I loved Selfridges and I knew all the departments like the back of my hand. I’d go straight up to the first floor to look at all the fancy ball gowns. I’d walk along the rails, touching the brightly coloured taffeta dresses and admiring the intricate beading. Sometimes I’d get the lift up to the roof, where I’d watch fashionable ladies and gents going for a promenade around the manicured gardens. There was even a café up there and a women’s gun club.
Afterwards I’d saunter along Oxford Street to Hyde Park, where I’d sit by the Serpentine and watch the birds and climb a few trees. Once, I was walking along a secluded path when I noticed a man coming towards me in a mackintosh. Call it a sixth sense, but I could tell straight away that something wasn’t right about him. He looked a bit scruffy and his clothes were all grubby. As he got closer he suddenly held his mac open, and I realised that he had his flies undone and his bits and pieces were hanging out for all and sundry to see!
‘Eurgh, put it away!’ I laughed.
But he just closed his coat, walked past and didn’t say a word.
I wasn’t scared or frightened, I just thought it was hysterically funny. If that was the way that he got his kicks then good luck to him, I thought. Then I caught the No. 49 home, my stomach rumbling with hunger at the thought of a boiled egg for tea.
In a way, even though I was still only eight I was a pretty savvy and streetwise child. Flashers were very common in those days and most of them seemed harmless to my friends and me. I coped with it better than my poor mother. I remember her coming home one night after work absolutely furious.
‘Oh my goodness, Rene,’ she said dramatically. ‘Something dreadful has just happened. I don’t believe it.’
‘What is it, Mum?’ I asked.
She explained how she had been on the Northern line and she’d been in the carriage on her own when a man had got on.
‘I’d just got up as mine was the next stop when he undid his trousers and exposed himself to me.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked her.
‘Well, I marched over to him and said: “How dare you do that to me, you disgusting little man.” I was so angry, do you know what I did, Rene?’
‘No, Mum.’
‘I was so cross, I got my violin case and I slammed it down really hard on his you-know-what. Hopefully that will teach him not to do that in a hurry again.’
My mum was a tiny woman, and she looked very prim with her two long plaits that she tied up on the top of her head. I bet he hadn’t been expecting her reaction.
‘Is your violin all right, Mum?’ I asked with a smirk.
Things were still very strained between Mum and her family, and as I got older I became more aware of the tensions. One day I went to visit my Aunty Vi, who lived in Hendon, north London. My mother never came with me, and I liked going because I could play with my cousin Shirley, who was four years older than me.
‘Violet’s a terrible snob,’ my mother warned me as she walked with me to the Tube station. ‘Just ignore anything she says to you.’
It wasn’t long before Aunty Vi started bragging about my cousin Shirley and how well she was doing at school.
‘She’s so bright there’s no doubt she’ll go to university one day,’ she said.
‘Will I go to university too?’ I asked.
Aunty Vi just laughed.
‘I doubt that very much, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re clever enough for university. You’ll have probably left long before it’s time to do matriculation.’
Matriculation was the exam that you took in high school to determine whether you were clever enough to go on to further education.
‘Well, I don’t need to go to university,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to be a ballet dancer.’
‘A ballet dancer?’ said Aunty Vi, aghast. ‘You’ll never make a dancer, Rene. You’re not pretty enough and I seriously doubt that you’ve got the talent, either.’
Hearing that sort of criticism at such a young age from someone should have been a crushing blow. But I’d heard it all before, so I just let it wash over me and refused to get angry about it.
It was always the same criticisms that I’d hear time and time again whenever I went over there – I wasn’t clever enough, pretty enough, slim enough, rich enough. I got so used to it I didn’t even bother answering her back. It didn’t matter to me that I was constantly criticised and put down. I didn’t really care what my aunties and uncles thought. In a way it made me even more determined.
‘I will be a ballet dancer one day,’ I told my cousin Shirley. ‘Just you wait and see.’
I never told Mum what Aunty Violet had said, though. I knew she would be furious and I didn’t want to make the rift between her and her sisters any bigger.
Sometimes it was just as bad at home. I was always very loyal to my mother, and I hated it when my grandparents would criticise her to my face.
One day my grandfather was grumbling about her and saying how she never had enough money. Anyone could say what they liked about me, but when it came to my mother it was a completely different matter. I had a sparky temper and if someone pushed the wrong buttons then I wasn’t frightened of speaking my mind.
‘Don’t you dare run Mummy down like that, Papa,’ I told him.
‘I don’t know why you always stick up for your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s a failure and she should have never married that father of yours.’
‘She’s doing the best she can,’ I shouted.
My grandfather had a typical Victorian attitude to children – he thought they should be seen and not heard – and he was furious that I’d answered him back.
‘Don’t speak to me like that, young lady,’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to lock you in your room and see if that teaches you a lesson.’
But when he tried to grab hold of me I went berserk. I lashed out at him, kicking and screaming.
‘I won’t have you behave like this, Rene,’ he yelled. ‘You’re a silly little girl who’s never going to make anything of your life, just like your mother.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I yelled. ‘I’m going to be a dancer.’
‘A dancer?’ he scoffed. ‘I doubt that very much.’
When Mum got home and I told her what had happened she didn’t seem surprised. She knew what her father was like.
‘I think it’s time that we tried to find somewhere else to live,’ she told me. ‘We need our own space.’
I knew that she found it a strain living with her parents and a few weeks later we moved out. Mum had found a job as a carer for an old spinster called Miss Higgins, who was paralysed from the chest down after contracting polio as a child and was completely bed-bound. We’d save money on rent because we’d be living with the old lady in her 1920s semi-detached house in Norbury. She had the downstairs, and Raymond, Mum and I had the upstairs. Miss Higgins was obviously wealthy, as the house was nicely decorated and pristine, but it was clear from the start that Mum hated every minute of it.
‘Oh, that woman,’ she said. ‘She just treats me like a dogsbody. It’s no wonder that she never has any visitors.’
She’d gone through several carers before Mum, and it wasn’t