Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother. Melissa Bell
British music scene. Top Of The Pops had been going on the BBC since the beginning of the year and the Beatles were singing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Jamaican singer Millie Small, the daughter of a sugar-plantation overseer, whose stage name was simply Millie, had a quirky little hit with ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (the first major hit for Island Records after Chris Blackwell, the label’s founder, discovered her and brought her to England in 1963), and Cilla Black was belting out ‘You’re My World’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Peter and Gordon had released ‘World Without Love’ (Millie had a brief relationship with Peter) and Billy J. Kramer was singing ‘Little Children’.
I, on the other hand, was not ‘little’ or ‘small’ at all, weighing a massive 13lb (almost twice the average weight of a newborn baby), and my birth actually killed Mum. The hospital had even called in a priest to give her the last rites. Dad had already been brought to the hospital by the police, where the doctors told him that he was going to have to choose between saving his wife and saving his unborn baby so that they would know what to do in the operating theatre.
Although I know how much they had both wanted to have me, Dad had to make a choice and he told them that they should try to save my mother.
I guess he thought that he and Mum could always try again for another baby but that he would never be able to replace her. It must have been a horrible decision to be forced to make and I don’t blame him at all for choosing Mum over me because he’d never met me, and I know how much he loved me once I arrived.
I had to be delivered by Caesarean section and, despite the surgeon’s best efforts, Mum’s heart stopped beating while she was still on the operating table. They called the priest into the theatre to administer the last rites and as he stood over her prone body on the operating table there was a miracle. Mum’s heart started to beat again. At the same time as she was coming back to life, the midwife had managed to get me to take in a lungful of air and I let out a loud cry, the first musical note of my life. I’m sure it must have brought a great deal of joy to all those who heard it and who just a few minutes earlier had thought I would not live. Having thought for a moment that he was going to lose both of us, Dad found in an instant that he had his beloved wife back and a bouncing great baby girl with a powerful pair of lungs as a bonus.
That was also the year when the Supremes had their first worldwide hits with ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Stop in the Name of Love’, and changed everything for black female singers. A few years later, Diana Ross would go solo and become one of the biggest stars in the world, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Although her life had been spared, Mum’s health never really recovered after that traumatic day – although perhaps she would have become ill anyway, regardless of whether I had come along when I did. She was already diabetic, which was the reason why I was such an enormous baby, feeding greedily on the sugar in her blood while I was inside her womb. Gestational diabetes is apparently very common among Jamaican women. (Insulin is a hormone and sometimes the other hormones of pregnancy block its usual action to make sure the baby gets enough glucose, creating a need for more insulin.)
Even once I was out of the womb, however, Mum and Dad’s troubles with their new baby were not over. Three weeks after I was born, the doctors found a growth in my back. I was operated on immediately and it turned out to be benign, but I was still left with a scar down 80 per cent of my back. It has grown with me and is still there today as a reminder of just how precarious my entry into the world was, and how I nearly didn’t make it. It seemed that right from the start I had been marked out as someone who was going to have to struggle to stay alive for her allotted span on earth. Watching their baby daughter being wheeled off into the operating theatre must have been like a nightmare to Mum and Dad, especially when they had just been through such a terrible trauma during the birth. And it was surely yet another reason why they were so protective of me while I was growing up, wanting to keep me away from every possible danger that they imagined might be lurking in the world outside our home, waiting to pounce. They knew already how easy it was to lose a small child.
But, however much we watch over our children, accidents will always happen and I believe that more come about inside the home than outside it. When I was four, we still didn’t have an inside bathroom and so we used to fill an iron tub in front of the fire in the front room with boiling water from saucepans heated up on the stove. Mum was filling the tub one day and I became impatient with the whole laborious process, wanting to play in it immediately. Not realising that the water was still boiling hot, I plunged my arm in up to the shoulder while Mum was looking the other way. The skin all the way up my arm was burned, leaving yet more scars that are still with me today as a reminder of how easily accidents can happen. Despite having lived with the scars all these years, I don’t remember the actual incident, but I do remember the subsequent ambulance ride to the hospital with Dad, the wailing of the sirens and the worried look on his face. Yet again they had seen how easily they could lose or damage me and their determination to keep me swathed in cotton wool grew stronger still.
They had both lost too much in their lives to be willing to allow me to take any unnecessary risks. Despite the restrictions which their fear put on me, it also made me feel very loved and very special at the same time.
Arriving in the country with some money in his bank account, Dad was able to buy us a small house, which immediately turned into a busy, crowded, happy family home with a constant stream of friends and relatives coming and going. With two grown-up sisters and our grandmother, Icilda Russell, living with us, I was the only child among the adults and so I existed confidently at the centre of everyone’s attention. But, even though I was spoiled in many ways, I was still never allowed out on my own to play like the other children in our street. I wasn’t even allowed to cross the road from our house to school on my own. Even when Dad finally agreed to buy me a bike, which had taken a lot of nagging from me, he would insist on always walking along behind me when I went out, like a policeman on his beat, so I could never really experience the freedom that most children enjoy when they get their first wheels.
Yet I didn’t really see it as a problem because in other ways I was given everything I wanted and, maybe to compensate for my lack of freedom, Dad made food my friend. He was constantly lavishing sweets and takeaway food on me and always encouraging me to eat more. He would take me out to the local Wimpy Bar whenever I asked, allowing me to order two burgers at a time, or he would escort me down to the sweet shop and egg me on to fill my pockets with whatever I wanted. The first Wimpy Bar had opened in London in 1954, selling hamburgers in the Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street, between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. The whole idea of fast food and hamburgers must have seemed as new and different and American to the British public as rock and roll itself. By the time I was six, Wimpy had a thousand branches around the world and it seemed to me like they must have been there for ever.
Not surprisingly, from being a sweet-looking toddler I developed into a seriously fat child but my weight was never the slightest concern to me. I was perfectly happy with my body, every last inch of it. I just loved to eat. I believe that, if Mum had understood more about the diabetes that was already starting to make her own life such a misery, she would have known that by allowing me to consume so much sugar when I was a child she was possibly making it inevitable that I would follow in her footsteps. People didn’t talk about that sort of thing in those days. There wasn’t any of the information which appears all over the media today about health and nutrition. Jamie Oliver, whose admirable mission would be to improve the nation’s diet, hadn’t even been born yet. We just ate the things that were cheap and available and tasted nice, which wasn’t always the best idea, and then we’d have seconds.
Things went well for me at school. I was pretty advanced at reading and writing because my sister, Sonia, who was very educated and went on to attend university, had spent so much time helping me at home. My piano playing was also great for my age because of