Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography Read Free Page B

pupils had left her feeling very disillusioned, and her plans to be a professional ballerina who danced on stages around the world were forgotten there and then. ‘It shattered my dream,’ she admitted in the Daily Mirror interview, looking back. ‘But I didn’t want to have to stand a certain way all my life and only eat salad.’
    Thankfully, this particular experience didn’t put her off dancing altogether. Back in Newcastle she attended the Newcastle Dance Centre, where she excelled at a wide range of dance styles. Her skill was of such a high calibre that she went on to win numerous dance competitions. Eventually, she teamed up with a boy from the centre for the British Dance Championships, and the pair of them appeared on Michael Barrymore’s successful TV show My Kind of People. But that wasn’t their only taste of TV stardom. They also appeared on the Saturday morning kids’ show Gimme 5 and enjoyed enough screen time to have their friends back at the centre and at school agog with excitement. It was also clear to Cheryl that performing in front of the cameras came naturally to her. Little did she know then that it would stand her in good stead in the future when she’d take part in a TV show called Popstars: The Rivals.

_____ Chapter 3
PLAYGROUNDS AND PARTYING
    By the time she was a teenager, it seemed clear that Cheryl Tweedy was destined to become a star, but that didn’t mean her life was all song and dance. In fact, when she wasn’t singing into her hairbrush or bopping away to the hits of boyband Five, she was just like most teenage girls who passed the time hanging out with her friends, larking about with boys and watching chick flicks such as Grease , Ghost and Dirty Dancing so many times that she could probably reel off the scripts word for word if she were asked to.
    In spite of her lofty ambitions, family life with her three brothers and one sister was pretty run-of-the-mill. All of them were given chores to do and taught to look out for each other. Life in their cramped house wasn’t exactly like an episode of the The Waltons , however. Far from it. The kids could be little terrors and often ran rampant around the house, proving to be something of a handful for poor Joan and Garry. ‘Our neighbours must have hated us,’ Cheryl confided on Loose Women years later. ‘Wewere such a noisy bunch of kids.’ Joseph, the eldest, was born in 1976, Gillian came next in 1979, and Andrew followed in 1980. When Cheryl came along in the summer of 1983, four years before youngest brother Garry, the boisterous young Tweedys had found a brand new toy to play with in their little sister. And play with her they did, as Cheryl recalled in an interview with Top of the Pops magazine in 2003. ‘I learnt how to fight cos me brothers would joke about and hang me over balconies. I had to learn self-defence.’
    Although Joan spent much of her time tending to Cheryl’s creative needs, she also had to make sure that the rest of the children didn’t feel neglected. As a busy housewife, Joan had to make sure that she found time for each of her kids. Having had her first child at just seventeen, the youthful mother had formed a close bond with her children.
    ‘She had to grow up fast,’ Cheryl said of her mum in the Daily Mirror. ‘And with five of us she had to work hard.’ Life certainly wasn’t easy, and Joan struggled, but with strength, determination and the love and support of her family, she managed to muddle through the rough times. ‘Dad supported all of us because my mum wanted to bring us up well.’
    Money may have been tight but Joan and Garry made sure that the children were well looked after. ‘There were five of us, so there wasn’t much money,’ Cheryl told Top of the Pops magazine. ‘We weren’t spoilt at all.’
    Christmases were family orientated, though never very ostentatious. However, although they were on a budget, it didn’t mean festive times at the Tweedys weren’t fun. One