An East Ender on-screen, an East Anglian by birth and upbringing. With June Brown releasing her autobiography, Steven Russell learns about an Ipswich childhood with its share of tragedy and turmoil

Ipswich Star: 05/11/2013 PA File photo of June Brown during filming for the Graham Norton Show at the London Studios, London. See PA Feature TV Brown. Picture credit should read: Ian West/PA Photos. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature TV Brown.05/11/2013 PA File photo of June Brown during filming for the Graham Norton Show at the London Studios, London. See PA Feature TV Brown. Picture credit should read: Ian West/PA Photos. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature TV Brown.

June Brown ? the former Ipswich schoolgirl who became famous as Dot Cotton in EastEnders ? opens her heart in her new memoirs to talk about the tragedy that changed her life.

It happened in the summer of 1934, when June was seven. Sister Marise, 16 months older, woke with earache. She had an operation at Ipswich General Hospital but developed meningitis and died a few days later. Ear infections often spread to the mastoid bone in the skull and mastoiditis was then one of the leading causes of death in children.

“Her coffin lay in the darkened drawing room with the door closed. We never saw her, Rosebud and I. (Rosemary was their four-year-old sister.) We just knew she was there,” June writes in her memoirs.

Micie, as she was known, was buried in Ipswich Cemetery – in baby brother John Peter’s grave. He’d died 18 months earlier.

“She and I had always shared a room, walked to school together and were hardly ever apart... Had antibiotics been available, there would have been no operation, she would not have died and, consequently, my life would have been quite different.

“The loss of her affected my whole character and shaped the way I behaved for a long time. In particular, it influenced my expectations of men. Too dependent, I found it impossible to be happy alone. I was constantly in and out of love, always looking for the kind of caring that Micie had given me – the wholehearted acceptance of me just as I was.”

Before the Year Dot covers the actress’s life up to the time of her big break in EastEnders in 1985. It tells of a childhood of family tensions but also lots of fun – from walks along The Strand at Wherstead to whizzing down the Belle Vue Road hill on the back of her sister’s bike, the church of St Mary-le-Tower and its youth club, and Olga Wilmot’s Dancing School.

Home at that awful time of her sister’s death was a flat over their dad’s electrical business. Soon after, the family moved to a house in Grove Lane. “Father was drinking heavily and there were many rows.”

June explains: “Everything had begun to go wrong for my father since his unwise move in taking out a court action against one of his customers to recover money owing to him but left unpaid.

“At the time my father owned the well-established firm of Wood & Co, Electrical Engineers.” The legal action prompted “the other members of the gentry” to withdraw their custom “in support of one of their own and his business fell away”.

He had to uproot from Northgate Street to Great Colman Street, and the family moved from Warwick Road (where they’d had a maid and a dog) into the flat above.

After the move to Grove Lane, life became punctuated by rows.

After one barney, mum Louisa removed herself and the girls to her parents’ house in Spring Road. After several months away, “Mother finally agreed to a reconciliation, though, on the condition that Father give up drinking and sign the Temperance Pledge.”

June started school at St John’s and writes about going to the cinema with friends – to the Odeon, the Gaumont and the Regent – and to a friend’s family’s beach hut at Felixstowe.

She was the only pupil at St John’s to win a scholarship to Ipswich High School for girls, but found it brought its problems at the start. “The three scholarship girls, all strangers to each other, were handed out used textbooks in front of the fee-paying girls who had their new books in their satchels. I felt rather inferior.”

Finishing school at 17 and a half, she volunteered for the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and trained as a cinema operator.

Demobbed in 1946, she went back to Ipswich – and through an advert in the Evening Star got a job in an office.

But it was tedious… and June was saved by Rosebud, who spotted an ad for a new drama school launching in January, 1947.

June applied. “I hadn’t done any acting, apart from the play that I toured with in the WRNS,” she admits. “In late November, I took the train to London on what was to be a pivotal day in my life.“

The rest we know.

Before the Year Dot is published by Simon & Schuster at £20