The Coal Hole

There’s only a month, now, until my book - How Not to be a Supermodel - is published. And the more people ask me about it - the more interview questions I answer and podcasts I chat through - the more I realise that I could probably write another whole book on my life as a model and still not exhaust my deep dark well of batshit crazy anecdotal material.

To be fair, quite a lot of the anecdotal material would be better off left at the bottom of that deep dark well because it’s entirely unfit for public consumption, but the rest of it? Come on! Who wouldn’t want to hear about the time a photographer almost froze me to death? Or the day I had my eyelids accidentally glued together on a beauty shoot and it took over forty minutes to unpick the lashes? Or the time I ended up at the bottom of a coal hole in the basement of an old London boozer?

With hindsight, the coal hole incident was mostly my own fault, but the story would still be worthy of an airing. Especially as I was at the pub in question to do a high-end lingerie shoot (good pay, revered photographer, in-demand hair and makeup artists) and I should have been on my best - most glamorous and sophisticated - top model behaviour.

‘They’re all down there,’ the pub landlord had said to me when I’d arrived, nodding disinterestedly towards a door behind the bar, ‘go right down to the bottom.’

And I’d passed through a room with broken chairs stacked against the walls and then down a flight of stairs and then into a basement with a fluorescent strip light on the ceiling and empty beer kegs and a life-size cardboard cutout of Dale Winton propped up in the corner…and that’s where I’d come undone. Because in that same corner, next to the Dale Winton cutout and a bedraggled Christmas tree made from silver tinsel there was an open trapdoor in the floor.

‘Right down to the bottom,’ the landlord had said.

There didn’t appear to be any other way out of this basement - just the door I’d come in through and so my thoughts naturally turned to the trapdoor. Yes, thinking back, a normal person might have explored all other avenues before settling for a trapdoor in the floor as a viable option but I was late. I can never make good decisions when I’m late. I was also slightly nervous because it was a lingerie shoot and lingerie shoots always made me nervous and - perhaps most importantly - I didn’t want to be the “weedy one who was too scared to venture down a hole in the floor”.

Because let me get this clear: If ever there was a poster girl for “weedy ones who are too scared to venture down a hole in the floor” then it would be me. Firstly, I am claustrophobic. The idea of going into any sort of limited space, including the boot of a car, a broom cupboard or even one of those kids’ play tunnels, is abhorrent to me. Secondly, I have the pessimistic outlook of a medieval doomsayer and consider just about every activity in life to be a fatal accident waiting to happen. Thirdly, I have a wildly overactive imagination. You say trapdoor? I say “entrance to serial killer’s torture chamber and storage facility”. Show me a hole in the floor and I can give you at least eight hundred different things that might be down there, right off the bat. (Bats would be on the list.)

Anyway, you will learn a lot more about my particular quirks when you read How Not to be a Supermodel but safe to say, for now, that dropping myself down into an unknown passage in the basement of a stinking, crustulated pub in the East End was not on my bucket list. I only ventured over there to the hole - and stay with me here - because I heard voices.

There must have been something weird going on with the acoustics in that place because I can say, with one hundred percent certainty, that voices were calling to me from the darkness beyond the trapdoor.

‘Ruth!’ said one of them. ‘Come on down!’

And I stuck my head over the side and looked down into the absolute, 100% pitch dark and answered back.

‘Hello?’ I said, and

‘Down here’ replied a woman’s voice, and the voice was jolly and welcoming and it was also close by. Oh, so close. Right there at the bottom of the dark, narrow hole.

‘Come on down!’ said the woman.

It seemed unlikely, really, that an entire photographic team would have willingly put themselves down an unlit hole, but - in my defence - you never knew with fashion people. They were always surprising you.

I mean here we were in an old man’s boozer, the sort that had a darts board and packets of nuts pinned to a picture of a topless woman (the point being, just in case you’re too young to remember these nut boards in pubs, that the tits would be revealed as more people ordered nuts. A wily landlord would sell all of the nuts around the edges of the photo first, to keep interest high): here we were in a stinking, eggy old watering hole to take photos of lingerie so pricey you’d be too scared to wear it. Knickers that cost over a hundred pounds. Handmade basques that cost a thousand.

(Image above is not from the Coal Hole shoot. Alas. My in-house art department (me) is having to get creative with the old pictures! This was a Myla lingerie ad campaign, I think…)

What bright spark had thought this pub location would be appropriate for a luxury underwear campaign? And with this in mind, was it really so farfetched that the crew might have set up camp down a coal hole?

I got onto my knees and shuffled towards the opening to get a better view.

‘Are you all down there?’ I shouted into the abyss. I could feel the cold rising up through the trapdoor.

 ‘Yes!’ called a man’s voice. ‘Down here! And you’re late!’

 The sense of panic at being late was what finally spurred me into action, had me stretching out my right foot to search for the rung of the ladder a few feet down the hole. There it was. I grabbed onto the top of the ladder and swung my left leg in.

‘Coming down,’ I said, as confidently as I could, just as my right leg slipped and my left foot failed to make purchase on the ladder. And here was the thing about that ladder: it turned out the ladder was seemingly only there for effect. After the first five or six rungs, the ladder simply stopped, yet the hole kept on going. It was just the taste of a ladder, a ladder sample, a ladder that was there to give you an idea of what it would be like to climb down a ladder, but not allow you to climb down to anything of purpose or use.

And the last thing I saw as my fingers began to lose grip on the edge of the trapdoor was a dark velvet curtain flouncing open on the opposite wall and the photographer’s head poking out.

‘What the hell are you doing down there?’ he said, ‘we’re all down here!’ And the man gestured behind him to where there was a short staircase and then a large, brightly lit basement room filled with people and the smell of coffee and a Hollywood-style makeup mirror with bulbs all around it that had been set up in the corner of the room.

Bollocks, I remember thinking, as my hands finally slipped free and I plummeted down into the depths.

It wasn’t really that dramatic a fall in the end, which is why the story didn’t make it into the book - I dropped a couple of feet, touched something soft and hairy and then the resulting horror was so deep and powerful that it basically catapulted me back out of the hole. I don’t think I even needed my hands. No athlete, even of Olympic standard, had ever jumped higher or with more velocity than I did that morning. I leapt up vertically from a standstill as though someone had lit a rocket beneath my feet and I was up and out of the hole within seconds, slamming the trapdoor shut behind me.

‘Don’t shut it,’ the photographer had said, ‘we’ll be shooting the silky negligées down there later.’

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So yes, twenty years later I still have this endless mine of anecdotal model material, this well of remembered conversation snippets and ridiculous events that seems to replenish itself each time I write anything down. OK, so I took the most outrageous bits and expertly* weaved them into the book that you will see before you on 29th August, but still. There’s a lot of extra stuff to get through. Maybe I’ll start with the glued-together eyelashes - at least it’s beauty related…

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You can pre-order your copy of How Not To Be A Supermodel here; it’s available in hardback, e-Book and audiobook. If you’re not in the UK then Waterstones deliver worldwide. Pre-orders are hugely important to authors and each and every one is very much appreciated!

I also have a couple of book tour dates live, if you’d like to come and hear me in conversation about my book. Currently there are still some tickets left for the Toppings event in Bath with Caroline Hirons (see here) and at Norwich Waterstones with Sam Chapman (here). More dates and events will be added - I’ll keep you updated.

* subjective