An Education (2 page)

Childhood

I know memoirs are supposed to begin with ancestors but alas, I don't have any, because I come from the lower, unremembered, orders on both sides. There is no Barber ancestral seat, nor even, so far as I know, any Barber ancestral village. The only remotely distinguished ancestor I ever heard of was a great-great-uncle on my mother's side who was stationmaster at Swaffham in Norfolk. Of course being a stationmaster was quite a big deal in Victorian times, and I remember once seeing a sepia photo of him in his stationmaster's uniform which was indeed very grand, but I don't think I need tax you (or myself) with any Swaffham stationmaster research.

The other day, driving down the M3, I saw a turn-off to Bagshot and thought, ‘My birthplace! Maybe I should go and see it?’ But by the time I'd debated the pros and cons, I was miles past the turn-off so Bagshot, like the stationmaster, remains unknown. I was only born there because my mother was staying with her parents in Sunningdale, Berkshire, and Bagshot was the nearest maternity home. No doubt it is a charming and salubrious place but all I know about it is that I was born there, on 22 May 1944, and survived.

My mother was staying with her parents because my father was still away ‘fighting the war’ or actually mending tank wirelesses in Catterick. He had such bad eyesight he was never sent on active service, but spent an uneventful war in England. He met my mother when they were both stationed in Birmingham, she driving ambulances, he guarding a mental hospital. He tells me she was the most glamorous woman he'd ever seen in his life – and that was
before
her teeth fell out. All through her girlhood and twenties, she had terrible goofy sticking-out teeth. But then – as apparently often happened because of calcium deficiency during the war – all her teeth fell out. It was the best thing that could have happened. With her smart new set of non-goofy National Health gnashers, she emerged as a real beauty, often compared to the film star Rosalind Russell. She had thick black wavy hair, hazel eyes, peachy skin, a huge bust and long legs. People must have wondered why such a stunner should marry a bespectacled geek like my father, but the explanation lay in her premarital teeth.

My memories begin after the war when we were living in a rented flat over a shopping parade in Ashford, Middlesex. I can remember seeing a caterpillar on the curtains, and a rat nosing round the dustbins in the yard. But the main thing I remember is that until I was about three there was a big pram in the corner of the sitting room and then one day it wasn't there. I asked my mother where it had gone and she said she'd given it away, but there was an awkwardness in the way she said it that made it memorable. I suppose it was the first intimation that I was to be an only child.

Being an only child is clearly the defining feature of my character. It meant that I was very lonely for much of my childhood, and relied entirely on books and my imaginary friend Kay for companionship. I didn't have any friends till I was ten or eleven, which was tolerable in term time but painful in the holidays. Worst of all was the annual seaside holiday – a week at a guest house in Lowestoft with my parents – when I would sit on the beach with my nose in a book, envying the other children who played around me. Envying them but also despising them. How could they be so
childish
? I sniffed. Why were they laughing just because they were chasing a ball? But apparently this was what was meant by having fun. I longed for it, but also recognised that I was not cut out for it. Even if the children on the beach had asked me to play (they never did) I wouldn't have known what to do.

I was not only an only child but also, I think, an exceptionally isolated one, because my parents didn't seem to have any friends. My father had his bridge club (he was a county champion), my mother her amateur dramatic society, but if they had friends there, they never brought them home. Nor did we have any relatives in London. My mother was an only child so her only family was her parents. My father did have siblings, two of whom had children, but we rarely saw them because they lived in Lancashire. I longed to be part of a big extended family, a ‘tribe’, with lots of cousins – I thought cousins would be ideal, much better than brothers or sisters who might encroach on my power. Most of all, I yearned to know, not just other children, but other
families
, to see how they interacted. But I never did, in fact not until I was an adult.

My parents were effectively first-generation immigrants to the middle class, having arrived by way of grammar school. My father's family was grindingly poor – his father, a millhand, died of ‘inanition’ when Dad was four and his mother raised four children on a tiny widow's pension. They lived in Bolton, Lancashire, in the shadow of the textile mills, and Dad remembers the great family treat was going round to his uncle's on Sunday afternoons to eat bowls of mashed potato with gravy left over from the Sunday lunch. Occasionally there was even a bit of meat. He remembers winning a prize at school and going on stage to accept it wearing new boots his mother had managed to obtain for the occasion – but they were bright orange and everybody laughed.

My father won a place at Manchester university to read maths but couldn't afford to take it up – instead he joined the civil service and did a law degree at night school when he came back from the war. I remember when I was very young, Mum saying, ‘Shush, Dad's doing his Torts.’ I never knew what they were but I knew they were frightening – as finals approached, the back of his neck was covered with flaming boils. He got his law degree and gradually rose through the ranks of the Estate Duty office but, although he had a middle-class salary, he somehow remained working class. He was formidably intelligent but socially untamed. He still said ‘Side the pots’ in his broad Lancashire accent, whereupon I would say to Mum ‘Shall I clear the table?’ and she would sigh and say ‘You know your father told you to.’ We also sighed over his habit of leaving the house with bits of paper stuck to his face when he cut himself shaving. My mother was far more civilised but, as I told my father, she had only a beta or maybe even beta-minus brain.

My mother came from slightly more genteel stock than my father – rural rather than urban, in service rather than in manufacturing, and with the towering figure of the Swaffham stationmaster in the background. Her father (an extremely handsome man) had an invalid pension from being gassed in the First World War, and took occasional jobs as a postman and gardener; her mother was a qualified swimming instructor. They lived in a two-up, two-down cottage in Sunningdale, which was then a country village, and went to Wentworth golf club at weekends to make a few pennies finding lost golf balls. My mother, despite her beta brain, won a scholarship to grammar school and then to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She hoped to become an actress but settled for a diploma that qualified her to teach elocution, of which more later.

My parents had been raised as Methodists but by the time they had me their religion was education, education, education. I was reared from the cradle to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship, and go to university – Cambridge if I was mathematically inclined like my father, or Oxford if I proved to be ‘artistic’ like my mother. My father often quoted Charles Kingsley's line ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever’ but he said it sarcastically – he wanted me to be clever, and let who can be good.

My mother taught me to read long before I started school so I was amazed on my first day at Ashford Congregationalist Primary to find myself stuck in a class with ninnies who didn't even know the alphabet. Naturally this attitude made me unpopular with my classmates and I was soon unpopular with the teachers as well because I refused to eat the school food. The school had a rule – as did most schools in those days – that you could not leave the table till you had eaten all your lunch, so some poor teacher would have to waste her break sitting with me, telling me to eat up. I never would. In the end my mother went to see the headmistress and arrived at a satisfactory compromise: I could leave most of my lunch provided I ate
something
and most days I could. But there was one day a week when we had gristle stew which I couldn't eat at all. So on that day I went down the road to the cinema where, in the hushed grandeur of the Odeon restaurant, I ordered soup with roast potatoes and was fussed over by the waitresses. It was my first valuable lesson in the rewards of intransigence.

That is about all I remember from Ashford; my real memories begin when we moved to Twickenham when I was eight. My parents kept saying they had bought this big old house – they were so excited they talked about it endlessly. My idea of big old houses was entirely derived from books like
The Secret Garden
so I pictured a rambling pile with attics and battlements and secret staircases. I worried that I might get lost in the cellars, or that my room in the west wing would be haunted by a headless nun. When I finally saw 52 Clifden Road, Twickenham, I laughed incredulously, ‘You said it was
big
!’ I can now understand that it
was
big by my parents' standards, a solid Edwardian three-up, three-down terraced house with a porch and a conservatory and longish garden at the back. (Apparently houses in Clifden Road go for almost a million now.) But I persisted in believing my parents had lied to me, and grumbled for years, ‘You said it was
big
!’

The house was opposite a girls' school, Twickenham County Grammar, but it only took girls from age eleven, so I had to go to junior school on the other side of town. It was a mixed school, full of rough boys who lurked round the playground lavatories, and jumped up and looked over the door if you went in. Consequently I was terrified of ever going to the loo and developed complicated regimes of what I could eat at what times. For a year –
pace
Aunt Ruth – I ate almost nothing but scrambled eggs on toast. Another year it was Marmite soldiers. Luckily the term ‘eating disorders’ was unknown then, or my parents might have worried about me – though on second thoughts, they wouldn't have worried about me as long as my school marks were OK, which of course they were. I was paired with the one other bright girl, Margaret M, and we took it in turns to win the class gold star every week – nobody else ever got a look-in. Consequently all the other pupils hated us, and we hated them, but we hated each other more.

The only good thing I remember from those early Twickenham years was the night sweet rationing ended. My parents had taken me to the cinema – we went at least once, often twice, a week and I saw some wonderfully ‘unsuitable’ films such as
The Barefoot Contessa
(‘What does it mean he was wounded in the war, Mum? What sort of wound? Why does it mean he can't marry her?’) – but this night I think was a boring one until the lights went up and the manager came onstage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have heard on the wireless that sweet rationing has ended. We have a full selection of sweets and chocolates in the lobby.’ Everyone stampeded for the doors. My father of course didn't. He ‘didn't see the point’ of sweets, but my mother did and we went and bought packets of toffee and chocolate raisins and ate them till I was sick. Since then, I've never cared much for sweets, but it was an historic occasion.

When I was ten, my parents took the huge financial gamble of sending me to the junior school of Lady Eleanor Holles, an independent fee-paying school some miles away in Hampton. The idea was that if they paid for me to go to the junior school for a year, I would then win a scholarship to the main school – which is what indeed happened. At Lady Eleanor Holles, for the first time, I was mixing with girls from quite wealthy backgrounds – some of them even had their own ponies. I would listen, ears flapping, to their boastful conversations about Daddy's new Jaguar or Mummy's new refrigerator. The snobbery at LEH was all the more fierce because it was conducted within such a tiny social range: the Oxshott girls despised the Ewell girls who despised the Kingston girls; the Jaguar owners despised the Wolseley owners and we all duly gasped when the parents of a rather quiet girl who nobody took any notice of turned up for prize-giving in a Rolls Royce.

I could see that there was no way I could win in the snobbery stakes – we didn't have a car, let alone a paddock – so I didn't bother lying but just told everyone I was a pauper and the cleverest girl in the school, which I probably was. (Apparently Lady Eleanor Holles is a highly academic school nowadays but it certainly wasn't then.) And actually it paid off. The pony-owners found it quite amusing to know me – I was a novelty in their world. And they were very generous: they would always lend me clothes for parties and hand over any book tokens they were given for Christmas on the grounds that they had no conceivable use for them and I did. Consequently I have always found it difficult to hate the rich, as good leftie journalists are meant to do, because they've always been so nice to me. The LEH girls liked having a pauper in their midst, and I liked having friends for the first time in my life. It was a great day for me when we moved up to the main school and
three
girls competed to sit next to me in class. Probably they just hoped to crib my schoolwork, but I basked in my first taste of popularity.

The only thing wrong with LEH from my point of view was that it was surrounded by miles of playing fields and you had to play games. Worst of all you had to play lax – lacrosse – which relied on the daft notion that it was possible to run while holding a ball in a sort of primitive snowshoe above your head while other girls hit you with their snowshoes and tried to trip you up. Obviously it was dangerous folly even to attempt it. And then we had to take communal showers where the dykey games mistress stared longingly at our nascent boobs and bushes. Eventually I got my parents to write a note saying I had weak ankles and should not play games – which would have been fine except that I then had to go to remedial podiatry sessions and learn to pick up pencils with my toes. Then the podiatrist said I should take up ice skating to strengthen my weak ankles and actually got me a free pass to Saturday sessions at Richmond Ice Rink. God – I'd thought lacrosse was scary, ice skating was
terrifying
. In theory there was a quiet place in the middle of the rink where you could practise your figures but you had to get to it through this stampeding pack of speed skaters. I once saw someone's finger sliced off when he fell over in the pack and a ring of blood went right round the rink before the stewards could get the speed skaters to stop.