And so it begins…

And so it was with a heavy heart and an even heavier suitcase, I made my way to Crewe on that cold November morning. I spent most of my journey on my first train trying to hold my emotions together and not break down in a million tears in front of complete strangers. I didn’t do too badly! The journey was pretty uneventful, and before I knew it, I had changed trains, met Marcus (my Romeo/Macbeth/George/Mr Birling) and had (probably) bored his ears off with tales of my month away from him, and arrived at Crewe station. Eden had been very nice and came to pick us up in his car to transport us to the rehearsal venue. Thanks to my inability to pack lightly, I was crammed into the back seat surrounded by bags with around 10% visibility!

Rehearsal week was a mixed bag of emotions. I arrived on the Monday not really wanting to be there, but my mood was slightly raised as we were beginning the week with ‘Of Mice and Men’, the one play that I had actually read and bothered to do any work on! The week was going to be incredibly intense, with five days to rehearse and learn four different workshops. I quickly found out that I hadn’t done nearly enough work on anything, and the first day and a half was excruciatingly awful as my workshop leader skills were exposed as a complete pile of awfulness! But that was nothing compared to later in the week! The second workshop to be rehearsed was Romeo and Juliet, which went by like a dream, I know that one!! Next up was Macbeth, which seemed to take an absolute age to get through, mainly because of my sheer awfulness at portraying Lady Macbeth! It didn’t help that it had been a million years since we did a tiny bit of work on it at school and that I didn’t understand a word of what was being said! I wanted to cry because it was that awful, and I was terrified of the ladder which was to be used as part of our set for the witches. By the time Friday rolled around, we had about half a day to rehearse the final workshop, ‘An Inspector Calls’. Thankfully it was incredibly straightforward due to the cuts made to the script, and as we wouldn’t be performing it in the first week, we brushed it to one side and forgot about it.

Outside of rehearsals, I was getting on very well with my new boys. My cooking skills are diabolical, and we all ate together so I had lots of nice meals made for me. We didn’t have too much time to get to know each other that well as our evenings were spent around a laptop with our heads in our scripts, trying to get a definitive script together for each workshop, and inserting our own words for the workshop-leader sections. But we seemed to be a nice little happy group, if slightly poorly, which made us avoid the kissing scenes during rehearsals. I think I remember Marcus even kissing my chin to avoid catching whatever germs were flying around inside me! We were very lucky when Saturday arrived, we had a day off! Huzzah! The boys headed towards Stoke to go and buy things like pants and socks (why didn’t they bring enough?!?), but I stayed at home, pottered about and attempted to learn a few lines. I wouldn’t have minded going with them and seeing my lovely ex-boss Barry, but he was off in Italy in his new house, the swine! I enjoyed being by myself though, and the day felt quite productive, after I’d eventually woken up at lunchtime! Then came Sunday, and we made our way back to the rehearsal rooms for a final run of all four workshops, loading up the van and heading to our first destination. The run wasn’t too bad, but I felt there was only so much we could do without an audience.

We then had our van brought round to us, and I did a little squeal of delight! It was a beautiful Transit van with six seats. Yes, six! It was like a limousine of the van world! Chuffed! We packed everything in and took a couple of photos of where everything was to make sure it would fit in again, and we were off! Eden did the first drive, which was to Cannock chase. The drive was a pleasant affair, and the first accommodation didn’t disappoint. It was a nice bungalow, with a gorgeous bathroom, two beautiful bedrooms, a cute kitchen and a cosy living room. Unfortunately, we had a lot of travelling to do that week and we would be finding ourselves in two Travelodges during the week, leaving the pretty house behind.

Monday brought our first two shows, a Romeo and Juliet, and an Of Mice and Men, the latter being attended by our bosses! The morning show went really well, the kids seemed to be above GCSE age, and had all made masks to bring along with them for some unknown reason! But we got through it, and they seemed to enjoy it! We found ourselves in a school that I had previously visited with Black Cat in the afternoon. About a minute after we pulled up in the car park, our bosses arrived and my heart started racing. The pressure was immense; the workshop was mostly me as workshop leader, and I just knew it was going to be awful! It went by in a flash though, and as it wasn’t quite long enough, Yvonne had to step in and put some extra bits onto the end but again, people seemed to enjoy it so I relaxed a little bit! The rest of the week went by in a bit of a blur as we were trying to find our rhythms in each workshop, and trying to adapt them to each audience to fit their abilities. On our second evening, we treated ourselves with a trip to the theatre. It had been a while since I’d been to the theatre to see a straight play, without people jumping up and breaking out in song every ten minutes so I was very excited. The boys had told me that it was about boxing, which didn’t really appeal to me, but I was willing to give it a go, and I was so glad that I did. It was also my first trip to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and I was suitably impressed! The play, Beautiful Burnout, was amazing. I won’t ruin it in case any of you want to see it, but the whole cast were amazing, and I didn’t see the end coming at all. I was completely transfixed and absolutely heartbroken! Yet again, I found myself weeping uncontrollably in front of hundreds of strangers!

The first week came to its end, and Saturday arrived, promising us a trip to Northern Ireland on a ferry! The last time I did that crossing, I slept the whole way because the sea was so choppy no-one could stay standing upright on the boat! Of course with touring, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and half an hour into our journey, we found ourselves at a standstill on the always glamorous motorway, the m6. It seemed like our journey would take forever, but thanks to some empty roads in Wales, we made it to the ferry with half an hour to spare and were able to buy some hideously overpriced snacks and beverages to accompany ourselves across the water. The ferry itself was nothing to shout about. I settled myself down in a quiet corner to go to sleep while the boys excitedly ran off to explore the boat. They were back in five minutes. There was nothing to see! While they bought some on-board food, I snuggled down under my coat to avoid the biting cold of my surroundings, only to see a man walk past me whose appearance startled and amused me! There was not a single hair on the top of his head but he had the most majestic of beards I have ever seen! It came half way down his chest! Funny how these things happen!

We arrived in Dublin in the dark, and were still faced with an epic 3-hour drive to our accommodation. It was my turn to take the wheel, and typically it started to rain- rain and darkness, the two conditions I hate driving in (if you can call the dark a condition!). But with the help of my trusty sat-nav Sean, we made it, and it was beautiful! It was a gorgeous stone house, with everything we needed. The only downside was that it was in the middle of nowhere, the nearest bit of civilisation was a twenty minute drive away. I demanded the downstairs bedroom, purely for the fact that I was too tired to drag my suitcase upstairs, collapsed into bed and woke up the next day to beautiful sunshine. I was going to like it there!

Our first week of shows in Northern Ireland was a good one! I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to understand a word of what anyone would say to me, and apart from having to ask kids to repeat themselves a few times, we did well! Apart from Tuesday. We drove to our afternoon school in plenty of time; we had a 1.30pm start time on our sheet. I made my way to reception and my phone started to ring, it was the lady from our booking office wondering where we were. The school had been on to them as we hadn’t arrived. I assured her that I was walking through the front door and breathed a sigh of relief. I spoke to the receptionist who just pointed her finger in the general direction of the hall, so I stuck my nose in and went to get the boys. As we were bringing things in, our contact teacher arrived and gave us some unexpected news. He wasn’t aware that it was a workshop, he thought he was getting a full performance, and that there would be 445 in the audience. I literally felt my heart shrivelling up and just wanted to go home! It was the toughest crowd we had to face, they went back for miles and we were just fighting a losing battle from the start! I was looking forward to Thursday, we had a Macbeth in the morning, and the afternoon off! The show went well, and we found a nice designer outlet shopping centre on the way home to stop at. I left the boys and went to do some girly shopping when the booking office phoned me again- a school had phoned them to check that we were coming; the booking office were under the impression that the show had been cancelled (as it had been 3 times before), and so I was phoned to see if we could make it. (I’m pretty sure the booking office phone me first because I’m a girl and a pushover!) So I ran around the shopping centre, found the boys, shoved them into the van and put my foot down to get us there in time. As annoyed as we were, the show was amazing, probably the best Romeo and Juliet we’ve done! Yay for us!

That weekend brought something rare, something precious, something that the touring actor longs for but hardly gets... a full weekend with no travelling! We were staying in the same house for two weeks so we got to do whatever we wanted! I was looking forward to chilling out, relaxing and having a lovely non-eventful day. And then I woke up ill. I wasn’t happy. The boys dragged me out of the house for some air, and we found a town that we thought might have something fun in it. We were wrong. We managed to find a library and caught up on some internetting, but that was about all we managed to do. We had a drink in a pub before coming home but I don’t remember much about it because my head was spinning and I felt dazed and confused! I woke up around lunchtime on Sunday to find Marcus missing. He likes to go walking so we weren’t worried, but I thought he might get lost by himself in a strange country! Eden decided that he was going to drag me out of the house whether I liked it or not, so we found Marcus and went for a nice walk. We followed signs for Beaghmore stone circles. Now, when I picture stone circles in my head, I think of something like Stonehenge, big old stones that look a bit creepy. Did I get Stonehenge? Of course I didn’t! I got a load of circles, around ankle height! I’ve never been let down by anything as much in my life! We moved on to a country park-style walking area in Creggan forest, and kept ourselves entertained by reading the story of the Creggan White Hare. He had some little rhyme in the story that reminded me of the gingerbread man. We were walking for a while when we realised that we weren’t getting any further in the story. We’d taken the wrong fork in the path and walked onto another route around the forest! I made Eden make up the rest of the story in case we couldn’t find it again! After about another hour and a half, we made it back onto our original trail and got to finish the story, which didn’t turn out too differently from Eden’s version!

Week two in Ireland was a full ten-show week, and was a good one! We were receiving good feedback from our bosses, it seemed that people were absolutely loving us! I had a lovely unexpected phone call from Barry which brightened up my evening, and a teacher even hugged me as we were leaving one school because she was so glad that we came in to help her kids! We had had such a lovely time over there, we had been given amazing food, been treated amazingly by everybody, sat in a staffroom watching a teachers husband dance on YouTube, and had a lovely sprinkling of snow that turned the countryside even more beautiful than it had been. I really didn’t want to leave. But our time was up, and on the Friday (after the teacher-hugging), we dropped Marcus off at Belfast airport for him to fly to Manchester for wedding-usher duties, drove home and started packing up the house ready for another full day of travel up to Scotland.

I woke up in a funny mood on Saturday, I didn’t know whether I was just sad to be leaving Northern Ireland, or whether I just felt that it wasn’t going to be a good day. We packed up the van, I filled my hot water bottle, and nominated Eden to do the first part of the drive while I warmed myself up. It was going to be a long day; we had a two-hour drive to the ferry, three hours ferry time, and at least another two hours driving up through Scotland. We programmed the sat-nav to take us to the ferry port, I took some last-minute photos of the view and off we went. Eden was chirpy, I was still in my strange mood but we were on our way. And then it happened. Less than five minutes into our journey we hit an ice patch on the road. We skidded and span around for about 100 metres before ending up going backwards and ending up in a ditch and half in someone’s field. Thankfully no-one was coming the other way up the road, and neither of us were hurt, but we weren’t going anywhere. We got out of the van to find that the window behind the driver was completely smashed, and further up the road I found our front bumper. Apart from that, it didn’t look too bad, but we were lodged on the roots of a bush and no amount of trying could get us out. We immediately phoned our bosses, but had no answer on any of the three numbers that we tried. We found the number for the breakdown assistance and tried to sort things out on our own. When Eden managed to talk to someone, they couldn’t find our location on their computer system and said that they would phone us back. When they eventually did, we were told that they knew roughly where we were, but their van wouldn’t be able to pull us out of the ditch, so could we go for a walk and try to find a farmer with a tractor to help us. If I hadn’t been in shock I would have started shouting at them! What’s the point in a breakdown company if you have to sort things out yourself!? I wasn’t happy about leaving our stuff in the van with a broken window so I stayed with the van while Eden tried to find help. While all this was going on, I realised how selfish and rude people can be. Eden was on the phone to people and I was standing by the van, clearly having had an accident, and people were just driving past and staring. A few people did stop to ask if we were ok, but I couldn’t believe the amount of people who would just drive past a young woman at the side of the road and just stare.

After about ten minutes Eden returned and said that he had found the farmer who owned the field we were in. The farmers wife had insisted that we go inside to keep warm while we waited for her husband to return from the shop and rescue us. But as soon as we were about to go, the farmer arrived. He took a look at the van and said that his tractor wouldn’t be able to get us out, but he would try with his car. I stayed further up the road to stop traffic coming down and watched as our van and the farmers car seemed to be ice dancing around each other, threatening to push each other off the road, but eventually we were freed from the torments of the bushes, and back on the road. Then came the phone calls. We had to phone the breakdown people again to say that we were moving but we didn’t have a window, change our ferry, and let our landlord in Scotland know that we would be late. The breakdown man said that he would meet us in the nearest town, so we picked up the debris from our van that was littering the countryside and very slowly drove to meet him. There wasn’t much he could do apart from checking the van over to see if we could drive it, and put something that looked like sticky backed plastic over the gaping hole where our window used to be. It was at this point (about two hours after the crash) that the boss phoned us back, in an absolute panic because we’d left her three messages telling her what had happened. She was in a state because she thought we’d been hurt and she felt awful that she hadn’t been there to answer the phone. I assured her that we were fine and that we had sorted things out, and we carried on our journey to Belfast. I made more phone calls again, trying to find somewhere to fix our window, but the glass couldn’t be got for another week. We were quicker than we thought in our progress, so I managed to get our ferry changed again to an earlier crossing, so we dragged our extremely sad-looking vehicle with its cling-film and gaffa-tape window onto the ferry and made our way to Scotland.

The crossing was once again pleasant. I kept myself entertained with a couple of glossy magazines and a huge bag of pick and mix (after all, I’d had a traumatic experience!), and in under three hours, we were back on dry land, ready for the next leg of the journey. It was I again who began the driving off the ferry, and I wasn’t particularly happy about driving it. But there was no snow or ice so after a while I relaxed, and actually enjoyed the journey up. The radio was playing songs that reminded me of home, and a smile crept on my face for the first time that day. We swapped drivers just over half way, and we started to notice the snow that had fallen that week, which was getting deeper the further north we went. The battery on the sat-nav started flashing, indicating that it needed to be plugged in but neither of us could remove Eden’s phone charger from the socket. It was time for maps, and the occasional turning on and off of the sat-nav to make sure we were going in the right direction. We had the sat-nav on and were about half a mile from the house we were staying in when the road we were meant to take was closed due to the snow. We carried on, knowing that the computer would find an alternative route. Which it didn’t! I pulled out the local map and Eden pulled the van over to find out where we were. We found the road to take and began to pull away again when we got stuck. The snow wasn’t too deep but the van wouldn’t move forwards. It went backwards, but nothing would make it move in the direction we needed. We managed to get it parked at the side of the road and Eden set off in the pitch black armed with a map, to walk to the house belonging to the landlord.

By this time, it had reached around 10.30pm, and I had had enough. I’d been trying to keep my emotions under wrap all day but it had got too much for me. I hadn’t realised at the time of the crash but I had really hurt my neck, I was freezing cold, in the middle of nowhere in a country I didn’t know very well and all I wanted to do was get into bed and forget about the whole day. And then I just sat and cried in the front of the van. I cried for about half an hour until Eden’s return. Thankfully he had found the landlords house, and he had been kind enough to drive him back to me, put our belongings in his car and drive us to our home for the week. He was the sweetest old man I have ever met, and he couldn’t do enough for us. He showed us every inch of the house, despite it being 11pm, and made sure we had everything we needed before he left. I felt bad in wanting him to leave the house so that I could just sleep but I had had enough! And so, twelve hours after leaving the house in Northern Ireland, I was ‘home’.

I woke up on the Sunday in a much better mood, after all, it couldn’t be any worse than Saturday! We sat down in front of the television for a while before realising we didn’t have any food in the house other than the complimentary fun-size cereal boxes and loaf of bread. That could only mean one thing... we were going on a food-retrieving mission in the snow! We wrapped up a million layers of clothes, and made our way round the streets and relieved, we found our van, still in one piece. There were kids everywhere on sleds and throwing snowballs at each other, and the children two doors along from us had made a three-tiered snowman in their front garden. I was slightly jealous that they were having so much fun when we were stuck with nowhere to go and hardly enough snow in our tiny garden to make a snowball bigger than my head. I resigned myself to the sofa and happily munched on pick and mix and Doritos, courtesy of yesterdays comfort-food buying! Marcus was supposed to be rejoining us later that day but all the trains from Glasgow to Paisley had been cancelled, and with no transport of our own to collect him, he found himself in a Travelodge for the night. Shame!

Fortunately, with one cast member down and no vehicle, we had no shows booked in for Monday, so we spent the morning on the internet looking to find garages to fix the van, and rental places for an alternative vehicle for the week. We also made another call to the breakdown company to rescue the van, who seemed very confused by the statement “it won’t move!”. This was after we’d been on hold for an hour! When eventually they understood our plight, they told us that we weren’t a priority because we were inside a building, so we wouldn’t be rescued until 3.30pm, our first call to them being made at 9am! But a phone call at around 12.30 informed us that would in fact be rescued in the next fifteen minutes. We pulled on our warm layers and raced to the van where surprise surprise, the breakdown man drove the van straight out and up the road. We were livid! Maybe the van had just given up like me on Saturday! After they had checked it out, we made our way to a garage and managed to get an appointment to take it to be fixed on the Wednesday. The trains were also on the move so we collected Marcus and made our way back to get food and get a good night’s sleep before the next day’s shows.

I wasn’t sure how I would react being back in the van on icy roads the next day, but I certainly didn’t expect to be sobbing while trying to map read because we were still minus sat-nav, whose battery had now completely ran out. I wasn’t concerned about Eden’s driving at all, it was just the fact that every road was completely covered in ice, and now without a front bumper and still with a window missing, our van wasn’t quite as safe as it used to be. I’m sure the other road users were wary of us too! But we made it in one piece and the boys didn’t pick up on the fact that I was having a major panic attack in the middle seat. Or if they did, they were very sweet not to mention it to me! The show went quite well, it was another ‘An Inspector Calls’ that we didn’t get to the end of but the kids were pretty silent anyway so we didn’t care that they were missing out on the end. They can watch the film instead! We were looking forward to a nice long lunch break as the schools were only 7 minutes apart. I whipped out my map again (I was refusing to drive in the snow, absolutely terrified) and we made our way. We turned around a couple of times because according to my map reading, we had gone past the school. Maybe we weren’t using our eyes properly. A quick phone call to the school told us that we were in the wrong place, the school had moved sited five years ago. We took a left hand turn to turn the van around and promptly got the van stuck. Again. Eden did his best to try and get the van moving, but the tyres were squealing and smoke started coming from the bonnet and I started screaming that I had to get out of the van before I threw up because I was so terrified again. I ran up the street far away from the van and watched as the van slid around the road before Eden gave up and got out. Marcus and I decided that we would go on a shovel-finding mission to try and dig ourselves out, after kicking the snow away and using lids of boxes from the set didn’t work. Of course there were no useful shops around that would provide us with anything useful, so we walked for what seemed to be miles to the school to explain our situation. We managed to borrow two shovels from the school and got our contact teacher to drive us back to the van! Thankfully we freed ourselves within five minutes, and ten minutes later, we were back at the school and only started the show fifteen minutes late! Result! We were so happy when the end of the day rolled around, we got ourselves a nice shiny hire car, took our van to the garage to be fixed, and made our way home with only our sound system and costumes for the rest of the shows that week!

And so came Wednesday. Considering we had no set we did very well adapting to our surroundings! I had been finding it difficult in a few schools finding power sockets that actually worked, and that morning was no different. I set up the sound system but nothing was happening. We spoke to the stage technician in the school who said there was a problem with our extension lead, but he would take it away and fix it for us and provide us with on for the morning. After the show, Eden went to find him and returned with the extension lead with the plug disconnected! Apparently it wasn’t safe to be using in schools so he’d whipped the plug off so we couldn’t use it! Oops!

Due to the heavy snowfall in Scotland (we had about 6 inches), our Thursday morning show was cancelled and I was ready for a sleep! But of course, with this being the most ridiculous week in tour history, I was woken by a call from, you guessed it, the booking office! To ask me if I knew the show was off! If I wasn’t such a nice person I would have sworn at her! Our afternoon school was in Edinburgh, so it was going to take us a while to get there. And with the roads like they were, we had decided to leave even more time. About twenty minutes into our journey again, another call from the booking office told me that the school was sending everyone home so no show, and both Friday schools were cancelled too! I was hideously gutted that the van wasn’t going to be ready until Friday or I could have gone home, but instead we spent the afternoon shopping in Glasgow and spent Friday sat in front of the television all day until it was time to collect the van and return the hire car, sob!

I had decided on the Monday that I was going to go home for the weekend, and nothing was going to stop me. I had had an awful week, and I was going to go out with the best one, get very drunk, and forget all about the tour and all the bad stuff that had happened. And so, after patching up the broken window further with bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard, we made our way out of Scotland and down to Leeds. The further south we were going, the less snow we could see, and by the time we reached England there was no snow at all. I was happy about driving now! No ice, happy Natalie! We stopped a couple of times for calls of nature and all forced a disgusting service station burger down our necks before the final leg into Leeds. Eden, bless him, managed to get me to the train station 12 minutes before my train left, and after buying my ticket and racing through the station to find my platform, I had given myself a small heart attack but I was there! Of course the train was delayed and the platform changed but I got myself on that train like my life depended on it!

Yet again the train journey was insignificant and I found myself passing the time by tweeting random nonsense and watching what people were doing over their shoulders. The first man I sat next to appeared to be doing a business assignment on his Macbook, and smelled strongly of garlic. When he left the train I moved into his window seat, and my previous location was filled by a much nicer smelling lady, I think it was Ariel washing powder. She was reading Reveal magazine, so I read it over her shoulder. I was counting down the minutes til I got home, and persuaded my brother to pick me up from the station. And so, just after 6pm, I was back! I sent Jacc a text message informing him that I was home and ready for some drinking action! My brother was going out that evening too, to a wedding reception. He won the battle for the first shower so I went along to the cashpoint to extract the evenings funds. I got back to the house just as Rob had finished in the bathroom and he noticed that he had three missed calls on his phone. He called back only to be told that our nan had died in the care home she had been in. Well, they say that bad luck comes in threes; Rob and I had both been in crashed that week, our Grandad was in hospital and now this. We just stood and looked at each other in utter disbelief. It felt like we’d really upset someone up there and we were being punished relentlessly that week. To top it all off, our parents were stuck out in Tenerife due to the airport strikes so it was left to us to try and sort everything out. Naturally we didn’t go out that evening, we just wondered what else could happen. Did anyone else want to kick us while we were down? I phoned Jacc, and he and Craig came round with hugs aplenty and whisked me away to their house where they cheered me up with pizza, and watched the DVD of ‘Leave That Wizard Alone’. It was nice just to be back in my second home, surrounded by amazing friends and their gorgeous animals snuggling up to me that night, and I really didn’t want to go back on tour the next day, I just wanted to stay there forever.

But Sunday did arrive, and after a few phone calls regarding my nan, I spent the day pottering around the house, putting up a few Christmas decorations and trying to tidy up for whenever my parents could get back. The boys came to collect me at about 5pm, but as soon as I’d locked up the house and put my stuff in the van I burst into tears again. I told them what had happened and we stood in the street for a couple of minutes, with them hugging me before we set off again. We were off to Norfolk, and staying in a house that I’d been to before, so I knew that it was a nice one. The journey wasn’t too long, the house was cosy, and I collapsed into my lovely double bed with ease, hoping not to wake up until the next Saturday!

Norfolk was a lovely surprise. We had originally thought that we had ten shows, but we only had seven, and spent a lovely afternoon in Norwich, taking in the sights! I even found a signed by John Barrowman Torchwood DVD, but refrained from buying it, foolishly! I think I wasn’t convinced it was genuine! The shows went well, my parents finally got home, and the week flew by, bringing us to Friday. The pupils on Friday were very intelligent, making the shows easy and a great success, and the journey home was fairly straightforward too. It seemed like the bad luck was over. I dropped my stuff at home, got the boys to drop me off in town, and I ran to Starlight Studios for rehearsals! Who says I’m not dedicated....!

N x