Heads and Straights Page 3

  Mum and Dad were the hapless gatekeepers of a house that was besieged day and night by hormonal boys. There was a kernel of them who virtually lived in the basement, forcing my mother to retreat to the sitting room upstairs: ‘I’m sick and tired of being stared out of my kitchen!’ And then there were those who had to vie for admission.

  Always welcome was our charismatic Uncle Henry. Mum’s little brother and Gran’s beloved elder son was a born Head. He would come over from San Francisco, where he lived and worked as a freelance writer, and appear at our back door with his wicked grin, his long hair and sideburns; six foot four and so handsome in his leather coat, his big silver-dollar belt and Mexican rings. He’d throw open his arms for Cissy and me, call us ‘buddy’, kiss us all full on the lips, and then we’d all settle down to listen to his stories. Most of what he related was beyond my grasp, but I was enthralled by his exotic American vocabulary and his big, contagious laugh. He ‘turned on’ the Big Three to politics, telling them about the horrors of the Vietnam War and Watergate and the abuse of power in America. Izzy dates her feminism back to her meeting with Diane, one of Henry’s sassy Californian girlfriends whom he brought to the basement once. She looked like Ali McGraw and, for Izzy, everything about her seemed to augur a much bolder, brighter future for women. Henry wrote for True, the magazine ‘for today’s adventurous male’: exciting news stories about the Baader Meinhoff group, Black Power, Patty Hearst and the Getty kidnapping. He also wrote for Car and Driver magazine and often had a sports car that he was test-driving for them, and sometimes he would challenge Dad, who viewed him with a pained mixture of envy and admiration, to a race down Park Lane at night. Poor Mum would endure his visits in those days with tight-lipped forbearance. As far as she was concerned her brother, like her mother, was a loose cannon.

  And she was not wrong. To the girls, Henry was the guru of Heads. Only ten years younger than Mum, Henry saw himself as the same generation as her daughters. It used to drive her mad that he would always choose to go straight down to the basement when he flew in, instead of going to greet her and Dad in the sitting room. She knew, because he never took pains to disguise it, that he smoked pot with her older girls and that it was he who provided the words and music to their rebellion. He gave Beatrice Layla by Derek and the Dominoes and sat listening to Jimi Hendrix’s The Cry of Love with them and American Beauty by the Grateful Dead. He gave Izzy Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and confirmed to them all that they were right to challenge the tastes and attitudes of their elders. On Izzy’s sixteenth birthday he sent her a return ticket to San Francisco. Mum intercepted it and spirited it away.

  The seventies marched on and the colours on the King’s Road turned slowly from rainbow to black. In 1976 a fracture opened up between my three eldest sisters. Izzy and Beatrice still favoured cowboy boots with long, embroidered, Arthurian dresses that came from a shop on the Kings Road called Forbidden Fruit, but Fly moved to black drainpipes and brothel creepers. Gradually the punks edged out the hippies and places like Gandalf’s Garden gave way to places like Vivienne Westwood’s shop, SEX. Just walking, aged twelve, past that place, the rudest word in the world towering over me in huge, wet-look pink letters, made my heart race. Everything about the world Fly was entering terrified me: the look, the language, the attitude. She painted her room black and forbade me to enter. Sometimes, when she was out, I would sneak in to look at her things: her panoply of silk scarves, her silver bangles that covered her wrists like armour, her dressing table with her kohl, her black nail varnish, her peacock feathers. Her clothes were an amalgam of Beardsley, carnival and punk rock. Every time she went out at night, she was pushing some kind of look. She had a black cowboy suit with white piping and when she wore it with her cowboy boots, she strode like a man. She started telling me to fuck off if I dared speak to her at the breakfast table, and swiping me round the head with her bangled arm when I pissed her off, which was most of the time. Beatrice and Izzy, the only family members she could tolerate, had left London by then, Beatrice for Bristol and Izzy to live on a commune near Oxford.

  When she wasn’t being grounded, Fly was out on the King’s Road, usually upstairs at the Cadogan, where the barman turned a blind eye to underage drinking. She never brought anyone home except on the rare occasions when she had the house to herself. One Sunday night my parents came back from the country, Cissy and me in tow, and walked into their bedroom to find her and a young man with a freckled face and green-and-ginger-spiked hair leaping from their preposterous four-poster bed. Spike, as he was then known, advanced, naked, towards my appalled father, hand outstretched. I don’t remember this, but I do remember the unsettling sight of Spike tugging his tartan bondage trousers on over his lily-white bottom as he shambled off down the corridor. Years later, when Fly and I were at a party, he was introduced to me as a landscape gardener called Steven Pike. I became his girlfriend and soon discovered where we’d met before.

  Sleeping with each other’s boyfriends was seen as an inevitable hazard of our closeness as sisters and perfectly acceptable provided a decent time lapse was observed. Laurent, my French husband, had been Beatrice’s boyfriend before he was mine. The value of sharing is so deeply ingrained in us as to seem, to many, dizzyingly boundaryless: shared boyfriends, towels, toothbrushes, even university degrees. Izzy would later borrow Beatrice’s degree to get her first job in publishing.

  Mum became more and more appalled by the spectacle of her daughters’ adolescence. She read Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in an attempt to make sense of it all, but it didn’t help. She would impose absurd curfews and then sit on the stairs, fretting, in her nightdress, hours after they had been missed. Phobic as she was about conflict, she would try in vain to get my father to apply the principle of consequence to their behaviour. The chaos of their emancipation reminded her of her own wild mother and filled her with a sense of dread, particularly when we all began to show such a deep devotion to Eileen. After all Gran was a Head and Mum would forever be a Straight.

  Back then we were all too dazzled by Gran’s strength and charisma to see how hard it must have been for Mum to have been her child. The two of them could hardly have been more different and when Mum talks about Eileen, even when she is speaking with fondness, she still manages to convey the sense of a deep, unspoken injury too painful to acknowledge. Mum was what Gran used to call her love child, as if this should pardon every blunder.

  When Eileen was seventeen, Captain Bolton, the man they had met on the train, invited her and her mother to a dance at the officers’ mess. Elspeth was still slim and youthful, and she and Eileen were often mistaken for sisters. As they got ready, Nick sat by the fire, listening benevolently to their excited chatter. Eileen wore a knee-length, apple-green silk dress and Elspeth a long gown made of bronze taffeta.

  In the two years since her arrival in Wales Eileen had, under Bolton’s tutelage, become a talented and fearless rider. Physical courage seemed to bring with it a boldness that was making her father increasingly uncomfortable. Reports from his eldest son, Ernest, reached him in London and confirmed that his youngest daughter was dreaming of becoming a vet and had already received three proposals from three different suitors. When she walked into the ballroom on that May evening in 1929 she was quite a beauty. As her elder sister, Kitty, once told Mum, ‘Eileen could have had any man in England’, but Eileen was not particularly interested. She wanted adventure and she sensed that marriage was the least favourable route.

  At the dance she met one of Bolton’s brother officers, a thirty-year-old captain called Tom Taylor. He was tall and fair and good-looking, but above all he was a crack rider, better even than Bolton. To her delight he offered to coach her in the manège. He taught her to jump, and, while doing so, to pull her loosened jumping saddle from beneath her and, while her horse was in mid-leap, brandish it above her head. She learnt fast and he watched in admiration, falling more and more deeply in love.

  I don’t know the details of th
eir courtship, only that her father, increasingly concerned by her flightiness, eventually struck a bargain with her. Marry Captain Taylor, he told her, and I will buy you both a riding school of your own in Hyde Park Mews. Seeing the opportunity for a life on her own terms, she agreed. She drew out her engagement for as long as she could. She became the belle of Rotten Row, could be seen driving a four-in-hand alone across London, broke in polo ponies for the Prince of Wales and sent her fiancé mad with jealousy.

  At last, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, they married. The ceremony and reception was bad enough; a grand affair, my grandmother told me, which bored her to tears, but the wedding night was much worse. Taylor lunged at her as soon as they were alone and his fervid performance after the long months of restraint convinced her never to let him near her again. A modern-day Irene Forsyte, she started keeping a gun under her pillow.

  After months of pleading, cajoling and raging, Tom complained to her father. Unwilling to confront his fiery-tempered daughter on the matter of her sex life, her father summoned the vicar, who bumbled his way through a monologue on marital duty while my grandmother, dressed in her jodhpurs and impatient to leave, glared at him with unabashed contempt. When he had finished, she told him that she wanted an annulment.

  A meeting was convened with Mr Life, the family lawyer. My grandmother announced her idea. Mr Life said there were absolutely no grounds for an annulment.

  ‘Divorce, then. I want a divorce.’

  ‘You won’t get a divorce. You would have to prove desertion, insanity, adultery or cruelty. Is your husband guilty of any of these?’

  ‘Adultery,’ my grandmother mused. ‘On whose part?’

  ‘On either part.’

  Eileen smiled triumphantly. ‘Then here I go to commit adultery!’

  By the time she had reached the mews, she had made her choice. He was one of her pupils, a handsome, red-haired Canadian of her own age called Brian Jackson. He was a foreigner and just passing through, so he would, she believed, make no claims on her.

  After their next riding lesson, she put her problem to him. She needed someone to be unfaithful with. Unsurprisingly, he agreed to help her. She made the arrangements; all he had to do was to turn up. So that was how my mother was conceived, in room number 24 of the Bridge Hotel in Epsom. The next morning Eileen and Brian ordered breakfast in bed so that the chambermaid who brought it up might later testify to their affair in court.

  When she came home that evening, her portrait – the one that her son would later burn – had been turned to the wall, and Tom, poised for her return, was lying on the kitchen floor with his head in the oven. When he heard her key in the lock, he turned on the gas. Eileen walked into the kitchen, stepped over him and put another coin in the meter.

  ‘I forgive you everything,’ Tom pleaded, leaping to his feet and grabbing her.

  ‘I don’t want forgiveness,’ she answered, shaking him off. ‘I want divorce.’

  This was my grandmother’s version of the story. She says that the marriage ended there and then, and that she, discovering she was pregnant, set up on her own. But here my grandmother’s narrative becomes unreliable. My mother has early memories of sitting on Tom Taylor’s knee and his name is on her birth certificate, so they must have still been together when she was born.

  My mother gives me a sly look and shakes her head. ‘Your grandmother made it up as she went along, darling. She was a complete mythomaniac.’

  What is certain is that, for Eileen, her beautiful, red-haired daughter was hers and no one else’s. She called her Elizabeth, after the Virgin Queen.

  Elizabeth never knew her father. Although Brian asked many times, Eileen refused to let him have any contact with his child. The price of Gran’s freedom was to plant a void in my mother’s psyche that would lead to an endless craving for male approval. When she was dying, Gran eventually asked for her forgiveness. My mother gave it, of course, but the remorse came far too late to be of any use to her.

  With this background, it must have been hard for Elizabeth to be a mother to five girls. When I was ten and she was forty-one, she and Dad adopted a son. My sisters and I have all noted, with no feeling of resentment towards our adored brother, Joe, how much more effortlessly she loved him. His being a boy simply made it easier for her.

  In the sixties Dad tried to find Mum’s father, beginning with a society photographer called Houston Rogers, who had taken Brian Jackson’s picture in the thirties. He tracked Jackson to Ontario, where the trail went cold. Gran said he was a member of Bert Ambrose’s dance band, which was very popular in thirties London. She said that he played the drums, but I’ve looked at a film on YouTube of the band playing in the Embassy Club in 1931, the year Jackson and Eileen met. The drummer in the film is a stout, middle-aged man. There is, however, a young man with slicked-back hair and a shy, dimpled smile, who is playing the xylophone, and I wonder if this might be my grandfather. Knowing Gran, in the telling of her story she would have had no difficulty upgrading the father of her child from a player of the xylophone to the drums, a much sexier instrument. A specialized website informs me that ‘not all Ambrose’s band members have been identified yet’. My mother had dimples; perhaps it was the xylophone player.

  By 1977 the King’s Road had become the setting for a rather stagey war between punks and Teds. Like the street fights between mods and rockers in the late sixties, there was often a call to battle on Saturday nights. That year Fly left home and moved in to a flat on a brand new, red-brick housing estate in World’s End. With the Big Three gone, for the first time, Cissy and I became inseparable. Rivalry for our glamorous sisters’ affections quickly became solidarity against the new regime that prevailed at home. Giggling became our principal occupation as an antidote to the ambient boredom. The phone had stopped ringing, the record player had gone silent and the heady scent of pot masked by joss sticks soon faded away. Our parents reconquered the basement and within a month the atmosphere in the house had gone from exotic, high-class brothel to Trusthouse Forte.

  Fly, who had by now completely changed her accent, settled into one of the seven massive tower blocks, which, as far as our parents were concerned, teemed with low life and marred the Chelsea skyline. I don’t think they ever set foot into the piss-infused warren of alleys that led to Fly’s building. The sentimentally named Whistler’s Walk (after the Chelsea-based American painter) was strictly out of bounds to Cissy and me, but we would sometimes sneak along the King’s Road to World’s End to visit Fly in her new life. This revolved around a large, joint-rolling coffee table, which drew, by turns, the stalwarts of the punk movement, the newly emerging rockabillies, the two-tone skinheads and the rude boys. Cissy and I would sit amongst them, all agog, our hands folded in our laps, trying to make polite conversation in between bursts of stifled laughter, until Fly would turf us out.

  Fly, along with many of the people who drifted through ‘Whistlers’, was a Chelsea supporter and was often at Stamford Bridge on Saturday afternoons. She fancied Chelsea captain Butch Wilkins and knew all the chants. She taught Cissy and me ‘Blue is the Colour’ and regaled us with stories of after-match violence on the streets of World’s End. She once took me to a Chelsea–Tottenham match. All the way through, the Chelsea fans in the sheds were shouting out a word I couldn’t understand. As we were leaving the stadium I asked Fly what it was. ‘They’re shouting “yiddo”. It means Jew. I know, it’s fucked. Hurry!’ She grabbed my wrist and pulled me towards the exit. People were starting to leave the stadium to avoid the aggro. We were pushed down in the stands on our way out and I still have the scar on my chin. I remember people grabbing milk bottles from doorsteps and smashing them to make weapons, and holding Fly’s hand as we ran down the street, mounted policemen in pursuit.

  Fly thrived on adrenalin and would never knowingly pay on the Tube or, if she could help it, for a gig. The following year one of her closest girlfriends started going out with a member of The Clash. The band was often round at th
e flat in World’s End and when they became successful the new rockabilly band, The Stray Cats, replaced them. I remember meeting one of them on the sofa, introducing myself politely and after a pause asking his name. Baffled by the question he answered, as if I ought to have known, ‘Slim Jim.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Slim Jim Phantom.’

  Nervously I looked up at Fly, who was standing in the doorway giving me the Look of Death.

  I persisted.

  ‘Is Slim your first name? Or Jim? Which is your surname?’

  Now it was his turn to look nervous. Who was this teenager and what did she want from him, clearly not to suck his penis for a backstage pass. He looked at Fly, then back at me waiting politely for an answer.

  Poor Fly, whenever Cissy and I showed up all her careful attempts to hide her background were suddenly doomed.

  By then, Fly had a serious heroin habit. Uncle Henry was the first grown-up to spot it. He had warned her off the drug in the past and realizing that she was now an addict, decided to tell Mum, who was still fretting about the dangers of pot. In those days the colour supplements were full of articles with titles like ‘How To Tell If Your Child Is Smoking Marijuana’. Neither she nor Dad had any idea how to face heroin addiction.

  Fly, meanwhile, had only one concern: how to pay for her gear. Mum had found out that she had been forging her cheques and swiftly cut off that source. Then Dad’s rich and elegant stepmother, Betty – whom I knew from photos as a Wallace Simpson lookalike leaning on a croquet mallet or a shooting stick – died and left each of us a dizzying five thousand pounds. Within the year Fly had spent all of hers. Freshly coached in the emergent concept of ‘tough love’, Mum and Dad cut off all financial help. Izzy leant on her new boyfriend, who was an assistant director, to get Fly work in the film industry. Her first job was a gift: she was to be a ‘runner’ on a film about a British borstal called Scum, starring the young Ray Winstone, who was, in those days, the paragon of working-class glamour. Fly was in her element: all those naughty boys (many of them, like Phil Daniels, recruited from Anna Scher’s theatre school in Islington), trying to make the posh girl blush.