Daring to Dream by Sam Bailey

started talking about leaving him again and I couldn’t put up any kind of argument about why she should stay apart from the fact that I was worried about how he would cope without her. But then maybe if she did leave him, I thought, it might make him see sense and get himself together? Mum had become really resentful towards him and there was such a terrible atmosphere in the house. They hardly ever smiled any more and they had a constant stream of visitors, so that they didn’t have to talk to each other.
    Sadly I didn’t get the job at Butlins, but through word of mouth I got a job working as a support artist at Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green, Camberley. It’s a big venue and every Saturday night a comedy act such as Joe Pasquale, Bradley Walsh or Cannon and Ball performed. It was always packed and I’d go on before the main performer and sing six or seven songs as a warm-up. One night Joe Pasquale was performing and he was massively famous at the time. I really wanted to meet him, so I knocked on his dressing room door. He opened it in just his pants and invited me in. Darren was walking up just behind me but Joe didn’t see him so he pretty much shut the door in his face. Oh dear.
    I was in there for about half an hour eating sandwiches and having a laugh and I was far too excited about meeting Joe to worry about Darren being annoyed. Or the fact Joe was sitting there in his boxer shorts! Darren, meanwhile, was
incredibly
pissed off. In the car on the way home he was in a right mood because he genuinely thought that somethinghad gone on between Joe and myself. I bumped into Joe on the
Dancing on Ice
tour recently and said to him, ‘You nearly split me and my other half up. He thought we were having a snogging session in your dressing room and I was only 17!’ To be honest, if he had split us up he would have been doing me a favour. But back then I had no idea what was around the corner.
    I was still playing a lot of football at this time, and I played for loads of different clubs over the years. The longest stretch I had was playing for London Women’s and I really enjoyed it there. It became harder and harder to fit it in around work and seeing Darren, but I stuck with it because it meant the world to me, even though getting to away games was a nightmare because I didn’t drive.
    I became so busy with the football and music side of things that I decided to give up college completely. I felt like I’d learnt a lot but I wanted more practical, hands-on experience. I was only performing in the evenings, which meant that I was able to get a day job and start earning some proper money. I got a job in a café and I also worked with my mum doing market research to support me while I did gigs, both paid and unpaid. A couple of months later I got a job through one of Darren’s friends working for a cable company in Lewisham called Videotron, which has now become Virgin Media. I was on a YTS scheme and felt so important travelling to work on the train each day wearing smart clothes. I’d been there a while when a job came up fora direct debit clerk, so I went for it and to my amazement was offered the job. I genuinely had no idea what a direct debit was!
    I don’t know how I blagged my way through the first few weeks, but I managed to get my head around the role and it was all going brilliantly. Well, until I got the sack, that is. My colleagues and I could instant message each other through our computers – I guess it was like an early form of emailing – but I didn’t realise that the bosses could monitor them. I got called into my manager’s office one day and he showed me this record of all the messages I’d sent, which showed I’d been blatantly messing around when I should have had my head down getting the job done. I wasn’t that gutted because the job wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but the one thing I had