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Carol Harrison Interview Danny Dyer calls her mum, she counts Patsy Palmer, June Brown and Nadia Sawalha as friends, she’s starred with Ray Winstone and worked with Bill Nye. Now actress, writer, producer and teacher, Carol Harrison, is happily settled in Brighton and working on the production she’s written called All or Nothing, celebrating 50 years of The Small Faces. Could tell us about your childhood and your early memories? I was brought up in the East End of London. My earliest memory is going down hopping, hop picking in Kent, and I really remember that distinctly and singing Valderi Valdera around the hops. It was a very traditional sort of East End upbringing, except for the fact that my mum was a single parent and in those days it was quite rare so it was more of a struggle. We were really quite poor but my mum worked as a tailoress all her life and I always remember she was an amazing dressmaker so I was never went without a nice outfit… if there was anything that I had to go to that was special, the sewing machine would be going because she’d make me something 8 out of remnants and stuff like that. It was so I always looked nice and she always drummed that into me. I had to look nice and I had to be somebody as well. That’s what she wanted. I think she left school at 13, although she got a scholarship she felt it was a lost opportunity in a way because her parents couldn’t afford for her to go there. She had to go out and work and bring money in. My mum always instilled in me that I had to be something, be somebody I guess. Do you have siblings? I’ve got a sister who actually lives out Lancing way - obviously she’s from the East End too but when I moved down here ten years ago she followed me down. So, it’s just me and her and my nephews from the family down this way… they had to come as well, I couldn’t leave them there! I remember a few different things from my childhood, I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, and things were very different then. I was born in the year that rationing ended. One of my favourite places in the East End is where I lived for a long while before I came here to Brighton and that was in Victoria Park. I always remember going there because I lived in West Ham, (near the football ground that’s why I’m a West Ham fan), and I remember going to Victoria Park for the first time and thinking it was heavenly and I remember sitting there thi nking, “one day I want a big house here and all my friends can