‘Oh, don’t get me started on that silly Duncan woman,’ he told me. ‘Did you know she strangled herself with her own scarf?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
I listened, wide-eyed, as he recounted the story of how Isadora Duncan was a real lady and used to love wearing these long, floaty scarves.
‘She lived in France, and she was coming over a bridge one day and her long scarf got caught in the axle of the convertible car that she was in and it strangled her. Broke her neck right there on the spot.’
My grandmother was a cold, unemotional woman but she was a fantastic seamstress and dressmaker, and I’d sit there for ages and watch her work. One day she was making a beautiful blue gown that had silk ribbons from the waist down with an underskirt underneath, and at the end of every ribbon there was a silver bell. It was the most beautiful dress that I’d ever seen and I was fascinated.
‘Who’s that dress for, Gaga?’ I asked her.
‘This one is for a Russian princess,’ she said.
It took her hours to sew all the tiny bells on the bottom.
In the front room she had a beautiful old mahogany sewing desk with her Singer sewing machine on the top and dozens of small drawers underneath that were filled with ribbons, beads and different coloured silks. I loved rummaging round in them and touching all of the treasures that were inside.
‘Can I help you tidy up your bits and bobs, Gaga?’ I asked her.
‘As long as you’re careful, Rene,’ she told me. ‘Don’t go pricking your fingers on any needles.’
My biggest wish was for her to make me a princess gown all of my very own. On my fourth birthday she made me a beautiful party dress. It was green cotton with a little collar, puff sleeves and a big bow on the back, and it had frills from the waist down. She even made a matching one for my favourite doll Audrey.
My mum was the eldest of seven children, although two of her brothers had died as toddlers – one had got diphtheria and the other had fallen into the Thames and drowned. It used to cause no end of arguments between my grandparents, as my grandfather could never remember the names of the two that had died and my grandmother used to get really annoyed with him about it.
‘Imagine not remembering your own children,’ she used to say to me. ‘How could he forget his own flesh and blood?’
Mum wasn’t close to her surviving sisters Violet and Winnie or her brothers Arthur and Harry, and they didn’t treat her very nicely. They were all very snobby and wealthy, and they looked on her as a failure when she came back to live with her parents, even though she was a widow. That side of it was all kept from me when I was small, but I began to realise it more as I got older. They didn’t like her choice of husband and the way, in their opinion, she had completely changed her views.
Mum and I stuck together, and we were a close little unit. She had a couple of boyfriends when I was very young, although I don’t remember meeting them. It was only when I was much older that she told me about one man she actually got engaged to.
‘But then he turned around and said that he’d only marry me if I’d agree to put you in a children’s home, so I told him to get knotted,’ she said.
It’s only as I grew up that I started to appreciate how hard it must have been to be a single parent in those days. As I got older, I came to realise that I was different because other children had fathers and I didn’t.
‘Why haven’t I got a daddy like everyone else?’ I asked Mum one day. ‘Where is my daddy?’
She got a dusty album out of a drawer and showed me a photograph. It was a sepia picture of a handsome young man with blond hair and big, expressive brown eyes and dark eyebrows.
‘That was Daddy,’ she said gently. ‘Your lovely dark eyes are just like his.’
There was another black-and-white photograph of Dad in a helmet and goggles standing next to a motorbike.
‘That’s him and his beloved motorbike,’ she told me. ‘He used to strap his cello on the back and go whizzing round London from theatre to theatre.’
Because I didn’t remember anything about Dad it was nice to hear stories about him.
‘Your father was a very unusual man,’ Mum told me. ‘He had strong morals about how children should be treated.’
She described how she had been out one day with him and my brother.
‘We were walking down the road and your father saw another man and his son across the street. The boy was only about five and he must have done something naughty so his father gave him a slap around the legs.
‘Well, when your father saw this he was so angry. He crossed over the road and told the man in no uncertain terms to never, ever hit his child again. I think the man was a bit shocked getting reprimanded by a complete stranger, but I was so proud of your dad.’
It was the norm for children to get a good hiding in those days, but Mum said my father was dead against it and he would always intervene if he saw someone hitting or shouting at a child or treating them badly.
‘Your father was a very gentle man and a great champion of children,’ she said. ‘He was a natural with them. You had bad colic when you were a tiny baby and he’d sit there for hours playing music from the ballet The Dying Swan on his cello trying to soothe you to sleep.’
‘He sounds like a lovely daddy,’ I said sadly.
Hearing how wonderful and kind he was made me feel even sadder that he wasn’t around, and even though I couldn’t really remember him I always felt his loss in my life.
The only father figure I had was my brother Raymond. He’d been very close to my father and I don’t think that he ever got over his death. People didn’t show their feelings in those days, though, and if I ever asked him about my dad, he would clam up.
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Rene,’ he would tell me.
My brother was very academic and clever, and he always bought me books. While other children my age were being read Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows, he brought me home the complete works of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
‘Sit down, Rene,’ he said one day. ‘I’m going to teach you to play chess.’
My father had taught Raymond to play chess and so he decided he was going to teach me. He was a chess whizz but I was four years old and had no interest whatsoever.
‘This is so boring,’ I moaned as we sat and stared at the checked board.
‘Oh, Rene, you’re such a fidget, it’s all about skill,’ he said.
But I preferred something much faster moving, and even though I adored Raymond it didn’t interest me in the slightest.
‘Oh, I give up,’ he said, exasperated. ‘One day, Rene, you’ll find something that you love doing.’
Even though I was only four years old I was about to stumble across something that would become my biggest passion for the rest of my life.
2
Through the darkness I saw them. Dancing around with their floaty wings like beautiful butterflies.
‘Fairies!’ I gasped. ‘I can see fairies!’
I felt as if I were in a dream and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I just sat there on the edge of my seat with my mouth gaping open as I watched these mystical creatures flitting around the stage.
‘Mummy,