Jayne Torvill - Our Life on Ice: The Autobiography

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
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Copyright Quila Limited 2014. All rights reserved.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-868-3
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-869-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47113-871-3

Typeset in the UK by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

JAYNE:

I would like to dedicate this book to Chris for being my inspiration and best friend; to Phil for his love and support; and to my beautiful children, Kieran and Jessica.

CHRIS:

I want to dedicate this book to the person who has been by my side on and off the ice for the last 46 years, Jayne; and to my two boys, Jack and Sam, who have shown me the love a father can have for his children.

JAYNE & CHRIS:

When we were first approached about writing this book its fair to say we were sceptical. Wed already written one autobiography, about 20 years ago, and were at a loss as to what else there would be to say. We were the same people whod want to read the same stories again?

Then, as we began going through the first book we realised that actually things had changed. Wed changed. Perhaps we could deliver something different and original after all.

As we discussed the idea further it became apparent that we did indeed have a story to tell. That 20-year period had presented us with countless new experiences the majority of which weve never discussed in detail before. But we also now see the past through different eyes, and our memories seem to be full of what really matters to us.

So, much of what youre about to read will be completely new to you. And even the events you may be familiar with have been told by us as we are today, not as we were two decades ago, and thats a very different proposition.

CHRIS:

I was born in Calverton, which is a small mining village on the outskirts of Nottingham. My parents, Colin and Mavis, and I lived on an estate that had been built by the council specifically to house miners and their families. Home was a flat a kind of maisonette, really. It sounds quite posh but I promise you it wasnt.

Come to think of it, the inside of the flat resembled something out of Coronation Street. We had lino instead of carpets and all of the furniture was either second-hand or on its last legs. If it had legs! We even had three ceramic swallows swooping majestically across the living-room wall, just like Hilda and Stan Ogdens flying ducks.

The flat was heated by coal, of course or at least the living room was which, despite living so close to the pit, would still be delivered by the coal men each week. The rest of the flat wasnt heated at all, except by the warm weather, and there was certainly no double glazing. I remember during the winter months getting up in the morning and scraping the ice off the inside of the window.

I had one bath a week (something my children find stomach-churning), except in the summer when I had a stand-up strip-wash the weather being far too hot to light a fire and we had no immersion heater. We had more of a continental climate back then and having a bath seemed less of a necessity. In fact, you could say it was more like an event.

Believe it or not, throughout my young life I only ever had one pair of shoes at any one time. There were no trainers or plimsolls then, or at least not in our house, so it didnt matter if I was playing football or going to school, I always wore the same shoes. We often went to ridiculous lengths to make them last usually sticking the soles back on with glue but I do remember going to school once with my shoe wrapped in black tape. The glue obviously hadnt worked so plan B was brought into operation!

All I wanted to do when I was young was climb. That was my thing, and from the age of about four I would shimmy up the side of our building, clinging on to the old pot drainpipes that ran down the side. You had to be careful as they could be quite fragile, but I always managed to get up on to the roof and into the garret. Funnily enough, my mother didnt share my enthusiasm for climbing and would stand at the bottom of the drainpipe trying to make me come down. You get down from there. Get down! Which I did, of course, although very slowly. Somewhere slightly easier to negotiate was the outhouse, which we shared with the other three flats. That was a far less dangerous proposition and didnt scare my mother nearly as much. Once on the roof I would sit there cross-legged, surveying all that I thought was mine and looking out for new things to climb.

Despite never falling off a roof (thank goodness) I seemed to have a hate-hate relationship with bicycles. I was a bit of a daredevil and could only go anywhere fast. Slow was just something you had to go through to get there!

Accidents became an almost daily occurrence at one point, with my mother spending half her life patching me up and mending my clothes. I always got straight back on, though; in fact, it was impossible to stop me. I saw it as some kind of challenge, even then. It was up to me to master the bike, not the other way round. It definitely stood me in good stead for what was to come.

As much as I loved exploring our garret, the one place in Calverton I visited on a regular basis but never wanted to leave was the local Co-op food store, where my mother worked full-time behind the meat counter. In those days professional childcare hadnt really been invented (we wouldnt have been able to afford it, anyway); so, if your parents didnt have a family member or a reliable friend close by, you were picked up, taken along, put down out of the way somewhere and told to behave. Had my mother worked in an office, I expect it would all have been quite boring; but the Co-op had a storeroom at the back, and in the storeroom there were boxes hundreds of them. To me, it was like having my very own adventure playground.

Something else that hadnt really been invented in the early 1960s was health and safety; at least, not like it is now. These days there are thousands of people all over the country busily enforcing billions of pages of rules and regulations. Back then, you got a finger wagged in your face and a warning: Remember, Christopher, no climbing on the boxes, OK?

Yes, Mum.

Despite being ordered to stay at ground level, I was allowed to build dens with the boxes not to mention cars, planes, rockets and battleships; a fair compromise, I thought. None of the other mothers who worked there brought their kids in with them, so I had the whole place to myself for the entire day. I only wandered through to the shop on the rare occasions I was either hungry or in need of some company.