Sussex, 2009
Alarm bells rang when I received a call from Dad while I was organising my parents’ sixtieth anniversary dinner. He was suffering: his spine and hips were crumbling in on themselves. He seldom gave in to self-pity, but the more he needed a caring partner by his side, the more Mum was absent. She’d long advocated that the formula for a successful marriage was spending plenty of time apart, and boy, she was embracing her own advice with enthusiasm. She hated to be reminded of her own diminishing future, hated seeing Dad in pain and was always busy. Nursing had never been Mum’s strong suit. When Dad had previously had operations and needed looking after, Mum had called in Granny Dock to help.
After hearing the tone of Dad’s voice, I jumped in the car and drove ninety miles down the A3 to have supper with him. My heart bled when I saw this once-mighty man grappling with self-doubt and depression.
‘I’m not sure what to do,’ he said, when we’d sat down for supper. ‘Our marriage is a sham.’
‘Daddy, let’s think this through,’ I said, my mind racing with ghastly visions of my parents getting divorced as they approached their nineties.
‘Your mother is always either away or making plans to be away,’ he lamented, his usual humour absent. ‘I don’t think I can stand it any longer. And to compound it all, Mum rang up Elizabeth to tell her, in no uncertain terms, to leave me alone and stop taking me out to the pub for lunch.’ Liz was a recently divorced friend of Richard’s, a good forty years Dad’s junior. They enjoyed each other’s company, but it was hardly a romance.
‘It was so embarrassing’ he continued. ‘What on earth does she think I’ll get up to? I can hardly walk!’
‘Oh, Daddy,’ I said. ‘I know Mum has always been hard to pin down, but she loves you so much – she just hates to see you suffer. Your marriage has been remarkable – you should look back over the past sixty years and feel a real sense of satisfaction.’ I took him by the hand and looked into his sad eyes. ‘Let’s be honest, you two have had more than your fair share of adventures together, and look what you’ve achieved. Besides,’ I continued, ‘you can still take Liz out for lunch. I won’t tell Mum, I promise.’
***
Back in 1966, with Lindy and Richard exiled to boarding school and Dad commuting to London, Mum made her first bid for freedom. She still had her ‘studio’ in the shed in the back garden, but her interest in fancy goods was waning and the business was now manned by Coley, a kindly lady who came in each day to make up the orders. Mum had read an article in The Times titled ‘Unspoiled Menorca’: in 1966, this small Balearic island was rarely visited by tourists, and there was only one flight from Barcelona to Menorca each week. She set off on her own to investigate and shocked Dad by returning with the deeds to the plan of a house in Binibeca, one of the first developments of its type. Each house was designed in the traditional Spanish style, with tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, and balconies overlooking the sandy cove.
Mum soon set up Binibella, a property company renting and selling houses in the village. I’m sure she hoped to supplement the family coffers, but her real motivation was the opportunities that this new venture would bring. Her children were all of school age and she was keen to make the most of her new freedom.
Until the age of seven, Shamley Green was my world, apart from the two weeks each year when I was sent to stay with Mum’s parents. On reflection, it seems strange that neither Richard nor Lindy joined me, but they took advantage of getting rid of the baby of the family and went boating on the Norfolk Broads and spent time with Aunt Clare and her husband Gerard. As a consequence of these separate holidays, I always had a closer bond with my grandparents, while Lindy and Richard were closer to Aunt Clare.
I relished my seaside holidays with my organised, efficient granny and my gentle, hen-pecked grandfather. They now lived in the clifftop Hampshire village of Barton on Sea, in a modern bungalow called Cleve Cottage, the name being a combination of their daughters’ names. At one end of First Marine Drive, in an even tinier bungalow, lived my stone-deaf great granny, who was by this point in her late nineties. At the other end of the road was a Christian holiday centre, a dour-looking building that echoed with the noise of chanting and singing. Rather than being uplifting, there was something ominous about it. At Cleve Cottage everything revolved around the pips on the radio that was always tuned to the clipped English tones of the Home Service.
Granny and I would visit her mother before walking along the bubbling-hot tarmac road towards the sea, past the booth that sold lilos and shrimping nets, and down the steep steps onto the pebbly beach. We would paddle together and then while I munched on digestive biscuit and Cheddar cheese sandwiches, batting away the odd beady-eyed seagull, I would watch my fearless, athletic Granny as she dived through the waves and swam into the distance. Once we were back home, she would teach me to knit and make wool pom-poms and I’d help her make salads and stick bags of Green Shield stamps into saving books.
One summer, our routine was disturbed by the death of Uncle Jack, Granny’s brother. He had spent the vast majority of his life abroad as a music teacher, and finally as a headmaster in Trinidad. He had contacted Dock expressing concern about his health and said he was planning a trip back to England. Dock had booked him into Enton Hall, a health farm in Godalming that was the inspiration for ‘Shrublands’, the health farm visited by James Bond in Thunderball. It described itself as a ‘dietetic and osteopathic health centre and organic farm’ and she was convinced that this was what her brother needed, but it was sadly too late and he died on the way to England. There was no funeral. I remember trying to put myself in Granny’s shoes, not being able to get my head around losing a brother, but she seemed quite unruffled.
‘Granny,’ I asked, ‘are you sad that your big brother has died?’
‘Oh well, Nessie,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid he was a heavy smoker.’
We went up to Great Granny’s bungalow to tell her about the death of her son. She had the TV on and was watching a game of football. Everything had to be written down for her on her notepad. ‘BROTHER JACK HAS DIED OF A HEART ATTACK,’ wrote Granny, after which Great Granny read the news and dismissed us with the back of her hand. I saw her holding back a tear as we left the room, but later that afternoon she scuttled around to Cleve Cottage. ‘Who was it who died at the football match this afternoon?’ she sweetly enquired.
The only time I wasn’t happy at Barton on Sea was when my grandparents were playing their interminable games of golf and I had to tag along. One day when I was four, after a few holes, they left me in a shelter saying they would be back ‘shortly’. Shortly feels like an age when you’re four, and I began to worry. The next players came along and, thinking I’d been abandoned, took me back to the clubhouse. It wasn’t long before my flustered grandparents found me there being entertained by the barman. I was never left to wait again, but it gave me some insight into the childhood my poor Aunt Clare endured.
My grandfather was a kind, quiet but distant figure. My last memory of him is of playing a game of catch on the pavement outside Cleve Cottage, with the sound of hymns pulsating towards us on the breeze.
‘Can we do this for ever and ever please, Granddaddy?’ I asked.
‘Well maybe not for ever,’ he smiled, ‘but we can do it again when you come to stay next summer.’
‘Do you promise, Granddaddy? Cross your heart and hope to die?’
‘Yes, Nessie. I promise,’ he replied.
‘Cross your heart and hope to die,’ I insisted.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ he replied with a chuckle.
Sadly, die he did. Years of reconciling the horrors of war, followed by the effort of living in a difficult marriage, finally overwhelmed him and he had a massive heart attack, aged just sixty-six.
Predictably, Granny took his death in her stride. At the time she tried to comfort my inconsolable Aunt Clare, saying, ‘It really was time he went; his teeth were beginning to need attention.’ When she later told me that Rupert’s funeral was one of the best days of her life, I don’t think she meant that she celebrated Grandaddy’s death, but rather that it opened the door to a completely new life. She dusted herself down and drove from the church to Enton Hall health farm. Life was short and she was determined to live every minute of it to the full.
***
There were two schools in Shamley Green, a state primary and a fee-paying pre-prep school, thus cleaving the village neatly down the middle. All three of us were sent to the posh school, Longacre, which took boys up to the age of seven and girls up to eleven. At four years old, we were dropped off in a standard outsized uniform of greys and blues, with felt bowler hats for girls and caps for the boys.
A quirk of memory is such that, while I’m sure Mum drove me to and from school on most days, I can now only remember the days when I had to walk. I’d trudge down Woodhill Lane, across the village green and up the hill to school, a long walk for a small child. I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t fair to expect me to do this. I would cut across the playing fields and enter the main building through the back door, where we would all be welcomed by Longacre’s indomitable headmistress, known to everyone as Chum.
Chum was squat and square but not squishy at all, her curvaceous torso restrained in some sort of corset. With her puffy features and tufts of facial hair, she could never be described as a beauty, but she had a kind face and we were all rather devoted to her. She loved ‘her’ children in return, which is more than could be said of Robert, the school’s silent and put-upon groundsman. Chum was openly hostile to him, barking orders and muttering ‘stupid man’ under her breath. Mum told me that Robert was, in fact, Chum’s husband – she’d married him when he was on leave during the war, and had regretted it ever since.
If Mum was in when I got home, you never knew what would happen. ‘Quick, Ness,’ she said once, ‘I hear the flood water is rising and that the River Wey has burst its banks. Debenhams is under water – let’s go and see what’s happening.’ And off we’d drive. Mum didn’t want to shower pity at others’ misfortunes – she just wanted to share in the drama. Any excitement, whether a fallen tree or a burned-out garden shed, and she was there.
I’d often hear her berating my poor father as he entered the house after a long day in London.
‘How’s your day been today, Teddy?’ she would ask.
‘Hello darlings,’ he would say, as he headed to pour his first G & T. ‘Oh, fine, just the usual – nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘Don’t be so boring, Teddy,’ Mum would reply. ‘Something must have happened. Tell us a story!’
Dad would scan through his day and come up with some small morsel to satisfy his wife’s insatiable needs. ‘I was the prosecuting counsel for a sexual assault today,’ he began, before pausing for effect, knowing that he had our attention. ‘Some chap sitting on the upper deck of a London bus had picked up his neighbour’s hand and placed it firmly upon his lap. His defence was that she must have mistaken the sausages he was taking home for his tea for his member!’
Dad took a sip of gin and tonic, before continuing. ‘My witness was a sterling girl,’ he went on, taking his time. ‘She clinched the man’s fate when she looked the judge in the eye and said, “Your honour, I’ve been a butcher’s daughter all my life and never have I come across a sausage with a throb in it!”’
Every evening brought some little snippet to make us laugh. ‘My gum-chewing witness was given a stern telling-off by the judge today. He was told to stop masticating. I’ve never seen someone whip their hands out of their pockets so quickly.’
‘Oh Teddy, I do love you,’ Mum would chirp, wrapping her arms around him and snuggling under his shoulder.
One day, Richard had wanted to see Dad in action in court. They had driven to London together. They were driving home across the Surrey Hills in a howling gale at dusk, when Dad saw a branch from an enormous oak tree coming hurtling down towards them. He braked hard and yelled ‘Duck!’ and Richard instinctively did as he was told, as the branch crashed down on the bonnet and windscreen of the car. Both Dad and Richard had to be freed by the fire brigade but they were largely unscathed, apart from some cuts from the shattered windscreen. The fire brigade cranked the roof up enough for them to drive the car slowly back home, without the windscreen. They drove up the drive tooting the horn triumphantly, happy in the knowledge that they had a good story for Mum.
Weekends at Tanyards were never dull. Richard would come home often, to discuss Student, a magazine he was planning to launch. He’d been editor of his school magazine at Stowe and decided that there was a need for a national magazine dealing with issues that would interest young people. He enlisted Granny Dock to help with the typing and sold advertising from the school telephone box. The first issue, published in the spring of 1968, dived right into some controversial topics. In his first editorial, Richard wrote, ‘The views of any student, politician or journalist must be tolerated, not only because some of them may, for all we know, be on the right track, but because it is only through the conflict of opinion that such words as knowledge or wisdom can have any meaning.’
From the crypt of St John’s Hyde Park, he and his business partner, our old Easteds neighbour Nik Powell, along with his editorial team of Jonathan Gems, Robert Morley and Paul Forbes-Winslow, interviewed the leading thinkers of their generation. Many of them came to sit animatedly around the kitchen table at Tanyards, eating Mum’s wholesome grub and drinking Dad’s distinctive homemade wine.
I don’t remember any creative classes at Longacre School – no plays, dance or poetry, and no singing other than hymns in assembly. I do remember trying to learn French verbs without knowing what a verb was, and being singled out for extra reading classes.
My true education took place in the Tanyards kitchen, listening to this group debating the pressing matters of the time: abortion, contraception, the legalisation of cannabis, pornography, homosexuality, Vietnam, Franco’s Spain, the women’s liberation movement, South Africa, Biafra, race, art and culture. We discussed Richard’s interviews with people such as James Baldwin, Vanessa Redgrave, Don McCullin, David Hockney and Henry Moore, plus archbishops, vice-chancellors, rear admirals, comedians and activists.
I only made two friends at Longacre: Belinda, whom I nicknamed Beatle, and a girl named Mags. At the end of school one day, Beatle said she didn’t want to go back to her house because her mother was very ill and home had become a place of misery. ‘Come back with me,’ I offered. ‘We can ask my mummy to call your mummy when we get home.’
We slipped out by the back entrance through the playing fields and walked hand-in-hand across the green and back down the lane to Tanyards. It was winter and getting dark. We must have realised that we were doing something naughty because as soon as we got home, Beatle curled up on an old armchair in the barn and I covered her up with a blanket and went to join Coley in the studio, before becoming so engrossed in making a picture out of material off-cuts that I forgot all about her. An hour or two later, her deeply stressed father came storming in, shouting and threatening to take off his belt and thrash me within an inch of my life, a fate that he said awaited poor Beatle.
Coley and I were speechless. She clutched my hand and we walked to the barn, where we found Beatle still curled up under the blanket, sound asleep. I will never forget her backwards glance at me as her father yanked her arm and frog-marched her to their car. Coley never said a word to my parents; we both understood that we had seen something that should never happen to a child. Beatle’s mother was to die soon afterwards.
Beatle was very clever and destined to go to St Catherine’s, the academic girls’ school in Bramley. I took the eleven-plus in a forlorn attempt to beat the system, but my desperately poor reading skills meant there wasn’t a hope in hell that I would pass.
My other friend was Mags. Her parents seemed very old to us – her mother was a teacher at Longacre and her father was dying of some dreadful lung disease. She was adopted, a concept I found hard to grasp, and though she loved her adoptive parents, we often fantasised about who her biological parents might be. When I went back to her house, we would skip through the sitting room past her dad, who was inevitably slumped in a wing-backed armchair watching television, his face covered by an oxygen mask. ‘Hi Dad,’ Mags would sing, hoping he wouldn’t stop us. He would take in a difficult breath before managing to wheeze out a word in response. Her mum would be in the kitchen, making us tea and toast before sending us out to play. It was dawning on me that some families had no music, no teasing and no laughter.
We would flee the house and go off to play in the local sewage works, where we would happily ride around on the bars of the massive water purifying plant as it sprinkled pure piss through drums of stone and sand.
One day, Mum was invited to be guest speaker at one of the Longacre School sports days. I realise now that Chum had recognised something inspirational in her, and I was inordinately proud as she walked up to the podium and talked with contagious enthusiasm to a hundred captivated children about the importance of building solid foundations under everything you do.
Apart from schoolwork, my Longacre days were blighted by another horror – two girls in my class called Lottie and Laura. After Mum’s talk, they attempted to make my life a misery by undermining my confidence at every opportunity. They both lived just off the village green, close to Tanyards, and acted as gatekeepers to my freedom in the village. I understand now that their home lives were wretched – one had an alcoholic mother and the other an anorexic one – so someone had to pay.
It’s easy to bully someone and go undetected, with the odd hiss here and the odd sneer there. Continually asking ‘What’s so funny about that?’ and rendering your cheerful banter leaden. You can move your victim’s coat onto another person’s hook, put a pool of water on her chair or hint to the others in the class that she smells, all things that while seemingly insignificant on their own are cumulatively enough to make a young girl turn inside out with misery. Once started, these girls were relentless.
I will never forget the bravery of one of the shyest girls in the class, Louise Elms, who once blurted out, in a fit of anguish, ‘Will you two just stop picking on Vanessa!’ There was a sudden silence as all the girls in the cloakroom stood still, in awe of her courage. I will be always be grateful to her.
It was early autumn, and Lindy challenged me to swim. I’d been trying to learn all summer but hadn’t dared to swim out of my depth. In the previous months, I’d had one unsuccessful lesson with a creepy man called Mr Pilkington. He’d been booked to give us a few sessions, but when I told Mum that he didn’t wear pants under his baggy shorts and that he seemed to relish the moments when he exposed his hairy thingy to us while looming above us at the edge of the pool, Mr Pilkington never returned to complete the job.
Lindy bet me a pancake that I wouldn’t be able to swim a length of the freezing pool, and with that prize in mind, I managed one length and then, like Forrest Gump, just kept on swimming. I swam and swam, with Lindy counting: one length, two lengths, and so on, until I reached one hundred. She made a fresh batch of pancakes as a reward. What joy to have mastered swimming and to be wrapped in a warm towel, while munching through a pile of pancakes cooked by an admiring big sister. I’ve loved long-distance swimming ever since.
Looking at photographs of myself as a child, I’m sure that people would now say that I ‘identified as a boy’. With my cropped hair, swimming trunks and ankle boots with elastic at the side, I never aspired to be a girl and I took pleasure in being physically strong. I chose to think of myself as being completely different to my sister, who exaggerated her feminine vulnerability and took great care of her appearance, experimenting with clothes and make-up. She would become coy in front of boys, but as far as I was concerned, I was one of them.
***
The winter term was over and the Christmas holidays lay ahead, and as the decade had got into full swing, life became more colourful. By 1966, Dad was gaining in confidence as a barrister and was being offered more lucrative cases by his chambers, while Mum was excited about her new business. The house was full of family Christmas rituals. Lindy was stirring cauldrons of fudge with a long wooden spoon – the smell of boiling condensed milk and sugar, mingling with woodsmoke, will always remind me of Christmas.
Mum dusted off the decorations from the previous year, including little cardboard snowmen with round tummies ready to be filled with handfuls of Quality Street chocolates. Richard was sent to the woods to cut down a suitable sized Christmas tree, before we girls smothered the less-than-perfect tree with so much tinsel that no one would notice its missing branches. Dad spent hours twiddling the tiny glass bulbs on the coloured lights to try and ‘get the damned things working again’, while ‘A Swingin’ Safari’ by Acker Bilk played on the record player. The pile of presents under the tree was growing satisfactorily, including one very large and heavy one to me from Lindy.
It even snowed that year, and once again, a sheet of hardboard came to good use. Placing it on the snow shiny-side down, we would sit three abreast on the board and shoot down the hill at breakneck speed. There was no way to slow down and no steering mechanism. It was breathtakingly good fun. Unfortunately Richard, going solo, shot straight into a barbed-wire fence, and had to spend the rest of the holidays with his face covered in plasters.
The Christmases of my childhood were heaven on earth. Dad had usually spent the year fermenting his frankly undrinkable but gratifyingly alcoholic homemade wine, and taking people up to the bathroom where it was concocted was his party piece. On top of a rickety chest of drawers were two twenty-gallon glass flagons, one full of a red liquid, the other a cloudy yellowy white. The flagons were stoppered with cork, into which a U-bend airlock was inserted. Dad stirred the brew by leaning against the chest of drawers and swilling the concoctions around the huge flagons. He was thrilled by the chemistry and marvelled at how cheap his wine was going to be. There was also an added bonus: knowing what was going to be on offer, most guests generously bought an extra bottle of wine as a gift.
On Christmas Eve, we’d all pile into the Vauxhall and drive to Corry Lodge for supper with Auntie Joyce. We’d be dressed in our Christmas best, which for me meant a clean pair of trousers and a jumper. Before we went up the drive, Mum would ask Dad to stop the car while she ferreted around in her handbag for a hanky that reeked of her metallic Rive Gauche perfume. She would spit on her hanky and rub it over our faces, ensuring that we were looking our best for Joyce. Joyce would make a fuss over us and prepare a feast of turkey followed by a flaming Christmas pudding studded with sixpences and served with dollops of cream and brandy butter and ladles of gooseberry fool. The food was served on beautiful hand-painted family plates, the drink from cut-glass decanters and champagne flutes. We would then race back to Shamley Green in time for Midnight Mass with a congregation of mildly tipsy villagers full of red wine and good cheer.
Waking on Christmas morning, the first thing I did was root around the bottom of my bed with my foot, hoping to feel a stocking weighed down with hard presents. There it was – Father Christmas had come! I’d run my hands up and down the knobbly stocking, in our case a shooting sock, the expectation almost unbearable as I waited for Dad to wake and get Mum her cup of tea, before we all piled into their bed to see what Santa had delivered. All families have their Christmas rituals, and Mum’s genius at delaying gratification defined ours. After church we would be allowed just one present, with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of champagne. Then we’d give the house a quick hoover before sitting down by the fire in the dining room and slowly working our way through the pile, one present at a time. I saved the big box from Lindy until last.
‘What do you think it is, Nessie?’ my family asked.
I opened the outer layer and found another box within.
‘There must have been some mistake,’ they laughed, as I ripped open the second box. Then there was a third box and then a forth and so on, until in the very heart of the box I came to my prize, a tin mug. I laughed, trying to cover my disappointment. ‘Very funny.’
We then went across the green to spend Christmas evening with the Talbot Wilcoxes – Peter, Jenny and their four children – in their elegant Georgian house to play parlour games. As the grown-ups steadily drank their fill, we would play charades, murder in the dark, sardines and Nelson, a marvellous game that you could only play once. Those of us in on the joke would gang up on some poor visiting guest, for some reason always known as ‘a waif and stray’.
The game worked like this. Someone would dress up as the admiral and be placed on a chair in the centre of a darkened room. The waif would then be blindfolded, spun around a few times and led into Nelson’s lair. The guide would speak respectfully to Nelson, asking if he would mind being introduced to the waif. Nelson remained silent.
‘This is Nelson’s knee,’ the guide would say, drawing the blindfolded victim’s hand onto the knee. ‘And this is his good arm,’ whispered the guide, as he took the hand up Nelson’s body. ‘This is his bad arm,’ he would continue, as Nelson proffered the stump of an elbow. ‘And these are his lips.’ This would start to feel distinctly weird to a blindfolded person. ‘This is his good eye,’ continued the guide, as he allowed the waif to gently feel Nelson’s closed eyelid. Then, gently prying the index finger of his victim forward, he’d say, ‘and this is Nelson’s bad eye,’ while plunging his finger into a pot of Vaseline. Oh, the shrieks of joy at the poor waif’s horror as his finger slid into the slimy goo.
‘Time to go home,’ said Mum. ‘Always leave a party when you want to stay for more.’
She’d repeat her conviction that Dad would still be at the party she’d met him at, had she not come into his life. ‘Come on, Teddy, time to go!’
Another family Christmas ritual was the bitter accusation from Mum and denial from Dad about him flirting with Jenny T. W. Dad would light his pipe while steering with his knees, and the car would fug up with the acrid smell of gas from his flip-top lighter, smouldering tobacco smoke, boozy breath and Rive Gauche.
‘I saw you sitting on the floor, stroking her knee,’ Mum would snipe.
‘Oh come on, Evie, it’s Christmas,’ Dad would reply. ‘I just had my hand on her knee for balance.’
‘Enough, the two of you,’ we would chorus laughing, as the car wove its way down the country lane and back to the house, which was lit only by the Christmas tree lights and the dying embers of the fire.
Forty years later, I met Lucy T. W. at a party, and we laughed about our family Christmases and our parents’ behaviour back then. Peter, her father, had died a year or two previously.
‘You know, Nessie, we always suspected your mother of having an affair with my father,’ she said.
‘Ha!’ I replied. ‘In our family, we always suspected your mother was having an affair with my father.’ What a laugh!
A week or two later, while flying to Necker Island with Mum and Dad for our annual family holiday, I bobbed up from the back of the plane to see them in Upper Class.
‘I must tell you something funny,’ I said. ‘I bumped into Lucy T. W. the other day, and their family myth is that you, Mum, had an affair with Peter!’
They both stared at me, startled rabbits in headlights, not knowing what to say. Oh Lord, I thought to myself, it’s true. Mum had accused Dad of flirting with Jenny to cover her own bad behaviour. Later in the holiday, she explained that the ‘affair’ had amounted to a walk on the heath one afternoon, but that she had always relished her emotional connection with Peter. To conduct a clandestine relationship in the 1960s would have had its own complications and would have been virtually impossible in a tight-knit village community. No wonder Mum organised to spent part of her life away from my father.
With Lindy and Richard away at school, and Mum focusing on Binibella and training to become a lay magistrate, I was becoming increasingly isolated. My only friend within walking distance was Mishi Blower, who lived a mile up a steep track, deep in the woods above Tanyards. I loved going to stay with her in her tiny woodsman’s cottage, but it had no television. Mishi and I had an arrangement with the family in the big house down the track: on Thursday nights we would brave the dark and knock on their front door. Someone would silently let us in and we’d traipse down a long corridor to join the family and watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. No one ever laughed out loud or said a word to us and, after the show, we would leave the TV room and make our way back to the cottage. It gave another insight into how other families lived.
I began to dread going to school. At first Mum told me to get a grip, reminding me how lucky I was. But I was bored, being bullied and utterly miserable, so didn’t feel lucky at all. Mum then told me to pull myself together and stop sulking, but by the age of ten no amount of self-pulling was going to cheer me up.
I developed a ‘breathing disorder’, a wheezing, panicky inhalation that would disappear as soon as I was snuggled up in the studio with Coley. It was also at around this time that I first became aware of a growing resentment from Mum when I looked to Dad for support. It was nothing dramatic, just a subtle sensation that I was getting in the way when Dad came home at the end of the day and she wanted to have a drink with him and discuss their day. Three of us for dinner each night just wasn’t working – it was time I too went to boarding school.