Adele. Sean Smith
eyelid.
With her distinctive short black hair, she didn’t look like your average pop star. She built the foundation of her career by singing in nightclubs. She explains, ‘If there had been talent shows like The X Factor in the early 1990s, I would have done terribly! So, when success did come it was a real victory because I don’t think anybody really expected it.’
Adele loved Gabrielle’s eye patch so much that Penny knuckled down like any dutiful mother and made her daughter one of her own. Adele had a bout of conjunctivitis and when it was time for her to return to school once she was no longer infectious, Penny presented her with her custom-made patch. She had bought one in Boots and sewn on sequins. Adele would jump up onto the table wearing her eye patch and deliver her own version of ‘Dreams’.
Gabrielle wore her famous eye patch for eight months before abandoning it; Adele wore hers for even less time. Its appeal was greatly reduced when she was teased at school. At the earliest opportunity, it was put in a drawer, only to be worn for special performances at home. Penny encouraged her to sing in front of her friends, even arranging the lighting in the house so it would seem as if the spotlight was on Adele while she sang.
The story of Gabrielle’s life and career is fascinating, almost spookily so, when compared to Adele’s. Her Dominican-born mother raised her and her three younger half-brothers as a single mum and chose not to name Gabrielle’s father on the birth certificate. Gabrielle had regular contact with him when she was a child, but that dwindled as she grew older.
Gabrielle always had issues with her appearance, not just because of her eye, but also her weight. She was never a skinny, model type. She had a son in 1995 and subsequently regarded being a mum as more important than fame or fortune, although she is a multimillionaire and would never need to work again if she chose not to.
She wrote songs that reflected her mood, was discovered when an independent label heard her demo, released only three albums in the first six years of her career and liked to be in control of her own destiny, not at the beck and call of a record company. ‘I was notorious for taking three years between albums. I love making music, but not 365 days a year. I’m probably just lazy, but I can’t force myself to write songs. I have to long to be back in the studio and feel good vibes when I’m recording.’
Gabrielle never saw herself as a celebrity, preferring to slip quietly out of the limelight when she didn’t have a record to promote – in a fashion remarkably similar to Adele at a later date. Her ‘disappearance’ led to the public wanting her more, so when her third album, Rise, came out in 1999, it went straight to number one, as did the single of the same name. It is a break-up song tinged with sadness, but one that is ultimately uplifting, ‘… ready to rise again’. Most of her songs have an autobiographical edge – ‘diary entries’ as she calls them.
Adele went to the Coleraine Park Primary School, just round the corner in Halefield Road. She once said she was the only white face in her classroom of thirty local children. That may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. She may well have been the sole white English child. It was a very diverse community. During Adele’s time in the 1990s, there were some eight major ethnic groups, but by the end of the following decade, there were forty-two ethnicities, with something like twenty-six different languages being spoken in the school.
Adele was popular, not least because she hated bullies. Marc recalled, ‘Tottenham is a rough place, but if another kid was being picked on, then she would be the one sticking up for them. She was also very protective of her friends.’
She didn’t stand out in class, and one talent her teachers may not have been aware of is that she wrote a lot, doodling little bits of rhyme and poetry, almost from the time she learned to write her own name. She was forever writing her mother little notes, especially if she had been told off for not tidying her room. Then she would shut herself away and push a note underneath the door to let her mum know that she wasn’t coming out for a year. From a very early age, she was putting her feelings down on paper.
Every couple of months, mainly in the school holidays, Penny would load up the boot of the Citroën and drive down the M4 so they could stay with Nana and Grampy in Penarth. If she needed a break, Penny always knew she could leave Adele there, and her daughter would be loved and well cared for by her grandparents, whom she adored.
Grampy John became a father figure in Adele’s life, simply by giving her so much time and attention. He doted on her. Marc explained, ‘Adele would spend much of the summer with my parents and most of that time my dad would be playing with her, talking to her, showing her the sights.’
John was only in his mid-forties when Adele was born. Fit and energetic, he was a big man with a darker, more Celtic appearance than his two sons. He may not have looked like a traditional grandfather figure, but he held conventional values: ‘He was a very hard-working man, my father – a very honest, straight-up sort of chap. He really was a lovely guy.’
John was also very fond of Penny. ‘He just loved my mum,’ recalled Adele. John and Rose didn’t always wait for them to visit Penarth. Sometimes the proud grandparents would travel up to London and stay in a local B&B so they could see them both.
Adele was very fond of her mother’s big family, but in Tottenham she was one of many, while in Penarth she was the centre of attention. Sometimes Adele would come down to visit with her best friend, her cousin Cema, who was Aunt Kim’s daughter. Kim had married a Turkish man called Ahmet in 1982 and subsequently had four children, Bren, Cema-Filiz, Erol and Erden.
Occasionally, Penny and Adele would spend Christmas in South Wales, where the young girl was spoiled rotten. One of her earliest Christmas presents from her father was a red toy guitar, which she loved. She would often try to play Penny’s grown-up guitar, but she was too little for that; here was something of her own.
These were happy times that Penny, in particular, always made fun for her daughter. One Christmas Eve, when Adele was asleep and Nana and Grampy had gone to bed, she carefully cut up a newspaper in the shape of feet and placed them on the stairs. When her daughter awoke in the morning, she said, ‘Look, Adele, it’s Santa’s footprints. He’s been.’
The great treat for Adele was in summer, when her grandparents would leave Penarth in their caravan. Marc, who would go too if he wasn’t working, recalled, ‘My mum and dad were very keen caravaners. They had a close group of friends. They were all caravaners and always had a laugh and a sing-song. My dad could be the life and soul. Adele loved it. She was a kid, wasn’t she, and it was an adventure.’
They didn’t go far, but it seemed like the open road to a girl from Tottenham. They would drive down the coast to stay at Three Cliffs Bay in the beautiful Gower peninsula or further along the coast at the Kiln Park camp in Tenby, one of the loveliest resorts in Pembrokeshire.
Adele was a kind and pretty, blonde-haired little girl with green eyes, and she made friends easily in South Wales. Many of the men and women that Marc had known all his life now had young families and they were very welcoming to the youngster from London. Her proud father observed, ‘She was a lovely kid. She was one of those kids who, if she had a bag of sweets, would give them all away and keep one for herself.’
She tended to be on the skinny side, even though she wasn’t sporty. She was not a girly girl. ‘She was funny and very sociable,’ said Marc. ‘She was more of a tomboy type than a girl with dolls. She was a scruffy yo-yo.’
Not everything was idyllic. On one memorable day in Tenby, Adele went missing. One moment, she was bouncing away on a trampoline; the next, nobody could see her, which prompted a frantic search. Marc had been windsurfing at the top of the beach. When he got back to his parents and his girlfriend, he asked, ‘Where’s Adele?’ She had vanished.
Marc panicked. ‘Imagine your child has gone missing on a packed beach. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? My mum is crying and screaming. There were sand dunes behind us and there were two old winos there and so I marched straight over and demanded to know where my daughter was. It was mayhem. So then I went straight to the nearest chip bar and I said, “Can I use your phone?” So I dialled 999 and fair dos to the police, they were