Holidays became a thing of the past, something we never even thought about again. But when I was twelve I was invited by Sebastian to St Tropez to visit his best friend Oliver, who was running a hotel there. It can’t have been a tempting proposition for Sebastian, aged twenty-two. All I planned from my trip was a glimpse of Brigitte Bardot, and a gingham bikini, one of which I managed to achieve. One night we drove to Juan Les Pins to see Nina Simone at an open-air concert. Arriving early so as to secure front-row seats, there was a hush of expectant silence as she was introduced. As we waited for the first note to be delivered, she slowly scanned the audience. There was a heavy silence, we waited, she looked again, we tried to look less uninspiring – we failed. ‘I don’t like you,’ she spat as she turned her back on us and walked off the stage and we, the puzzled and disappointed audience, collected our belongings and returned from whence we came.
I found my gingham bikini in a minute boutique. Positioning the tiny top over my gnat bite of a bosom, I eased the bottom half over my knickers to the enthusiastic urgings (‘Oh! You must get it’) of the only other person in the ultra-modern communal changing room – Virginia McKenna.
Back at school I passed the tedious days having imaginary friendships with famous people. I wrote poems to and about them, all of them sincere, all of them dreadful. None of these people were alive and not one of them an original person to love. I was in a fan club of millions, but still they spoke to me in a way that moved me profoundly. There was John Clare, Van Gogh and Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday, James Dean, Emily Brontë and A. E. Housman, all unashamedly passionate and sensitive and precisely what I was looking for in this land of the unmoved.
After lights out I shone my torch under my bedclothes and read Vincent’s letters to Theo and cried myself to sleep imagining his life, his wonderful brother, his roughly formed face, his orange beard, his thick, expressive paint, his lonely mission, his bed, his lack of love. The pure emotion that surged through my body made it impossible to look at one of his pictures without hot tears slipping down my face. I wanted to tell him that at thirteen I didn’t need to be told he was good, that every fibre of my body reacted to his pictures all by itself. And although I didn’t know it at the time, my father must have felt exactly the same.
Dead, the Dutch Icarus who plundered France
And left her fields the richer for our eyes.
Where writhes the cypress under burning skies,
Or where proud cornfields broke at his advance,
Now burns a beauty fiercer than the dance
Of primal blood that stamps at throat and thighs.
Pirate of sunlight! and the laden prize
Of coloured earth and fruit in summer trance
Where is your fever now? and your desire?
Withered beneath a sunflower’s mockery,
A suicide you sleep with all forgotten.
And yet your voice has more than words for me
And shall cry on when I am dead and rotten
From quenchless canvases of twisted fire.
I lay in bed and learned great chunks of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and ‘A Shropshire Lad’. I read Wuthering Heights and imagined I was Cathy, running to the moor, waiting for Heathcliff to find me, as torrential rain lashed at my pallid face. I dreamed of Marilyn. Giggling side by side, wads of cotton wool separating our crimson toenails, our hair curled in gigantic rollers, a silk scarf tied around our alien-like heads, we chatted together. I found a garish copy of Lady Sings the Blues at home, which told me some of the facts of Billie Holiday’s short and troubled life and, at the time, I thought everything I read about her as imperative as the music I listened to over and over again. If this now seems overly romantic, I’m not embarrassed. The adults surrounding me day in and day out were ordinary and un-mysterious in the extreme; even their passion for Jesus seemed obscured by an aggressive thirst for the prosaic.
After holidays, it was back to school – back to the grindingly tedious suffering for our sins, the constant praying for the less fortunate, the endless waiting for every other Sunday to arrive, the early morning train to Victoria Station and freedom. I could almost feel the shackles falling away as the train pulled into the station and I searched under the clock to see which member of my family would be there to greet me. It was almost worth going to boarding school for that day every fortnight, when you could shed the dreary conversation of the nuns, shake off the constant reminder of the mortal and venial sins you’d no doubt committed, and escape the aridity and putrid smell of pretend goodness. The Sunday morning bustle of the tube – the gorgeous London air, the coffee at Dino’s and the slow walk up the Old Brompton Road to the heavenly warmth of our basement kitchen.
Dad came home occasionally and sometimes his weekend coincided with mine. By now it was becoming impossible to understand anything he said, which was just as frustrating for him as for everyone else, but we were all there to help him, and his inherent playfulness was impossible to extinguish. We would put a record on and he would do a funny little dance to make us laugh, and attempt to imitate Groucho’s walk. He had always been so supple and athletic, leap-frogging over his chair at meal-times, running up the down escalators at the station, the simplest and most ordinary thing made fun, and still he tried.
There are a few similarities between us, small tics that tell me I am my father’s daughter. But for them, it would be hard to believe we were related. His eyes were blue, mine are green; he was tall, I’m small; he was dark, I’m fair; he was thin, I’m round. I hadn’t inherited any of his talent, but I had inherited his cheerful disposition, his squeamish temperament and his propensity to faint. Mervyn’s most memorable faint was when he slid down a wall while being measured for his army uniform, assuming he was being measured for his coffin. We both found it impossible not to pass out when doctors squeezed our arm into a sausage for a blood-pressure reading. Just the sound of the air breathing in and out was enough to do it for both of us.
My fainting fits began at school, when the long silences in our daily Mass and Sunday Benediction gave me the time to imagine myself transported to another time and place – a forgiving place, where the constant worry of having committed a mortal sin could be alleviated, without the fear and humiliation of unburdening it to our school priest. Surely he must have recognised our voices and stored up our smutty little secrets, held us in contempt for the dreadful interior life we were leading. I hated the feeling just before I slid down the tiny, cramped space between kneeling and sitting on the hard benches, the spinning head, the clammy hands, the humiliation. The relief after we had taken confession, when we were clean again, had earned a fresh start – no more dirty thoughts, no more swear words carved into desks, no more imagining what it would be like to be kissed, no more hatred for the nuns. It could all be wiped out with the simple words: ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned.’
The early 1960s had seminal moments and, like everyone else, I remember them well. A sunny lunch with Mary Norton in her daughter’s garden was abruptly interrupted when Sebastian ran out of her kitchen to tell us Marilyn Monroe had died. My head was bent over a sink in the communal washroom as a screaming sixth former came running in to tell us the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Her jumbled words were incomprehensible through my shampooed ears but, as I looked up from the washbowl, soap pouring down my face, I saw groups of girls huddled together, wailing uncontrollably as only groups of girls can wail. As we tacked the Broderie Anglaise frill around our crisp white aprons, a song burst on to the radio in our warm sewing class. It was ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles. Our response was immediate. We’d never heard anything like it before and, in those few short minutes, each and every one of us was smitten. For us, and every other thirteen-year-old girl in the country, it was the start of Beatlemania. It was 1963.