Biography

I was born in Birmingham in 1949. My home was a terraced house rented out to my Gran and Grandpa. There was me, my brother Richie, mum and dad and the grandparents on dad’s side.

Mum’s recollections:

Val, (that’s what the V stands for), was a sly whiney baby. She’d wait until Phil and Tom, (my dad and my grandpa), were coming in the door and then start bawling. Tom would say, ‘Two women in the house and they can’t look after a tiny baby’. As soon as Tom picked the little wretch up she was all smiles.

When I was five mum and dad separated and initially because Richie had measles I was sent away to stay with my Aunty and Uncle near Enfield while mum waited for Richie to get better. She filled the waiting time with ordering saucepans, sheets, blankets and hats and leather gloves for herself from the Birmingham shops. Gran told me years later, that bills were still coming in months after she left.
I stayed with Aunty for six weeks as Uncle was in hospital having had a car crash while under the influence. Aunty bought me ribbons for my plaits which filled a shoe box and taught me to knit. I remember afternoons with the curtains drawn watching horse racing with her. It was a happy time.

Aunty’s recollection:

She was no trouble.

For a while after mum and Richie came down from Birmingham we lived with our cousins. The three of us shared a room. There were five cousins and it was very cramped. In retrospect I appreciate how difficult it was for mum - nobody wanted to let out a flat to a woman with two children and no husband. Finally we found an upstairs flat quite near to Aunty. Richie had his own room which he filled with model planes and armies of soldiers and cowboys. I shared with mum and under my bed kept my plastic weaving loom and toy garage from the jumble sale which I used as a dolls’ house. It had a car lift and Teenage Doll who only wore bra, knickers and plastic sandals used it as a punishment for my other smaller dolls when they misbehaved, putting them in the lift and letting it bang down to ground level. Teenage Doll was possibly my alter ego. She attacked Richie’s armies when he set them out on the carpet and was impervious to the matchstick ammunition he pelted her with from his tiny model cannons.

Richie’s recollection:

I have no recollection of my sister at that time but I do remember Teenage Doll. She was a bloody nuisance always jumping off the garage roof and flattening whole battalions.

I was rubbish at school. I made no friends until I was eleven and getting them so late I had no idea what to do with them. Fortunately we moved to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire and I went to Cheshunt Grammar and had the chance to start all over again with a new batch. I was a bit more successful but was still rubbish at the lessons. In classes of thirty I usually came in the last three which surprised me and infuriated mum. I wasn’t too bad at art and English but my favourite occupation was reading in the library. I truly did hate school, played truant, forged the one letter from my mother saying I had an ‘upset tummy’, over and over again. I left school and got married to a chap who looked like one of the Bee Gees.

Teacher’s recollection:

Valerie was a disruptive element. She was a tall, gangling girl who thought it amusing to play practical jokes, concocted ridiculous excuses for not doing her homework, sewed an epaulette onto the shoulder of her blazer and tucked her rolled up school beret into it. Coming from a broken home was no real excuse. She shone in nothing. Had more upset stomachs than I’ve had gin and tonics.....she was a good if unimaginative forger.

Marriage lasted a long time. I’ll skim over those years as they represent a period in my life I can’t yet quite find the lighter side to. However during those years I went to the London College of Printing as a mature student where I studied graphic design. I formed a design partnership with a friend I’d met on a sandwich course at the BBC and we worked together for nearly twenty years. Our work ethic was to have fun and make a living. We had a lot of fun but didn’t always quite make a living. We painted murals for hotels and restaurants, never serious - dancing tomatoes, acrobatic mushrooms, embracing lettuce leaves. We made wooden six foot high signs of chefs holding plates of lurid coloured spaghetti, in fact one of these chefs stands in Parkway, Camden Town. Even now, several years after the partnership finished I’m still tempted to answer the telephone with a cheery, ‘Hello, this is MVL Designs’. MV for Mary Vassallo, VL for Val Lee.

Mary Vassallo's recollection:

It was during those years that I learnt the rudiments of tap dancing which has taken me forward to the ballro om dancing I enjoy today. Val and I practiced on a sheet of ply wood when there wasn’t much doing on the work front. She wasn’t very good being tall and rather awkward but I believe even then I had a natural aptitude.

By 1997 I realised I wanted to concentrate on writing. Some years earlier at the age of forty, a long term relationship with a woman had ended and feeling depressed and sorry for myself I joined a creative writing class in Hackney taking with me three pages of writing about my aunt and mum and a visit to Worthing Theatre to see ‘Perchance to Dream’, starring Patrick Mower. I’ve been writing ever since. With several other women we formed a literary cabaret group called ALL MOUTH, NO TROUSERS; which provided a platform for ourselves and other women to read, recite, sing and dance before a live audience. At that time I began recounting the Joanie stories that later became part of my first novel, ‘THE COMEDIENNE’.

I don’t only write humorous fiction. I have a more sombre side which surfaces in ‘Still Precious’ written for the Diva Book of Short Stories and two novels; VINEGAR FLY and BELLBIRD which I hope will eventually be published. Although much of my fiction is based around lesbian characters this does not apply in every case. I didn’t realise I was a lesbian till my early thirties so many of my life experiences are from the straight world before that time.

For many years I took my ability to make people laugh for granted; something I did to cover shyness, put unhappiness in a bearable context, or ease a difficult situation. However over recent years I’ve come to value this ability. It’s an absolute joy when an audience laughs or just one person chuckles. And when I look back over the things that have gone right and those that have gone wrong in my life, they were all really good for me - I didn’t learn at school but I’ve learnt so much since. It all feeds into my writing and often the times that were the most painful, in retrospect have a very funny side.

Dad's recollection: I mean, where did her ears come from? I hadn’t seen the little tike for a year or two and suddenly there she was with a pair of ears that Dumbo the elephant would have been proud of. It was most distressing. I make no bones about it, I can’t stomach physical imperfection especially in my own kith and kin. I said, ‘Val dear, for my sake, grow your bloody hair and cover yon eyesores’.