Tulisa - The Biography (3 page)

It was the first makeover of Tulisa’s life, though certainly not the last. First, they went to a couple of footwear stores, and emerged with a pair of Nike trainers. They then drifted through other clothes stores as they assembled a new outfit for Tulisa: a baseball jacket, a jumper from Gap and a pair of Nike tracksuit bottoms. What a fun day it was, as Dappy helped her choose the right gear. She really looked up to her cousin, who is a year older than her and had a sort of sibling role from early in their lives. The
Dappy-commissioned
makeover was complete when a female friend of his helped Tulisa slick her hair back. Having given Tulisa a new look for her new school, he then set to work on her etiquette. He encouraged her to play it a bit more cool but also to be more open than she had been prior to then. He wanted her to come out of her shell at Haverstock and to be accepted and popular, much like he was.

For the first eight months there she was so happy. She enjoyed the co-educational atmosphere and tried to carry herself with some of the swagger of her popular cousin Dappy. One day while Tulisa was taking a PE class a girl swiped her tracksuit bottoms from where she had left them in the changing room. Tulisa believed that the theft was motivated by the fact that the bottoms actually belonged to her hugely popular cousin. She laughed the incident off and borrowed another pair from a friend. If anything, she enjoyed the reflected glory of being the cousin of such a popular pupil. ‘I thought it was so cool,’ she said. ‘I was going there as Dappy’s cousin. That made me cool. Automatically, the whole popular crowd embraced me. All the girls wanted to know me, because they all fancied Dappy. It was great.’ Soon, she was hanging out with the ‘cool’ kids and became one of the school’s more popular pupils. She became confident around boys and also befriended some teenagers from local estates who she would never have previously had the confidence to approach and attempt to befriend. She also began to drink alcohol and smoke cannabis – such behaviour was ‘a standard thing for everyone’ at the school, she later wrote. She convinced older girls to go into the shop for her and buy her some alcohol. Vodka, cider and beer were her usual tipples. She said she got ‘absolutely smashed’ for the first time as a 12-year-old and was soon ‘getting messy’ each weekend, including at under-18s rave parties.

It was a welcome source of escapism for a girl who, lest we forget, was still going through hell at home. ‘When I was 12 I wanted to have fun,’ she said, looking back later. ‘I didn’t want to go back to the one-bedroom council flat, crying myself to sleep at night. I became a lot gobbier and had my first boyfriend.’ Plenty of her classmates were even having sex, she said.

Tulisa claimed she knew for a fact that pupils were having sex ‘in the toilets at the age of 12 in break time’. Soon, such behaviour would provoke tensions and suspicions that would hurt Tulisa. Meanwhile, she was more interested in getting out of her head. Given the history of mental illness in her family, it was rather dangerous for Tulisa to experiment so enthusiastically with a
mind-altering
drug such as cannabis. Indeed, the very same issues that pushed her towards the drug also meant she should have avoided it. Episodes of users, particularly the young, developing emotional issues as a result of cannabis-use – particularly the stronger modern forms such as skunk – are reasonably commonplace. After a while, she began to have intense panic attacks, complete with terrifying heart palpitations. One day the attack was so bad that she collapsed and started to froth at the mouth before passing out. The next thing Tulisa knew she was coming-to in the back of an ambulance. This terrifying moment drew a line in the sand as far as she was concerned. She has not taken cannabis since.

However, other parts of her newfound confidence and rebellious behaviour continued. The quiet, studious girl of her earlier years was replaced by someone at ease with what she saw as the disrespectful and lazy kids at Haverstock. She has recalled how plenty of the pupils did next to no work, as they were too busy ‘screaming at each other and cussing the teachers’. She had never seen the like of this before, but she was so keen to be accepted by her peers that she joined in with this misbehaviour. She estimates that in the 18 months she spent at Haverstock she did little more than two days’ worth of actual schoolwork. Her memories of the place no doubt seem accurate to her but how fair they actually are to the school they are is open to question. The school authorities would certainly prefer to paint a more positive picture of the establishment. Dappy has also spoken disparagingly of the school, saying, ‘I ain’t gonna big up no teachers because it didn’t feel like none of them gave a damn about me’ and saying it ‘gave out no positivity’. Tulisa’s favourite moments at school included drama classes and – surprisingly – school dinners. She has always enjoyed the food that most kids dread. She also fondly remembers a school outing to the Natural History Museum in Kensington. She had been obsessed with dinosaurs since watching the movie blockbuster
Jurassic Park
, so she lapped up the chance to study their story at the museum.

There is no doubt Tulisa often misbehaved and slacked, though, and she looks back at this as a ‘negative way of blending in’. But some real personal negativity for Tulisa is just about to enter our story. Eight months after she first arrived at Haverstock, she began to be targeted by bullies. A brutal chapter in her school life started with a confrontation between Tulisa and a highly aggressive girl who had been led to believe Tulisa had been bitching about her. In a flash, Tulisa found herself facing more aggression than she had ever encountered before. The girl was face-
to-face
with Tulisa and screaming abuse at her, while brandishing a pencil and threatening to ‘stab’ her with it. In an instant, eight months of happiness and fun seemed to disappear as she faced a terrifying, threatening verbal onslaught. However, if Tulisa thought she had tasted a new low, there was to be plenty more where that came from. A process began of fellow pupils wrongly accusing Tulisa of speaking about them in derogatory terms and then attacking her for it either verbally or physically or both. Lots of these rumours concerned Tulisa having sex with boys who were already in relationships. Their girlfriends would naturally be furious and would confront her about the alleged liaison. Words and sometimes shoves or worse would be exchanged. The added hurt for Tulisa was that these rumours were always untrue – she had not slept with any guys at this stage. As she learned, the truth mattered as much in the unforgiving atmosphere of school as it does in the wild west of some celebrity magazines.

Again, Tulisa’s good looks and head-turning chest were behind much of this treatment. Girls became jealous and suspicious of her. Although most of the suspicions were unfounded, it was true that she was turning lots of young male heads. When people realised that Tulisa was often being asked out for dates by the most popular guys, a new raft of rumours would be launched to try and dissuade such advances. To make matters worse, just when she needed friends most Tulisa found that some of the people she considered in that category were not worthy of being called friends. She felt alone, frightened and cornered. After some months of this cycle of behaviour Tulisa decided she had to deal with the issue and the person she believed to be at the centre of the rumour-spreading. She confronted the girl and soon a heated argument broke out. Then the girl lost her rag and began punching her in the face. What Tulisa had not realised was that the girl was a victim of bullying as well. So patience for both girls was at a premium as they fought each other. By the time it was over Tulisa had a split lip and was bleeding from her face. Although she insisted in
Against All Odds
that she had landed some damaging blows to her opponent, she added that the wounds she inflicted were all hidden by her hair.

However, as far as the rest of the school was concerned, Tulisa had lost the fight and was a ‘pussy’. As her opponent was not a tough girl, this perception was dangerous as it made Tulisa seem vulnerable and weak – and therefore a target for any bully who fancied an easy ride. The problems escalated from there – with enormous seriousness. ‘I was always outnumbered,’ she said. ‘By the time I was 15, to go to my friend’s house in Kentish Town, I used to walk around with a baseball bat or a knife on me, because of the fear of being attacked by 15 girls. This was no joke. They would get a bottle, smash it on the floor and happily stab it in your face. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but it was my way of sticking up for myself. It was a dangerous cycle to be in.’ A dangerous cycle indeed. Tulisa said that the beatings she received were always severe and left her in a shocking condition: ‘Black eyes, bust lip, bottle over the head.’ She added: ‘By this time, I couldn’t go to school because I’d get beaten up.’ Why did she not report all this to the police, she was asked. ‘No, you wouldn’t tell the police,’ she explained. ‘It was against the code of street law. You couldn’t be a grass.’

Instead, she had to be creative and fast-thinking to find a way out of this brutal cycle of violence she seemed stuck in. She could not, she felt, call on the police to protect her. So she turned to a different kind of authority and courted the protection of the circle of people she considered to be the toughest in the neighbourhood. Her courtship was successful. ‘My way of getting out of things was getting in with this really hard crowd – the hardest of the hardest in the area,’ she said. ‘We were a wild bunch of girls, but I was content being protected.’ Finally, she had found a way to stem the tidal wave of violent bullying she had been facing in recent months. Still, she remained vigilant. Sometimes, she later admitted, she would carry a weapon for her own protection. ‘I had to walk down the road with a baseball bat in my pocket,’ she told the
Radio Times
. ‘I didn’t end up having to use the bat, but I did have to punch people back.’ Arming herself was not a step taken lightly; rather, it was a reaction to some horrific and detailed threats. ‘This was a time when people were saying, “We’re going to come down with 20 people and put you in hospital”.’

Although the approval and resultant protection Tulisa received from her new friends brought great relief for her, by choosing to run with such a tough and unruly crowd she realised she had to quickly start to behave in kind in order to stay in with them. Therefore, this new association of hers sent her further off the rails in terms of behaviour. ‘Yeah, we did do naughty things,’ she said. What, specifically? ‘We did pinch a couple of handbags and get into fights. I wasn’t part of a girl gang, though. We were just a group of troublesome chicks. Obviously, we were consuming so much weed and alcohol, we were going loopy anyway.’ She later expressed regret for the stolen bags. ‘I nicked a couple of handbags and I’m deeply unhappy I did that,’ she told
Now
magazine. ‘But it was done to give myself power. I was vulnerable, I had no
self-worth
and I’d do anything to get some attention. So to those people I would say sorry.’

There is something almost moving about Tulisa’s claim that some of her misbehaviour as a teenager came not from an inherent nature of hers, but from the neighbourhood she grew up in and then out of a desire for protection from bullies. That said, she has to take responsibility for what she did and must not be allowed to spin herself entirely out of the blame for her actions. Plenty of youngsters have gone through bullying experiences as children but few of them turn to theft as a way out of it. While expressing sorrow to her victims, she also says she would not change anything else about her childhood. As far as Tulisa is concerned, everything she has been through has made her the person she is today. ‘There’s really nothing else for me to feel ashamed about,’ she said, during the same interview in which she expressed regret for the thefts. One senses that she is conflicted in her feelings: on the one hand she feels ‘deeply unhappy’ for some of what she did, and offers apologies to her victims; on the other hand she says that overall she has nothing to feel ashamed about.

In time, she moved schools and enrolled at Quintin Kynaston, in Marlborough Hill, near Swiss Cottage. She arrived there a different Tulisa to the one that had last enrolled at a new school. This time, she was ready and on the lookout for trouble. Never again was she going to allow herself to be pushed around at school. Educationally, she has since written, ‘there was really no point me being there’ as she had no interest in learning. Only one teacher – called Miss Shield – had any influence on her. Indeed, Miss Shield had a big influence on her life. When Tulisa bunked off school she would find the teacher on her doorstep, encouraging her to return to school. It was Miss Shield who saw the beautiful gem inside the tough and ugly front that Tulisa felt forced to put up in life. Few other adults in her life managed that. Tulisa and Dappy have both spoken out about education, encouraging their fans to work at school. Indeed, Tulisa has even declared herself in favour of a return to more old-fashioned discipline in today’s schools. She believes that if teachers were once more allowed to give pupils a ‘cane or a wallop’ then society would benefit.

The bullying she worked so hard to overcome had originally been dominated by suggestions and perceptions of her as a sexually active teenager. However, as we have seen, such perceptions were for a long while far wide of the mark. That ‘while’ ended when Tulisa first had sex with a boy when she was 14 years of age. Despite being two years below the age of consent when she lost her virginity, she now considers that she was in one sense a late, rather than early, starter. ‘I was about to turn 15,’ she told
The Sunday Times
, looking back on this rite of passage. ‘I was one of the lucky ones to keep my virginity for as long as I did.’ It seems that the hurried, precocious pace at which Tulisa lost her virginity was shared by most of those around her. ‘It’s the environment you’re from, it becomes normal,’ she said. ‘Everyone around me had lost it. We were too mature for our age. We were doing things we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t have been drinking or smoking weed. The first time I went to an over-21s night, I was 13 years old.’