The Prediction
One summer about ten years ago, I flew into London to record my Persona album. After a long limousine ride from Heathrow airport, I was dropped off in front of a Regency house in Kensington where my producer, Michael Kamen, and his wife were accommodating me for the night. As I looked around, the cockney driver remarked, “Ave you been ’ere before, luv?” I laughed, telling him that I had once lived a stone’s throw from where we were standing, and had spent the first year of my life being pushed in a pram up and down the sidewalks of this same street. The iron balconies, cream-painted walls, and mottled plane trees could have been lifted straight out of my parents’ first photo album. By coincidence, I had returned to the very street where my life had begun. My mother often told the story of how, when I was only a few months old, she was wheeling me along Kensington Park Road when an eccentric, white-haired lady peered through the veil of her hat into my pram to see the “dear little baby.” She stepped back with a startled expression on her face. “Dear Lord above, this child is going to be famous and travel all over the world!” she exclaimed. Years later, my mother, a skeptic in matters of clairvoyance, admitted, “You know, Liona, that old psychic was absolutely right.”
Eileen Hancock, my mother, had been raised in Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands, but had been drawn to London once she had acquired her teacher’s qualifications in 1945. The long-haired brunette enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere that flourished among her circle of acquaintances from all corners of the world — political science students from India, artists from Africa, and writers from America — who drifted through her emerging consciousness. But it was a blond, blue-eyed youth from northern Spain who stole her heart, wooing her with romantic dreams of travel and family. John Boyd and my mother had both been students in the north of England — he at the Durham University, she at Whitelands College, which was evacuated to Durham during the Second World War. They did not meet, however, until gravitating to the same student club in London: my mother by then an art teacher, my father waiting to pursue further studies after his stint as a Royal Air Force pilot trainee in Oklahoma.
John had been born into an English family that had resided in Spain for several generations and assimilated into the Spanish culture. William and Anita, his parents, were members of the English community centred around the mining industry. To their dismay, their handsome son gave up university studies in geology; weekends spent at the child psychologist A.S. Neill’s progressive boarding school, Summerhill, had stimulated his bohemian spirit and his interest in childhood creativity and emotional development. Postwar London was experiencing a resurgence in the arts, and he and my mother attended concerts, lectures, and galleries, hungrily devouring the delights of life in the cosmopolitan capital. Only one year into their twenties and after a few months of courtship, they were married and settled in a flat on Stanley Crescent, in that same elegant corner of Kensington.
Impatient, even at life’s earliest stages, I was born one month ahead of the anticipated date, on July 11, 1949. As at first my parents could not decide on a name, they called me Popsy. Many years later, it was amusing to read the headline of a music review of my Persona album, “Boyd Becomes Very Popsy!” Eventually, John and Eileen settled on the name Leona, but my paternal grandmother was horrified, as in Spanish it means “lioness” — a name not at all befitting a delicate baby. My mother obligingly changed the spelling to Liona, and a Spanish middle name, Maria, was added to please my grandparents. As she set off to the registry office with my newly invented name, she stepped over a cleaning lady polishing the wooden stairs of the flat and exchanged a few words. “Oh, luvvy, you must call her Carolynne. It’s so pretty for your baby,” the woman insisted. In this rather haphazard way, my name evolved into Liona Maria Carolynne Boyd, leaving my parents happily confident that they had given their first-born plenty of choices.
I spent my first eighteen months teething on dried bananas and scampering barefoot on the grassy lawns of Holland Park and Kensington Gardens. After my sister, Vivien, announced her presence one and a half years later, we moved to Welling, near the outskirts of London, in the county of Kent. The house had billowing bushes of pink roses in the back garden and a cement wading pool where I splashed naked during the hot summer and prattled away to an imaginary playmate called Oku Poku. My parents, indulging my desire for a kitten, brought home Mimi, a tabby who lived with us until my mother’s allergies and his nightly forays with the neighbourhood cats drove them to distraction. To my dismay, he was given away.
Christmases were spent with my grandparents, James and Millie Hancock, in Stoke-on-Trent. The hissing steam engines of Euston Station in central London petrified me almost as much as the black-bear rug on my grandma’s bedroom floor; both recurred with regularity in my childhood nightmares. I remember frosty mornings before the coal fires were lit: steaming bowls of salty porridge, tantalizing cornflake and golden syrup pies, jam tarts, and treats of Turkish delight covered in powdered sugar from my grandpa’s secret store in the drawing-room bureau, where Vivien and I hung around like eager puppy dogs waiting for tidbits.
Each summer, our small family headed off to the empty, flat beaches of Norfolk, on the east coast facing the North Sea, to erect canvas tents among pine-treed sand dunes. My father knocked together rough tables and chairs out of gnarled logs after first filling his rucksack with pine needles to make a long cushion on which we sat and watched in admiration. I amused myself for hours catching sea crabs or gathering the prettiest shells from the beach. Once, my little sister and I, blissfully occupied constructing a sandcastle, failed to notice that, as the afternoon tide edged around us, we were on an ever-diminishing sandbank. To my horror, Vivien’s beach shoes began to float away along the channel! My father, who had been sunbathing a short distance away, came rushing to carry his two panic-stricken daughters to safety. The sea barely rose above our ankles, but that image of eddying waters has remained with me ever since. Whenever I am particularly tense, the night before an important trip or a critical performance, I dream of ominous dark waves creeping up the beach. There is no way to ever outrun those insidious tides of my nightmares.
One Christmas, at age four, I awoke to find a lovely honey-coloured teddy bear sitting beside my bed in a pale blue stroller. My new friend, who was almost as big as I, was named Moses. He still reclines regally in my bedroom today, a little thin on top, because when Vivien had her hair cut, I gave “Mosey” a quick trim, believing his hair would grow back just as my sister’s did. Tonka, the leopard, came several Christmases later and together they travelled with me from continent to continent. Years later my record company, Moston Music, was named in honour of these long-time companions.
After two years in Welling, my parents became disenchanted with the blandness of suburbia. While bicycling to Bethlem annex of Maudsley Hospital, where he was working with emotionally disturbed adolescents, my father noticed a straggle of caravans encamped in a nearby field. Eureka! He could buy a trailer and take us to live with the gypsies. The next weekend, my mother, sister, and I trudged over clumpy grass to meet this motley gathering. I looked in awe at the olive-skinned Romany women trailing velvet shawls, and at their swarthy menfolk who emerged from brightly decorated caravans. “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies” sang in my head as I inhaled the unfamiliar aroma of damp grassy earth, smoking fires, and snorting horses. Bright eyes peeped from behind lace-curtained windows as I tried to pet the mongrel dogs who sniffed at us suspiciously. Living here would be even more fun than playing in the secret forts Vivien and I had constructed beneath the gooseberry bushes — something akin to joining the circus! My father’s fantasies might have been fulfilled had not alternative accommodation suddenly materialized, much to my mother’s relief. We abandoned “the road less travelled” and rented the upper portion of a sprawling Victorian house on Perry Vale, in south London’s residential borough of Forest Hill. I was six and my sister four; my little brother, Damien, was born in the house a year and a half later. “Oh, Mummy, he’s just like a big frog,” I cried, watching the midwife giving him his first bath.
Perry Vale had an enclosed back garden canopied by the branches of a pear tree from which my father hung a wooden swing. The hours of uninterrupted solitude, the natural beauty of our wildflower weedy garden, and the airy sensations of swinging inspired me to compose poems and songs, which I secretly hummed to myself. There was something magical that occurred when I combined my own little melodies and words. The desire to create music and songs was born thanks to my pear-tree swing.
Every night before my mother tucked me into bed, she explained the meaning of two new words. Intended to improve my vocabulary and spelling, these “morning words” were written and left on my night table, along with a slice of pear or apple, to be memorized on awakening — boycott, announcement, co-operate — I can still recall the feeling of munching on a piece of fruit while trying to assimilate those difficult words. In spite of a less acute memory these days, new words never fail to fascinate me. So many aspects of personality seem to be rooted in childhood experience.
Adamsrill Junior School initiated me into the world of chalky British teachers and puddly playgrounds. At school, one of my childish essays won first prize, a treasured book from my grade one teacher. Accused of “growling” in my attempt to imitate the boy next to me, I was removed from the chorus, which was to sing for a visiting dignitary, and in compensation I was singled out to present a bouquet of flowers onstage. Although my vocal efforts were unappreciated, when my mother began to teach me the treble recorder I discovered that blowing the correct pitches and deciphering the treble clef presented a fascinating challenge. Instrumental music was a delight.
My parents were wonderfully devoted and spent hours reading books and encyclopedias to us. Nothing could be more riveting than Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Birds of Great Britain, and the adventures of Noddy and Rupert Bear. How our parents adjusted from their days of concerts, lectures, and university life to domestic duties and child-rearing, I cannot imagine, but Damien, Vivien, and I never suffered from lack of attention.
My parents, noticing that one of my eyes turned inward when I was tired, consulted an oculist, who stuck an adhesive patch over my good eye to rest it while strengthening the lazy one. Although I hated this indignity, which I endured for several weeks, I reluctantly complied, struggling to read and write with blurred vision. Piercing wails of protest deafened my mother when she removed the bandage, which had become firmly attached to my eyelid and lashes. The experience proved almost as traumatic as my first dental extraction, performed by an appropriately named Dickensian dentist called Doctor Payne! As the right-eye squint persisted, I was carted off to another oculist, who recommended balancing exercises — standing on cement-filled tin cans while rolling my eyes from side to side. Needless to say, my weak eye did not improve after this unorthodox treatment. Finally, glasses were issued by the National Health Service — horrid little round spectacles that constantly misplaced themselves. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I suffered wearing glasses to school until, at the age of seventeen, I unceremoniously deposited the offending pair in the garbage. At age nineteen, I miraculously scored perfect 20/20 vision; fortunately, I have never required glasses since then.
On weekends my parents used to take us on trips to the country: blackberry-picking in the autumn for my mother’s homemade jams; outings to gather the wild bluebells and daffodils of Surrey in the springtime; expeditions to catch tadpoles in the weedy ponds of Kent; and fossil hunting in the chalk hills of the South Downs. Staying with friends in the Ashdown Forest, we tunnelled mazes through the bosky hillsides of tall, musky ferns and crept into farmers’ fields at dusk to pilfer succulent loganberries. My father scraped together his savings to acquire a moribund black 1936 Austin whose sputtering engine needed to be cranked by hand. Whenever it rained, we had to rearrange our seating to avoid drops from the leaking roof, but at the end of a long day’s trip — probably no more than fifty miles — we children always kissed our faithful motorcar to thank it for getting us safely back to London.
Crossing the choppy English Channel by ferry and taking tunnel-crammed continental train rides filled me with excitement when we visited my father’s family. In “grandma-in-Spain’s” house, Vivien and I entertained ourselves feeding the chickens or begging the maid, Ascensión, for pieces of almond turon or quince membrillo. The house was always busy with the hustle and bustle of food preparation for picnics at the beach, where we sat under umbrellas eating sandy Spanish omelettes and sweet figs. Surely in Spain the first strains of guitar music must have reached my ears. At my mother’s urging, my father bought a cheap souvenir guitar, which he carried to England slung over his back in a canvas case.
Vivien was usually my very best friend, but as with most sisters, on occasion my worst enemy. As the eldest, it was my prerogative to be “in charge,” reporting to my mother if Vivien misbehaved. Peevishly I pilfered “sweeties” from her secret supply when she was not looking and invented scary stories guaranteed to keep her awake at night. To retaliate she chanted, “Liona the Moaner.” How infuriating! Not to be outdone, but unable to find a word to rhyme with her name, I neologized “Quivien” — a nasty thief who stole from children — and sashayed round the house singing “Vivien the Quivien” at the top of my lungs. To my great glee, she would run away, crying. Years later, Vivien was amazed to discover there was no such word.
Two mischievous neighbourhood girlfriends used to invite us into their secret playground, which was accessible only over their garden wall. The fenced-in area contained a high-tension transformer and displayed a sign marked DANGER NO ADMITTANCE. There we competed to see who could do the longest “wee-wee” on the concrete pavings, and danced around naked, like little savages, with rubber hoses, pretending to be boys. They convinced my credulous sister and me that people could fly. After hundreds of abortive “flights” off the back steps, we opted for ballet lessons; watching ballerinas on television, we agreed that their motions looked pretty close to flying. My compliant mother enrolled us in Saturday morning classes, where Chopin’s piano music helped us glide around on tiptoes imitating wood fairies and nymphs. I loved wearing the pale grey tunic, pink headband, and ballet slippers, but was disappointed when the ballet mistress told me that flying was not on the curriculum.
A corpulent great aunt from the Midlands, who smelled of lavender and rosewater, came to visit. Her explanation that perfume was made from flowers set me on a quest to duplicate the magical smell of her scented handkerchiefs. Tirelessly I squeezed the petals from garden rosebushes and added drops of rubbing alcohol, but my attempts at perfume creation were a failure. Sun-drying and curing banana skins with various oils, to make a “leather” belt for Mosey, proved equally futile. But with what perfect passion I pursued the improbable dreams of childhood.
Scanning the London Times, my parents, anxious to expand their horizons, became interested in applying for teaching jobs in some faraway corner of the world. Since my father spoke Spanish, he was keen to answer the ads from British Columbia and Bolivia, both of which he presumed were in South America. The former replied, and to his surprise he discovered it was in Canada! However, he accepted a position, not in British Columbia, but in Toronto, Ontario, as principal of Thistletown Hospital School, the first school in the province for emotionally disturbed adolescents. My parents were excited by the prospect of a new life in Canada, although my mother was saddened by the thought of relocating so far from her own family in the Midlands.
Organizing a sale in the front garden, Vivien and I sold off old toys and my father’s handmade wooden “climbing frame,” from which we had enjoyed hanging upside down like bats on a rafter in the warm summer months. I was eight years old, my sister six, and my new brother just nine months when we boarded the ship that was to take us to a new life across the ocean. My parents were still in their twenties; I often marvel at how courageous they were to blithely head off toward a foreign land with three young children in tow and no more than a few spare pounds of savings in their pockets. Our years of travelling had begun.