Spice Girls: The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band. Sean Smith
teaching by organising fundraisers for her daughter’s primary school in Wanstead. She enjoyed that so much, she moved on to charging 10p a lesson for talented local youngsters. In 1981 she started a Saturday school in Drury Lane but that soon proved so popular that she decided to look for a permanent base. Two years later she took over a disused former Church of England primary school just north of Marylebone station in Rossmore Road.
Sylvia liked to call her pupils her ‘babies’ or ‘young ’uns’, which led her to adopt Sylvia Young as her professional name. Legend has it that she expelled her own daughter, Frances Ruffelle, from the school for being ‘disruptive’, although the award-winning actress and singer was already eighteen when the permanent school was founded. Discipline, however, was an important ingredient of life at Sylvia Young’s – not so much abiding by a long list of rules but, more importantly, cultivating an ability to work hard and be a step ahead of the competition in the tough world of entertainment.
Sylvia was always looking for ‘someone who has a certain amount of ability but is trainable’ – mirroring Chris Herbert’s expectations for his girl group. Another mantra from the school also fitted perfectly with his strategy: ‘If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.’
She also insisted that her students learn everything equally so they could audition for a television soap one day and for a new pop group the next. It’s easy to see how Emma would be a perfect candidate for Touch.
By the time Emma joined Sylvia Young in 1985, the school seemed to have a direct conveyor-belt to Central Casting for some of the most popular programmes on television – if you needed a young Londoner for a market stall in Albert Square, Sylvia’s establishment was the first place to look. Adam Woodyatt (Ian Beale), Nick Berry (Simon Wickes) and Letitia Dean (Sharon Watts) were just three of the alumni who became household names in EastEnders.
You had to be good to be accepted at the school in the first place, passing an audition, an interview and a written test. Her mum waited nervously in the street outside throughout the process and was as pleased as Emma when she was accepted. Parents had to be able to afford the fees, which weren’t cheap and were an obvious drain on the Bunton family finances. It didn’t help matters when Pauline and Trevor split up a year later, although he still lived locally and, according to Emma, the disruption to her life was minimal. She remained on very good terms with her dad throughout her teenage years. Pauline retrained as a martial-arts teacher and taught her daughter the finer points of Goju-kai karate. Emma might look sweet but you wouldn’t want to get on her wrong side.
Apparently much more traumatic than her parents’ split was the news that she would have to leave the theatre school because her mum and dad could no longer pay. She was enrolled for a week or two at a local secondary school, which she hated. ‘I cried so much,’ she later said. All ended well when she was awarded a scholarship back to Sylvia’s.
By this time Emma and her mum had moved to a third-floor flat on a small estate in Rogers Walk. There was no garden so Emma and her friends would spend a lot of time in the local park. One of her best friends as a young teenager was Kellie Bright, then another budding actress. They would spend weekends at Alexandra Palace in North London, roller-skating or messing about in the rowing boats on the lake. Much later Kellie would become one of the best-known faces on British TV playing Linda Carter, landlady of the Queen Vic pub in Albert Square.
Another classmate was star actress Keeley Hawes, the daughter of a London cab driver, who lived in a three-bedroom council flat practically across the road from the school in Marylebone. She and Emma were London girls and became firm friends; Keeley was a welcome guest at the caravan in Clacton. She, too, had won a scholarship to Sylvia Young’s. In those days she didn’t sound anything like her famous creations, Mrs Durrell in The Durrells or the home secretary, Julia Montague, in Bodyguard. A series of elocution lessons gave her the cut-glass vowels of one of television’s most recognisable voices.
When she left Sylvia Young’s, though, she became a model before her breakthrough as an actress, and didn’t need to speak. She had been working in the fashion department of Cosmopolitan
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