Let’s start with happy. A colour photograph. A dimpled dumpling infant captured in a moment of pure, unambiguous singleton delight: enthroned in my high chair, I have a gamine chop of hair that looks as if it was done with kitchen scissors but almost certainly wasn’t and am hogging a bowl of cherries. My ears are festooned with stems of plump glossy fruit. One dark cherry sits on my tongue like a giant bead, about to be swallowed. I am looking at the camera, or rather, at my mother behind it, clapping my hands in glee, more cherries within easy reach. The expression on my chubby cheeky face screams, ‘All these are for me!’ Sharing is as unknown to me as algebra.
Cherries have been uplifting ever since. Their appearance sudden, their season short, a fleeting treat to be seized at any opportunity, their rarity enhancing their appeal.
Twenty years after that photograph, I was lucky enough to be in the south of France with a friend, picking cherries from heavily laden boughs in a vast orchard. Despite the wicker basket on my arm, I mashed most of them straight into my mouth, drunk on their bloody juice and meaty flesh. Spheres of flavour both tart and sweet—impossible to tell which from their shiny eat-me exterior. There may be more messy sensuality to a ripe mango or the sun-warmed velvet of a peach, but cherries remain my favourites, perhaps because of their miniature size, which makes them as covetable as gems.
I keep that cherry snap of myself within my eye line at my desk, a frozen frame of what uncomplicated, unadulterated joy looks like. It’s a good reminder that sometimes, all it takes is fresh fruit.
The photograph was taken in the flat in St John’s Wood where my parents lived when I was born. Five years later we moved south of the Thames to Wimbledon—a deliberate ploy of my mother’s. She was keen to put some distance between herself and my father’s business partner’s family, whom she considered nosy and intervening. Determined to carve out a life of her own, she chose exile to a part of town where she knew no one but could suit herself. With my father’s business established and doing well, my parents bought a large two-storey brick home with a big garden and renovated extensively. Though I never liked the house, which had a gloomy atmosphere intensified by wood-panelled hallways and pelmetted curtains, it was undeniably comfortable and extravagantly spacious. A lot of shouting between floors went on to locate one another. My mother banged on the central heating radiators to summon us to dinner. It was only when I visited friends that I realised having two rooms plus their own bathroom was not usual for most children.
One of the best things about our street was its proximity to Wimbledon Common and all its wildlife. In summer my mother and I walked there to pick abundant blackberries. Woodpeckers, jays, robins and nuthatches visited our garden regularly, especially when my mother put up a bird feeder, as did hedgehogs, for which she left out saucers of milk. On snowy mornings, there was nothing lovelier than to see a fox slink across our lawn to scavenge in our bins, its russet brush tail like a flame against the frozen whiteness.
At Christmas, which was an entirely secular occasion celebrated only for my benefit, my parents exchanged gifts with the formality of court emissaries swapping ceremonial offerings—Hermès for him, Gucci for her, hardbacks for each. All the rest were for me. As soon as I woke up I would lean over the bannisters to survey the landing below piled high with parcels of all shapes and sizes. Sliding backwards down the carpeted stairs on my tummy, enjoying the friction of every tread, I landed in a sea of boxes and sat tearing away wrapping paper, surrounded by booty while my parents looked on with the satisfaction of benefactors. Everything I wished for materialised: large tins of Caran d’Ache colouring pencils, dolls in national costume to add to my extensive collection, new outfits for Cindy (I was never a Barbie fan), a subscription to my favourite nature magazine, snow-white ice skates, a tennis racquet, an orange space hopper, a pogo stick my father almost bent out of shape with the sheer force of his bouncing, and those ugly little Moomin trolls whose hair I liked to comb out.
There was no ambiguity as to the origins of this haul. I never put out a stocking for Father Christmas because my own father was more than able to satisfy my every desire, and keen for me to know that he and no one else was the provider of all bounty.
Birthdays were even more extravagant occasions of conspicuous consumption. Like a small buddha, I was adorned with jewellery before I could even walk. As I teethed, I sucked on gold medallions and charms for comfort. I have some of these still—a snowflake, a heart-shaped locket—indented with the marks of my milk teeth.
Each year was marked with fine gold pieces in small powder-blue boxes—the name TIFFANY printed on their lids meaningless to me until decades later. I remember a finely hinged bangle I accidentally bent out of shape and a stylised wishbone brooch (I loved pulling the real thing from my mother’s roast chicken dinners) that I eventually downgraded, to her displeasure, using it as a safety pin.
Because my father had business connections with the top hotels in London, my parents hosted my early birthday parties at the best establishments in Mayfair. Magicians entertained me and my friends from kindergarten and then primary school. Films of Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy were screened in between boisterous rounds of pass the parcel and musical chairs. Best of all was the jewel-like fruit jelly served for tea, which shivered and shimmered in paper bowls with pleated edges and which I much preferred to the creamed gateau centrepiece that held the candles I blew out. It never occurred to me as odd that these celebrations were not held at home, any more than I thought it peculiar that annual prize-giving at my school was held at the Royal Albert Hall, where the 3000-strong student body filled the stalls, while the proud parents occupied the red velvet boxes. You just take it for granted as a kid that the world you live in is normal. My normal just happened to be privileged.
Although I had a large collection of dolls, they were mostly neglected. Instead of playing with them, I turned my own high-sided baby cot into a crib, preferring to tuck them in, sometimes side by side, sometimes more carelessly heaping them on top of one another, a mêlée of piglet-pink plastic articulated limbs sticking out at odd angles.
Some were almost as big as me, usually blonde with eyes that blinked thick black lashes over bright blue irises. My favourite was Chatty Cathy. She had a string in her back that I pulled to make her talk. In her high-pitched American accent she invited me to brush her hair, give her a bath and change her dress. Once her high-maintenance repertoire was exhausted, she’d say ‘I’m tired’ in a slightly whining tone and get put to bed with the others.
But none of these creatures held my attention or affection. What need did I have of dolls when somewhere, deep inside, I knew that I was the doll? My dresses were nicer than any of theirs, my wardrobe more extensive. I was loved, admired, cuddled, hugged, squeezed, kissed and groomed with far more care. To punish the dolls for the temerity of their pretensions, I twisted their heads back to front and arranged their arms and legs the wrong way round, distorting their perfect prettiness into freakish deformity. There was only room for one princess in our household, and I knew who she was.
Not all gifts were received with equal enthusiasm. The night before my seventh birthday I was in bed when I heard bumping along the hallway outside my bedroom. Something large was being manoeuvred into the playroom. As soon as the coast was clear, I got up, unable to wait until morning for the intended surprise. There was a hulk against the wall, covered in a chenille bedspread. Lifting a corner, I was dismayed to discover an upright piano. It was loathing at first sight.
The next morning, I was vocally ungrateful, protesting tearfully that I had never played a note, never expressed any musical aptitude or interest. But my father was adamant: it was a skill that well-brought-up young ladies, of which I was to be one, whether I liked it or not, simply had to possess. His old-fashioned Viennese notions of gentility and discipline were not to be argued with. I was lucky he did not summon a dancing master to teach me the waltz.
That wretched instrument became the bane of my life. I had no desire to learn and no enthusiasm when it came to practice, but an hour a day, under my mother’s half-hearted supervision, was insisted upon. When no one was looking, I tormented the piano in every way I could: stuffing chewing gum into its innards and encouraging our dog Sasha to jump up and run along the keys. We never achieved any semblance of harmony, the piano and I. Ten years later, when I finally persuaded my parents to get rid of it, I could not resist giving it a spiteful little shove as it was manoeuvred down the stairs.
That was the first act of real defiance and self-assertion I can remember, the first time I refused to conform to an ideal and standard set by my father. Until the piano revolt, I was docile and compliant. My rebellion coincided with my going out more into the world and noticing that a piano was not a standard fixture in every home. Equally, that other children did not enjoy such palatial amounts of space to themselves, more commonly sharing a bedroom and all their toys. That they helped wash up after dinner or had a weekend job like cleaning the car or a paper round. That some mothers worked and did not have au pairs. I was formulating my own theory of relativity, beginning a lifelong habit of comparison, endlessly weighing up the pros and cons of every situation and circumstance, fuelled by my father’s competitive insistence that everything we were and owned must be the best.
Convention dictates that only children are spoiled. What does that even mean? Spoiled like milk that has soured naturally past its use-by date? No. More like an overindulged brat, who as a result of too much attention, becomes selfish? Yes, that’s it. This tired nostrum has gone unchallenged for centuries, recently boosted by stories of how China’s generation of so-called Little Emperors has turned out: pampered, demanding, unfit for marriage. The world over, we are labelled as being socially maladjusted, needy, attention-seeking and incapable of forming meaningful relationships. Common wisdom says we lack generosity and basic interpersonal skills. We have a terrible reputation, an image problem that needs a serious makeover.
I had always understood that my mother, herself a singleton, could not have more children for medical reasons; only recently she told me otherwise: she made a deliberate decision not to have more in order to devote herself exclusively to her only child. In the purely material sense, it’s true that I was indulged in all the ways the cliché suggests. At the epicentre of my parents’ universe, I had few chores or duties for pocket money and was raised in an atmosphere of comfort, exclusivity, praise and reward. But I was also captive.
When I was an infant, it was common for toddlers to learn to walk wearing harnesses like small ponies. There was nothing sinister about it, the leather straps just kept them safe and within reach in case they stumbled. My mother disapproved of these reins. The invisible restraints came not from her but from my father, when I was steady on my feet: a raised voice at the least sign of insubordination or a look of disappointment when I failed to score top marks. I loved the element of performance that went with being admired in my newest smocked dresses with stiff petticoats and my straw boater. Despite a self-conscious shyness, I was enough of a show-off to strike a pose for my mother’s camera. But there was an expectation that I should perform in the sense of always doing my best away from the camera too. The role I was expected to play began to seem constricting, as if that pretty dress had shrunk in the wash.
From infancy to puberty I was self-contained and entertained myself with solitary pursuits. Swaying on my painted dappled grey rocking horse, wearing a cowboy outfit complete with gun holster and red felt stetson purchased by my father on his annual business trip to the US. I had a slightly macabre fascination with dead insects for a while, collecting the corpses of bees from windowsills and saving them under my pillow. In season, I gathered up conkers as they fell from our vast horse-chestnut tree, fascinated by the natural gloss that made them look polished. Like cherries, their shiny quality fascinated me. I wanted some of that varnish for myself, perhaps guessing it was a protective coating that might shield me from knocks to come. But kept in my coat pocket, they wrinkled, dried and lost their sheen.
Although I could amuse myself well enough, I was lonely a lot of the time. Hours spread out endlessly before me like an edgeless glassy pool, especially during holidays. I spent a lot of time looking out of the window of my playroom on to the street below, sometimes waving at strangers if they happened to look up, or listening out for the rag-and-bone man who came past on his horsedrawn cart shouting ‘Any old iron’, or the Breton with the weatherbeaten face who sold ropes of garlic from the pannier on his bicycle, having come across on the Channel ferry. It became a habit to curl up next to the radiator in my room and listen to the water running through the pipes, pretending that its warm-blooded gurglings were the sounds of a friend talking to me. But the radiant heat was no substitute for human playmates.
Until I went to school I don’t think it occurred to me that most other children had siblings. If they did, I had failed to notice them. But suddenly they were impossible to ignore; there were brothers and sisters everywhere. In most books I read growing up, same thing. Siblings to look up to, copy, play with and annoy. To teach you about teasing and sharing and all those other life skills you take for granted when you are one of many. Fitting in, group dynamics, tag teams, relay-style cooperation. Singularity suggested a handicap to be overcome.
When a Belgian aristocratic brood moved in next door with five children, the message was clear: a real family was bigger, louder, messier. They were pale and plain, big-boned and heavy. When they came over to play, it was like an invasion from a cloned Teutonic platoon. You could see their DNA replicated in each family member: the prominent nose, frowning brow and straight thick hair, the ungainly gait and thick ankles. Slightly diluted in each iteration but unmistakable nonetheless. Their consistent guttural accents were abrasive and ugly, as if they were permanently choking. The volume of their exchanges bewildered me: they seemed always to be shouting at each other. Their tribal tone was one of aggression. Two of them had spectacular tantrums, turning puce, as if they had been boiled, while they wailed at some perceived injustice. I was fascinated by their hair-pulling rough and tumble, but often could not wait for them to go home.
They only had to look at each other to know who they were. As a child, I could not identify with anyone or recognise myself anywhere—my own features too wobbly like unset custard to draw any obvious comparisons. Once the flesh had settled on my bones in my teens, friends and acquaintances commented on my resemblance to my mother—her olive skin, deep-set eyes, long neck and high brow. It took me much longer to see that I had also inherited my father’s crooked smile along with invisible, less appealing traits.
I found the whole concept of games and play baffling or tedious. With no regular experience of catching a ball, I was splay-fingered, clumsy and uncoordinated. Board games were unfamiliar, meaning I usually lost, lacking the competitive edge of my rivals. I even threw the dice badly and found shuffling cards embarrassingly awkward: others knew how to keep the deck tightly held, while in my inexpert hands, the cards slipped and spilled. Marbles, which enjoyed huge popularity in the playground of my French school, seemed just an excuse to collect pretty shiny spheres. My mother encouraged me, prompted by her own nostalgia. I swapped the glassy beads for more precious agates, but had no interest in the rules of the game.
Shaky when it came to balance, I was slow to learn to ride a bicycle, preferring instead to wheel sedately along the leafy streets to Wimbledon Common on my tricycle. Long after other children had graduated to two wheels, I chose stability over speed. I was careful with myself, sensing the burden of being what the French call un enfant unique.
When I visited friends at home, I generally preferred to talk to their parents, developing a precocious appreciation for conversation.
Up close, the personal habits of other families were often shocking. They shared things I had never shared. At about the age of eleven I was finally allowed to go for a sleepover at my best friend Antonia’s house. After dinner, she and her sister popped into the same bath and invited me to join them. I am not sure I had seen anyone naked before. Alarmed and disgusted at the murky soapy water, I politely asked if I could use the telephone. Unaware of social niceties, my message was crisp and to the point: ‘Please come and get me, they’re dirty.’
When I repeated the sleepover experiment in other homes, I was not used to sharing a bed and found the kicks and snufflings intolerable. My parents were so fastidious about bodily functions that I only learned what a fart was when we got a dog.
Since games, whether physical or mental, required partners, reading and crafts were the alternatives, and I grasped at them enthusiastically. I pressed leaves, cut out figures from felt, lost myself in the hypnotic symmetry of Spirograph drawing and the sensual feel of Play Doh and clay. The pleasing click of a Lego window fitting into the bricks I was assembling to build a house was sometimes the only sound in my playroom.
But I was agonisingly lacking in social confidence, so hesitant about inviting friends to play that I wrote out a script with a list of all the possible responses I might get to be prepared for all eventualities. If they said no, I quickly scanned my follow-up options (What about tomorrow? Or can I come to you?). I was totally unused to rejection.
Aware that I needed to keep myself active and amused, my parents installed an impressively professional gymnastic set of rings, trapeze, rope ladder and swing on a large steel frame in the garden. Professionally assembled and concreted into the lawn, it looked forbiddingly like the equipment at a penitential bootcamp rather than a place to play. After attending that year’s Royal Tournament at Earl’s Court, I was very taken with the military obstacle course and tried to recreate it single-handedly with my version of commando rolls. But the effect was not the same. A general needs troops.
One summer, when I was about six or seven, without warning or explanation, a French boy came to stay. Bruno was the son of my mother’s friends. Five years older than me, he was of a somewhat sullen disposition and no doubt furious at having been sent away from copains (mates) his own age to a quiet English suburb. Totally unprepared for the presence of this instant brother, instead of welcoming his company, I saw him as a threat. It was the first time anyone had attempted to annexe my territory. I refused to share my toys. When Bruno helped himself, I retaliated with wild scenes until my exasperated mother had to separate us like warring nations with a quickly drawn-up frontier: me in the front garden, Bruno in the back. Grudgingly, we shared an inflatable pool. Surprisingly, in water, we were able to submerge our hostilities and our splashings were relatively cordial. Eventually, poor Bruno was introduced to the brainy boy next door, who took him off my hands. The experiment in sharing had been a dismal failure.
A few years later my father bought a ping-pong table. Little did I know that he had been something of a champion player at university. It was a natural outlet for his aggression and lightning reflexes. When we played, I spent most of my time dodging the ball as if it were an oncoming bullet, such was the velocity of his strokes.
The same was true when we had snowball fights. My father packed his projectiles so hard they were like cannon balls, knocking me backwards. Also keen at fencing as a student, he loved to lunge, parry and thrust with sabre-like icicles picked from the gutters of chalets when we holidayed in the Alps. Fortunately, the point of his frozen rapiers would snap on impact, preventing serious injury. But if my ski jacket had not been padded, I would have had bruises from his jabs and stabs. He was always dangerous, forgetting his own strength and unable to rein in his natural competitive aggression.
My chief pleasures were watching television and ice skating. In the afternoons after school I watched my favourite children’s shows (Animal Magic with Johnny Morris, Crackerjack and Blue Peter), but on Sunday evenings I graduated to more adult fare. We lined up our armchairs like the three bears: Papa Bear in the large velour recliner where he would work his way through a box of chocolates without sharing them and smoke himself into a cloud of cigarettes until he was barely visible; Mama Bear in the wing chair with footrest, knitting elaborate Aran and Fair Isle patterns without any visible signs of counting stitches, never dropping one, her eyes on the screen; and Baby Bear in the small bucket seat, positioned halfway between them. Together we watched Upstairs Downstairs, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In (one of the few things that injected unanimous mirth into our otherwise serious household) and the BBC’s latest literary adaptation—in my pre-teen years it was The Forsyte Saga, which fascinated me with its formal dialogue and heaving bosoms. To keep track of the plot twists, I wrote a synopsis of each episode in my diary:
January 5: Soames finds out about Elderson, Victorine sits for Greer in the nude.
January 12: Fleur (my favourite character, played by Susan Hampshire) has a baby boy.
January 19: Irene and John come back. Soames resigns.
On our weekly sports days I went to the Richmond ice rink. The journey on a specially hired coach was a treat because it was my only experience of travelling with friends. To my endless frustration and despite weekly pleading, I was not allowed to use public transport to get to school until my mid-teens, and even then, an au pair had to wait with me on the platform and see me safely on. At the rink I enjoyed the ritual of tightening up the laces on my boots and slipping into my blue skating dress with its flared skirt and matching knickers. A pair of white gloves completed the outfit.
The rink offered a magical opportunity to slide with balletic grace, however fleetingly. I learned basic moves and spins from a patient ex-Olympian, Mr Nixie, duly noting weekly progress in my diary:
February 19: another twizzle
February 25: skating backwards and crossovers
Graduating to the rudiments of ice dancing, beginning with the foxtrot, meant whirling round the rink at speed facing forwards, holding hands with a friend, feeling the wind in my hair. This exhilaration culminated in the interval, during which we adjourned to the cafeteria to buy egg mayonnaise sandwiches, possibly the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. No one anywhere has ever got the proportion of egg to mayonnaise as right as the caterer at the Richmond ice rink.
But mostly, I played in my head. I imagined myself as a spy or a secret agent, and kept my parents under close observation. I listened behind doors or stealthily picked up the phone in another room while they were talking. I riffled through the papers on my mother’s spindly-legged bureau and my father’s more solid home-office desk.
Or else I devised new ways to torment our good-humoured, gap-toothed Cockney housekeeper, Mrs Barns. My favourite tricks were to switch off the power point for the vacuum cleaner or floor polisher while she was rooms away or to creep up behind her and tie her apron strings to the door while she was ironing. Nothing rattled her: she chuckled at this mischief, though I was a proper pest.
Mrs Barns was far more than a housekeeper in our lives. She didn’t just clean: she kept my mother company. Every weekday at eleven, they shared a coffee break (Nescafé was considered sophisticated in those days, especially when it switched from powder to granules), during which they dissected the day’s headlines and any local gossip that Mrs Barns felt it necessary to impart. Her husband, Bob, who was considerably smaller than his hefty spouse, worked ‘on the buses’ so there was also much talk of public transport and its many vexations. Delays on the route to her favourite shopping destination in Clapham were a frequent topic: ‘I could only take the 74 up the junction but then I had to wait for the 93 and it never come, Mrs Bawm, it never come,’ her mournful repetition turning her account into an almost poetic lamentation of disappointment.
She also had the habit of repeating the last syllable of every single word my mother said, as if to demonstrate her attention, creating an echo chamber that could become so hypnotic my mother never spoke to her for too long, fearing the effect would put her in a trance.
Mrs Barns was also a champion malapropist, with my mother trying to keep a straight face before rushing off to a notebook hidden in the pocket of her corduroy gardening jacket to jot down her latest turns of phrase. The only one I can remember is when describing the process of getting a perm she said her head had been covered in swastikas. This sounded alarming until we worked out she meant Schwarzkopf hair products.
At Christmas she gave us hideous gifts we were obliged to display: multicoloured crocheted skirts attached to luridly pink naked plastic doll torsos, meant to hide loo rolls. Every summer she took a coach holiday with her family to the British seaside, from which she sent us a postcard of crowded beaches covered in large uncomfortable-looking stones and where the weather was almost unfailingly foul. My mother commented wistfully that the Barnses seemed to enjoy each other’s company no matter where they were or how much it rained. Mrs Barns always returned with a stick of Brighton Rock for me. After she retired, my mother made several efforts to stay in touch, all of which were met with silence. It was puzzling and hurtful. Her big-hearted loyalty was missed and mourned.
Thinking that a pet might teach me responsibility and to care for something other than myself, my parents bought me a puppy, a pedigreed West Highland terrier that made up for his short-legged stature with a defiantly outsize personality. He had the hunting instinct of his genes and would regularly return from garden skirmishes involving hedgehogs with his handsome muzzle as stuck with spines as a pincushion. Sasha became immediately devoted to my mother, who was the only one to take regular care of him. He followed at her heels from room to room, sitting on her feet while she watched television, emitting a low rumbling growl if anyone came too close.
I was ambivalent about him: I loved grooming his long silky coat with a steel comb, but had no interest in the daily chores of walking or feeding him. Though undoubtedly a companion, he also stole some of my limelight with his antics: he chewed a neat fringe in every coat in the cloakroom, from my father’s cashmere to my mother’s camelhair, to indicate his displeasure at being left on his own.
My solution was to see him as a surrogate brother to tease and torment. (As with a brother, his was the first penis I ever saw. Unlike a brother’s, I found the way it would pop out and retract like a glossy pink lipstick when he humped a visitor’s leg fascinating.) I occupied his bed so he was forced to lie elsewhere and even ate his Good Boy choc drops when there was no other chocolate in the house. Best of all was his Pavlovian reaction to the word shampoo: to say it was to trigger an inexplicable but cartoonish, lunatic run through the house, with him bumping into furniture, knocking obstacles in his path flying, like a frenzied greyhound at the track. Poor creature: he hated water as much as a cat. We took him to the beach once, encouraging him to follow us into the sea. No sooner had he done so than we discovered he was the only canine that did not know how to dog paddle, as he promptly started to sink.
Not surprisingly, he viewed me with distrust. But if we were alone in the house for too long he would often seek me out. I was always touched when he pushed my door open, even if I was a companion of last resort.
Sasha lived for fifteen years. The day he died was the one time I ever saw my parents in the same bed together, sitting up like the effigies of couples on Etruscan coffins, his tartan collar between them on the covers. They had slept in separate rooms since I could remember, supposedly because of my father’s snoring. I don’t know what was more shocking: to realise I would never see Sasha again or to see them in this unprecedented intimacy.