There'll be no moaning from Our Bar

Nigella Lawson

BARBARA: THE LAUGHTER AND TEARS OF A COCKNEY SPARROW by Barbara Windsor Century, £11.99, pp.195 'B arbara isn't a sex symbol. She's a body, a bosom and a joke'. Other women might have taken umbrage at this remark of Peter 'Carry On Producing' Rogers, but it don't rattle Our Bar.

She's not, it has to be said, the rattle- able type. Windsor, as she often calls herself (in the third person as well as the vocative), has more bottle than rattle. And although she hasn't rummaged through the Actor's Drawer of Characters and Types and reached for no. 4(b): the Cockney Sparrer, she gives an unblushing display of all its customary virtues. Generous with her gorblimeys and barely restraining her- self from a Lor luvaduck, Our Bar paints a picture of herself as a tough but bubbly blonde wiv a 'eart of gold an' prahd of it.

Barbara Windsor was, in fact, meant to be a boy. A more analytical approach might ascribe her later emphasised, almost lampooned, femininity to her parents' initial disappointment when 'out pops little Babs', but her autobiographical romp is perky rather than self-pitying.

Our heroine was born 'seven pounds of joy' into an unhappy working-class home in the East End of London in 1937. Her mother scrubbed the doorstep every morn- ing and dreamt of better things, of which her husband was not one. She hated their life and where they lived — 'too common'. She was, in fact, one of those mothers no working-class showbiz autobiography can do without: ambitious, snobbish and as tough as old boots. She sent Bar to dancing classes at Stoke Newington town hall with Madame Behen- na and her Juvenile Jollities. Madame Behenna was a fat women 'who spoke with a posh voice through half an inch of make-up' and gave Bar a note to take home saying 'She's a born dancer. She must keep it up.' But having passed the 11-plus with the best mark in the whole of North London, Bar was ready to go on to the Convent and to higher things. In fact, she decided to become a nun, and took to going around with a tea towel draped over her head and a beatific smile on her face.

The veil was, however, cast aside in favour of tighter-fitting garments when a talent scout called Brian Mickey (later to discover Morecambe and Wise) asked her if she'd like to join the Eleanor Beam Babes for a pantomime in the Wimbledon Theatre.

Reverend Mother was far from pleased, and Bar had to be removed from the Convent to be more satisfactorily accommodated in Aida Foster's stage school in Golders Green. At that time the girls would trill 'I Heard A Robin Singing' at auditions. Bar confesses she didn't 'have the range', so gave them 'Sunny Side of the Street' at full throttle instead. Guess who got the jobs?

It was about this time, too, that Bar started noticing boys. Or, in her words, 'I was 15 years old and, for the first time in my life, I fancied the pants off a geezer.' But if it was the first, it certainly was not the last.

She lost her virginity while working in Monsieur Vincent's Ctite d'Azur club in Soho to one of its Arab customers ('they went mental for blondes with bosoms') and progressed to a vegetarian garage mecha- nic. The relationship did not last long. Bar was not a one-man girl: 'Once I discovered sex, I assumed you just did it.' She stayed the night once with Victor Mature, tut we never actually did it.' (She wouldn't do it with Warren Beatty either: 'I didn't want to be just another notch on his six- shooter.') There was a singer called Cliff Lawrence ('somewhere between Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme'). In Fings Ain't What They Used to Be she has 'a nice little ding-dong' with the leading man, James Booth. She hung around with the Krays ('ever so polite and gentlemanly'), though her affair with Charlie 'wasn't a great passion'.

'She'll have it off with anyone,' Kenneth Williams once told a boyfriend of hers.

Although that is obviously not quite the case, she is generous with her favours, a real trouper. If it'll help the show go on, she'll do it. Ned Sherrin was worried that Maurice Gibb was not 'quite putting it across' as second husband to her Marie Lloyd in the Sherrin/Brahms/Bennett Sing A Rude Song. 'Ned said: "I think you'd better give him one, Miss Windsor." "No one,' she remarks coyly, 'subsequently accused Maurice of not having any balls!'

Sid James got all moony over her, and although he was not a geezer she fancied the pants off, she listened to reason when Tony Wells, the Carry On press agent, explained how it would help everyone if she would just put Sid out of his misery. Unfortunately, it all got out .of hand, and after far too long she brought the affair to a head one morning at Heathrow airport. 'I arrived at 11, wearing a leopardskin coat with a matching trilby hat. Sid looked dreadful.' As he threatened, he was dead within the year.

During all this time, of course, she was married to Ronnie Knight, dandy and villain. Despite her infidelities, she stood by him when things got tough. Every day she would lay his clothes out on the bed, put his rollers in for him and then blow-dry his hair. When he was on trial at the Old Bailey she struggled valiantly to raise the bail money (and anyone who can find a five-year-old bounced cheque, the vital evidence for the defence, in their files is no bit of fluff). But she could take no more when she found out he'd been having an affair with a Barbara-Windsor lookalike for years. She was not being hypocritical. It wasn't his infidelity that infuriated her, but his shiftiness. 'If he'd just been giving her one, then I wouldn't have minded — I was hardly in a position to throw stones. But what was important to me was that we should both be honest.' They had a huge row and she threw all his clothes out of the bedroom window. And what really got her was that they all matched.

Of all the relationships in the book, it is the one with Kenny (Williams) that I wanted to carry on reading about most. Bar met him on her first day on the set of Carry On Spying, her very first Carry On (of the 29 she in fact appeared in only nine). She was making a botch of her lines, and Kenneth Williams, in false black whis- kers as the British agent, lost his temper with her. Our Bar was having none of that. She'd heard that he couldn't bear Fenella Fielding,

so pulling myself up to my full 4ft 10 inches, I retorted: 'Ere you, don't you yell at me with Fenella Fielding's minge-hair stuck round you face. I won't bloody stand for it!

He was entranced. They remained close and he enjoyed camping it up with her on the set. 'Oooh, she's given me the 'arf 'ard!', he'd trill in asides to the technicians. His own chastity a self-advertised fact, he thrilled to the moister details of her sex life. When Bar and Ronnie got married, he joined them on honeymoon: 'Well, you've been having it off with the chap forever . . . you can hardly call it an 'oneymoon.' Barbara's subtitle — 'The Laughter and Tears of a Cockney Sparrow' — gives a clear enough indication of what sort of a book it is. But she deserves her status as plucky little survivor. 'The other day a taxi driver was telling me he'd had all of the Carry Ons out on video. "Mind you," he said, "you're all dead now."