Chapter 5

For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a typewriter. Not a toy one like some of my friends had, but a proper Olivetti Lettera 32 portable, in a dashing shade of turquoise with a same-colour carrying case. By then I’d already shown some flair for writing, and Mutti was determined to encourage me. Ten was double figures, she reasoned, which meant I was virtually an adult. That meant I needed to be equipped for the job.

But the transition from childhood also needed to be marked in some appropriate manner, and not just with gifts however lavish. Of course there was a three-course dinner at Sully House, but that’s how we had celebrated all my birthdays since I could remember. It was a family tradition and the only difference this time was that I was permitted to sip the Piesporter Michelsberg. No, Mutti declared, this year I would have a grand party.

In retrospect, maybe she was feeling guilty because I’d never had a birthday party before and she wanted to make it up to me with one big world-beating bash. She didn’t realise that I’d deliberately avoided the ghastly indignity of bringing my parents and my school friends face to face. Actually, calling them “friends” is a vast exaggeration – acquaintances would be more accurate. They were a pallid lot of Susans and Carolines, who looked like they belonged to a different species to me – blonde and blue-eyed, with squeaky little voices.

Their mummies were like grown-up versions of themselves, with Alice bands on their blonde manes, and neat little skirts. None of them ever spoke to Mutti at the school gate. Her booming Hungarian vowels formed a ten metre exclusion zone. You could see them looking at her rolling red locks and billowing cigarette smoke as they might have regarded a African tribesman wearing nothing but neck rings and a horn over his penis.

When it came to the party, I must have got carried away with a combination of Mutti’s florid fantasy and my own pre-adolescent hormonal ferment. She’d been a debutante herself in Budapest, and been courted by scores of young men bearing bouquets to her door. So at least she had some experience of romance, and that must have convinced me.

We had inevitable differences about the style of the event. The whole Beatles thing had passed Mutti by, so she envisaged ball-gowns and cups of fruit punch followed by Coronation Chicken to the strains of a big band in what passed for a smart local hotel. I was aiming more for mini-skirts and Coca Cola, with cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks stuck into half a grapefruit, while “Yeah Yeah Yeah” blasted out of the Dansette in our front room. To my great surprise, she gave way on everything apart from the menu. She even got her dressmaker to knock me up a dress just like one Mary Quant was wearing in a picture I cut out of a magazine.

On the day, I watched with trepidation as the butcher and greengrocer delivered, and Mutti set to in the kitchen. Thirty minutes before the appointed hour, Mutti was still up to her elbows in coleslaw.

Mercifully, she managed to get upstairs by the time the first few guests were smoothing down their velvet pinafore frocks as their coats were whisked away by “the help”. I’d put on a long playing record. Shy girls were making stilted conversation with spotty boys while their parents admired our collection of delft china figurines. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Mutti had come back downstairs wearing an outsize version of the style of dress that Jackie Kennedy went for. Her love of patent leather must have started around then and she was wearing a nice pair of shiny black court shoes. The whole ensemble would have looked terrific, if only she’d managed to get her lipstick on straight.

I became aware that she had pounced onto an unwary trio of parents, and was regaling them with her opinion of the music, which was poor. By the time we approached the buffet, she was far from steady on her feet. At some point in the evening, a lot of food ended up on the floor and angry words were exchanged. I was hiding in the downstairs toilet; when I came out most of the guests had disappeared. So by the time we got to Uncle Bernhard’s reception in Hampstead Garden Suburb Mutti had form in the party department, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened.

The Grand Ball proved to be a bit of a watershed in all our lives. Together with the typewriter it signalled the official start of my adulthood, but not in the way Mutti intended. Though she must have been drinking for years by then, I don’t remember it affecting anything much. Afterwards it affected everything.

The first day of high school I found myself having to explain why I wasn’t wearing the uniform tie. I wasn’t brave enough to tell the truth. That my mother had taken me out, heading with all good intentions to the department store to get the necessary. She’d become confused halfway through the day and came home without half the kit. After writing out “I must remember ALL my school uniform” one hundred times, I went home and helped myself to enough money from her purse to get a tie the following morning. So I got another hundred lines for being late.

When she didn’t turn up for parents’ evening at school, it was apparently because I’d failed to tell her about it. Meissen china plates smashed because I was clumsy. And when she crashed the car under the influence, I was hastily swapped into the driver’s seat and had lost my no claims bonus before my eighteenth birthday.

I tried my best to get on with being an ordinary teenager, albeit one without much of a social life. But in the frequent periods when Mutti’s drinking got out of hand, I was also handbag carrier, clearer up and fixer. Dad was at work and didn’t see that I’d made the dinner and ordered the groceries. I also negotiated with irate tradesmen, smoothed out relations with the neighbours and even on one terrible occasion kept the police off our backs. I spent many lonely nights yearning for a mummy with a velvet Alice band, even if she was holding a chip pan in her hand. But at least I had my Olivetti for company.