We all sat round the kitchen table: me, Mam, Dad, Gillian and Andrew. My dad looked absolutely shell-shocked, I was sitting there panicking so much I wanted to be sick and Gillian and Andrew were still shouting and just going into meltdown.

‘Be quiet and let me tell you,’ Mam said, shushing Gillian and Andrew. At last there was silence, total silence, and Mam spoke softly.

‘I was 21 when we met, me and your dad.’ Mam nodded towards my dad, to make it clear she was talking about him. ‘I already had Joe, and you two.’ She looked at Gillian and Andrew now, but not at me. My brother’s and sister’s eyes were on stalks, bulging out of their heads.

‘I was married to your dad, to your real dad,’ she told them. ‘But we broke up not long after we had you both. Andrew was only a baby. Your dad, Garry, was very young when I met him. He was 17. And he took me on, with three kids. Then we had Cheryl and Garry together.’

Mam took a deep breath and we all just stared at her.

I think it took us all a few minutes to take in what she had said. What she was telling us was that Joe, Gillian and Andrew were only my half siblings.

‘Is that what you mean?’ I asked her once I finally felt able to speak. ‘Gillian and Andrew aren’t my real brother and sister? They have a different dad to me and Garry?’

Gillian and Andrew were asking loads of questions too, shouting and stomping around the room. I don’t know where Garry was, but he was only seven at the time so was too young to hear all this anyway.

‘Our Cheryl and our Garry are only our half brother and half sister?’ Gillian screeched. ‘Is that what you’re telling us, after all these years?’

‘Yes,’ Mam said, in a quiet but firm voice.

My dad had lost all the colour from his face. ‘When did you and Mam get married?’ I asked him.

‘Actually,’ he replied, looking anxiously at my mam. ‘We’re not married.’

I think it was the first time he had spoken. I was stunned into silence again, but Andrew was shouting and getting more and more angry.

‘How come we’re all called Tweedy then?’

‘Well, your mam just uses my name, so we’re all the same.’

‘The same?’ Gillian screamed. ‘I don’t think so!’

I can remember a lot of sadness, falling right down on us like it came out of the ceiling and just surrounded the whole family. Andrew and Gillian’s faces were filled with confusion; devastation, in fact. They were asking more and more questions and shouting and screaming a lot, at each other and at my mam and dad. I was just staring at my dad and thinking, ‘How could you know all these years and say nothing? How can this possibly be?’

I don’t think anyone got an explanation as to why this secret had been kept for so long; at least I certainly don’t remember hearing one.

Garry doesn’t remember any of this chaos at all, and Joe wasn’t there either. When I thought about it later, I wondered if Joe already knew, or had at least suspected something. I mean, I eventually worked out that my dad would have been about 13 when Joe was born, as my dad was four years younger than my mam. Maybe Joe had worked things out for himself already.

At this point Joe was 18 and my dad was 32. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember Joe being a part of that day. Maybe he just didn’t need to hear this.

‘I’m going and I’m never coming back,’ Gillian yelled. She slammed the front door so hard I was afraid the glass in the windows would break, and I started to cry.

Gillian had gone from being my sister to my half sister to not being there at all in the space of about 30 minutes. The police came knocking on the door later that day and I remember seeing nothing but anxiety etched on my mam and dad’s faces for a very long time. Gillian didn’t come home that night or the night after that and soon the days became weeks. I felt sick with worry every day, from the minute I opened my eyes in the morning until I eventually fell asleep, exhausted, hours and hours after getting into bed and staring at Gillian’s empty bunk bed each night.

Joe was out looking for her every day and night, going crazy. He used to fight with Gillian a lot and they had some terrible arguments in their time, but if anyone or anything outside the family threatened her he was on it, straight away. He was combing the streets, doing all he could to track her down. He always had that same super-protective attitude towards all of us.

Joe eventually found Gillian after six weeks of sheer hell at home. She’d been staying with a friend and I heard she had taken drugs, trying to block out what had happened. Joe literally barged into the friend’s house, got hold of Gillian like his arms were a straitjacket and carried her home, kicking and screaming.

‘I’ve met my real dad,’ I heard Gillian tell my mam. ‘I’m gonna keep in touch with him.’

He was called Tony and lived not far from us in Newcastle but Mam had not kept in touch with him after they got divorced, which was about 13 or 14 years earlier. I don’t know how she found him, but Gillian had marched right up to his front door and hammered on it until a woman answered.

‘Is Tony there?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘His daughter. Who are you?’

‘His wife. You’d better come in.’

Gillian was 15 years old when she did that – maybe the worst age possible for something like this to have happened. It must have been a terrible ordeal for her, but she waited for Tony to get home from work and met him that same day. It turned out he was a tattoo artist, which fascinated us all when we found that out, because Joe had always been very artistic and amazing at drawing cartoons. We’d often said: ‘I wonder where he gets that from?’ and now we knew.

‘You’ll have to meet my dad,’ Gillian told me. ‘You won’t believe it. He looks exactly like our Andrew.’

‘So … do you like him?’

‘I think I will.’

I didn’t know what to say or how to react. It was a hell of a lot to take in. I’d suffered major anxiety when Gillian was missing and now I began to worry constantly about everything, every day.

Andrew started running away a lot too, and whenever the police knocked on the door I’d panic, imagining all kinds. I was aware that Andrew had started sniffing glue, though I couldn’t tell you exactly when his habit started, or whether it was already a problem before the bomb went off in the family. All I know is that I’d lie in bed waiting for him to come home, not being able to sleep until I knew he was safely back in the house. I’d look out of the window, watching for him coming up the street, sometimes right through until five or six o’clock in the morning. When it was time for school I could never get up.

‘Are you awake, Cheryl?’ Mam would shout. ‘Yes, but I’m just resting my eyes,’ I always replied. I was late and tired all the time.

One night, Andrew had been out with no key and so he smashed a window to get back in. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and I listened as a huge row kicked off between him and my dad.

I didn’t care about the shouting; I was just glad Andrew was home, even though the whole house started to stink of glue once he was inside. The fumes rose up the stairs and hung in the air, and to this day I still feel sick at the smell of glue.

‘Get to bed, go on with you!’ Mam would shout, and I’d lie there wide awake and on red alert for a long time after the house fell quiet.

This wasn’t the first time Andrew had been in trouble. He was done for thieving when he was 13, which was a year or so before all this kicked off with my mam and dad, but to be honest I don’t really remember that being a big hoo-hah. The bizzies, as we usually called the police, were always knocking on doors all over our estate. If someone got arrested or even sent to prison the neighbours were more inclined to sympathise and ask if there was anything they could do to help the family, rather than to judge or look down their noses at you. It was practically an everyday occurrence, which must be why Andrew’s early problems with the police really didn’t stick in my mind.

‘Who’s that now?’ I remember my mam snapping whenever the police hammered on the door.

‘Can’t you tell?’ I always thought, because to my ears the ‘bizzie knock’ was instantly recognisable. It always made my nerves tense and my stomach sink as I wondered what would happen next.

Andrew became more and more volatile and unpredictable after he found out about his real dad, and before long he was completely unrecognisable as my funny brother who used to tell silly, exaggerated stories and make us all laugh.

‘I got struck by lightning,’ he told us once, when he came home soaking wet in a rainstorm at the age of about 10. ‘Really, Andrew?’ we all asked. ‘Really,’ he replied with wide, serious eyes. I remember we all laughed our heads off because he actually thought we would believe him, but that Andrew just seemed to vanish from our family, almost overnight.

My mam and dad split up not long after the family history had been laid bare. My dad had an affair and my mam tried to take him back, but they couldn’t make it work any more. I was still only 11 years old and that’s about all I knew. Mam went absolutely crazy for what felt like a long, long time, understandably so with all the trauma she had gone through. She was still only in her mid-thirties but the stress of bringing up five kids on her own, with the police banging at the door all the time, must have been very hard to cope with.

It was around this time when I first noticed my mam starting to become what you might call ‘spiritual’. She was always floating round the house being unbelievably calm when all hell was breaking loose, saying stuff like: ‘things happen for a reason’ and ‘live one day at a time, that’s all anyone can do’. Even if there was absolute hell going on in the house, with Andrew off his head on glue, ranting and raving, she’d stay incredibly calm.

Mam’s got lots of sisters and sometimes I’d hear her saying to one of my aunties, ‘Eee, there’s no good telling the kids what to do or they just want to do it more, don’t they? What can you do but hope they’ll grow out of it?’

When Andrew was 15 he stabbed someone in a fight. This guy had punched Gillian in the face in a pub and so he stabbed him. That’s what Gillian told me when she eventually came home, crying and in a terrible state, and without my brand-spanking-new trainers she’d borrowed from me that night.

‘Sorry about your trainers, Cheryl,’ she sobbed.

‘When will I get them back?’ I moaned, telling her I wished I hadn’t lent them to her because I wanted to wear them that weekend.

‘The police took them away for forensics. They got splattered with blood. Could be six months.’

‘What? They’ll be out of fashion by then. Anyway, as if I’d want them, after they’ve had blood on them.’

I was 12 years old and by now I was well used to Andrew being arrested regularly for thieving and stealing cars. That meant the seriousness of what he had done this time round didn’t hit me at all until I saw the rest of the family just crumbling in front of me. Everyone was in pieces and it was so painful to see. Mam cried a lot. People were talking about sentences and prison, and I was lying awake yet again, worrying myself sick.

‘We’ll go and visit him as much as we can,’ my mam said after the court case. ‘He’ll not serve the full sentence years, I’m sure.’

I hoped not. My brother had been sentenced to six years and was being locked up in a young offenders’ institution to start with as he was too young for an adult prison. I’d be 18 by the time he was released, so I felt like part of my childhood was taken away that day too.

By now Joe had left home and me, my mam, Gillian and Garry had moved into a three-storey house in Langhorn Close, Heaton, which was not far from our old family home in Byker.

Once a week I’d pop over and see my dad. I’d either get a bus over to his new house, which wasn’t far away, or I’d see him at my Nana’s. There was never any formal arrangement in place or anything like that; I was old enough to see him whenever I wanted to. Whatever my mam thought of my dad after their split, she never tried to poison our minds against him and I don’t really remember my relationship with my dad changing that much; he just didn’t live with us like he used to. ‘Want to listen to some Level 42?’ he’d ask, just as he used to when he lived with us.

It was my relationship with my mam that changed more, probably because she altered so much in herself. Without Dad there, I think me and Mam started to become closer, like friends as well as mother and daughter, and it’s more or less stayed that way ever since.

***

Throughout all this upheaval I carried on dancing every week. Whatever was going on in the rest of my life I always smiled when I was performing. It wasn’t my way of escaping the bad things that happened at home or anything as deep as that; dancing was just a part of my life I really enjoyed, while the family problems were something I accepted and got on with, because I had no choice and that was the way it was.

‘There’s a panto coming up, I’m gonna audition,’ I said to my mam one day.

‘That’s nice. We’ll go and see Andrew after.’

I’d go on my own to shows and auditions now, taking buses or getting lifts from other parents, because Mam couldn’t drive and we never had a car. Sometimes I’d still be in a sparkly costume when we visited Andrew in the young offenders’ institution. It was like a kind of foster home, with a lounge and a place you could play pool, but I knew Andrew was locked in his bedroom at night, which was a horrible thought.

‘Tell Andrew about your next show,’ Mam would say. She never seemed to get upset, blame Andrew or ask him why he had committed crimes, and we’d just talk about normal stuff, as if we were sitting in the kitchen at home like we used to.

‘It’s a panto but I haven’t got the part yet. I’ve made up my own dance routine, though, and I’ve done a tape of the music for the audition.’

‘What have you picked, Cheryl?’ Andrew asked.

‘“No Limit”, from 2 Unlimited. I got it off one of them “Best of” tapes my dad got me for Christmas. You know the one: “No, no, no, no, no, no, there’s no limit!”’

I sang the words a bit too loudly, which made everyone smile. Then we said our goodbyes and went home to have chips and egg for our tea. With Andrew inside, life seemed a lot more simple, and once I got used to the idea of him being away, I was glad I didn’t have to worry about what he was getting up to or what time he would come home.

‘Good luck, Cheryl,’ Andrew said, and I told him I didn’t need luck. ‘Thanks,’ I shrugged. ‘If I don’t get this one I’ll get another one.’ My belief that I was going to succeed as a performer was the one constant in my life. It was not a question of ‘if’ I was going to make it, just ‘when’.

2 ‘You need to get your head out of the clouds’

‘Cheryl Tweedy,’ the teacher called out at afternoon registration. ‘Yes, Sir. Here, Sir,’ I replied. ‘Oh, and by the way I was late this morning. Sorry, Sir.’

The teacher rolled his eyes as if to say ‘not again’ before giving me a late mark for the morning, even though I had not even been there, and then marking me in for the afternoon. After registration I walked straight out the back doors of Walker School at the first opportunity, as cool as you like, wagging off for the afternoon with my best friend Kelly, who’d pulled the same trick.

‘Can you believe he fell for that again!’ we both cackled before pegging it down the road.

Kelly was as feisty as hell and I loved being with her. Usually we went back to her house because her mam and dad both worked, but if we heard someone come in the house we’d run out the back door and go and sit on the train tracks at the bottom of her street, or hang around Walker graveyard. God knows why we went to the cemetery; it seemed quite cool at the time and nobody would ever see us there.

I had no interest in being educated. My life took place outside the school gates, not inside them. I was always more focused on getting the next dancing part than wasting time working out why x equalled a plus b or whatever my teacher was on about.

‘Cheryl Tweedy, you will amount to nothing!’ the maths teacher exploded one day. I was chewing gum and rehearsing my dance moves in my head. The audition for the Christmas panto I’d made my ‘No Limit’ music tape for was tonight, and all I wanted to do was get out of school and practise.

‘Amount to nothing?’ I thought cheekily. ‘Just you wait and see. I’ll show you!’

I couldn’t have cared less what any of my teachers thought of me, because I knew for a fact I was going to make my living by performing. Nothing and nobody was going to stand in my way.

It’s just as well I had that attitude, because at break time I went to find the music tape I’d left in my locker and found it had been stolen. I was really annoyed because I’d gone to all the trouble of making the cassette myself, and there was no time to make another one.

‘What will you do?’ the man at my audition asked later that day, looking worried for me.

His name was Drew Falconer and he’d come into the dance school to watch a few of us.

‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna sing the song meself,’ I said. Then I just started singing and dancing in front of him, giving it my all.

‘The poor guy must have thought I was mental,’ I laughed to our Gillian that night.

‘He sat there lookin’ at me gobsmacked while I was bustin’ these moves and singin’!’

I was offered a part in the panto the very next day, but my excitement was short-lived because it turned out they couldn’t fill the other places and the show had to be cancelled.

‘There’ll be another one, Cheryl,’ Mam said.

‘I know,’ I replied. I was disappointed but I wasn’t too bothered. I didn’t ever feel I had to chase my dream, because I firmly believed I’d make it happen one day, when the time was right. It wasn’t about being famous or rich, I just wanted to dance and sing and entertain people, because it’s what I loved to do. It was that simple, that clear.

I remember explaining all this to Dolly one day, who was an old lady who lived across the road from us. Dolly had six kids and lots of grandkids and I’d known her and her family all my life. After I started at Walker School I’d begun to spend a lot of time with her, partly because she didn’t care if I wagged off school and her flat was another place to go to during the day, if I wasn’t with Kelly.

‘Eee, Cheryl, it’s lovely to see you,’ Dolly would say every time I knocked on her door, even if it was clearly during school hours and I was in my uniform. ‘Come in, and stay with us for a bit of company.’

Being with Dolly was far more interesting than being at school. She told me stories about the war and I was absolutely fascinated by her. She didn’t have a tooth in her head and her language was shocking, but also very funny to listen to because she couldn’t pronounce an ‘f’ through her gums.

‘Who’s that knocking on the buckin’ door!’ she’d shout whenever someone came to her flat.

I soon learned why she reacted like that, as it was often the police asking questions about one of the colourful characters in Dolly’s large family.

‘You haven’t got a warrant!’ she’d shout, knowing all the spiel. ‘You can’t come in here!’

Whenever a woman came in from social services or the home help service, Dolly always made a point of telling them proudly that I was her granddaughter.

‘Hi darlin’,’ she always greeted each helper warmly. ‘Do you want to put the kettle on an’ we’ll ’ave a nice cup of tea? This is me lovely granddaughter, Cheryl. She’s going to be a pop star, you know.’

Whenever the visitor was out of earshot Dolly’s smile would fall from her face and she’d whisper to me behind her hand: ‘Watch that one, she’ll be all nice to me face but she’ll be dippin’ in me purse when me back’s turned.’

I found out many years later that when my back was turned Dolly would often say, ‘Cheryl? She’ll never be a buckin’ pop star!’ That was typical Dolly, and I don’t mind at all, not now.

I’d push Dolly in her wheelchair to the shops along the Shields Road, which was the big main road separating our estate from Walker, or I’d go out and pay her rent or get her some teabags and milk if she needed me to.

Dolly would forget all about cups of tea when the helpers weren’t around, mind you. She liked vodka and Irn-Bru, and even when I was just 12 or 13 years old she’d be trying to give me tumblers of the stuff. I’d take a swig just to keep her happy even though I didn’t like the taste at all, but sometimes I’d go home feeling drunk and dizzy at 5pm.

Her daughter lived in the flat upstairs and if there was any noise Dolly would take a broom and bash the ceiling like a mad woman, making dents in the paintwork and shouting, ‘Keep the buckin’ noise down!’ I’d often stay the night at Dolly’s, and my mam was quite happy with that. She knew Dolly well and she always knew where I was, so she didn’t mind. It wasn’t out of the ordinary where we lived to be in and out of each others’ homes like that. Besides, Mam had her hands full being a single mother, especially with Garry still at primary school, and she was always happy to let me come and go as I pleased.

One afternoon Mam told me there was a little festival on, just two minutes down the road. ‘Let’s take our Garry,’ she said. ‘There’s hook a duck, toffee apples and all that. Shall we go and have a look?’

As soon as we got there I saw someone I recognised. ‘Mother,’ I hissed. ‘That’s that guy that auditioned me for the panto.’

‘Never!’ Mam said.

The man started walking towards us, smiling. ‘It’s Cheryl, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘I’m Drew Falconer,’ he told my mam, shaking her hand enthusiastically.

‘We were very impressed by Cheryl’s audition. It was a real shame the panto never went ahead. Your daughter is very talented. I reckon she has it in her to be a pop star.’

I couldn’t believe it when I heard that because it was absolutely amazing to hear someone as important as him confirming what I already felt in my heart. It turned out that Drew ran a local talent management company and was always looking for young acts to bring on. He put up-and-coming singers on the stage at Metroland, which was like a big indoor theme park within the Metrocentre shopping complex in Gateshead.

‘What d’you think?’ my mam said when he left us with his card, asking us to get in touch to discuss giving Metroland a try.

‘As long as I can still do me dancing as well as singing, I’ll do it,’ I said. Even though I’d been telling people for ages I was going to be a pop star, dancing was still the biggest thing in my life; the singing just came along with it.

‘You’re a weirdo,’ Kelly said when I told her I was going to meet Drew to listen to music and plan some stage routines the following week. ‘What d’you wanna do that for?’

‘Why not? It’s brilliant,’ I told her. ‘I love all this.’

I don’t think any of my friends really understood how passionate I was about music and dancing, or how I could be so convinced that was where my future lay. My dad was the worst, forever repeating what he’d said to me for years.

‘Cheryl, sweetheart, you need to concentrate on getting a proper job. You need to get your head out of the clouds.’

‘No, Dad, being a pop star is a proper job. I’m going to be on Top of the Pops one day and I’ll be number one. Watch.’

None of my mates took the mickey or anything like that. I was never bullied or picked on for doing something different, but neither was I ever one of the in-crowd, or the ‘it’ girls as we called them. I was somewhere in the middle, and I liked it like that. I had just a few close friends, and when I wasn’t singing or dancing I spent my time either with Dolly, hanging around with Kelly, or messing around with another good mate of mine, Lindsey, who was a year older than me and lived up the road.

Lindsey was always up for a laugh, and it was around this time that she suggested we should sneak out one night and go camping with some of the boys we knew on the estate. I readily agreed, but I was just 13 and I knew my mam wouldn’t let me go out camping at night with boys.

‘We need a plan,’ I said. ‘You tell your mam you’re staying at mine, and we’ll sneak out when my mam’s asleep.’

Why I didn’t just say I was staying at Dolly’s I don’t know, but I suppose Lindsey had to say she was staying at mine so her parents would let her out. When the big night came, Lindsey and I pretended to go to sleep in my bedroom, but underneath our quilts we were fully clothed, waiting to make our escape at 2am.

Meanwhile, the group of boys we’d arranged to meet were in my back garden waiting for us. Lindsey and I peeped out of my bedroom window and saw them mucking about. One of them, Lee Dac, was doing Mr Motivator aerobics routines to keep warm, because it was the middle of winter. The other boys joined in and they were all flexing their muscles and posing. We thought it was hysterical, but we buttoned our lips and scrambled back into bed when we heard footsteps on the landing outside.

‘It’s me mother!’

Lindsey and I were trying not to snigger under our quilts, but the boys gave the game away because they’d started chucking clumps of mud at my bedroom window to get our attention. My mam must have heard them from her bedroom, and she stormed in and went berserk, pulling back my quilt and smacking me so hard that she nearly took my head off my shoulders. I literally saw stars, and I couldn’t believe it because my mam normally flounced around the house like a little fairy, being super gentle and soft. She’d given me a clip round the ear plenty of times before, or a smack on the legs when I was naughty, but nothing as bad as this. I’d never seen her lose it like this, ever. I was so shocked, and really annoyed that our camping adventure was over before it began.

We couldn’t sleep and Lindsay and I stayed awake for ages, whispering to each other.

‘Have you kissed anybody yet?’ she asked me.

‘John Courtney,’ I confessed.

My first kiss had happened quite recently in fact, in the back alley one afternoon after school.

Me and John just liked each other and so we had a kiss, that was all. I was at that age when I was starting to get interested in boys, but it was all very innocent. I was a typical teenager, giggling like a little girl with my friends one minute and wanting to be all grown up with the boys the next.

All of our family was close with John’s and I really liked him because he was very cheeky and always smiling. He was also a really good footballer. People said he had the potential to play for Newcastle one day. He trained hard and was ambitious, which I admired. I know it can’t have been true, but at the time it felt like me and him were the only two around our area who knew where we wanted to go. I never said that to any of my friends, of course, but that’s how it felt, especially now I was working at Metroland

‘I’ve got you a gig, Cheryl,’ Drew told me one day. ‘I think you’re ready for it.’

I’d done lots of rehearsals with him by now and I’d been on the stage plenty of times at Metroland. I honestly can’t remember much about my early performances there, but I think that’s because it really didn’t feel like a big deal to me. I must have been only 12 the first time I took the microphone, but right from the start I always felt very comfortable on the stage. It felt just like an extension of all my dance shows, except I happened to be singing as well.

I think my experience of ballroom dancing, as well as ballet, helped. When I was younger I’d had a regular ballroom partner for a few years called James Richardson. We won loads of competitions and made the finals of the National Championships in Blackpool. The pair of us also appeared on Gimme 5 together and on Michael Barrymore’s My Kind of People, which at the time was a really popular TV show. We went our separate ways when I suddenly got taller than James, but it had all been good experience for me, and it meant Metroland just felt like the next step in my career. The audience would typically be made up of families on a day out, or other kids who’d been dropped off while their mam went shopping. I never felt under pressure because the atmosphere was always friendly and people always clapped and cheered. ‘What’s the gig?’ I asked Drew confidently.

‘You’re doing the warm up for Damage,’ he replied, which made my heart skip a beat.

‘Bring it on! Wait till I tell me sister!’

Damage was a really well-known boy band. To me they were proper, famous pop stars, but I wasn’t fazed at all. I felt ready, and I was really excited. When my big moment came I wore high-top trainers and baggy trousers with a little crop top, trying to look all cool and R&B like the boys. I remember my heart was pounding when I ran off the stage after completing a few well-rehearsed numbers, but my biggest memory from that time is being invited along to watch Damage perform on the Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party, which was a TV show filmed at the Metro Arena.

This was a programme I’d watched for years, dreaming of being on it one day. I remember standing in that arena literally open-mouthed, feeling within touching distance of making my dream come true.

‘Wow! This is it!’ I thought. ‘This is what I want to do.’

From that point on I started performing regular gigs at Metroland. It was on the other side of the River Tyne to where we lived and took me 40 minutes to get there on the bus but I always did it willingly, every time. I just loved being on that stage. I felt alive. It’s where I felt like me.

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