I travelled from Cheshunt to Cheddar with Mum, in the Jag. Tony and Matt followed behind in a transit van containing some of our furniture, and with our caravan hitched on the back, stuffed full with a set of kitchen units for the new house.
Mum and I nearly didn’t make it. As we were travelling down the M4 in the middle lane, a woman in a white Mini suddenly pulled out of the inside lane in front of us. Mum swerved, slammed on the brakes, and our car went into a spin in a cloud of white smoke. We performed three complete circles, the last one on two wheels, and ended up broadside on across the motorway, with the engine cut out. Mum sat behind the wheel, transfixed. I broke the spell by saying ‘At least, Mum, we would have died together.’ She snapped into life and tried the engine. At the first turn of the key it would not start, but luckily at her second attempt it did. We were very close to a motorway service area and we pulled off for a cup of coffee to calm us down. After we parked and started to walk towards the café, a car passed quite close to me and I jumped in fright, my nerves shattered. Mum put her arm round me and we had a big hug.
If we had died on the motorway that day, it would not have been Mum’s fault. She is a good driver, and she was doing everything right. Even to this day I have a very firm idea of what I would like to do to the driver of that Mini, who pulled out without looking in her mirror and drove on, safe and sound, almost leaving death in her wake. We were lucky that no other cars were close enough to ram into us: if the motorway had been busier the consequences could have been appalling.
Despite the near-accident, we still arrived first at the house in Cheddar. I couldn’t believe it. There were no windows, the doors were hanging off, it was a dilapidated mess. ‘That’s not where we’re going to live, is it, Mummy? We can’t live there, it’s worse than a shed,’ I said, praying that she would say there was a mistake and we had pulled up outside the wrong house. But there was no mistake: this was our new home, Jasmine Cottage.
We were too frightened even to go inside. A woman was coming down the hill and Mum asked her if she would mind going in with us. She must have thought we were mad, but she was very kind and accompanied us. It was far worse than Mum had remembered it: local kids had been using it for all sorts of things, and it was full of used condoms, cigarette ends, matches and every other kind of litter. We pitched the caravan in a nearby farm field and lived there until the place was habitable. It was a good choice of field: the farmer had a son, Robert, who was the same age as us, and became one of our best friends down there.
Living in Cheddar did not work out for our family, but in many ways it was a great year, and I would not have missed it. Mum was able to get work easily: she worked as a secretary at the local electricity board, which was just up the lane from us. She made friends and loved the life there, as did our dog, a Yorkshire terrier called James, who came with us. To our dismay he was run over in our quiet little backwater – ironic after surviving life in London and Cheshunt. We buried him in the garden and replaced him with two mongrels called Bill and Ben. We also had a cat called Jessica, who had the quickest sex change in history when we discovered that she was a he and renamed her Jesse. The cat was the Madonna of the feline world, because he seemed to like nothing better than letting the dogs inflict pain on him.
We also bought a goat called Mary who attached herself romantically to Tony. I learned to milk the goat, and came to prefer chilled goat’s milk on my cornflakes to cow’s milk from a bottle. Unfortunately, Mary died giving birth and we had to bury her in the garden, too.
Matt and I used to go fishing in a private pond nearby, with a big No Fishing sign – it was poaching, to give it its correct name. We did not have expensive fishing tackle, just worms on the end of a line, but when my granddad came down to stay with us for a few days we caught the biggest trout he has ever eaten. It must have weighed three pounds and was probably the prize specimen in the pond.
We had a lot of fun and a very strong feeling of being up against the odds together: we all worked hard at getting the cottage straight and, although it was never completely finished, when we moved out it was a very attractive and picturesque home. We never really got to grips with the garden though: it was waist deep in nettles when we moved in, and then one day when I returned from school it had all been ploughed up. It looked like a muddy field, with deep furrows across it. It stayed like that until we left.
We went to Fairlands School, our first secondary school. We made friends and we were not unhappy, but we always felt we were outsiders. Our strong London accents made for a communication problem with the local kids, who had country accents as broad as ours. Some of them asked us if we were Australian! We had to learn a new language: ‘daps’ meant trainers, ‘scrap’ was a fight. Because we were already very interested in clothes and always believed in personal hygiene (Matt and I were using deodorants and anti-perspirants before most boys had heard of them), we tended to be more popular with the girls than the boys. That made us even less popular with the boys, but we were already tall and strong (five feet ten inches by the time we were eleven) and we defended ourselves pretty well in any punch-ups.
For a time I went out with a girl called Karen, who was a year older than me and the most popular girl in the school. One day her sister phoned up and said she didn’t want to go out with me any more, and I found out later that behind my back Matt had been round to her house and chatted her up. It didn’t always work that way, though: I took great delight one day in introducing him to my new girlfriend, a girl called Nicky: she’d been going out with him the previous week!
When we were told by Mum and Tony, a year after moving to Cheddar, that we were going back to London I had mixed emotions: I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend, a small, pretty blonde girl who I thought I was devoted to at the time, and, much worse, I did not want to be parted from our puppies, Bill and Ben, who had to be given away. But I did want to get back to the city.
It was Tony who had the worst time down there. He could not find work. The good life is great if you have lots of money: when you are trying to pay back a loan and support yourselves, it can be a nightmare. Tony travelled as far as South Wales to work, but could find only casual jobs. Village people don’t exactly open their arms to outsiders and he found it difficult to fit in. At times he had to hunt around the garden for firewood to keep us all warm.
He tried lots of schemes to make money, and we all trudged miles sticking leaflets through doors for him. We had great fun helping him to train as a double glazing salesman. He did a course, and then he practised knocking on our door and trying to sell to Mum or Matt or me. We loved it because it was an excuse to open the door and be rude to him, which most kids would enjoy. I know that whatever else becomes of me, I could always work as a trainer for door-to-door salesmen: I perfected all sorts of excuses for not buying from him. When he had to do it for real, the whole family went out in the car with him and literally pushed him up the first drive.
Mum and Tony protected us from the worst of it, but they were at a very low ebb during that year in Cheddar. They used up all their savings, they could not afford to pay Tony’s father the money they owed him, and Tony was so unhappy he was close to a breakdown. He’s definitely a city person; country life was not for him. Unknown to Tony at the time, and because she was desperate, Mum went to see his father and asked him to give Tony a job, which he did.
We sold the house in Cheddar and made sufficient profit to pay off the debt and put down the deposit on a house in Camberley. Mum chose the house by herself: Tony told her to get on with it. But there was a hiccup, and the purchase of the original house they were buying fell through at the last minute. Mum rushed around and found another, but we were unable to move in for a few weeks, so when we first moved back to London we were once again living in a caravan, this time on a site at Henley. I hate caravans and I cannot for the life of me imagine why people go on holiday in them.
Because we were enrolled at Collingwood School in Camberley, and because Mum did not want our education to be messed around any more by changing schools, she drove us to Camberley from Henley every morning in the rush hour, a round trip of one and a half hours,