Paul O’Grady once made a heartbreaking confession about his childhood home following his mother’s death.
Speaking back in 2012, the 66-year-old For the Love of Dogs star revealed that the day his mother passed was the day “everything changed” for him.
Paul O’Grady’s heartbreaking confession
Paul opened up about the day that changed his life in his book, Still Standing: The Savage Years.
A passage from his autobiography was published in the Daily Mail almost 10 years ago now.
Paul’s mum passed away in 1988 when he was 33, almost half a lifetime ago now for him.
He explained that his mother had been feeling ill that day, but despite the doctors’ advice to go to the hospital, she’d stayed at home instead.
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His mother was lying in bed, having the paper read to her by Paul’s Aunt, Anne, when she simply closed her eyes and passed away in her sleep.
“I went to see her [his mum] at the undertaker’s and told her about Lily Savage, the character I’d created on the London cabaret circuit, and what I’d been up to in the past few years, as I should have done when I’d had the opportunity,” he wrote.
What else did Paul O’Grady say?
Paul then opened up about his childhood home, and how he had to say goodbye to it, forever.
He said that he had lived in their house in Birkenhead all his life before he’d moved to London.
He claimed that going back after his mother died was “hard”.
“They’d rented it for over 40 years, and although deep down I knew I’d have to give it back to the landlord, it felt like a betrayal. The landlord offered to sell it to me for £9,000, but that was a fortune and I didn’t have the money,” he explained.
Paul then went on to write about how hard giving back the house he’d lived in all his childhood was.
However, Paul revealed that the worst part was that underneath the wallpaper of the house was the “O’Grady’s very own Bayeux Tapestry”.
All the doodles he and his family had drawn over the walls since they lived in the house were still there, and Paul had to leave it all behind.
What else did Paul say?
Paul revealed that that was the moment he “grew up”.
It was at that moment that he realised he had no childhood home anymore, and nothing to go back to in his hometown of Birkenhead.
His father had died in 1973 and with his mother sadly passed, Paul felt as though nothing would ever be the same again.
However, it was at this point that he remembered some advice his Auntie Anne had imparted on him – to think of the past, but not to dwell on it.
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Paul then revealed that he had only been back to his old house once (as of 2012). He had driven past it when back in Birkenhead for a cousin’s funeral.
He said that he had stopped outside the house, but it wasn’t the same anymore.
“The windows were different and there was a big satellite dish on the side,” he wrote.
“It just didn’t feel like my house. It had changed and so had I.”
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