We begin in the autumn because that’s when everything changed. Autumn is a season I love more than any other; for its smoky sense of purpose and half-lit mornings, its bonfires, baked potatoes, nostalgia, chestnuts and Catherine wheels.
It was late September. I was eighteen. I had experienced a rather unceremonious exit from school. I had no real idea about what I wanted to do, just some vague fantasies involving writing, a palazzo, an adoring Italian, daily love letters and me in a Sophia Loren sort of dress, weaving through a Roman market holding a basket of ripe scented figs. I had just tried to explain this to my mother over lunch at a restaurant on Elizabeth Street in London. She was not, curiously, sharing my enthusiasm.
‘Enough,’ she said. ‘No more alleged history of art courses. You’re going to secretarial college to learn something useful, like typing.’
‘But I need to learn about culture!’ She gave me a very beady look.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more. End of conversation.’
‘But I…’ The look blackened. I resorted to the historic old faithful between teenagers and their mothers.
‘God…Why don’t you understand? None of you understand me!’
I ran out into the still, grey street, sobbing. I threw myself on a doorstep and lit a bitter cigarette. And then something between serendipity and Alice in Wonderland magic happened.
A black taxi chugged to a halt by the doorstep on which I sat. Out of it fell a creature that surpassed my Italian imaginings. She wore a ship on her head, a miniature galleon with proud sails that billowed in the wind. Her white bosom swelled out of an implausibly tiny corset and she navigated the street in neat steps, teetering on the brink of five-inch heels.
Her arms were full to bursting with hat boxes and carrier bags and she was alternately swearing, tipping the taxi driver and honking a great big laugh. I remember thinking: ‘I don’t know who that is, but I want to be her friend.’ I was so fascinated I forgot to cry.
I stood up and said, ‘Do you need any help with your bags?’
‘Oh yes!’ she said. ‘Actually, you are sitting on my doorstep.’
‘So, why were you crying?’ The ship woman said in her bright pink kitchen. It transpired that she was called Isabella Blow; she was contributing editor at Vogue and something of a fashion maverick. We’d put the bags down and she was making tea in a proper teapot.
‘I was crying about my future.’ I said heavily. ‘My mother doesn’t understand me. I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, it’s so awful.’
‘Oh don’t worry about that. Pfff!’ she said. ‘Do you want to be a model?’
If it had been a film, there would have been the audible ting of a fairy wand. I looked at her incredulously. ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of avoiding the purdah of shorthand. My next question was, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll tell your mother we’ve found you a career’
The ‘Are you sure?’ didn’t spring from some sly sense of modesty; it was brutal realism. And not of the usual model standard ‘I was such an ugly duckling at school, and everyone teased me about how painfully skinny I was’ kind.
Bar my height, I couldn’t have looked any less like a model. I had enormous tits, an even bigger arse and a perfectly round face with plump, smiling cheeks. The only thing I could have possibly shared with a model was my twisted predilection for chain smoking.
But for sweet Issy, as I came to know her, none of this posed a problem. She saw people as she chose to see them; as grander cinematic versions of themselves.
‘I think,’ she said, her red lips a post-box stamp of approval, ‘I think you’re like Anita Ekberg.’ I pretended I knew whom she was talking about.
‘Ah yes. Anita Ekberg.’ I said.
‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll go and find your mother and tell her we’ve found you a career.’
We celebrated our fortuitous meeting, with my now mollified mother in tow, at a Japanese restaurant in Mayfair, toasting my possible new career with a wealth of sushi and tempura.
‘Gosh, you do like to eat,’ Issy said, eyes wide, watching as my chopsticks danced over the plates. I would have said yes but my mouth was full.
Social activities in England often revolve around the tradition of the nursery tea. I was deeply keen on tea, but as an only child I was not at all keen on having to share either my toys or my food.
‘You must learn to share. It’s a very nasty habit, selfishness,’ Maureen, my Scottish nanny said, her grey eyes fixed on me in a penetrating way.
‘Urgh. It’s so unfair!’ I would cry, scandalized by the injustice of having to watch impotent as other children, often strangers, were allowed to torture my dolls and eat all the salt and vinegar crisps for the mere reason that ‘they can do what they want—they are your guests.’
But I didn’t invite them! You did. I don’t want them messing up my dressing-up box and smearing greasy fingers on my best one-eyed doll, or asking to see her ‘front bottom’. I don’t want friends who say ‘front bottom’. I want to play Tarzan and Jane with Dominic from next door, who has brown eyes and kissed me by the compost heap. I don’t want to be the ugly stepsister in the game, I want to be Cinderella! No, I’m not tired. I might go to my room now and listen to Storyteller. They can stay in the playroom on their own.
When I was six, my friend Ka-Ming came for tea. There was macaroni and cheese, and for pudding, yoghurt. Maureen announced in her buttery burr that there were only two yoghurts, chocolate and strawberry, on which Ka-Ming, as the guest, got first dibs. Agonizing as Ka-Ming slowly weighed up the boons of each flavour, I excused myself and ran to the playroom, where the wishing stone my grandmother Gee-Gee had found on the beach sat on the bookshelf. I had one wish left.
‘Please, wishing stone and God, let her not pick the chocolate yoghurt, because that is the one I want.’ I cradled the stone, hot in my palm.
I walked into the kitchen to find Ka-Ming already eating the strawberry yoghurt with enthusiasm. The chocolate Mr Men yoghurt sat sublime on my plate. This turn of fate cemented my belief that if you wish for something hard enough, as long as it doesn’t already belong to somebody else you tend to get it.
At ten, to my great dismay, I was sent to boarding school. I recalled the permanent midnight feasts in Enid Blyton books, and reckoned that this was the sole pro in an otherwise dismal situation. Yet on arrival I realized that the halcyon midnight feasts were a myth. The reality was fried bread swimming its own stagnant grease, powdered mashed potatoes, bright pink gammon, gristly stew, grey Scotch eggs and collapsed beetroot, which I was made to eat in staggering quantity.
The consolation prize when home from boarding school was picking a Last Supper. Last Suppers were cooked the final night of the school holidays by my mother at her bottle-green Aga; a balm to the palate before another term of unspeakably horrible food. I