Victoria. The age gap, and the fact that he already had a child of his own by the age of 23 added to the situation and, although they kept in touch, they remained relatively distant.

‘When you’re a child thirteen years is a lifetime. I was five when he went away to university and I didn’t have much to do with him after that,’ said Victoria. With her sisters it was different. They were there but Victoria was made to feel like an unwelcome outsider.

‘They were horrible. All sisters are horrible. Well, mine were. Very bossy, and they treated me like a nuisance. They were very proficient at giving “young Victoria” a good quashing, telling-off and bossing-about.’

Whatever she wanted to do, they found very babyish, although they did indulge in childish sadism, using Victoria as the butt of their teasing. ‘I was cruelly sat on, sat on and tormented for many years, and made to eat putty.’

Unfortunately, Victoria’s relationship with her parents, particularly Helen, did not make up for the rather strained state of affairs she had with her siblings. ‘My parents were not very family minded,’ she said. ‘Their interest was not in their children.’

Looking back, Victoria realised her mother had probably been severely depressed throughout most of her childhood. She attributed it largely to Helen’s inability to admit that moving from a normal, busy street to the bleak and remote Birtle Edge House had been a massive mistake. Because the family never communicated with each other about anything of real significance, it was a state of affairs that could not be remedied.

‘Indomitable’ and ‘scary’ were the words she used to describe her mother. They were qualities that did not endear Helen to those living in the Birtle area. Joan Lloyd’s memories of her as being a rather difficult and cold woman were typical of the few people who actually came into contact with her. ‘She was very aloof and snobby. You never got past first base with her. She wasn’t popular at all. She wouldn’t even look at you.’ Her memories of Stanley were more favourable and she remembered him as ‘a bit of a toff, a pleasant, well-spoken man who always gave you a smile’.

Helen’s flintiness did not mellow with age and years later, when she was the sole inhabitant of Birtle Edge House, she was still giving short shrift to outsiders. One unfortunate woman made the mistake of telephoning to see if she was okay after a particularly deep fall of snow. ‘I am perfectly capable of looking after myself,’ declared Helen loftily, before slamming the receiver down.

Distant if not dysfunctional, is probably the best way of describing life at Birtle Edge House. Victoria first publicly acknowledged the parental ambivalence in 1996 when she was the subject of The South Bank Show. In one telling segment Melvyn Bragg probed her about the effects of Helen and Stanley’s disinterest. She responded with a rueful smile, a jutting chin and a sigh as she carefully chose her words. ‘That’s just the way it was and I didn’t expect anything different really. That’s what we were used to: that we all lived in a very separate way.’ She added: ‘There was encouragement in the sense that you could do what you wanted, which was a bit scary in a sense.’

And Helen’s reaction after viewing the documentary? ‘She just said how nice the garden looked,’ said Pam Wheeldon who, with her husband, bought Birtle Edge House in the mid-1990s when Helen moved to Skipton.

It was not until many years later, after therapy, that Victoria was able to describe her upbringing as what it was; neglect.

The parental indifference must have hurt and Victoria dealt with it by withdrawing. There were no attempts at gaining Helen’s or Stanley’s approval or attention. ‘I’m glad to be doing something they like, but I always did what I wanted to do … I didn’t do it for them,’ she once said. ‘I love them and I’m very proud of them, but I can’t ever remember really trying to please them.’

Even when her youngest daughter became nationally famous, Helen refused to discuss her. She would immediately start talking about her other children whenever a rare visitor to Birtle Edge House spotted Victoria on family photographs, and would later take to hiding them in a drawer. ‘My mother won’t discuss me with other people,’ Victoria once said. ‘If someone says “You sound awfully like Victoria Wood” she might admit through gritted teeth we’re related.’

Stanley, however, basked in Victoria’s glory and even introduced himself as her father to complete strangers at bus stops. ‘He was a frustrated entertainer. He’d done shows in the Navy and things like that. He would have loved to have done what I do,’ Victoria said. Stanley would share a double act of sorts with his daughter in the wryly ironic letters they exchanged in later life. Victoria believed he too would have achieved success as a comedian or musician if he had been of a different generation, but there was never any question of Stanley forcing Victoria to live his ambitions for him as he enjoyed his insurance work so much.

Stanley’s creativity and industry was the more obvious influence on Victoria’s career, but Helen did contribute in part. Despite claiming to have no sense of humour, Helen was, according to Victoria, unwittingly funny and very observant, and was used as the basis for many of Victoria’s older comic characters.

Television comedy shows were a welcome relief to the lonely, young Victoria. She claimed she ‘wasted’ her childhood slumped in front of the box, but the ideas and dreams it planted in her were a vital part of her adult success. It enabled her to see how comedy worked and, in the absence of close friends and family, it was the performers who set an example. ‘When I started watching television a lot, I wanted to do that, to “do television” as a job,’ explained Victoria, whose biggest pleasure was discovering comedy programmes.

Comedy was something of an antidote to the grim lifestyle of Birtle Edge House. ‘I think it was more my own thing,’ Victoria said. ‘Obviously, I gradually realised how witty my father was, but humour wasn’t a particularly frequent thing. We didn’t all roll around on the floor together … so comedy didn’t feel to me a family thing, but something I was into.’

Domestically, Victoria’s years at Birtle Edge House were lacking, but culturally there was stimulation that formed a rare bond between the family. Bolton’s Octagon Theatre was a popular destination, but seeing one of the actors greeting his wife at the station amazed Victoria – she did not think actors did such mundane things. Every Christmas there would be a family outing to the pantomime at Manchester’s Palace Theatre where the Woods sat at the back of the gods. The theatre trips were not limited to the festive season and Victoria was lucky enough to see some of the great entertainers of the day in concert. It was on one such outing that the foundations of her own career were built.

Victoria added: ‘She did the whole two hours, or whatever, just her and the man at the piano. I was made aware that that was a job, that you could go on stage and stand on your own.’

Grenfell’s performance that night left an indelible impression on Victoria and the gauche comedienne became a role model. ‘It had such a huge effect on me that when I was deciding what I wanted to do for a job, when I was about fifteen, I decided that’s what I would do. I wanted to stand on stage on my own doing something like Joyce Grenfell.’ The newly discovered career also matched Victoria’s psychological make-up. ‘As a very sort of isolating person I find that appealing: the idea of standing on stage and not being with other people.’

British comedy owes a huge debt to Grenfell, not only for her own talents, but for passing the baton on to Victoria, who admitted: ‘If I hadn’t seen her it might never have occurred to me.’ The seed was planted.

After the performance, the family momentarily tore Victoria away from her starry-eyed dreams by snapping her back to the reality of her lowly status.

Victoria never forgot this act of kindness and always made time for her own fans at the stage door after shows. ‘I wait until everybody’s had an autograph and everybody’s said what they want to say. It’s really, really important.’

Grenfell died in 1979, but had she lived it is highly likely that she would have been recruited by Victoria. The two did ‘appear’ together in 1996 thanks to the South African caricaturist, Nicky Taylor. He was commissioned to design a pack of cards honouring 54 exceptional women to mark the 50th anniversary of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Victoria and Joyce were the jokers of the pack. Victoria paid her own tribute to Grenfell by incorporating a ‘Mrs Comstock’ in a 1988 stage routine about a holiday flight. It was the same name of the nice but nervous woman played by Grenfell in her monologue, ‘First Flight’.

Besides outings to the theatre there were weekly trips to Bury’s cinemas, the Art being a Wood family favourite. Comedies such as Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man were, not surprisingly, Victoria’s favourite type of film. In fact, she would sometimes refuse to join the family if she didn’t approve of the selected film. But there was laughter to be found in even the most serious films.

‘They always seemed to be showing Biblical epics,’ recalled Victoria. ‘I saw a different Jesus being nailed to the cross every week.’ The memory of the Bury audience calling out ‘Don’t drink it!’ to Victor Mature during the drugging scene in Samson and Delilah still made her chuckle decades later, but not all her visits to the cinema were as fondly remembered. A man once stroked her leg throughout an entire film but she was too shy and embarrassed to complain. She was just thankful it was not a double feature.

An attempt to alleviate the isolation of her home life and overcome her shyness came when Victoria joined Birtle Parish Church Brownies. Unlike her brother, who had worked diligently towards a Duke of Edinburgh Award gold medal, Victoria was not suited to group activities. Despite her young age, Helen expected her to press her own uniform, and the crumpled result and subsequent embarrassment may have contributed to Victoria’s short stay in the pack.

When the family moved to Birtle, Victoria transferred to the nearest school, Fairfield County Primary on Rochdale Old Road. Her world was upturned in more ways than one as, for some reason, the classes at Fairfield were numbered in reverse order.

‘It was a fairly strict school, but enjoyable with a friendly atmosphere,’ said Kevin German. It did not dawn on him until the 1980s that the Victoria Wood he saw on television was the same Vicky Wood who used to play chainy, tag and bob in the playground with him and Marilyn Wood.

Her classmates remembered Victoria as a plump, scruffy, red-faced girl who was rarely seen without sweets or her thumb in her mouth. Accounts of her personality varied, but years later the impression Victoria made was still vivid in their minds. ‘She was a bit of a loner,’ recalled Dave Roscoe, while Graham Bentley remembered her as ‘outgoing, lively and a bit of a chatterbox who had a lot to say for herself’. Graham Spencer said: ‘She was funny, but not funny ha-ha. She was a bit of a queer girl. She was very pushy and forthcoming and clever, but she wasn’t a show-off.’

One girl in Victoria’s class lost a leg when she was knocked down outside the school. Another classmate became a transsexual. ‘He caused quite a rumpus when he went into Huntley Mount Union Club dressed as a woman,’ said Billy Armstead. ‘He joined the RAF and later had a sex change. He calls himself Rita now, I believe.’

Victoria herself felt similarly out of place and wanted to be a boy. She felt she had nothing in common with the other girls in her class whose play consisted of pretending to be passive housewives, which made Victoria feel like she was ‘trapped with 47 middle-aged women’. Such frustrating sexual stereotyping was something that she would come up against again and again in her early days of stand-up. But her yearning to escape the limits of her own gender would later help her to develop and shape an act that she hoped would appeal to all sexes.

Victoria said that at Fairfield her thing was ‘being clever’ and her competitive streak was already evident in the way she vied with Ann Kilgowan and Graham Howarth to be first at everything. There were also early signs of her creative talent. Janet Robinson (née Ashton), her teacher in Class Two, said: ‘Her handwriting was awful, her books were messy, but she wrote some wonderful stories. I remember an inspector, Mr Page, looking at her work and saying “Watch this girl. She’ll go places.”’

Victoria even made a positive impression on the strict Norman Rushton, who taught her in her final year at the school. ‘We had a very good relationship. Her command of language was exceptional, she certainly stood out. Victoria worked hard and had a good imagination. She was ebullient and a real extrovert.’

Hard-working, but by no means saintly, Victoria found herself attracted to the notorious twins, John and Robert Mahon, who were always getting into trouble. She demonstrated her affection during one outing to Bury Public Baths. John was the first boy she kissed on the lips. It was underwater and she was so excited she had to leave the pool immediately to have a sixpence cup of chicken soup.

Her early ambition to appear on stage did not have much of an outlet at Fairfield. ‘I narrated the nativity play once, but I was never an angel or anything like that. I never even got a chance to dress up, which was a sad disappointment to me.’ Decades later she could still quote Helen’s verdict on her nativity appearance: ‘Well I hope nobody knew you were my child, you kept moving your head from side-to-side.’

Instead, it was Victoria’s piano playing that was to provide her with her first public audiences.