Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
at maths because of the lessons she’d done with her mother. Janis would set Amy some pretty complicated problems, which she really enjoyed doing. Amy would do mathematical problems for hours on end just for fun. She was brilliant at the most complex Sudoku puzzles and could finish one in a flash.
The pity was that she wouldn’t do it at school. We received notes complaining regularly about her behaviour or lack of interest. Clearly Amy was bored – she just didn’t take to formal schooling. (I had been the same. I was always playing hooky but, unlike my friends, who would be out on the streets, I’d be in the local library, reading.) Amy had a terrific thirst for knowledge but hated school. She didn’t want to go so she wouldn’t get up in the mornings. Or, if she did go, she’d come home at lunchtime and not go back.
Though Amy had been a terrific sleeper as a baby and young child, when she got to about eleven she wouldn’t go to bed: she’d be up all night reading, doing puzzles, watching television, listening to music, anything not to go to sleep. So, naturally, it was a battle every morning to get her up. Janis got fed up with it and would ring me: ‘Your daughter won’t get out of bed.’ I had to drive all the way from Chingford, where I was living with Jane, and drag her out.
Over time Amy got worse in the classroom. Janis and I were called to the school for meetings about her behaviour on numerous occasions. I hope the head of year didn’t see me trying not to laugh as he told us, ‘Mr and Mrs Winehouse, Amy has already been sent to see me once today and, as always, I knew it was her before she got to my office …’ I knew if I looked at Janis I’d crack up. ‘How did I know?’ the head of year continued. ‘She was singing “Fly Me To The Moon” loudly enough for the whole school to hear.’
I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but it was so typically Amy. She told me later that she’d sung it to calm herself down whenever she knew she was in trouble.
Just about the only thing she seemed to enjoy about school was performance. However, one year when Amy sang in a show she wasn’t very good. I don’t know what went wrong – perhaps it was the wrong key for her again – but I was disappointed. The following year things were different. ‘Dad, will you both come to see me at Ashmole?’ she asked. ‘I’m singing again.’ To be honest, my heart sank a bit, with the memory of the previous year’s performance, but of course we went. She sang the Alanis Morissette song ‘Ironic’, and she was as terrific as I knew she could be. What I wasn’t expecting was everyone else’s reaction: the whole room sat up. Wow, where did this come from?
By now Amy was twelve and she wanted to go to a drama school full time. Janis and I were against it but Amy applied to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in central London without telling us. How she even knew about it we never figured out as Sylvia Young only advertised in The Stage. Amy eventually broke the news to us when she was invited to audition. She decided to sing ‘The Sunny Side Of The Street’, which I coached her through, helping with her breath control, and won a half-scholarship for her singing, acting and dancing. Her success was reported in The Stage, with a photograph of her above the column.
As part of her application, Amy had been asked to write something about herself. Here’s what she wrote:
All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to shut up. The only reason I have had to be this loud is because you have to scream to be heard in my family.
My family? Yes, you read it right. My mum’s side is perfectly fine, my dad’s family are the singing, dancing, all-nutty musical extravaganza.
I’ve been told I was gifted with a lovely voice and I guess my dad’s to blame for that. Although unlike my dad, and his background and ancestors, I want to do something with the talents I’ve been ‘blessed’ with. My dad is content to sing loudly in his office and sell windows.
My mother, however, is a chemist. She is quiet, reserved.
I would say that my school life and school reports are filled with ‘could do betters’ and ‘does not work to her full potential’.
I want to go somewhere where I am stretched right to my limits and perhaps even beyond.
To sing in lessons without being told to shut up (provided they are singing lessons).
But mostly I have this dream to be very famous. To work on stage. It’s a lifelong ambition.
I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes.
I want to be remembered for being an actress, a singer, for sell-out concerts and sell-out West End and Broadway shows.
I think it was to the school’s relief when Amy left Ashmole. She started at the Sylvia Young Theatre School when she was about twelve and a half and stayed there for three years – but what a three years it was. It was still school, which meant she was always being told off, but I think they put up with her because they recognized that she had a special talent. Sylvia Young herself said that Amy had a ‘wild spirit and was amazingly clever’. But there were regular ‘incidents’ – for example, Amy’s nose-ring. Jewellery wasn’t allowed, a rule Amy disregarded. She would be told to take the nose-ring out, which she would do, and ten minutes later it was back in.
The school accepted that Amy was her own person and gave her a degree of leeway. Occasionally they turned a blind eye when she broke the rules. But there were times when she took it too far, especially with the jewellery. She was sent home one day when she’d turned up wearing earrings, her nose-ring, bracelets and a belly-button piercing. To me, though, Amy wasn’t being rebellious, which she certainly could be; this was her expressing herself.
And punctuality was a problem. Amy was late most days. She would get the bus to school, fall asleep, go three miles past her stop, then have to catch another back. So, although this was where Amy wanted to be, it wasn’t a bed of roses for anyone.
Amy’s main problem at Sylvia Young’s was that, as well being taught stagecraft, which included ballet, tap, other dance, acting and singing, she had to put up with the academic side or, as Amy referred to it, ‘all the boring stuff’. About half of the time was allocated to ‘normal’ subjects and she just wasn’t interested. She would fall asleep in lessons, doodle, talk and generally make a nuisance of herself.
Amy really got into tap-dancing. She was pretty good at it when she started at the school but now she was learning more advanced techniques. When we were at my mother’s flat for dinner on Friday nights, Amy loved to tap-dance on the kitchen floor because it gave a really good clicking sound. The clicks it gave were great. I told her she was as good a dancer as Ginger Rogers, but my mother wouldn’t have that: she said Amy was better.
Amy would put her tap shoes on and say, ‘Nan, can I tap-dance?’
‘Go downstairs and ask Mrs Cohen if it’s all right,’ my mum would reply, ‘because you know what she’s like. She’ll only complain to me about the noise.’
So Amy would go and ask Mrs Cohen if it was all right and Mrs Cohen would say, ‘Of course it’s all right, darling. You go and dance as much as you like.’ And then the next day Mrs Cohen would complain to my mum about the noise.
After dinner on a Friday night, we’d play games. Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary were two of our favourites. Amy and I played together, my mum and Melody made up the second team, with Jane and Alex as the third. They were the ‘quiet’ ones, thoughtful and studious, my mum and Melody were the ‘loud’ pair, with a lot of screaming and shouting, while Amy and I were the ‘cheats’. We’d try to win no matter what.
Another lovely birthday card from Amy, aged twelve. This came just after yet another meeting with Amy’s teacher about her behaviour.
When she wasn’t playing games or tap-dancing, Amy would borrow my mum’s scarves and tops. She had a way of making them seem not like her nan’s things but stylish, tying shirts across her middle and that sort of thing. She also started wearing a bit of makeup – never too much, always understated. She had a beautiful complexion