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for space with Gene Anthony Ray.

      Louise fitted in well at school and found herself having to stick up for her elder sibling. Their different personalities highlight why Victoria had a tough time. Ironically, considering the pack appeal of the Spice Girls, she was never one of the girls. She had a natural shyness that could be exploited by others, but beneath that apparent vulnerability was a girl who was thoroughly determined and as tough as old boots.

Fortunately, there was some enjoyment to be had at school in its lavish dramatic productions. Victoria was one of the best dancers in Les Misérables and Jesus Christ Superstar. Her passion for dancing was a double-edged sword. It gave her a sense of escape but also meant she seldom socialised with classmates. Boys were not on the agenda, although she did have a date aged fifteen with an American pupil called Franco McCurio who took her to the movies. The most memorable thing about it was that it marked the first time she had ever been on a bus.

      Victoria met her first proper boyfriend in the kitchen of the Old School House when she was sixteen. Mark Wood had come to fit a burglar alarm. He was three years older, six foot two, and the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. They started chatting and she readily agreed when he asked her out on a date.

      She didn’t have to travel by bus, which was a relief, when they went out for a drink to a wine bar. Instead, he picked her up in his dad’s white van, having taken the ladders off the roof for the occasion. Technically, Victoria was too young to be served alcohol but that didn’t stop her getting tipsy, although Mark did not take advantage.

      Being in a committed relationship with Mark was not necessarily the most important thing in her life that year. She was determined to leave St Mary’s to further her chances of a career in show business. She set her heart on going to a stage school. She still regretted not going to a ‘Fame’ school like the Sylvia Young Theatre School or the Italia Conti.

      Victoria did a tour of the leading ‘finishing’ schools in and around London before deciding to apply to Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom. Joy Spriggs approved: ‘Laine is the crème de la crème really.’ The audition was itself an ordeal and a good grounding for more nerve-racking battles later on. One fellow student from Victoria’s year recalled that Betty Laine had a fiery disposition: ‘You wouldn’t want to cross her. She and the teachers present managed to convey a sort of good-cop-bad-cop aura. She was the bad cop!’

Not for the last time, Victoria had no idea if she had made a good impression so she was thrilled when she was accepted. Joy Spriggs and her other mentors at the Jason Theatre School were equally delighted, especially as Victoria was one of three that year considered promising enough to win grants from the local education authority. Joy observed, ‘I know her parents would have paid for her to go there but she deserved her place. She’d worked hard for it and it is so competitive. For the school to get three in with scholarships was quite something. They were a talented bunch.’

      Victoria’s successful application demolishes the opinion that she has no talent or was in some way lucky to achieve any success. Laine accepted only serious, dedicated and talented young people. It had its Premier League reputation to maintain.

      Leaving the Jason Theatre School was quite a wrench. It had been her comfort blanket and her inspiration for nine years. She never forgot how much it meant to her and in 2001, as a worldwide superstar, she went back to present the prizes when the school celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Joy gave her the Jason Anniversary Award – the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Victoria told the girls, ‘I wanted to come to the school to give back something that they’ve given me.’

      She was not so sorry to leave St Mary’s, although she managed five GCSE passes and won a cookery prize. She left school and home at the same age as Melanie Brown but there was a world of difference between the bright lights of Blackpool and the gentle Surrey town of Epsom. It was too far to commute from Goff’s Oak so Tony drove her to some lodgings.

Victoria was quite young and protected for her age. One friend from Goff’s Oak remembered, ‘She was quite naïve when she went to college, not very streetwise at all.’ She made sure she went home every weekend. Slow to settle in, she rang Mark in tears. He recalled, ‘The teachers told her she was too fat. She had put on a few pounds after going on the pill. She said the other girls were awful and she wanted to come home.’

      Even the slimmest of girls would be told to watch their weight at a dancing college. It’s the last thing any young woman would want to hear but Victoria was not being singled out. She was a healthy size twelve. By no stretch of the imagination was she fat – but in dancing terms she was not one of the slender visions that glide around in tutus.

      Joy Spriggs explained that dance colleges would tell all the female students that they needed to lose weight if they wanted to get work: ‘They just want the girls to be slim, particularly if they are doing lift work. The boys won’t want to lift them if they’re overweight, will they?’

      The girls lived in fear of putting on a few pounds. One fellow student explained, ‘It was generally accepted that if you put on a little too much weight in the holidays then Betty would have no qualms in telling you that you were too fat and needed to sort it out ASAP. We were constantly fretting about this possibility.’

      Victoria liked a McDonald’s when she was out – there was a convenient branch on Epsom High Street – and her mum’s meals when she was home. She enjoyed cooking for Mark, particularly pasta. And she loved chocolate, so dieting was not an easy prospect. Like many of her peers, she took up smoking cigarettes to try to suppress hunger pangs. It was bad enough having to deal with the teenage nightmare of acne without having to worry about weight too. She was becoming very body-conscious.

Victoria did not stand out among many fine dancers in her year but she did excel in one of the courses at Laine’s. She was the star pupil in image classes. Betty Laine explained, ‘She was always very conscious of image, which is, of course, paramount to success. If they are going into the pop world, image is very important. She took it extremely seriously. She was always first or second in our image classes.’

      Now seventeen, Victoria was beginning to get a better grip on things. Her parents had bought her a Fiat Uno and some driving lessons for her birthday. They also splashed out on a flat in Epsom where she lived with four girls from college. That meant they could visit her regularly and so could Mark.

      She was also developing her image and plotting her professional future. She had some photographs taken locally by Geoff Marchant, whom most of the students used for their portfolios. She knew the look she wanted or, more precisely, the one she didn’t. Geoff recalled, ‘She didn’t want to make herself girly and she didn’t want to make herself pretty-pretty. She wanted this moody sort of expression, even though it meant there was a lot of shadow, which didn’t help her skin at all.’

      Eventually Geoff persuaded Victoria that it might be a good idea to smile for a few shots in case an agent down the line asked her for something more cheerful. She insisted on wearing black for almost all of the pictures, though. At the time Geoff thought she was quite a cold young lady, but his view changed: ‘I think it may well have been a mixture of shyness and determination.’

      Victoria had a very privileged lifestyle. For her eighteenth-birthday treat her parents arranged for her and Mark to go by Eurostar to stay in Paris. For his twenty-first, Victoria organised a surprise dinner at a West End restaurant and invited his closest friends. They spent their summer holiday at Tony and Jackie’s villa on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Mark was treated as one of the family. He was now living full time at the Old School House – a big step for an eighteen-year-old girl and an even bigger one for her parents. When they got back from Spain, looking fit and tanned, she took Mark along to see Geoff Marchant for some shots, separate and together. This time round, Victoria was much more relaxed. It seemed she had designs on her boyfriend becoming a male model, although Geoff thought he lacked the extra something to make it in that competitive world.

      Victoria needed to think about her own career. Despite the very obvious advantage of having wealthy parents, she retained her own personal ambitions.

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