We’d always been comfortably off, but after my father died we were left destitute. My brother had to leave his private boarding school and it was a real struggle. Mum had a small amount from her widow’s pension so she decided to buy a 1920s house in London. But we were there less than a year as she couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments. Eventually the house was repossessed and she lost her deposit. There were no Social Services then, and my mother couldn’t work because she had me and she’d lost all her income from Dad.
‘We’re going to have to move in with your grandmother and grandfather,’ she told me.
I was three by then and this is where most of my memories start. Her parents, Henry and Kate Livermore, lived in a large, three-storey Victorian terrace in Battersea, south-west London. We called them Gaga and Papa because my brother couldn’t say their names properly when he was little and those nicknames just stuck.
The house seemed huge to me as Raymond and I tore around it. There was a big sitting-room at the front with settees and an open fire and all this lovely antique furniture. A passageway led to a tiny scullery with a big copper pot with a fire underneath where you would boil your washing and a really tired-looking porcelain sink. There were no hot-water taps in those days, of course. Then there was a dining-room with a big range cooker that had a coal fire underneath a couple of hot plates and took hours to heat up. On the second floor there was another living-room, two bedrooms and a bathroom, and on the very top floor was a tiny, dusty attic room.
‘This is where we’ll live, children,’ Mum told me as we climbed up the steep staircase to the attic.
‘Where’s all the furniture, Mummy?’ I asked.
It was very dark and shivery cold, and there was hardly anything in it. But there was a double bed for Mum and me to share, a camp bed for Raymond and a little larder where we could keep our food.
There was only one very dim electric light up there, and one night while we were sitting there it went out. I screamed, as I was so afraid of the dark.
‘I’ll go and find out what’s happened,’ said Mum.
She went downstairs to have a look while I sat there, completely petrified. A few minutes later she came storming up the stairs holding a candle. I could tell by the look on her face that she was fuming.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘They’ve cut us off.’
Mum hadn’t been able to afford to pay her share of money for the meter that week, so my grandparents had cut off the electricity supply to the attic. From then on, even though the lights were blazing downstairs, we had to make do with a single candle. Mum was absolutely furious.
I was too young to really understand at the time, but now looking back, no wonder. How awful to do that to their own widowed daughter at a time when she so needed their help and support. I was old enough to know it wasn’t nice, though.
‘Why are Gaga and Papa being horrid to you?’ I asked her.
‘Your grandparents didn’t like it when I married Daddy, as he believed in different things to them,’ she explained.
My grandparents were right-wing Conservatives and extremely religious, which was the norm in those days, while my father was the complete opposite. He was a very left-wing socialist and an atheist. In fact, when he died he insisted that there was no funeral or flowers and he was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in London. He used to speak at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park and was one of the founder members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When he and my mother had gone off to the register office to get married in secret when she was eighteen, Mum’s family had practically disowned her.
‘But I loved your father and it doesn’t matter what they think,’ said Mum, giving me a kiss on the forehead.
I could see she was holding back the tears but I never once saw her cry in front of me. She was very loving, and was always kissing and cuddling me. I think in a way she needed me as much as I needed her.
My mother was a very proud person, so I could tell it was humiliating for her to have to go cap in hand to her parents and to have absolutely nothing.
One morning she was busy cleaning and tidying up our room.
‘I’m getting everything spick and span as the means test people are coming today,’ she told me.
I wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, but half an hour later a stern-looking woman in a suit came up to the attic. She opened up the larder door and had a good look inside.
‘As you can see there’s nothing in there,’ my mother told her frostily.
I could tell that Mum was very annoyed to have to ask for help.
‘What’s that lady doing?’ I said.
‘She’s checking to see how much food we’ve got,’ she told me. ‘Or should I say how little.’
I was even put out to work to try to help Mum make ends meet. I remember we were walking to the shop one day when a woman stopped my mother in the street.
‘Oh, what a pretty little thing,’ she said to me. ‘Look at those great big brown eyes.’
I was such a show-off, and even as a toddler I knew how to play to a crowd. I opened my eyes even wider, fluttered my eyelashes and flashed her my best and biggest smile.
‘I know a photographer looking for child models,’ she told Mum. ‘I’m sure he would love your daughter to pose for him.’
The photographer in question turned out to be a very famous man called Marcus Adams. He was a renowned children’s photographer who had taken pictures of King George V’s six children and all of the royal family. Although I couldn’t have been more than three, I remember sitting there in his studio in a little woollen hat and jacket. I was paid three guineas a time, which was quite a lot in those days, and Mum was given copies of the shots, which were very beautiful, pale, sepia photographs printed on soft paper.
Things at home continued to be frosty between Mum and my grandparents. She was allowed downstairs to cook, but then she would always bring our food back up to the attic for us to eat at our little table. We’d never have a meal with them.
My mother was a good cook and we always had lots of fresh vegetables to disguise the fact we couldn’t afford much meat. We’d have our main meal of the day at lunchtime and she’d rustle up pies and stews, apple tarts and cakes. I liked having a boiled egg for tea, which she’d bring up to the attic for me on a silver tray.
Looking back, it was a very peculiar situation. Here were two opposing ideas of life – my mother’s and my grandparents’ – and then me in the middle seeing both sides of it. My grandparents were all right to me and Raymond, and I got on with my grandfather quite well. He used to be a French horn player in the Grenadier Guards, and one afternoon he started stomping up and down the hallway.
‘Come on, Rene,’ he bellowed. ‘Let’s pretend we’re in the Grenadier Guards.’
I giggled as he marched up and down pretending that he was blowing his French horn.
‘Come here and I’ll tell you a story about when I was little,’ he said.
He told me how he grew up in Devon with his father. He’d hated his stepmother, so he ran away from home at the age of fourteen and pretended he was sixteen so he could join the army. He’d never fought but had become a very good French horn player and afterwards had played in the pits in London orchestras.
‘I played at Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria’s birthday, you know,’ he told me.
‘You met the Queen?’ I gasped. ‘What was she like?’
‘Oh, dreadful woman,’ he grumbled.
‘Why’s that, Papa?’
‘She used to come out on the balcony all in black after her husband had died, and even if it