Kerry. Emily Herbert
children take for granted, among them her very own bedroom and her first holiday abroad. Kerry, unsurprisingly, grew to love them as her own family, and blossomed in the time she lived in their house.
The Woodalls, who stayed in touch with their young charge after she moved out and are still very close to her – Fred gave her away at her wedding – have nothing but happy memories of the time Kerry remained in their care. They were also extremely sensitive to her particular situation – that she and her mother loved one another, but that it was simply not practical for them to live together at that stage – and gave her the space to continue her relationship with her mother, while at the same time building up her confidence and happiness. She also began to develop into a typical teenager, who sometimes had to be kept in check.
‘Kerry told us that she loved her Mum and would not swap her for the world,’ said Fred. ‘We never asked her what she had been through and she didn’t volunteer anything. But she loved her time with us and she was a joy to have. I occasionally had to tell her off for wearing skirts that were too short, but I suppose that happens in most homes. With everything she’s been through and all she’s achieved, Kerry’s an inspiration to anyone. She’s proof that anyone can make it if they want to enough.’ Of course, she was also helped by having the love and support of a new family behind her, one which was determined that she should have as normal a life as possible.
They also imposed limits, something that did the young Kerry a world of good. ‘Fred taught me what it is to have a strong, supportive father figure in your life,’ said Kerry. ‘He and Mag showed me what real family life is like, which I had never known before I met them. They taught me discipline, though I was never a naughty kid. Mag used to ground me sometimes because I was such a little entertainer. I’d always be performing for her.’
It is a great credit to the Woodalls, to Sue and to Kerry herself, that she managed to see the positive side to her experiences. In a childhood as problematic as Kerry’s, the individual concerned tends either to sink or swim, and Kerry most definitely swam. Although she has spoken as an adult of her very difficult upbringing, she has never blamed her mother – rightly, as her mother was ill – and refuses to indulge in self-pity.
‘I’m not one of these pessimistic people thinking “Poor me”,’ she said. ‘I got to meet a wonderful set of foster parents. With others, there were stupid things like parents giving their foster kids the cheap Rice Krispies while their own children got the proper ones. It was horrible because I didn’t know these people and kids at that age are cruel. It was lonely but you got on with it. You have to. The way I look at it, tomorrow’s another day.’ It’s an attitude that has stood her in good stead since then. The world of showbusiness is one of the toughest in which to make a mark and the fact that Kerry learnt early on how to be able to put the past behind her and move on to new areas was to help her enormously in the years to come.
It was while she was living with the Woodalls that Kerry first began to think that a career in showbusiness might actually be feasible. Until then, such a dream would have seemed impossible – a mother suffering from depression, a poverty-stricken background and life with a string of foster parents were a very long way from the glittering career that Kerry was ultimately to make her own. ‘I wanted to get into showbiz almost from the moment I could walk,’ she said. ‘I was always playing around in my nan’s house, performing songs and dancing around.’
But Kerry was beginning to see that it was a potential way out of the life she was then living and, more than that, it began to become apparent that she had some talent for it, too. School friends began to notice that she had a flair for music and was not averse to being noticed; it was as if she was beginning to flex a set of muscles she had not previously known she’d had.
‘She was always the centre of attention,’ said Michelle McManus, who was in Kerry’s class at Padgate High School in Warrington and who went on to be in a dance group with the soon-to-be chanteuse. ‘If she could get up and sing and dance in class, she would. She saw showbiz as her way of making something of herself. With the kind of life Kerry had, things could have turned out very differently. But she had a good head on her shoulders.’
She certainly did, and was sensible enough to be able to take the opportunities that were soon to present themselves to her. And the head of music at the school agreed, calling Kerry ‘a very strong performer in every way’.
As her sixteenth birthday approached, Kerry began to sense freedom. She was clearly not academic and was keen to leave school and set up on her own as soon as possible. The Woodalls had provided her with a real home and a great deal of love and understanding, but Kerry was turning into a young woman and wanted to live in her own space. But she was not, as yet, entirely clear what she was going to do. She had no formal dramatic training of any kind, and no one to advise her. It was a difficult situation, but one that began to throw up possibilities even then.
For a start, her figure had suddenly matured into that of a very curvy and desirable woman, something that could clearly be used to her advantage. But how? Kerry had no family in the world of showbusiness, no connections and no real idea about how to get into a world so far from her own. Similarly, neither her school nor the people she knew in Warrington had any idea how she should further her plans and, if truth be told, at that stage, most of them would have considered her wildly over-ambitious.
Indeed, if truth be told, Kerry would have agreed with them. She was only a few years away from stardom by this stage, unaware as she was, but even when that stardom finally came and embraced her, Kerry sometimes seemed to have trouble believing quite how far she had come, and just how successful she was. That is not surprising, given her background, but neither, given what she had been through, was the fact that she has always managed to remain down to earth. That is at least one element in the key to Kerry’s popularity – a lousy childhood combined with the fact that she kept her feet on the ground when she did become successful have made her admired in many quarters. Kerry has always managed, by and large, to bring out feelings of goodwill in others.
But back then, aged sixteen in Warrington, brimming with energy and not yet sure how to use it, Kerry had no idea what to do to make her mark and so she embarked on a path that was a high risk strategy, to put it mildly. She decided that it was in glamour modelling that she would make her mark.
Kerry was ready to spread her wings; she had left school and she was about to take on the world. But still the question continued to haunt her – just how was she going to go about doing that? How exactly was she going to make her mark on the world?
Kerry came from a poor, underprivileged background, she had no contacts, no qualifications, she had yet to discover her particular talents and there was no obvious career path to take. And yet Kerry was determined that somehow, whatever it took, she was going to make a life for herself. She had experienced at first hand a life of poverty and unhappiness and she was resolute that her adult life was going to be different. But what was she going to do?
Her first plan was not, perhaps, the classiest of ways in which to enter showbusiness, but it had been a route chosen by plenty of famous female stars before her, and would be done by plenty more in the future. And at first, at least, it seemed to her that it was her only way to get noticed. She decided to become a glamour model. There are very few ways that someone from Kerry’s background can hope to go on to bigger and brighter things without, at the least, a very good education and so, she reasoned, if she was not unattractive, then why not pick the route chosen by so many other women?
And there seemed to be no reason she shouldn’t do very well at it. Kerry had, by this time, developed an extremely pretty face, combined with an extremely voluptuous body, the ideal combination for glamour work and so, unbeknown to the Woodalls, she contacted a Liverpool photographer in order to get some glamour shots taken. These were duly produced with Kerry wearing nothing but a G-string and a bright smile. Later, she would say, ‘I wanted to