Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Read online

  Looking back, however, those traumatic times seem like the romantic scenes from a nineteenth-century novel. The morning meets in front of the old houses around the county, mostly shrouded in mist and drizzle so that all you could see were the reds of the hunting coats, the silhouettes of the horses and the dripping gables of some Elizabethan manor. The hunting horses always beautifully turned out, clattering down driveways, waving their bandaged tails; you could hear them even if you couldn’t see them. Did people shout “Tally-ho”? I don’t remember. I remember the smell. The chatter. The women with their veils, leaning over to tighten their horses’ girths and somehow managing to hold a glass and a conversation at the same time—chatting and flirting with the men who drank from their flasks with their hands on their hips. There were a lot of affairs conducted from the raunchy position of the saddle and a lot of political talk; because this was the era of power cuts and “Bloody Wilson!”

  It could be a dangerous game, the hunt. When you put your kids into it you knew there were certain risks. We were to be tested against the elements. But that was good. It gave one a zest for life and adventure that you cannot get from a Gameboy or a computer in a world where everything comes second to safety. You had to take the bull by the horns and that was what they taught you when you went out hunting and you galloped off out of control. You held your whole life in that moment and if you fell—then that was that. But if you didn’t . . .

  Sometimes if the meet was near by we would hack home in the dusk down country lanes where the only noise would be our horses’ hooves and the odd pheasant crashing through the hedgerows. Lights twinkled out from the cottages by the road and we all thought anxiously about high tea in front of the fire at home. Baked beans and poached eggs; toast and Marmite; whisky for my father as we all helped to pull off his boots before he disappeared to soak in a salt-filled bath.

  CHAPTER 2

  Innocence and Experience

  My life started on the move. Our family, led by my father, was a restless one from the beginning. When I came along he was still a major in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire regiment, and so our first home was one of those weird red-brick army dwellings in a place called Hook in Hampshire. My first real memory is of travel: falling down the polished wooden stairs in our house. The trip seemed to go on for ever, and I must have gone head over heels because I could see the whole world turning upside down and then zooming in as my face crashed against the oak stairs. My parents both claim amnesia about this moment, but I know it happened. I think it did me serious damage. To this day I cannot totally straighten my arms; not to mention my ways.

  My father left the army when I was three and we moved to London where he went to work for the notorious Marquis of Bristol who, in the thirties, had presided over a bunch of upper-class thugs nicknamed the Mayfair Gang. They stole jewellery. Now in 1961 he had moved into the import-export business.

  Our house was in Cheyne Row, in Chelsea, opposite the Catholic church, but we didn’t last long there, mostly because our labrador Susan couldn’t figure out London at all and went into a serious depression. Anyway, soon my dad had changed jobs and was working for a firm of stockbrokers in the City. So, after nine months we all got back into the Hillman—me, Mummy, Nanny, Susan and my brother—and drove to a pretty clapboard cottage near Colchester. This was where I witnessed my first snog.

  My nanny, Jenny Pepper, was extremely pretty. I loved her almost as much as I loved my mother. She had an auburn beehive and every day we went for our walk down a lane with steep banks on either side. After about a mile there was a crossroads where a tree trunk stood next to an old black-and-white striped wooden signpost. This place was one of my many “houses” and I would hold tea parties for Nanny and Susan on the tree trunk, using acorn cups.

  One day, Nanny’s fancy man, Dave, came on the walk with us. He was good looking with greased-back hair and long black sideboards. They were walking on the road and I was scampering along the bank above. As we approached the tree stump I turned round, proffering acorn cups to Dave and Nanny, only to see Dave’s tongue burrowing down inside Nanny’s mouth like a huge slug. He looked as if he was going to eat her. Instant jealousy brought forth the most blood-curdling scream I could manage, but Dave just glanced at me as he continued to snog Nanny and raised his hand from her bum in a gesture of “Wait a minute.”

  I began to prepare myself for a major tantrum but something stopped me. This was interesting. I’d never seen Nanny so speechless. Her heavily mascaraed eyelashes were tightly shut to the rest of the world. She was in a trance. Dave had his hands in her beehive, on her bottom, all over, so I just sat down on the tree trunk and gaped. The thing that fascinated me was that they just weren’t themselves; they were bewitched. But after the snog was over, it was as if it had never happened. They both came up to the tree trunk for tea; Nanny’s face was raw from Dave’s stubble. I tried reproaching them with my eyes as I passed round tea, but Dave wasn’t having any nonsense, though Nanny looked down with a self-conscious giggle. Her beehive was all over the place. “Cake, anyone?” I burbled with quiet wounded dignity, but in reality I was pretty excited. Now I knew this was what grown-ups did, and I was longing to join in.

  At about the same time my mother took us boys aside and in serious tones warned us not to go into the woods above the farm because there was a funny man there who might take us to his house, give us sweets, put us on his kitchen table and play with our “wees.” My brother looked horrified but I couldn’t think of anything better. Travel, sweets and someone playing with my willy: I couldn’t wait to trike up there. But no matter how often I slipped away from our house to tramp around the woods behind the farm, I never met a soul. (My poor old mum, though, was always inadvertently pushing the wrong buttons. Much later, when we were teenagers, her fantasies took on a darker twist. She told us to be careful of our bottoms on the streets in London because often men would come up behind one and give one an injection and one would be kidnapped and then one would never get home.)

  My father put on his stiff collar, his City suit and his bowler hat on Monday mornings and left the house at eight-fifteen. He came back on Friday at about six. When I was five, my brother Simon was packed off to school, so that I was left alone with Mummy and Nanny, and my governess Miss Spooner who lived at Windy Ridge and came three mornings a week. These were, without doubt, the most glorious days of my life. And if Mummy, Nanny and Miss Spooner weren’t enough, in the almshouses up the lane towards the church lived my best friend, Mr. Brewer. He was eighty-nine years old. He loved dogs so I would go round with Susan. His sister Elsie lived in the house next door and she would knock on the wall with a spoon to let him know that dinner or tea was ready. The almshouses were low red-brick studios from a bygone age, with latticed windows and tiny doors, but then Mr. and Miss Brewer were minuscule. Mr. Brewer wore braces on his legs and Elsie rarely got out of her dressing gown. Their back gardens were jungles of flowers with two little tumbledown outdoor loos at the end. They were in bed by eight and Mr. Brewer was up at six and off to the church where he was the verger. If my family was typical of the post-war rationing generation of the last century, then the Brewers belonged to the one before.

  Life seemed to stretch out around me like the endless cornfields about our house. My father would come home from the City for the weekends. My brother would come home from school for the holidays. Our fortunes steadily increased and my father decided it was time for us to buy our own home. So one day we moved from the little clapboard farmhouse to the pink one with the moat. It was round about then that Nanny and Dave announced their wedding and her impending departure.

  Bundled into the Hillman once more, Mummy tooted the horn as we drove past the almshouses. Out hobbled Mr. Brewer from one door and old Elsie from the other. A pair of weathervanes announcing a change in temperature, they chatted philosophically about how we’d keep in touch and see each other soon, but of course, even though we were moving only fourteen miles away, we never saw the
m again. My last sight of Mr. Brewer was vanishing in a cloud of dust through the back window of our departing car. He was leaning on his stick, waving. Elsie was hobbling into her house. Susan watched solemnly but I waved back excitedly as we disappeared around the corner.

  Soon afterwards, the day of the wedding dawned and we all drove up to Castle Rising in Norfolk, where Nanny was from. As soon as we got to the church I could feel that chill wind of panic announcing the oncoming storm. I had a starring role as Nanny’s pageboy in short red corduroy overalls. We all waited outside the church, my mum like Jackie O. in a mini dress, big white earrings and an extraordinary pillbox hat attached to her bouffant, my dad suave in his morning suit. Rockabilly Dave stood with us outside the church as the organ tootled inside and finally Mr. Pepper arrived with Nanny, lovely in her wedding dress. On cue the organ piped up into some rousing anthem and I was given Nanny’s veil to hold. As the service began, everything fell into place. All the previous conversations when she’d tried to explain to me that she was leaving; all the warnings; all the little asides I had heard but not understood (“I think he’s taking it rather well, don’t you?” “Yes, he doesn’t seem to mind at all”).

  Mary Poppins was coming to life, except that I was not being spared the last scene. I was right in there, and I played my part to the hilt. I completely ruined her wedding day. First of all, I started asking questions, tugging at Nanny’s dress as the vicar tried to get on with the service.

  “Where are you going, Nanny, anyway?” I whined.

  “Shush,” said my mother from the second row.

  But I wouldn’t let up. My little quavering whines rose above the drone of the vicar and became more insistent each time I was told to be quiet. No one would answer; I had become invisible. So, as usual, I became hysterical: floods of molten tears burst out over my fat spoilt cheeks as I sat down in the aisle and bawled. My mum tried to take me away but I had hold of Nanny’s veil and resisted arrest.

  I was terribly upset and so was Nanny, because she loved me too. Dave, on the other hand, had had his fill, so he must have been relieved when the wedding march trumpeted his and Nanny’s impending freedom. He began to walk her firmly out of the church, but I still had her by the veil, and I yanked at it with all my might. Freeze frame. My mum tried to prise it out of my hot furious little fists and poor Nanny was stuck there in the middle of the aisle, Dave pulling in one direction and me in the other. Were the guests amused? I’m not sure. A brief impasse ensued, but not for long. My father took over and hauled me out, and the wedding marched on. Poor Nanny was whisked into her car and off to the reception before I had a chance to wreak further havoc. My parents decided it would be too risky for us to go with them, so we drove off without a real goodbye, leaving Nanny to her new life, while we went to stay with my grandparents in nearby Brancaster.

  For many years we kept in touch: always a card at Christmas and birthdays; and in the early days Nanny would visit us with her own babies, first one and then a second. But slowly, painlessly, we drifted apart. We moved again; Nanny and Dave split up; I went away to school. The common ground was being washed away. Waves of new experiences effaced the old footprints, and soon Nanny and me were a dot on the horizon.

  CHAPTER 3

  Brancaster

  Through all the moves, the new schools, the holidays and my parents’ business trips, the one constant in my life was the house I was born in, and my grandmother who looked after me there whenever my parents went away. My grandparents’ house was the most romantic thing in my world. It was a Victorian rectory of flint and brick with steep slate roofs over ornate peeling green gables. It stood between the marshes and the gently rolling Norfolk hills. My grandfather planted a poplar wood to protect us from the rough winds off the North Sea and it was under those endlessly whispering trees that I was lulled to sleep every afternoon in my pram.

  I was born on 29 May 1959 “sometime before tea.” No one can remember exactly when, and my birth certificate holds no clue. I was delivered by our local doctor, Jarvis Woodsend. My father was painting the garage doors as Dr. Woodsend drove past and cheerfully called out, “It’s a boy, all eleven pounds of him.” My father fell off the ladder and cut himself. Those were the days. No epidural for my poor screaming mother. Just her mother, the midwife and Jarvis Woodsend, who had an appointment to play golf at half past four.

  If things were quite relaxed in our house, at my grandparents’ the clock was turned back and we lived by the standards of the Edwardian age. My grandfather was the alpha male of our family and I was terrified of him. He was not particularly interested in little children and in the dining room at “the old rec” we sat with Nanny at a table apart from the grown-ups and talked in low voices if we had any sense. If we got too noisy my grandfather would make some crushing remark that could reduce us to tears, so we mostly kept quiet. But in a way, we were all in the same boat because he found his own children—my mother, Uncle David and Aunt Katherine—equally irritating at times. He loved my grandmother, his parrot Polly, books, sailing, the news and of course the Queen on Christmas Day. (That event still brings my entire family to a standstill.) For Grandpa, everything else was a distraction. Sometimes his mother, Great-Granny M, would come and stay, and we would have to go and kiss her goodnight in bed. It was frightening and exciting to kiss her bearded face and sometimes you could see her breast peeping through her nightdress. She was the bohemian in our strict naval family. One day Great-Granny M made an announcement: “Roo is musical.”

  We were all on our best behaviour when Grandpa was around, and our mutual fear and respect for him made for a kind of camaraderie in our old-fashioned family. He was a huge man, extremely antisocial, but also very funny when he wanted to be. Everyone was in awe of him, except my grandmother. They had been in love since they were children, and theirs was one of the most successful relationships I have ever seen. They were perfectly matched, both equally formidable, quite frosty to the outside world, and quite reserved with each other, but they were very happy together. And after my mother, Granny was the person I loved most in the world.

  In the summer months we would go sailing in my grandfather’s blue sailing boat, the Wayfarer. She was moored in a creek on the marsh next to her little pale blue tender, a rowing boat named Sieve. A sailing morning would begin with my grandfather announcing at breakfast (a meal, like all others, where you had better not be late) the predictions of his treasured best friend, the barometer. If high tide was at about noon and if the wind was of a favourable direction and strength, it would probably mean that we would be sailing. A flurry of militarised activity would ensue. The women disappeared to the kitchen to help Miss Cottrell, the cook, while the men, which included me, would set about organising the sail bags and batons for the Wayfarer, the rowlocks and oars for Sieve, and the binoculars and rugs for our picnic. Laden down with this seafaring treasure, our strange family caravan left by the west door of the house, across the lawn that sloped down towards the water garden where Granny kept her Muscovy ducks, through the poplar wood, over the bank and across the dyke that separated the low Norfolk farmlands from the sea. My grandfather strode ahead while the family chatted behind him. (“I thought Miss Cottrell looked a bit under the weather, this morning.” “She’s having a terrible problem with her left knee.” “Will someone remember to close that gate?” “Roo? You’re the last.”)

  You were in another world once you stepped out onto the Norfolk marshes; our voices blew away on the salty wind into the huge grey sky. It blustered in your face and roared past your ears if you stood against it. When it stopped there was an eerie silence broken by the screech of a sandpiper high above and the gurgling of the incoming tide through the marsh below. The marshes stretched out as far as the eye could see. A track snaked through them towards the Wayfarer, past banks of sea grass and samphire, where boats lay, beached whales ludicrously dumped by the tide, sometimes tilted against a bank, sometimes sunk into the mud like alligators. There was an old black a
bandoned tugboat that had a chimney with a conical hat. It could have been Peggotty’s house from David Copperfield. We would arrive at Sieve and in groups of twos and threes would be shunted to the Wayfarer: men first, of course, to get the boat ready, women and children second with the food.

  Eventually, everything was “shipshape” and we would all take our positions. Children would be laced into life jackets, while my grandfather sat at the helm in his straw hat giving orders, a grown-up at each side to man the foresail, and someone to release us from our mooring and pull up the anchor. Precision was the order of the day. The sails would flap noisily as they discovered the wind and we’d be off, tacking through the creeks, until we reached the ocean. As the Wayfarer took the wind and we careered towards the oncoming bank, my grandfather would shout, “Ready about!” and we’d all duck down. The two grown-ups at the front were coiled springs on the foresail, waiting for my grandfather’s word, and when, finally, he gave it—“Leo!”—the boom would swing, the foresail flap, and at the last minute the Wayfarer would elegantly turn and head out for the open sea.