A Mind of My Own is a memoir by Kathy Burke, the much loved London-Irish performer perhaps best known for winning the best actress award at Cannes for her part in Nil by Mouth, and the catchphrase, “I am smoking a fag”, as Waynetta Slob in the sketch show Harry Enfield and Friends.
It is unusual for anyone to achieve such excellence in both comedy and drama, and rarer still to combine it with writing and directing at a high level, as Burke, a working-class woman, has done.
A Mind of My Own attempts to describe how all this happened. Burke is born in 1964 to Irish emigrants in London. Her mother dies of cancer when she is two and after stints with friends and relatives, she moves to a council flat in Islington with her two older brothers and father, Pat.
Pat is an alcoholic and, until she is 10, Burke must share a room with him. When he is not drinking, she writes, the vomiting, hallucinations and diarrhoea last for days.
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“If it was really bad, I’d take my blankets into the livingroom to sleep on the sofa but he would cry in the middle of the night that he needed company because he was ‘dying’. ‘Please Kathy, come back to the room, I’m dying here. I may not last the night’
“So I’d reluctantly head back to my bed, where he’d reach across from his own to hold my hand while he cried, farted and belched. He was good enough to keep the sick bucket on his side of the bed.”
On another occasion she awakens to find a woman shooting up in the darkness next to her.
The children manage the situation with remarkable pragmatism. Burke’s older brothers bargain with shopkeepers for food, cook, clean and try to look after Kathy. She grows more self-reliant, running away to scavenge for food from others in her estate.
She is a voracious reader and an excellent improviser. It is clear that from early childhood Burke possesses both the need and star quality that draw other people to her. These include a social worker who takes her to art galleries, an old man who shares his boiled eggs with her and a roadie from The Clash.
As a teenager she joins the legendary Anna Scher Theatre School and quickly dazzles. She is cast at 16 in a film called Scrubbers and works as an actor and later a playwright with the Old Red Lion theatre. Collaborators include Gary Oldman, Alex Cox, Jennifer Saunders, Harry Enfield and Patrick Marber.
It’s an extraordinary trajectory and Burke name-checks colleagues, lock-ins and plays. She also takes times to settle scores with luminaries such as Danny Boyle and Shane MacGowan, and provides welcome insight into the filming of Nil by Mouth. The hungover journey to Cannes to collect her unexpected award is hilarious, especially when she mistakes Gary Oldman for her Auntie Joan on the phone. A film shoot in Ireland is an interesting and plausible anticlimax.
A Mind of Her Own contains some brilliant stories, and will delight many. Its early scenes in particular potently evoke the world of working-class London.
Yet one has the sense there is much she will not or cannot share still. Some of the incidents she recounts are extreme but rendered in a sentence or two; her father batters her after the police are called, a local woman decries her “ugliness” in front of a crowd of children when she is eight.
In the chapter titled A Madness she alludes to an abusive romantic relationship over three short paragraphs and concludes, elegantly, that her “precious time” has been wasted. An entire body of work could be devoted to just one of these experiences in another person’s hands.
This lack of self-pity has been a useful survival tool and Burke has found a way to channel the trauma through performance, but I sometimes longed for her to enlarge upon certain injustices.
It is worth rewatching Nil by Mouth, for example, to understand how electrifying and subtle her talent has been. Yet for most of her career she was cast as friends of leads or “maids, wonder why”. Most readers will know why; her looks were unconventional and she wasn’t posh.
A Mind of My Own is well named; she is original and it would be fascinating to know more of what she thinks.
Peter Cook once called her a genius and it’s hard to dispute this by the end of the book. Readers are also likely to conclude that Kathy Burke has much more to say.
