My funny old life: Julie Walters tells her story - and reveals some ...

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The nuns were of the classic penguin variety, their black veilsbillowing out behind them like giant bat wings when they walked atspeed.
Not only did they dispense helpful gems like 'Don't cross yourlegs, you never saw the Virgin Mary cross hers' or 'Beware ofchocolate . . . it's a stimulant', and offer strictures thatpatent-leather shoes were not to be worn because they reflectedyour nether regions, they also administered painful and randomslaps to the head for such misdemeanours as whispering in class.
My years with them were among the unhappiest of my life. I neverwent into that school without fear of what was in store, and theelocution lessons my mother spoke about with such reverence wereone of the unhappiest experiences of all.
My abiding memory is of standing at the front of the class readingfrom a book. Throughout the reading, I consistently pronouncedwords that had a long A, such as 'daft', in the same way as wordswith a short A, such as 'cat'. This was the way I spoke then andhow I speak today; it was the way we all pronounced such words athome, my mother being Irish and the rest of us having Black Countryaccents.
I knew what was expected of me, but I simply couldn't bring myselfto say this long A.
After the reading, the teacher wrote a list of similar words andasked me to read them out. Something in me, even though I wasfrightened, still refused to say it the way she wanted and everytime I said the short A she walloped my hand with a ruler.
I can't recall how long I stood there, but there were severalstinging slaps and I know that I never gave in. It felt like somekind of final frontier to my self-worth. I was defending who I was.
If I gave her what she wanted, I would be confirming my mother'sfears - that we were not good enough - and I simply couldn't dothat.
THE DAY I WAS MOLESTED

I was allowed to travel to and from school by myself, and this wentwithout a hitch until one afternoon when I was ten.
I was with my two best friends and the little sister of one ofthem.
We had been waiting for the number nine bus and, feeling a bitbored, we decided to play in the huge overgrown front garden of anenormous empty house that was next to the bus stop.
After some time we heard a man's voice shouting at us and comingtowards us, through the bushes, from the direction of the house.'Oi! What do you think you're doing?'
We decided to run for it and scampered into the front garden ofanother huge house and there we hid in the bushes.
We crouched down, hoping the man had gone, but a few minutes laterhe reappeared.
He was tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and agrubby-looking mac.
'What do you think you were doing in that garden?' I don't know whosaid what, but I think we probably all spoke at once.
'We were just playing.' 'We're really sorry.' He told us to standup and proceeded to put a clammy hand up each of our skirts in turnand to feel the tops of our thighs.
While doing this he asked us what school we went to, this simplequestion striking more fear into our hearts than the molestationthat was taking place.
Suddenly he said that he was going and then, jabbing his forefingerat us, he told us we were to stay put until he came back or else.
We stood there for several minutes in silence, precious minutesduring which we could easily have escaped. But we were doing as wewere told out of total fear.
I can still smell the damp earth and the rotting leaves around ourfeet, and I can recall wanting this man to be harmless and tellingthe others in a frightened whisper that I believed his touching usup was simply him working out our age.
'What would the nuns say if they knew what you'd been up to?' Hewas back again and strangely breathless.
'Oh, please don't report us! We won't do it again.'
'Well, you'd better come with me.' And dutifully, with heartsracing, we followed. He took us back the way we had come and into amuch quieter road. A little way down it, he instructed us to standagainst the wall and lift our dresses up.
I can still see his face as he stared at us and my recollectingwith horror that not only was I not wearing my school beret, areportable offence, but that I was also not wearing my regulationnavy-blue interlockweave school knickers.
Instead I had on a pair of shameful, pink nylon frilly ones that mymother had bought off the market.
After several seconds of staring, he was clearly becoming agitatedand took us back the way we had come, up the road and round thecorner, where now there was quite a queue at the bus stop.
On seeing these people, one of my friends, God bless her presenceof mind, suddenly proclaimed: 'Oh! I've got to go and get my busnow.' And she ran off at top speed in the opposite direction.
This, of course, attracted the attention of the people in thequeue. The man, clearly panicking, said, 'Yes . . . yes . . . offyou go and don't let me catch you playing in that garden again orI'll smack yer bums.'
And with that, he scuttled off. We never used that bus stop again,preferring to walk a quarter of a mile to the next one; nor did weever speak of the incident. I never told my parents either. Ididn't want them to worry.
The next day at school the girl who had run off didn't turn up. Iwas in a complete haze of fear the whole morning until her brightlittle face appeared around the classroom door. She had been to thedentist.
I have often wondered what would have happened if that bus stop hadbeen deserted. The man was obviously looking for somewhere to takeus and that empty old house would have been perfect.
I also think that if we hadn't been so terrified of being reportedto the nuns, we'd have been more inclined both to stand up forourselves and to get away from this man.
MAKING PEOPLE LAUGH

At prep school, I was ashamed of virtually anything that might givea clue to my working-class background, from where I lived (I neverinvited anyone home) to where I went on holiday (we went toMargate, the other girls went for three weeks to Cornwall orItaly), right down to the material that my school uniform was madeof - my mother always going for the cheaper option.
My panama hat, which we were required to wear during the summerterm, was unlike anyone else's, theirs being neat, pale andpork-pie shaped, and mine being large, yellowish andbatteredlooking, the sort of thing that wouldn't have looked out ofplace on a scarecrow or Guy Fawkes.
'I realised I could make people laugh': Julie Walters in the filmEducating Rita alongside Michael Caine

Then, when I went to secondary school, I switched to Holly Lodge,the local grammar.
Arriving there was like getting into your own bed after weeks ofsleeping on someone else's hard floor.
There wasn't a nun in sight. People spoke as I did; they lived inhouses like mine.
Slowly, I began to discover a pride, both in my family and my home.I recognised my peers and found my place among them.
I was the cheeky clown, calling out in class with comments to makethe other girls, and sometimes the teachers, laugh. I wouldimpersonate the headmistress, my grandmother, or a nutty woman wholived up the road: anything to get those laughs.
I recognised a power in it; it both put things in perspective andcut them down to size. It stopped the world from beingoverwhelming.
Throughout my entire time at Holly Lodge, I felt younger than mostof my peers. Some of them looked as if they could be about 30 witha couple of kids, while I still looked as if I was about nine.
A lot of them were sexually active and, if not, had a good workingknowledge of how you went about things. I had no experience apartfrom a bit of kissing and fumbling.
My sex education started when playing with my friends in LightwoodsPark aged about eight. One of them drew my attention to two dogs,one mounting the other, and said: 'That's what your mum and daddo.'
I took issue with this, thinking it to be a personal insult to myparents, stating that it couldn't possibly be so because my motherwas a Catholic.
Even if it was true, I didn't really want this piece of informationand did my best to rid my head of the image it conjured up.
Then, at secondary school, I laboured under the delusion, born of arumour spread throughout my year, that if a girl had splayed feet,it meant that she had lost her virginity. It didn't occur to methat my mother's feet, for instance, pointed straight out in front.
I was also told by some informed soul that you could get pregnantby sitting in a married man's bathwater, so I always gave the batha good rinse if my father had been in before me.
My mother never broached the subject of sex education until I was16, when she asked without looking at me, in a little girl's voice:'Do you know about periods, Julie?'
'Well, I should hope so, Mum, I've been having them for two years.'
DISCOVERING KAMA SUTRA
A few years after I left home, I was in the pantry at BishoptonRoad when I mysteriously came across a copy of the Kama Sutra whilelooking for a clean towel in the laundry basket. It was hidden inthe washing.
I felt uncomfortable and a little shocked at the find. Where onearth had my mother got it? Surely she wasn't attempting any ofthese Olympian postures herself and, if so, who with? My father haddied some time back.
I never did find out and in some ways I'm grateful for that, but itdid go part way to explaining something that my mother had said alittle while before the discovery.
We were sitting in the kitchen, discussing the new husband of afriend of hers, when she suddenly announced in a rather baffled butthoughtful voice: 'I don't think your father was very good at sex.'End of conversation.
My own first love was a chap called Bob. It was a relationship thatwas never consummated, its physical side consisting of a lot ofsnogging to the Beach Boys' God Only Knows and well-manneredgroping in Bob's front room, either when his parents weren't in orwere keeping a discreet distance in the back kitchen.
In fact, the only time we could have done the deed was when a groupof us from school, who my parents thought were all girls, spent aweekend in a caravan on a windswept site somewhere in mid-Wales,the boys turning up later after our dads had dropped us off.
Bob and I spent hours in frenzied snogging on a very narrow bunkonce the lights went out, but in an act of gallantry he placed thesheet between us, so that should his passion reach uncontrollableheights there would be this crisp, white contraceptive to save theday.
However, it wasn't to be the sheet that eventually cooled ourardour. It was the sound of whispering coming from the bunkopposite ours, where one of my friends was sleeping with a boy whowas new to the group.
The whispering then became more urgent. 'No! No! No!' And withevery 'No' I remember that Bob squeezed me to him as if I were theone calling out.
For what I think was several minutes, while the rest of us held ourcollective breath, this poor girl's pleas hissed out into thesilence, punctuated by pitiful sobs, which then finally stopped.
What was chilling about it was that there was no utterancewhatsoever from the young man, just the lonely, frightened soundsof the girl.
I know that, were my adult self to be miraculously transported backthere, I would have spoken out in the darkness to that girl and puta stop to what was going on.
But back then, we weren't sure and, indeed, one of the boys thenext day, when his girlfriend had expressed her concern, wasreported to have said: 'Oh, she was all right. She must have wantedhim to or she wouldn't have got into bed with him.'
Bob and I lasted only the length of the summer holidays, but in myblurry memory he is tall, dark and handsome, with a bit of a RoyMarsden look about him, easily outclassing the normal run ofsuitor. So I thought myself lucky.
There had been two or three before him, but my dates with theminvolved mainly writhing about - while trying to keep strayinghands out of my bra in case they should happen upon thehandkerchiefs stuffed therein - as we sat in the back row of thePrincess Hall Cinema on Smethwick High Street, on seats scarredwith cigarette burns.
Bob was on another plane. He had just left grammar school havingdone A-levels, he was going to teacher training college; mybrothers didn't sneer and, most importantly, my mother approved.
So when he came home for the weekend after being away at collegefor about a month and told me in his front room that he thought itwas best that we perhaps finished, it was as if he was suddenlyspeaking Urdu.
Gone was the warm, crinkly-eyed, only-between-us look and here wasthe awkward staring-down-at-shoesandcarpet look and body languagethat said: 'Don't make yourself comfortable, you won't be stayinglong.'
He walked me to the bus stop. I don't know what was said and Iprobably couldn't have told you then either, overwhelmed by theterrible need to get away and cry.
The tears began on the bus and they never really let up for about amonth. I lay on the floor in mourning, endlessly poring over hisletters, which I kept in an old sewing box under the bed, called myBob Box.
My parents never once challenged my red-eyed silence or my draggingmyself around the house, my eyelids swollen and puffy, and I had noinclination to discuss it with either of them, thinking thatneither would understand or realise the magnitude of my feelings.
I questioned mum about it much later in my 30s, wondering whethershe remembered.
She said: 'Oh yes, we knew what had happened. We guessed that youhad a broken heart, but we didn't like to say anything. We thoughtit best.'
I'm not sure why I was immensely touched by the fact that they hadknown all along. I know that their silence was born out of aninability to deal with 'feelings', as it wasn't the done thing totalk things out then, but it was also born out of recognition,sympathy and, of course, wisdom.
I WOULD TAKE UP NURSING

'Julia . . .' Teachers always called me Julia. 'We don't want youto come back next year.
You will never get your A-levels now; it's a complete waste ofeveryone's time, as you are too far behind.
You simply haven't put in the work. And we don't like yoursubversive influence.'
I looked up into the intense blue eyes behind the horn-rimmed specsof Mr Taylor, our deputy head, while scrabbling in my mind for themeaning of 'subversive', as he handed me a letter to take home.
Did it refer to my truancy, which had got so bad that I was hardlyever there?
Or could it have referred to the time when I had gone into an emptyclassroom, egged on by my friend, and thrown a metal tubular chairat a thin wooden partition, on the other side of which was ourtight-bunned and straight-faced form teacher who, in her terribleEdward Heath French accent, was in the process of teaching theupper-sixth French group?
It was reported that the resulting clatter had almost caused her tocollapse with fright.

I went home that afternoon, posting the letter to my parents,unread, into a dustbin outside a shop and told my mother that I hadreached a momentous decision: I would take up nursing.
There was no need for me to stay on at school; I would prefer toget a job for a year and save some money (the word 'save' wasalways a good one with my mother).
Surprisingly, without any discussion-she agreed. I went straightupstairs and looked up 'subversive'.
THE BULLYING THAT LEFT ME SO ASHAMED
At school, I became friends with a clique led by a bright andcharismatic girl with a wicked sense of humour.
While scared of her, like the others, I was both captivated and inawe of her. After a few weeks, she started making snide commentsand funny asides about a girl.
Although underneath I felt guilty about this bullying, I didnothing to discourage it.
In fact, the opposite. I, along with the others, giggled andlaughed. But then it began to escalate. A horrid plan was hatchedto rub butter on the pedals of her bicycle and put pepper in herberet.
I stood with the others, unable to bear the thought of it, yetheartily agreeing with it, feigning glee.
This girl had been a good friend of mine and I feel huge shametoday at my cowardice and regret when I think of her sitting in theclassroom, her face burning from the pepper, her eyes smarting andbloodshot.
A couple of evenings later, I was at home, lying on the sofa in thesitting room, watching television, when someone knocked at thefront door. On answering it I found our victim's mother. She askedwhether she could come in.
I knew why she had come and I was very scared that my mother, whowas only in the kitchen, might walk in at any moment. She said thather daughter was desperately upset and didn't deserve thistreatment; it wasn't fair and why were we doing it?
I stood there dumbly, unable to answer. As she left, she turnedaround and said: 'She's got a heart of gold.' And I knew it wastrue. I went straight to my bedroom, flung myself on the bed andcried myself to sleep.
I told the others the next day. They were shocked and said little,I suspect fearing there could be repercussions.
The incident was duly hidden away, in 'the never to be looked atagain' file, at the back of my head, but like anything that isn'taired it began to smell.
Several years ago I could ignore it no longer and decided to writeto the girl.
I wanted her to know my side of it and how I had felt, but morethan anything, I wanted forgiveness.
I apologised for the pain she must have suffered and for myweakness and cowardice, at not sticking up for her or at leastwalking away.
She was generous in her forgiveness and made light of it all. It isa tribute to her strength of character that she withstood theonslaught of our childish bitchiness and I'm reminded of this everytime I read of yet another child being kept off school or, worsestill, committing suicide as a result of bullying.
• Abridged extract from THAT'S ANOTHER STORY by JulieWalters, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on October 2at