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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 119493" data-attributes="member: 22">Max: You should have seen my first wedding — me and a pregnant Rachel, a couple of strangers for witnesses, and then we all went up the pub for a Ploughman’s.Rachel Branning to Max: You promised to love me.Bradley: So you weren’t playing around? You weren’t seeing other women when [Rachel] was pregnant, even when I was a baby?Max: I was eighteen. I was a little baby, I was a kid. I admit what went wrong, it was my fault, but that’s who I was back then.Rachel on Max: I had years of crap from that man.Max: I told a woman I was an airline pilot once.Darren Miller: What and you got away with it?Max: Always got away with it.Jack Branning: [That’s] the Max I remember — wandering eye, sordid affairs.Max: I was a mess. I got married too young, felt the pull, jumped on in, didn’t work out. I wish someone had taken me to one side, talked it all through. I loved Rachel, but when you’re that age, things change quickly.Rachel: Max never satisfied me. You know Max — always in a hurry. All quantity, no quality.Rachel to Max: You think too little of me. You always did.Alan: I was [eighteen] when I moved in with your mum. She had three kids. It was a huge responsibility, a bit scary really.Robbie: You must have really loved her.Alan: I did.Alan to Bianca: You just can't become a dad overnight. It takes time to get used to the idea of putting kids first. I had all them months when me and your mum were going out.Bianca to Carol: You never could apologise, could you? You slammed my hand in the door once. You never said sorry.Carol: I remember that time when you caught your hand. I was arguing with Alan. I shouted at you.Bianca: Yeah well, it was only so I’d be careful.Carol: You were so small and all I wanted to do ... I just wanted to kiss your little fingers.Carol: My daughter Bianca got in such a strop once she didn’t talk for a week and a half, but even she had to say something eventually.Alan: I had this ready made family, didn't I? It was what I wanted.Rachel Branning: I remember when I was carrying Bradley. Swelled up like a barrage balloon. People looked at me like I was an alien.Rachel: I remember [being heavily pregnant]. Nothing looks good.Rachel on herself and Max: We were young, badly suited — very badly, as it happens.Max: You knew me.Rachel: I thought I did.Rachel on Max: He used to say I did the best spag bol this side of Naples. Rubbish, of course, likeeverything else that comes out of his mouth. Max to Rachel: You could never accept a compliment.Rachel: Always made you feel better, didn’t it, Max? Putting me down.Max to Bradley: The day you were born, mate, I remember it like yesterday. Twenty four hours of labour and it was all through the night, and your mum, she passed out and they wrapped you up and they gave you to me and I held you for an hour, maybe two, just you and me and it was like a punch in the gut because I realised I could never be selfish again, that someone else meant more to me than my own miserable hide. I never forgot that, just you and me.Max: I remember when Bradley first came along, I didn’t have a clue. I remember picking him up, petrified I was going to drop him. All of a sudden, his head goes back and there was this matron or whatever she was, like a foghorn across the ward, “Support his head!” I wasn’t like that forever. You should have seen me a couple of days later. I was doing everything. I was doing nappies, top and tailing him, winding him. I never did drop him. Just come straight from the gut. I loved him straightaway. Just did my best for him.Max: I was just a kid meself when Bradley was born.Bradley: Ever since I was born I’ve always come second, second to your other women, your other children.Max: Bradley, that ain’t true.Max to Bradley: I’ve been saving since the day you were born. Opened an account, put a tenner in, took it from there, making sure my boy was going to be all right.Max on Bradley: As a baby, I loved him.Derek Branning: So there I am, right, staring down both barrels of a sawn off shotgun when all of a sudden, me phone goes off. Now, this is 1987. No-one’s even heard of a mobile phone in them days. I’m the only man I know who’s got one and I’ve only got one because it’s been knocked off. So I’m thinking to meself, “Who the hell is this?” The geezer’s started to get all jumpy. Anyway, I said to him, “Excuse me, mate. Mind if I get this?” So he’s looking at me all suspicious. He says, “Go on then.” So I fish out this great big brick of a thing. They used to be huge in them days. I’m trying to figure out which button to press. Turns out it’s only the Old Bill — can I come in for questioning? I said, “I’d love to, but it’a a bit difficult at the moment!”Jay Brown: So what happened to the bloke with the shotgun then?Derek: Well, I handed him the phone and said, “It’s for you!”Jack Branning: The Jack you used to know was sixteen years old.Michael Moon: Back then, you had a bit about you. You fancied yourself a bit.Michael: Have I ever had any trouble pulling, Jack?Eddie Moon on Michael: Some of his girlfriends, oh dear me. Do you remember that — what was her name — Melanie? You were fifteen. She was a punk.Michael: She was a goth.Eddie: Straight from the Addams Family she was. I’m surprised you could ever find her when the lights were out.Eddie: Back in the day, used to get an old washing machine drum, hammer in some staff pickets to keep it off the ground, voila — barbecue! Out in the garden in Canning Town, a few beers ...Max: Happy days.Eddie: Yeah.Eddie, speaking to Michael in 2011: I remember when I was your age [thirty-nine]. It wasn’t a happy time.Eddie: Do you remember the washing machine — barbecue in the backyard?Michael Moon: Oh yeah, he [Eddie] burnt everything to a crisp, this one.Eddie: No one complained.Michael: To your face.Max on Michael: Never stayed in touch after school.Max: I thought I’d seen the back end of you when you ponced off to college.Michael: I thought I’d try and better meself.Max: Did you manage it?Michael: Occasionally.Michael: It’s the story of my life — arrive, make enemies, leave.Derek Branning on Michael: Thought he’s be dead by now [2011]. Well, he was never cut out for life, was he?Michael: It’s actually quite enjoyable, hating someone. I hated my dad for years. I sort of fed off it. It was brilliant, actually.Eddie to Michael: You were a damaged teenager.Heather Trott: ‘Faith’ [by George Michael] released October fifteenth 1987, reached number two in the charts.Janine: Homework, a biscuit and a drink — we used to [have that after school], didn’t we? I remember doing your maths.Ricky: You were only four — and they called them simple equations!Ricky, mid-anecdote about Janine: ... so she weighed the lid down with the bricks and that was the end of Tommy the hamster. I tell you, the next year, on her fifth birthday ...Ryan Malloy: Ricky man, no more, no more!Zainab to Syed: I remember the first time that Masood’s family ever saw you. I was so proud. Daadaa and Dadi, they couldn’t stop smiling, and your aunts and uncles, they passed you around on their knees like a tray of hulva.Syed: I remember there was lots of kissing going on.Zainab: And then Pappu Masnad took you to a fortune teller. He was sat by the roadside and he had a parrot on his shoulder, and it was the parrot that told the fortune.Syed: What did he say?Zainab: It was all the usual stuff, you know, like he said that you must always love Allah and he gave you a few kalmas to read. And he said you were a lone traveller in this world and that you could never truly be known. And I gave him his five rupees and we walked away and I smiled because I knew you and I also knew that you would never be alone as long as I lived.Masood to Syed: I brought you up to be what you are and I’m sorry I did such a terrible job. I should have been stricter with you.Masood on Syed: If I’d just talked to him more, listened to him when he was a boy, made sure he was on the right path ...Zainab on Syed: He’s my son.Masood: And I’m your husband. But then I never did get equal billing, did I?Zainab to Masood: Ever since [Syed] was a little boy, he was brighter than you, cleverer than you, and you just couldn’t bear it, could you?Zainab: Syed always was very fastidious.Garry Hobbs: When I give up the fags that time - hard for the first couple of weeks but then after that ...Minty Peterson: When did you give up?Garry: When I was sixteen.Heather: My Aunty Val died of breast cancer. She was only forty-three.Bushra Abbasi: My sister had a spell of fainting. Turned out she had a tumour the size of a grapefruit.Janine Butcher: Mum dying of cancer in some stinking hospital.Janine: You had an affair with my dad while [Mum] was dying.Pat: Actually, me and your dad were never together during that time.Janine: So you managed to control your hormones until she was dead and buried? How very commendable.Lydia Simmonds to Janine: When she was ill, towards the end, that’s when your mum needed me most. I used to do her hair for her.Lydia to Janine on the Cancer Nurses’ Trust: They looked after your mother during the final weeks of her illness.Ricky: I hate hospitals. I reckon it goes back to when my mum died - having to wait in the corridor, hearing Dad crying. It was the first time I ever heard him cry, you know. [Janine] cried as well.Janine: My mother loved me until someone [Pat] drove her into an early grave.Mo Butcher: My Frank, he lost his wife, God rest her soul.Janine: It’s my fault that Mum died. She was never the same after she had me.Lydia: Any hope of [forgiving Frank for how he treated June] died when she died. All I was left with was bitterness and hatred — and me money. Oh, how he hated that!Mo on Frank: He didn't know if he was coming or going. I took care of him and the kids. He was the biggest kid of the lot. He never made a move without asking me.Janine: Do you know what my earliest memory is? It’s of my dad telling me that Mummy had gone away and that she wasn’t coming back. I thought he meant to the shops. That was the only “away” that I knew.Janine: I knew that he was lying, of course — about the "going away" bit, I mean — not that I could have known what lying was then. I just didn’t take it onboard that she was dead for days, weeks. It just wasn’t mentioned. And I can remember just being so angry at her for leaving me.Janine: When Mum died, Dad explained it to me. He said that she was very, very tired so one night she went to sleep and just didn’t wake up again.Ricky: He didn’t explain about her heart?Janine: So after that whenever I went to bed I was terrified of going to sleep in case I never woke up again. I used to count things to try and stay awake.Sam Mitchell: How old was you when you lost [your mother]?Ricky: Fifteen.Janine: I was four.Diane: I was thirteen.Ricky: I was fourteen when Mum died. That’s a well selfish age and you — you were so little.Janine: Yeah, and you had Diane. You and Diane.Janine: When my mum died, I wouldn’t leave Ricky alone. I followed you [Ricky] about everywhere, didn’t I?Ricky: She was only four. I was fourteen. I tell you, she was so annoying!Janine on June: I hardly remember her.Lydia: Well, you were only four when she passed.Janine: That’s what you get for being an afterthought, I suppose.Joan Garwood to Janine: The last time I saw you, you were really tiny.Diane Butcher: Was that at Mum's funeral?Frank Butcher: Yeah, it was.Janine: I never got to go to my mum’s funeral. They said I was too young to understand, but I wasn’t and I can remember Ricky, Diane and Claire all being allowed to go and thinking that somehow it meant that she loved them more than she loved me.Lydia to Janine: I wanted you to come to the funeral, but he [Frank] wouldn’t have it. He said you were too young, that it would upset you. I said to Frank, “Who’s going to look after Janine while we’re all at the funeral?” And he said, “Oh, I’ve got this friend I was thinking of asking.” I said, “Is it a woman?” And that’s when he stopped fiddling with his spectacles, which was always a sure sign.Janine: Pat.Lydia: Yeah well, she didn’t come. He backed down. I’d have killed him if he hadn’t.Lydia: A mother shouldn’t have to bury her daughter.Diane on her mother: I felt she cheated me somehow. I went off to school as if nothing had happened. Then it hit me one day. I'd made some stupid thing. I knew she wouldn't be at home. No-one to laugh at it.Ricky to Frank: When Mum died, it was all arrangements — keeping you going in work, what you were going to do with your life — and we, we just tagged along.Ricky: When my mum died, I went completely off the rails. If it hadn’t been for my dad — he noticed it and he sorted me out.Ricky on his mother’s death: I didn’t think I was going to cope, but I did. I’m not saying it was good. It was awful, but the funny thing is after a bit, it don’t matter so much. No, that’s wrong — it does matter, it’s just that then it becomes part of you and then you sort of can’t remember how it was before.Claire Butcher, Janine's sister: You used to come and sleep in my bed, remember?Janine: I don't remember anything, except for wishing that [Mum] would come back.Barry Evans: Who taught you how to swim?Janine: My dad, at the Ocean Hotel in Marbella.Barry: Holiday?Janine: Yep, I couldn't have been more than four. It was just after my mum died. I think my dad took us there to help us get over it. Anyway, Ricky and Diane were on the water slide and I remember I was really jealous so I badgered my dad and he got up extra early to give me lessons. We had the pool to ourselves. I remember him letting me go, bit by bit. It must have been so hard for him, thinking about it. Three kids and no wife. Anyway, by the end of the week I was splashing around on my own and then my daddy said I could go on the slide.Barry: Bet you were well excited, weren't you?Janine: Well, Ricky and Diane were bored of it by then so they were off messing about with some other kids.Barry: You were left all on your own, you poor little thing.Janine: Hardly. I marched straight up to my dad and I told him to go and make the bigger kids like me. Do you know what he said? "Janine, I'm trying to get a suntan!"Janine: I have been lonely for always.Janine: My dad was never around.Diane on Frank: Ricky and Janine, they were always his favourites. He was glad when Claire left home.Janine: Claire always was your favourite, wasn't she?Frank: That's not true, darling.Janine: Or was it Diane? Or maybe Ricky. Because, Dad, it certainly wasn't me.Michael Moon on himself and Janine: We’re so similar in so many ways. We’ve got this messed up childhood where we were wondering if anybody loved us enough.Ricky on Janine: She always was a good actress. She could always turn the tap on when it suited her.Ricky: Oh come on Janine, this is me, your brother, the one you used to share a bath with.Janine: My dad was always too busy for parties when I was a kid.Janine to Ricky's son Liam: I'm not very good [at football] because I didn't get much practice. Your dad was always out with his mates and my dad was always too busy getting rich to play games.Janine: There were plenty of tarts lined up ready to sink their claws into my dad but none of them matched up to [June]. They all pretended to be nice — you know, buy me ice cream when my dad was about and that — but as soon as he left for work, they just changed. Nobody wanted Daddy’s little princess cramping their style.Diane: I sort of took over — looked after my dad, Ricky, and Janine before she went to Claire's.Frank: After June died, I didn't exactly win any merit badges for being a great dad. For instance, as soon as my youngest daughter [Janine] was invited to stay with my eldest daughter [Claire], I jumped at the chance.Janine: Nobody's ever wanted me, not even my dad.Lydia: I wanted you to come and live with me. When it was being discussed, Frank said, “I can’t run a business and look after a four year old.” So I said, “I will.” I begged him, even though the words stuck in my throat, because I wanted it, I wanted it so much. I wanted you. If I’d had a little girl to look after, things might have been ...Janine: So you mean when I was living with Claire, I could have gone to you instead?Claire to Janine: Have you ever thought what it was like for me? When I should have been out enjoying myself having fun, what was I doing? Wiping your snotty nose.Janine: I have been treated like nothing but a little nuisance ever since I was a kid.Pat Evans to Claire: You were old enough to cope when your mother died, but [Janine] was just a little girl. She needed support, she needed stability and she didn't get it.Frank on Diane: She used to look after that house all on her own. I used to get terribly worried about her getting old before her time, but I tell you this — there's no way I could have managed without her.Ricky on Diane's cooking: She had this vegetarian bit once. All funny beans and green stuff. It was horrible.Frank: We used to muck in together, didn't we? You remember my first attempt at Yorkshire pudding?Ricky: Talk about Nightmare on Elm Street.Joan on Mo Butcher: Last time she came up [to Colchester], I was struck by how old she looked.Minty on Garry: He ain’t mastered the French lingo. Failed his CSE.Garry: I might only have three CSEs, but I can win a teddy bear virtually at will — one of the few benefits of a misspent youth — because when I was a young lad, I was banned from [Brighton Pier]. I knew all the dodges, didn’t I? I was putting them out of business.Frank on Janine: She never had a teddy bear, not even when she was a little girl.Nigel: I've got very painful memories about hoovering, ever since that hassle with Mum's canary.Phil Mitchell: Yeah well, most people clean the cage out properly, don't they — take the old stuff out, put the new stuff in — but you ...Nigel: I thought it would save time. My mum loved that bird.Kathy: You always lived with your mum?Nigel: Yeah. I just couldn't bring myself to leave the old girl. Murder, she was. Couldn't let me out of her sight for more than five minutes. Played havoc with me love life. Course, I was her one and only. That made it worse. Still, she cooked a good tea, I'll say that for her.Shelley Lewis: Never married?Nigel: No.Shelley: No lovers?Nigel: Not really. Magic moments, plenty of those, but no one actually living in. I couldn't really, not with me mum always being there.Billy Mitchell on pulling women: We had no fear when we was younger, eh? Cast out twenty hooks a night, bound to get one bite.Nigel: All those years I spent looking for the perfect someone, I never thought I'd get that lucky. Not me, not Nigel Bates.Billy: I never imagined it could be me walking up the aisle, beautiful girl on me arm, settling down and that. That's just like fairy stories that happen to other people.Billy: I used to go walking sometimes in the streets in the winter. I'd look in the windows of the houses, see people in there, you know — families watching telly, just getting on with their lives. I was sort of outside of all of that. Maybe it was something to do with being in the kids' home, but I used to get this feeling, it was like an ache in the pit of my stomach, because all I wanted was to be in the window with the family with the light on. All I wanted was to belong.Minty Peterson: I always wanted kids, but I never thought it was ever going to happen.Nigel: I went out with a bird once [with] huge bulgy eyes.Billy: I went out with this bird, this girl, once. She was really, really odd looking so I goes to her one day, "You know something, you should get your portrait painted." She goes, "Really? Who by?" And I goes, "Picasso."Little Mo: That's cruel, that is.Billy: Nah, she took it as a compliment.Grant Mitchell on Nigel: He took this girl, Janice Horton, out for six weeks. Never laid a finger on her. He said he respected her too much.Sam: I think that's really nice.Grant: Janice Horton didn't think so.Nigel, speaking in 1994: I proposed to a bird once. Remember that bird from Southend, the one with the legs, whatsername - Sophie something?Phil: From the amusement arcade?Nigel: That's her.Grant: She weren't much of a looker, was she? Even the tide wouldn't take her out.Nigel: She was all right.Phil: And you proposed to her?Nigel: Yeah.Grant: And she turned you down?Nigel: Not exactly, no. She said she'd think about it.Phil: That was seven or eight years ago.Grant: So she's still thinking about it?Nigel: No. She moved away. I lost her address.Nigel: I went out with a nurse once. Left me for one of her patients. Sally, that was her name.Grant: What, the nurse?Nigel: No, the patient. Nurse's name was Andrea.Kenny Fraser: She ran off with another bird?Nigel: Yeah. They got married and moved to Godalming. I've still got her stethoscope.Hazel Hobbs: I did apply to be a nurse once, only I can’t stand the sight of blood.Nigel: I remember the best stag night I ever went to. They had this girl — well, woman really — and she was wearing these balloons. All sizes, different colours. And then we all got given these drawing pins and —Grant: Yeah, I think I get the idea.Nigel: No, no. You had to be there. It was all really tasteful.April Branning: Last time I saw you, Sonia, you must have been about two.Bianca Jackson on April: I ain't really had much to do with her since she went abroad.Carol Jackson on her sister Suzy: She's been up north all these years.Billy: I’ve never been north of Sheffield.Bradley Branning: I had a great aunty who came from the north.Bert Atkinson: Oh aye? Where was that then?Bradley: Chesterfield, was it?Bert: Listen, soft lad, Chesterfield is in Derbyshire and Derbyshire’s in the Midlands. Midlands is not in the north.Irene Hills to Sarah: You didn't used to believe there was any such place [as Grimsby]. "Who'd call a place Grimsby?" you'd say.Garry Hobbs: I went to the north once. It was shut.Roxy Mitchell: I went to the countryside once and it was shut.Kevin Wicks: I’ve been up [north] - got wet, got bored, got out.Derek Branning: I broke into a van for the night once. Woke up in Dundee.Heather: ‘Father Figure’ [by George Michael] released December the fourteenth 1987 - George’s first single never to reach the Top Ten.Ted Hills on his marriage to Irene: I was very jealous. I accused her of having affairs even before she'd had any. I wanted to know where she'd been, who she'd been with, and then when that didn't work, I started to undermine her. I'm not proud of that. I did it because I loved her.Sarah Hills to Ted: Mum said you needed [psychiatric] help.Ted on himself and his son Tony: We've never seen eye to eye.Tony Hills to Ted: All my life, when something good come along, it was always, "What will Dad do when he finds out?" You spoil everything.Tony to Ted: I think I've always known that I was [gay]. I just couldn't admit it to myself and I was afraid that you'd hate me.Sarah: I've always wanted things to go right between me and Dad, but they never have. He's just always been really overprotective.Sarah: Dad always said we [Sarah and Irene] were like twins.Cora Cross: I knew a woman once. She had three sets of twins in three years. She used to take them out walking on leads. It was the only way she could control them.Sharon: Leads? No — reins!Cora: No, I mean leads. Her dad ran a pet shop and they all had dogs leads and collars.Irene: Tony always liked a proper cooked meal in the evenings.Irene to Sarah, mid-anecdote: You were a right little madam. Tony was scared stiff. You didn't turn a hair, not even when ...Dennis Rickman: I fell through the ice once. I bunked out of a home and met some mates of mine down the park. We played football on the ice with a mop head. It was pitch black and there was this little island in the middle and they dared me to get on it. Even back then, I didn’t care. I could feel the ice giving way as I got closer and suddenly, it went — crack. I tried to climb out, but it kept breaking up. That was the scariest bit really — that everything you thought was solid wasn’t.Babe Smith: Your dad [Mick] stole a Christmas cake once. I spent hours icing it — little reindeer, everything. He scoffed the lot. I never said anything. Tell that boy off? He’d tear the house down!Nancy Carter: What, did you just let him get away with it? Babe: Made him his own special little cakes for a year after that. Poor lad was never off the toilet.Lorraine to Joe: Remember that time I baked the Christmas cake, the square one, and you bit all the corners off because you reckoned it wouldn't matter once it covered with icing? I was so mad with you that I clipped you one round the ear, and you cried and you ran away. No one could find you. We had all the neighbours out and everything. I was so worried. We were just about to phone the police when your dad found you hiding behind the dressing table in our bedroom. I was so angry with you, but I was so glad that you were safe. I hugged you till I thought I'd burst.Lorraine to Joe: Do you remember those Garfield [slippers] I bought you at Christmas that year?Irene: I've never really been into [Christmas].Sarah: You were once — stockings by the bed.Janine Butcher: Every Christmas I can remember — a whole bunch of relatives that you don’t even like, certainly don’t want to spend any time with, tatty crackers and paper chains and that fight, you know - who’s going to sit on the kitchen stool and who got the pouffe from the lounge. For years, Ricky ate his Christmas dinner with his chin on the table.Shirley Carter: A false alarm — it happened with all three of my [pregnancies].Shirley on Dean: I’m not his mum. I’m just someone who gave birth to him.Pat Evans to Shirley: You are nobody’s mother. You just happened to be there when [Carly and Dean] were born.Shirley: I stuffed up with my kids.Kevin Wicks on Shirley’s son Dean: Who’s been there for him, eh, every single day of his life? Me.Shirley: [When] you two [Carly and Dean] came along, I had absolutely no time to myself. I felt like the walls were closing in and I wanted out.Kevin: You think I was happy, being landed with two kids? Most men would have disappeared as soon as a kid came along that weren’t theirs. I didn’t. I cared for you like my own. I was trying to protect you.Carly Wicks: We never asked you to stay. You had a choice.Kevin: No, I didn’t. I was forced. I never asked to be your father. I had no choice.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?