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      Contents

      Title Page

      Acknowledgements

      Jade’s Final Chapter – by Lucie Cave

      Prologue

      The Voice of Big Brother

      Introduction

      1. Low Life

      2. Best-laid Plans …

      3. Re-re-wind

      4. Jack the Lad

      5. Kiss and Don’t Tell Me Again

      6. Running Scared

      7. Ch-ch-changes

      8. Highs and Lows

      9. Big Mistake

      10. Trial and Error

      11. New Beginnings

      12. Making Amends

      13. Back to Reality

      14. Hot and Bothered

      15. Hopes and Fears

      16. Lost Treasure

      17. Jack’s Back

      18. Family Values

      19. Fat Chance

      20. Friends and Fun

      21. End of the Road

      Epilogue

      Afterword

      Copyright

       Acknowledgements

      Thanks to my mum for loving me unconditionally. You have as many great things about you as you have faults and it’s because of what I’ve been through that I’ve become the strong person that I am today. I love you to bits.

      Thank you to Sean O’Brien for taking me under his wing when no one else would.

      Thanks to Danny Hayward and Simon Bridger for being good friends, and also to Lucie Cave for helping me write another brilliant book.

      Finally, thank you to Bobby and Freddy, my beautiful boys, for helping me get through the tough times and making me smile every single day.

       Jade’s Final Chapter –

      by Lucie Cave

      ‘Life is for laughing’

       Jade Goody, February 2009

      This is the second of Jade Goody’s books about her life – something, even before she was fatefully diagnosed with cancer in August 2008, she had always planned as a precious record for her two beloved sons Bobby and Freddy. Jade brought me on board as her ghost-writer to help her pen an honest account of her colourful upbringing – to show her boys just how much their mum had achieved and to serve as an inspirational reminder that success can be built on hard work, persistence and inner strength.

      The Jade I got to know was more open, honest and candid than any celebrity I’d ever met (and probably ever will again). Unique, strong, brave, big-hearted and extremely vulnerable, Jade wore her heart firmly on her sleeve in a way no-one else, especially those in the public eye, would dare. And despite the fact that by the time we embarked on her first book in 2006 she was one of the most famous people in the UK (with three reality TV shows under her belt and having sold more perfumes than J-Lo and David Beckham) there was never an ounce of the diva about her.

      Most celebs want things done on their terms or not at all. But rather than making me trek all the way to her place in Essex whenever we worked on her autobiography, Jade insisted on driving herself to my house. Of course, Jade being Jade she was usually late – and I’d get the inevitable phone call telling me that the sat nav in her car had sent her ‘the wrong way’ (this happened to her a lot – she was stopped by police for driving the wrong direction down Oxford Street once) or that she’d spent the afternoon searching for a missing budgie that Jack had bought her as a present (turned out she’d left the window of her conservatory open). One evening I got a knock on my door and opened it to see her standing there in fits of giggles because she couldn’t park her car so we had to leave it in the middle of my road and hope none of my neighbours needed to go anywhere. But no matter what time she eventually arrived, Jade was always full of apologies and would stay working with me for hours (in between making calls to her babysitter – mum Jackiey or ex-boyfriend Jeff – to check that her little boys had brushed their teeth and gone to bed on time). She might have been known for having a big mouth, but Jade was super-polite at all times. Manners were of utmost importance to her – something she instilled in her sons.

      She would always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and would courteously ask if it was okay for her to use my bathroom when she needed the loo. Jade visited my house loads, but wouldn’t ever accept anything other than a glass of water – this was typical of Jade, she didn’t want to be a burden.

      When Jade was around you certainly always knew about it and my flatmates would chuckle to themselves whenever she poked her head round the door with her trademark grin. At the time of writing the first book together, Jade: My Autobiography, she had just opened her salon, ‘Ugly’s’ in Essex, which meant she often turned up in her beautician’s uniform. This was way too short (and tight) for her but somehow she pulled it off. Working with so many beauty treatments meant Jade was a guinea pig for new products – and regularly appeared with different-coloured skin or excitedly pointing to a ‘wrinkle-free’ patch on her forehead. Once she turned up with extremely unusual eyebrows – ‘I’ve had them tattooed!’ she cackled. But Jade could get away with it. One of the enduring things about her – and the thing most people remarked on when they met her – was how very pretty she was in the flesh. Flawless skin and jaw-dropping features made her incredible to look at, and when she lost all her hair from chemo she still looked arrestingly beautiful.

      Jade’s life story was so eventful – a film-maker couldn’t have dreamed it up. She’d sit on my bed recalling the things that had happened to her – growing up with a drug addict dad who was in and out of prison, Jade was then forced to care for her mum after an accident left her paralysed. But Jade still managed to find a funny side. ‘I remember when I first got pubes. I was so proud of them. Then my mum leant over the bath with a razor and shaved them into a heart shape!’ As with her later years, nothing was without drama. Jade sold her bed to a neighbour for £25 aged seven and was arrested for shoplifting in Selfridges when she was a teenager (she got caught because she went back to ask for carrier bags for her stolen goods). Then the ups and downs just kept on coming – a drug addict boyfriend, being sent into foster care, buying her first designer outfit (‘I got this white Moschino outfit with little stick men and women all over it. I thought it was the nuts.’) It was only in 2002 that her colourful existence became part of our world too. And if she hadn’t been saved in the first week of Big Brother (she was up against Lynn in the public vote but was chosen by her fellow housemates to stay) we would never have experienced the delights of this unique breed of celebrity.

      Sitting in my bedroom reliving her experiences, she was a floodgate of emotions. Hiding behind a pillow and shrieking at the mention of the ‘BJ with PJ’ under the sheets in Big Brother 3, tears streaming down her face when recalling stories from her childhood, beaming with pride when talking of her sons, giggling when I pointed out that she was saying words wrong (she

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