My Mother My Mirror Read online

  The other beach, reached by a path over the cliff or from the rocky beach if the tide was out, was covered in sand. Here we would body surf with wooden boards, and make sand cars and sand boats and sit in them and pretend to be on the move. The other children were a bit younger than me and mainly boys, but I played with them a fair amount. The mothers would make generous picnics, all the more welcome because of that huge appetite that results from swimming in a bitingly cold sea; and for Easter Sunday Pip, Tim’s wife, would make a gorgeous orange-and-lemon cake decorated with little eggs and slices of crystallized fruit. This was also the place in which I was introduced to sea spinach. The grown-ups would pick it in bagfuls from the cliff-tops and boil it up for supper. Even though children don’t usually like greens, I could appreciate that this wild, salty flavour was rather special.

  My other favourite activity in Cornwall was climbing. I’ve always loved the challenge of getting to the top of something and seeing a whole new world open up in front of me. One cliff that I climbed, farther along the rocky beach, was particularly scary. I was all on my own, and it was a tricky one, but I was confident that once I reached the top I would find the cliff path and be able to crawl to safety. However, I had miscalculated the angle of the cliff to the beach, and when I reached the top it was barely six inches wide, then there was a sheer drop down the other side! As you may know, getting down is often not as easy as climbing up, but I now had no choice but to gingerly back downwards all the way to where I had come from. At times like this I was aware that I was risking my life... but then a bit of a risk was what made it exciting. Later on this same mentality was to lead me to inner adventures in which I was often faced with an emotional cliff that took all of my courage to climb or even to leap from, trusting against all odds that there would be a pair of inner arms there to catch me.

  One of the most exciting climbs in that area was down into the ‘blow hole’ in the field above the sandy beach. Waves had beaten their way through a cave on the other side of the hill until the ground in the middle of the field gave way, creating a huge crater that you could clamber down at low tide and climb through onto the otherwise-inaccessible beach. At high tide the sea filled the hole so that it surged and spat like a witch’s cauldron, and when it was really rough the spume would come shooting out of the top like sparks from the mouth of a volcano.

  Towards the end of our Cornish holidays, when I was seven or eight, I fell in love with the boy next door, where another family were renting the house for their holidays. He had big brown eyes, floppy brown hair and freckles and his name was Andrew. I kind-of made friends with his sister; I even went to visit her once in Wiltshire in the hope of seeing him again. But mostly I just gazed at him from an upstairs window as he kicked a ball energetically around on the grass with the other children. He seemed very spirited and sociable and fun, and completely out of reach.

  For summer holidays we went to Frinton-on-Sea, on the east coast. There was a vegetarian bed-and-breakfast there, and the breakfasts were so sumptuous, with so many choices of cereal and fruit, toast and spreads, dried fruit and nuts, that we ate lots and lots and always came home a little fatter. Across the road was an enormous ‘greensward’ stretching for at least half a mile in each direction, with many different paths and steps down to the long sandy beach. On an early holiday I once took the wrong path and panicked, unable to find my mother for a whole three quarters of an hour. On later holidays I was happy to go off on my own, trying to catch one of the poor blind rabbits on early morning walks amongst the bracken and gorse, or wandering out onto the grey mudflats at low tide.

  And one time, when, I was five, we went to Majorca. Carmen and Shelley had friends with a villa over there. Our propeller-driven plane was delayed and we ended up eating egg and chips and ice-cream in the middle of the night close to the airport. This was thrilling enough, never mind the holiday! We were given a hotel room for a few hours, then set off early next morning across the sea.

  Most of my memories of that holiday involve food: the figs that the man next door squidged with his thumbs before laying them out in the sun to dry, Pepsi-Cola from the van outside the gates while the adults were having their siesta, finding sugar lumps wrapped in paper, as well as pesetas, buried in the sand; blocks of vanilla ice-cream in cornets. I also remember lizards, and having to wear a T-shirt and a hat in the sea, and most of all a frightening journey into the hills in which our host nearly drove off a precipice. The road had become so steep that he asked his passengers to get out and walk for a few yards to lighten the load on the engine, then a bit further on he decided to back into a lay-by, maybe to allow us all to get in again, and somehow got the brake and the accelerator muddled up and ended up with the back half of the car teetering over the edge of a cliff. There was much screaming and shouting, and after an hour or so a crane turned up and lifted him back onto the road. The whole occasion was very scary.

  I’m trying to gather all my earliest memories before I move on to ages seven to ten, and the only other thing I can think of at the moment is the fancy-dress parties at the Montessori school. I don’t think I would remember these but for the costumes my mother made me, which were really rather wonderful. The first one, soon after I began there, was a Fairy Princess dress made with dozens of pointed strips of different coloured satin, cut with pinking shears to make a jagged edge. Each strip, as well as the bodice, was covered in tiny sequins. And I had wings and a crown, and a wand wrapped round with silver tinsel with a tinsel star at the top. Such a labour of love!

  The following year I was the ‘Queen of Hearts’ with a golden cardboard crown and pretty white dress covered with shiny red hearts. I must have had a tray of tarts too, but I can’t remember those. Well, perhaps this is a good note on which to conclude my early years. By this time I was well on the way to becoming the Fairy Princess – a light-footed, elusive creature, sweet and appealing but with a habit of disappearing, drifting away into dreams and fantasies or fading away into the background until she barely existed. She is the person I became so I could slip invisibly through life and not be hurt.

  It took me many years, many experiences and much soul-searching before I began to taste the qualities of the Queen of Hearts: confident, purposeful, solid on my feet, wise and compassionate, loving the Earth and all its creatures.

  7

  My best Friend & Two little Sisters

  I loved Alice-in-Wonderland, in fact I often felt that I was Alice-in-Wonderland. I’ve read the book again recently and appreciated as an adult how magical and bizarre it is, but at that time I simply slipped into her world as if it was made for me. And one night I actually saw her. She was sitting beside my bed. I called out to my mother in a voice croaky and stifled from sleep, but as soon as my voice broke into a shout Alice swiftly disappeared into the cupboard on the landing outside my bedroom.

  This happened when I was seven. I didn’t tell anyone for a while, then I confided in my friend Jo who was a bit of a wonder-child like me, and we started a ghost club, whose members were only ever the two of us. She was a boarder at St Christopher’s with a concessionary place due to being ‘maladjusted,’ and I used to go and stay with her at her home in Friern Barnet. Getting to know her family, I think it was them who were maladjusted, or possibly just plain mad. Her mother used to sit in the middle of the road all on her own demonstrating against the bomb. She had wild greying hair scattered with grips, and thick spectacles, and when she wasn’t sitting on the road she would be sitting on her bed in a state of distracted distress with posters and petitions scattered everywhere around her.

  Her father was divorced from her mother but would come home from time to time, creeping around like Inspector Clouseau with his little moustache and mild-mannered suspicions. Her younger brother Giles was relatively normal, but then there’s usually one person in a family who gets away with it.

  While Jo’s granny was still alive there was some order in their house, in fact there was a dramatic contrast between Granny’s
immaculate upstairs flat and the chaos of downstairs. It wasn’t just messy, it was truly impressive. Piles of furniture, books, boxes, food, toys, plants, cushions, ornaments – anything and everything – went way up towards the ceiling, with tunnels running through the junk from one door to another or sometimes to the window. The little kitchen was cold and dirty with an odd assortment of cups, plates, and pans, which we had to wash up if we wanted anything to eat; and the back yard was scruffy too, with a sloping patch of tired grass and an old shed.

  At bedtime we went upstairs to Granny’s flat. Here the carpet was clean and smooth, every surface was polished and each of her many ornaments was regularly dusted. We would kneel and say prayers together, naming each of our relations and friends and asking God to bless them. Sometimes she would give us sponge cake on little plates and cups of lemon squash. Then we would pad back downstairs and go to bed.

  When Granny died, the tide of mess crept upstairs, but it was never quite as bad as down below, and there were still some nice things dotted about. Now we were allowed to sleep in her big old bed, and the mantelpiece opposite the bed was the source of much ghostly speculation. There was a big mirror, a clock and a scratchy portrait of an old man, and one night we definitely saw a face appear in the mirror with a hand beside it; also a human-shaped shadow in the corner of the room. We would talk for hours about ghosts; I suppose it was the next stage in my investigations into the nature of reality, after the earlier world of dreams and fairies. I was fascinated in what lay just beyond our everyday seeing, hearing and feeling, and so was Jo.

  Outside the window was a large plane tree, and while it was still light, and then again in the watery orange of the street-light, we would stare at the leaves and find pictures: a judge, a helicopter, a vampire, a church, a face, a letter E... One person would describe what she had seen and where it was until the other person could see it too.

  Another memorable participant in our night-time fun was Pink Teddy. He belonged to Jo, and the special thing about him was that he had a big pink willy, made out of an uninflated balloon filled with water. I can only imagine what he got up to, but I do know that it made us giggle for hours on end.

  Sometimes we would explore the neighbourhood. Jo had a friendly and intelligent white rat called Sammy who we would take for walks on a lead in the park. One day we found a burnt-out factory where there were still chests of tea and charcoal toothpaste, and another day we went to the local swimming baths. We must have just heard about the possibility of past lives, because I can remember a particularly fat boy jumping in, and me turning to Jo and saying, “I think he must have been a pig in his last life!” and both of us thinking it was hilarious. We also occasionally went to church with Granny.

  We may have got the past life idea from a medium who lived just along the road from Jo. Discovering this lady was a very interesting step forward in our psychic investigations. She would talk to spirits sitting on the end of her bed, and she told us her house had been built on the site of a monastery and that she often saw monks in the back garden. Most impressive of all, she had photographs. What looked like an ordinary garden scene, when examined more closely could be seen to contain the very clear outline and detail of the figure of a monk.

  When I moved schools I slowly lost touch with Jo, and years later someone told me she had died from a drug overdose. Bless her; she was my closest friend as a child.

  When I was seven Carmen’s belly began to swell, and this time the result was two thriving babies. The first I knew about it was on a trip to the doctor when the word ‘pregnant’ was mentioned, apparently thinking I didn’t know what it meant. As soon as I got home I rushed to tell Benjy all about it. He was my large grey rabbit, who spent his days hopping up and down on the grass in a ‘run’ that Shelley had built for him out of bits of wood and chicken-wire.

  A little while later I was told the good news, and that October my mother and I went to stay in an old farmhouse in Buckinghamshire which doubled as a nursing home. The idea was to be somewhere relaxing where other members of the family were allowed to stay. Olive Rogers, who ran the farm, was also a midwife who believed that birth should be as natural as possible.

  It was a great place. I became firm friends with Kit, a young black cat, and we would go everywhere together: climbing the pile of grain in the barn, tunnelling amongst the hay bales above the smelly pigs with their suckling piglets, wandering in the big garden where I could help myself to cox’s orange pippins. Olive made the most gorgeous, frothy juice from these apples, and we were well fed in the big farmhouse kitchen.

  Sometimes Kit and I went further afield, across the meadow and down to the slow-flowing river where astonishingly one day I came across mountains of currants, dates and sultanas on the bank. Carmen said they had probably been dumped because they were poisonous so I never tried any, but it seemed a terrible waste!

  Then one night I was woken only four hours after I had gone to bed, and told that it was happening at last. I was worried about my sleep. Carmen was a chronic insomniac, and every day after lunch for as long as I could remember I had had to creep around very quietly because it was ‘rest time’. If I accidentally made a noise and woke her up she would be distressed and I would feel terribly guilty. Now my night had been interrupted and I was afraid that the unknown dreadful thing may happen: whatever it was that happened when people didn’t get enough sleep.

  However, once I was up and about I forgot about that. I was allowed to go and visit my mother, who was looking pink and distracted. Then Shelley and I went downstairs to the kitchen and he presented me with Crocus, the baby doll who had been waiting for this occasion, and who was of course born on the same night as the twins. Back upstairs, Kharis had already been born, her head looking slightly squarish from being sat on; Lucia followed ten minutes later, with a more egg-shaped head, and soon they were tucked up in their cot, with the smelly placenta lying in a big enamel dish just inside the bathroom door, where I had to pass it every time I went to the loo.

  I was slightly disappointed. For years I had longed for a playmate; instead they were two small and rather irritating babies. I didn’t feel jealous or put out, but I didn’t feel particularly maternal either. When they got a bit bigger and I tried to do things with them they were annoyingly stupid, just because they were that much younger than me. And they were very much each others’ best friends, so once again I was excluded from a close partnership. There were a few highlights, such as getting them to play dentists and pulling one of their teeth out, or lowlights such as when they snuck into my bedroom and systematically smashed my entire collection of birds-eggs, but I didn’t really enjoy their company until I was a teenager.

  Then they would come into the bathroom while I was having a bath and I would regale them with exciting tales of parties and snogs, drunkenness and intrigue. They would be deeply impressed, and I began to feel that I really was somebody after all. There is still a myth from this time that I have large breasts, which I’m sure was only because they were looking from low-down, awestruck eyes... I have never been hugely well-endowed in that area!

  When I was ten years old Hugh, my grandfather, died of cancer of the spine. I didn’t see him for a year or so beforehand. The grown-ups thought it would be upsetting for me because he was so emaciated and in so much pain, but I still wish I had been able to visit him. There seems to be a theme in my life of missing Hugh, that is reflected in the men I have chosen, and has often been fraught with difficulty. I didn’t go to his funeral either, but he left me all the first editions of his books, and £1,000 towards further education, and the beautiful, chunky gold medal for poetry that he won at Cambridge University, which very sadly got stolen, but not until I was in my late teens.

  I remember my tenth year, 1965, as a time when I began to be more objective about life. Before then I was at the mercy of existential doubts and fears; now I made a decision to take a step back and not worry so much. I suppose I was beginning to become my own person. That summer
we borrowed a cottage from some friends of my mother’s on the North Devon coast. Up a track behind the cottage and across one field lay miles of beautiful cliff-tops along which I would stride for hours, singing ‘Jerusalem,’ ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful,’ ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ and ‘Hills of the North Rejoice’ – strident hymns that I had learnt at school – and sometimes my old favourite, ‘My love is there.’ Back indoors, my father impressed me by eating some cheese that was crawling with maggots. Maggots, he told us, were, after all, still protein - and he prided himself in his economy, as did many who had lived through the second world war – in which, by the way, he was a Conscientious Objector, working on a farm then driving an ambulance in Germany.

  By now I was in the junior part of St Christopher’s, and had friends in Letchworth – particularly Sarah, Claire and Bridget - that I played with and sometimes stayed overnight with. We used to go to the ‘Corner Post Office’ close to the school whenever we had the opportunity, and spend our pennies, thrupences and sixpences on a wonderful variety of confectionery. Away from the watchful eyes of my parents I discovered the joys of sherbet dips with their liquorice pipes for sucking up the sherbet and making you cough and sneeze; pear drops, Cadbury’s hazelnut chocolate, walnut whips, pastel-coloured flying saucers made from rice-paper filled with sherbet, fruit-salad chews (four for a penny); black jacks to make your teeth black, rocket lollies to make your tongue green, twopenny lollies made out of sweet synthetic chalk you had to gnaw at, gob-stoppers that broke your teeth if you bit them, penny lollies like red or green glass, great chunky satisfying Mars Bars, Milky Ways, Bountys... An endless variety of tasty pleasures.