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 th ey 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 wait ing
time with ordering saucepans, sheets, blan kets
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.
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 eleve n 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 a nd 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 w ith 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’.BELLBIRD
wh ich 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.rs
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.
