Heads and Straights Page 5

  Fly and I both experienced Dad’s bankruptcy as a form of deliverance: Fly from expensive rehabilitation clinics and I from private school. My first day at Kingsway-Princeton College of Further Education in King’s Cross was to be the first day of my new life. I was fifteen and a fully blown, self-loathing Straight. I had never slept with a boy, or taken drugs, or been to a rock concert. I thought long and hard about what to wear on that first day in September 1980 and when I walked into the cafeteria I realized that I had made a mistake. I had chosen a hand-me-down outfit from Fly’s wardrobe: a V-shaped, brown and white mohair skirt with Peruvian motif and matching jumper (the sort recently repopularized by Detective Inspector Sara Lund of The Killing), with suede moccasin boots. Suddenly I realized that I looked like a roaring Sloane. As I filled my tray, found a table and sat down, I felt as if I had ‘Made in Chelsea’ stamped all over me. Hoping to disappear, I talked to no one that day and vowed to blend in better in future. After that I stuck to jeans and a sweatshirt like everyone else.

  Slowly I began to meet people. I turned sixteen and by the winter of 1981 I had black friends for the first time in my life. Although I could hardly shout it from the rooftops, I wanted to. I had started going to parties in Bethnal Green and Stoke Newington and Mile End. I was falling in love with a boy from my A-Level English class. There was only one problem: I was leading a double life.

  Before Mum and Dad had left for Sydney they had billeted me with a family of Catholic aristocrats who lived in a very large house in South Kensington. Their daughter, Eloise, was my oldest and closest friend, but the life she was leading did not easily merge with mine. That year, she was ‘coming out’, which in her world did not mean declaring her homosexuality, but ‘doing the season’: in other words, she was a debutante. This meant being photographed for magazines like Harpers & Queen and Tatler, attending tea parties in other large houses with other young heiresses and going to charity balls. Once I borrowed one of her voluminous, silk ball dresses, with a bodice that felt as though it was cutting off the blood supply to my bosom, and went with her. It was called the White Knight’s Ball and it was held in a smart hotel off Park Lane to raise money for the Order of Malta, a ‘noble’ Catholic order of which Eloise’s father and eldest brother were distinguished members. Dressing up was, as usual, the best part of the evening and once I realized that the place was filled with boys who danced like horses trying to kick their shoes off, I sat most of it out, resting my poor breasts on the table and chain-smoking Benson and Hedges. By this stage public schoolboys had lost their charm for me but, loaded up with champagne, I did try kissing one that evening and noticed, as his large teeth ground into mine, that they also kissed like horses.

  After that I fell into the arms of Mark, the boy in my English class. My heart goes out to him for his patience because for almost a year (my sisters will shudder to read this) I withheld my virginity, willingly abandoning myself to endless snogging and through-the-trousers kneading. We would spend hours on his mum’s bed in Islington, heavy petting to the soundtrack of Midnight Express.

  Through Mark I became close friends with a girl called Kelly who lived with her parents on a council estate in Dalston. When Thatcher brought in the Right to Buy policy, Kelly’s dad, a retired dustman, gloomily predicted the demise of his class: ‘That’s how she’ll have us in the end. She’ll buy us off.’ With Kelly’s help I began, along with the rest of the students in my year, to despise Margaret Thatcher. She and Denis had lived round the corner from us when we were growing up and I had retrospective fantasies about shooting her in the chest on Chelsea Manor Street and changing the course of British history. Kelly took me on protest marches, for the ‘right to work’, for nuclear disarmament, for sanctions against South Africa, against spending cuts and the ‘sus law’ and Cruise missiles on British soil. I remember the particular fatigue that came with the sustained slowness of marching, the insidious cold, and the joy when it was over and I could wrap my hands around a mug of tea and sit listening to everyone arguing about the attendance figures. I remember, on one of those marches, Kelly and I gleefully shouting into each other’s faces, ‘When the Tories get up your nose … Picket!’ I also remember my hatred of Thatcher intensifying one May morning as I was dressing for college in my charming, sunlit attic bedroom in that large house in Kensington and the news came over the radio of Bobby Sands’ death from hunger strike. I had no idea, of course, that my political rage was mostly a smokescreen for profound unease.

  For that daily journey between Gloucester Road and King’s Cross had become a kind of airlock between two worlds. Soon I began making the journey at night. I would put on a coat over my nightdress and sneak out of my room on the top floor of that large house, slip down the wide, carpeted stairs to the hall, where a carriage clock ticked grandly, unlock the door and ride the Tube to King’s Cross and then to Angel. There I would walk along the canal to Mark’s house where I would stay until dawn, unmolested by his mother (a prominent feminist whose only concern was whether or not I was using birth control). I would then catch the first Tube back to Kensington and slip back to my bed unnoticed by my host family, or so I thought at the time. As it turned out, Eloise’s mother had put a call in to Australia. She didn’t mention my midnight flits across London, but she did ask my mother if she was aware that I was sleeping with a black boy. When I told Mum that Mark’s father was Kenyan, she went dewy-eyed and asked where, exactly, he was from.

  I remember sitting in ‘the library’ one evening, watching the news with Eloise’s father, a peer in the House of Lords. The room was painted Chinese yellow and there was a chandelier that, at certain times of the day, cast drops of rainbow light on to the walls. On the television, Brixton was in flames. We sat there in silence watching the footage of the day’s riots. When the news was over I dared to look over at him, trying to frame some conciliatory, non-committal sentence that might not be too great a betrayal of my own feelings, but he stood up, walked over to the set, switched it off and walked out of the room.

  Meanwhile Dad had started to put pressure on me to join them in Australia. He sent me a prospectus for Sydney University and suggested that I apply. I didn’t want to leave London. I was a teenager in full self-dramatization mode and believed that my life must be in England: I would be a writer and, with time, I would take on the Tory regime. But Dad dug in his heels. I would have to think of a better reason not to go to Australia. That was how the idea came of applying to Oxford, the one and only place that I knew Dad would accept as an alternative to Sydney. Even if I didn’t get in, I thought, sitting the exam would at least delay the application process for a year, and by then, who knew? Anything could happen.

  In the end I didn’t go to Australia, but Fly did. By the winter of 1981 she could, as she put it, no longer handle her habit, a chilling euphemism for the state her life was in. Work had dried up and she was signing on. One weekend I went to London from Oxford to stay with her in her basement. She lived in her bed, watched TV and ate Hot Oat Cereal. I never saw her shooting up but I remember the bloodstains on her sheets.

  I rang Mum and Dad and told them that Fly might die unless we could get her some help. This was not idle dramatizing. Many of her friends from that era would end up dead or in prison. Remembering, no doubt, their own powerlessness in the years before they had left England, on the phone my parents hedged. Maybe later, they suggested. Driven by that teenage theatricality, I slammed down the phone and marched off to see the bank manager to ask him if I could borrow £360 for a ticket to Sydney for my sister who was a heroin addict. I sat in his office and told him that I was worried that if she didn’t go she would overdose. I don’t know who that man was, or what spirit was animating him that day, but he lent me the money. I bought the ticket and Fly had her last fix in the plane toilets.

  That summer I left the house in South Kensington and the college in King’s Cross, and so ended my year of living dangerously on the class divide. I went to live with Izzy and her boyfriend in Putn
ey and enrolled in another ILEA college in Hammersmith where a loud minority of delinquent Sloane Rangers set about proving to the majority that this was their decade.

  Izzy mothered me through my first heartbreak, my first moped accident, my exams and all the usual dramas of teenage life. Together we watched the Falklands crisis unfold, and then the miners’ strike, both of us stupefied by the terrifying deftness with which Thatcher seemed to be lastingly changing people’s minds. We found ourselves, along with the rest of the country, giving up active protest in favour of a detached scepticism. At Izzy’s dinners, political debate gave way to risqué party games, and the drug of choice moved from pot to cocaine. During that time, Izzy was looking, as ever, to augment her income. (She was earning a paltry salary working for a small publishing firm off Notting Hill Gate called Virgin Books which was run by a man called Richard Branson whose list included titles like Cluck! The True Story of Chickens in the Cinema and Rockstars in Their Underpants.) She decided to try her hand as a coke dealer and managed to leave her handbag (containing some scales and the newly scored drugs) on the Underground. She realized her mistake on the walk home from the station and was white with fear when she stepped through the front door. Her boyfriend would kill her if he found out. What was she going to do? Then the phone rang and a man with a Scottish accent asked, ‘Did you leave something on the Tube?’

  Had he opened her bag? Of course he had. In fact he had touched the scales and was terrified he had left his ‘dabs’ on them, thinking that it was heroin and fearing that it would be pinned on him if he was caught with it. He was torn between his fear and his curiosity, a curiosity well rewarded by the posh girl who answered his call.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ Izzy said. ‘I’ll never do it again …’

  Izzy wanted desperately for him to give back the coke, as she stood to make about £300 on it (which, in 1982, was a considerable sum), but she sensed there was little hope of that. His voice had a menacing calm about it. He asked her to meet him outside Notting Hill Gate Tube station. They went to his room in a cheap hotel round the corner to collect the bag. Then they went downstairs and he made Izzy scatter the coke in the gutter. Izzy thought about running away with it, but she did what he asked. It was a sobering experience for her to see herself through his eyes. He, an oil rigger from Glasgow, just couldn’t understand why a young woman from a privileged background had become involved in drugs.

  Soon after that Izzy met her French husband and I met mine and we both ran away to join Beatrice in Paris where, so it seemed, people still believed in politics and mass demonstration and the idea of equality and were doggedly refusing to accept the new global consensus. Thanks, in part, to Gran and her intricate snobberies, all of us would ultimately feel excluded from that consensus. Like me, Izzy and Beatrice chose to stay in a society relatively untouched by the all-out consumerism that would blossom in Britain from the eighties onwards. Cissy would join the New Age revival and flee to southern Spain to start a yoga retreat, moving back ten years later to settle in the West Country where she is now pursuing her dream of being a singer. Fly has been clean for over twenty years and is still – in spite of herself and much to her chagrin that I should even mention it – very much a Head. As for me, the prejudices I inherited from my Edwardian grandmother were not likely to be challenged by the elitist education I would receive at Oxford, and so I ended up living, as she did, in the middle of nowhere. In the Cevennes, one of France’s wildest and remotest corners, I’m removed from everything Gran despised. I realize, too, that I’m at the age Dad was when he lost his business and Eileen was when she met her final lover, Kole. In the mythology of my family it is an age when new lives and new creeds begin.

  As I was coming to the end of writing this, Dad died in Sydney after a short and spirited battle with cancer. To the last, he had bottles of claret smuggled into the hospice by friends and he won the nurses over by singing snatches of Cole Porter to them and kissing their hands. The young Australian wife he spent the last twenty years of his life with agreed that he would have wanted a Chelsea send-off, so we organized a memorial service for him in the church where we had sometimes occupied a pew, shamelessly belting out the descant.

  All five sisters and brother Joe were there in the front row with Dad’s brave, beautiful widow, and Mum, a little further back, looking slightly stricken by what her children might do next. Laurent was there, next to my new in-laws, and all twelve grandchildren. Uncle Henry had died at the beginning of the year, but his big laughter poured forth from his daughter, warming or shocking the congregation, which seemed to be a perfect blend of Heads and Straights.

  We all sang Dad’s two favourite hymns and then Cissy sang Nat King Cole’s ‘Smile’, Fly offered snatches of Peter Cook, the organist was prevailed upon to play ‘The Girl From Ipanema’, the incumbent vicar wept for the first time in his career and we all walked out of the church behind a piper singing, ‘I’ll take the high road and you’ll take the low road’ in broad Scottish accents. In the pub afterwards, where the long afternoon’s emotion was washed down by reassuring quantities of alcohol, we sang ‘Frank Mills’ from Hair, and on the bench outside the pub, Izzy and Cissy could be found sharing a joint with two of the old Westminster gang. As one of them put it to me in an email the following day, ‘There’s hope for the future.’

  In my own tribute, I shared with the congregation a memory that I felt captured my father’s spirit. It is 1972 and I am eight. Dad is holding me firmly by the wrists and dangling me from the top of the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct in France about 160 feet high. We’re grinning gleefully at each other and I feel both utterly endangered and utterly safe, the particular combination which, I realize, we have all been looking for in our lives ever since.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not have been possible without the help of my family. I would like to thank my mother for her courage in answering my questions; my eldest sister, Louise (Bee), for having pushed me, despite all my misgivings, to tackle this subject in the first place; my sister Catherine (Izzy) for her support and her candour; my sister Amynta (Fly) for her strength and her remarkable ability to tell it as it is; Cissy, whose life merits a book of its own, and my dear brother, Tom (Joe), whose benign, unwavering presence sustains us all.

  I am also grateful to my late uncle, Charles Fox (Henry), a hellraiser who not only filled our lives with fun, but who was also a gifted writer who taught me the trade. I have him to thank for encouraging his mother, Enid Duncan (Eileen), to sit down as an old lady and put her life on tape. Those delightful tapes provided much of my material and it is, as I came to realize as I was writing this little book, her indomitable spirit overarching the whole. I’m grateful to all the other members of this weird and wonderful family – some of whom I’ve mentioned – be they Heads or Straights.

  My thanks also go to Helen Conford at Penguin Press for seeking me out and for trusting me, to Anthony Goff for his faith, to the London Underground for giving me the opportunity to dig down and take a good look at where I come from and to Luthfa Begum for helping me to bite the bullet. (In the run-up to publishing this book I received a message from one of the reps at Penguin. She knew Luthfa. Would I like her email address? With some trepidation, I wrote to Luthfa, sending her what I had written. ‘Funny thing,’ she wrote back. ‘I went to Kingsway too – ten years later – and loved it. Like you, it was the first time I properly met and got to know people from outside my Bengali community and my bit of the East End and it led to my own double existence for a few years. Amazing, the similarities, and I’d like to think it’s why we clicked that evening. It was brilliant fun and I do remember pushing the tables back and having a dance.’)

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