A punishing wind blew past the dingy council houses of Cresswell Street on
Friday, causing empty beer cans and fast-food boxes to rattle in the
doorways, as locals struggled to come to terms with the shock.
Some broke ranks. “This is just a terrible place to live,” sighed a pensioner,
hunching her back against the cold. “Drunk or drugged-up yobs roam the
streets at night terrorising families. Law-abiding people are scared to
leave their homes after dark — and it’s only getting worse.”
Others had defiant pride for these tatty streets, yet astonishment remained:
how could one of their own have done such a thing?
Perhaps you are thinking Cresswell Street was home to Karen Matthews, the
33-year-old mother who was convicted last week of staging her daughter’s
kidnapping.
Wrong. This terrace in Walker, one of Newcastle upon Tyne’s toughest
neighbourhoods, was the childhood home of Cheryl Cole, 25, an
extraordinarily pretty pop star and Wag who is fast becoming the nation’s
favourite celebrity. Safe to say Walker’s natives, who include more than a
scattering of teen mothers, drug addicts and staffordshire bull terriers,
are stunned by her good fortune.
Cole escaped the deprivation to garner 19 top 10 hits with her pop group Girls
Aloud, multi-million-pound advertising deals and a starring role as a judge
on The X Factor, where last night she again upstaged Simon Cowell to the
rapture of the talent show’s 12m viewers.
With council estates like the ones in Walker being pinpointed by officials
trying to explain how the toxic environments of the underclass may have
contributed to Matthews’s crime, Cole’s rise is looking even more
remarkable.
Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire police, which handled
the Matthews case, said last week that sink estates were the “hidden, secret
parts of our community. People who actually don’t socialise beyond a small
group of people — no holidays, no going to town, no going to the cinema. If
it doesn’t go on in their house, or a house nearby, it doesn’t happen as far
as they’re concerned.
“What that means is that they aren’t socialised in the way that the rest of
society is in terms of behaviour. Norms of behaviour for them are, ‘Whatever
I can get away with’.”
Cole and Matthews could not be more different. The former is an attractive and
emotionally intelligent national treasure. Matthews, meanwhile, is a
haggard, sexually incontinent, benefit-grabbing child abuser who
masterminded the abduction of her nine-year-old daughter for a shot at
claiming a £50,000 reward.
Yet it is curious that both Britain’s current Wonder Woman and its Medusa were
raised in the glummest council estates in the land, poverty-stricken areas
where drugs and violence rule.
Not that you would guess it to look at Cole now. She has eclipsed Posh Spice
(overexposed), Jordan (passé) and Kerry Katona (just too depressing) to
become the undisputed queen of chavs, but she is also demonstrating a
cross-class appeal none of her predecessors had. She is like a female David
Beckham: physically perfect, but in possession of a comfortingly squeaky
voice, which retains a Geordie accent that reminds you that, for all her
good looks, she is an extremely normal girl.
Or as Jane Bruton, editor of the women’s magazine Grazia, put it: “In these
times of doom and gloom, all we want is a hug from Cheryl. She is like
comfort food for the soul. Everything she says on The X Factor is absolutely
in tune with the mood of the nation. The time for bitchy TV is over. We want
warmth.”
If Bettison is right in his assertion that a sink estate such as the one in
which Cole grew up can infect its inhabitants with an insular world view
that makes outside success next to impossible, how did she pull off her
coup?
COLE was born Cheryl Tweedy in 1983 and spent her early years in Walker with
her mother Joan and father Gary, who she did not realise until she was 11
were not actually married.
The neighbourhood had been in decline for several years and today its walls
are graffitied, houses stand empty and entire streets have been demolished.
There is as well the usual detritus of social decay such as smashed windows
and discarded needles.
A resident, who was too frightened to be named, said last week: “Not so long
ago one young lad, Paul Gilbert, was murdered in broad daylight. He was
stabbed because he accidentally bumped into someone.”
Research published in July showed that the unemployment rate for Walker was
33%, and more than 70% of children lived below the poverty line.
Cole, who now shares a £4m mansion near Oxshott, Surrey with her husband
Ashley, the Chelsea and England footballer, was lucky enough to have parents
who made sure she went to school and did not run too wild, but her childhood
was bleak in many respects.
“All I knew was going to school and going back home, not always being able to
have dinner, not knowing why we were so skint, just assuming that’s the way
things had to be,” she has said.
Crime was everywhere, not least in her own family. In 1996, her older brother
Andrew (one of four siblings) was sent to a young offenders’ institution for
stabbing two students in a Newcastle pub. By his early teens, he was an
alcoholic and addicted to glue.
“It was disturbing as a child,” said Cole. “I’d be sitting until five, six, in
the morning sometimes, watching at the window to see if he was coming down
the street, just to check he was safe, then he’d come in and the whole house
would smell of glue.”
Andrew, now 28, did not stop there. As an adult, he has appeared in court more
than 50 times, mostly on charges of theft, vandalism or affray. He spent
four years in prison for beating a man nearly unconscious for a personal
stereo and £6 from his wallet, and was in court last month charged with
“interfering with a motor vehicle”.
Cole’s sister Gillian, 29, has also been in trouble with the police for
brawling. And Cole was no angel herself. She was suspended from school twice
in her teenage years, although her offences — slapping a boy who spat in her
face and swearing on a bus — seem trifling by comparison.
In fact, for most of her childhood Cole was blinkered by ambition. She won a
clutch of child modelling competitions and earned a place at the Royal
Ballet summer school. The local newspaper had to run a campaign to raise the
£300 fee so she could attend.
By the time Cowell was auditioning contestants for Popstars: The Rivals in
2002, the family had moved to nearby Heaton, but Cole was desperate to get
out. She had already seen a friend murdered and others were getting addicted
to hard drugs. “If I hadn’t been exposed to what [heroin] did to them at
such a young age, who knows what might have happened,” she said.
Her trump card was her preternatural drive. While this has forged the careers
of many high achievers in the past, Bettison’s remarks attest to a feeling
that the problems are more intractable now and that most young adults on the
worst estates cannot see beyond a life of benefits, multiple pregnancies and
drink (or worse).
Julia Margo, an expert on social policy at the think tank Demos, said: “People
can get stuck in these estates because situations that may seem very extreme
to you or me — like hardcore drug use or prison — become normalised because
that is all they know.
“Our research shows that, in many cases, the only social influences that exist
in these communities are parents or next-door neighbours, many of whom set
no boundaries for normal behaviour themselves, and television — by which I
mean EastEnders, set in another bubble world with plenty of abnormal
behaviour.”
Cole always had ambitions beyond her bubble and, as a child, repeatedly told
her father she would have a Christmas No 1 single. Yet it took a television
talent show with open auditions to give her a break.
Even then, her success was at times precarious. In January 2003, two weeks
after first topping the charts, she engaged in some decidedly sink
estate-style behaviour when she was involved in a fracas with a toilet
attendant at a nightclub in Guildford, Surrey.
She was found guilty of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and sentenced
to 120 hours of community service.
After marrying in a £1m wedding covered by OK! magazine in 2006, Cole showed
signs that she was growing up when she shrugged off the Wag tag, saying:
“Footballers’ wives are just as bad as benefit scroungers. These women have
nannies, they don’t cook or clean and never do a day’s work. What kind of
aspiration is that?”
The nation was warming to her, but it took a second scandal to get them firmly
on side. Last January, a tabloid revealed that Ashley had cheated on her
with a hairdresser 18 months into their marriage.
After a self-empowering flourish of hubby banishment, she took him back with a
few choice words about the sanctity of marriage vows and the importance of
working at your relationship. The public was in thrall.
But it is The X Factor that has been the making of her. Week after week, Cole
is warm-hearted, unpretentious and utterly non-chav.
The only person more besotted than the viewers is Cowell, the show’s creator
and lead judge, who has reportedly offered her a 100% pay rise — to an
estimated £1.5m — to return next year.
Now Vogue is rumoured to have shot her for its next issue and she has become
an artist’s muse. A portrait of her as Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North
will go on display at London’s Arts Club in the new year.
“I see her as a new icon of popular culture for the 21st century, a beacon of
light in these bleak times, a fine example of a northern lass making good,”
said the artist Lee Jones.
“We all love a girl who drags herself up, don’t we?” said Bruton. If she can
only inspire the rest of the Walker gang to do the same.
Additional reporting: Angela Wormald
