And I liked things my way and wanted to make my own decisions. I remember once being on holiday with my parents when I was 10 and they decided we should all have a sleep in the afternoon. Of course, I had different ideas. Darren, who would have been 11, and I sat in the lounge of the self-catering apartment we had and made up a song called ‘Half A Beer Saint Allier’ after finding a bottle of it in the fridge. We’d sing, ‘Half a beer Saint Allier round and round,’ and spin the bottle. When the bottle stopped, it was time to take a swig. Needless to say, we were roaring drunk when our parents woke up. They blamed me, even though Darren was older. They were probably right to do so. To this day I’ve never been able to drink beer without remembering that afternoon!
Speaking my mind was always my only option. In situations where other people would keep their mouths shut for a quiet life, I was the opposite. Darren used to say to me, ‘Why do you have to say what everyone else is thinking? Why do you do that?’ But biting my tongue just wasn’t me – if I had something to say I wanted to be able to say it, which caused some eye-rolling. ‘Oh, Karren!’
I was fiercely determined. If I wanted something and my parents wouldn’t give it to me, I’d find a way to get it for myself. I was never given pocket money: my parents always said, ‘If you need something, let us know,’ which was very kind of them, but I wanted to be in charge of my own money. I recall them once saying no to something I wanted, I can’t remember what it was – but I haven’t forgotten what I decided to do. I put up signs in my bedroom window – it was my bedroom so I could do what I liked, I reasoned – saying, ‘Massages, manicures, come inside!’ My mother was shouting up, ‘Who are all these weirdoes coming to the door?’ and I bawled back, ‘They’re my customers!’
I was definitely bloody-minded. I once put up a Vote Labour poster in my bedroom just because my parents were Conservatives. ‘Take that down!’ my dad roared.
‘It’s my bedroom!’
He said, ‘What does the poster even mean?’ and I didn’t know, of course, I just knew it would wind him up and cause a debate.
I wasn’t all trouble, though. From an early age I had enormous energy and an appetite for hard work. I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and go to work with Nanny Nina, who was an office cleaner. No one made me do that – I enjoyed it. Even then I just really liked working. And to this day I love cleaning.
Another thing I learnt when I was very young was never to take no as the final answer, that there is always room for a bit more manoeuvring. At my boarding school you were given a limited number of weekend passes to go home. I quickly worked out that if you asked all the time and the nuns felt they were always saying no, they were more likely to say yes – eventually. So I’d ask every weekend. They’d say no, so I’d say, ‘Well, you’ve said no five times and it’s important,’ and they‘d give in. In the end, I had more time at home than anybody else, through strategy and sheer persistence.
Despite all the effort I made to go home, I was confident that I could take care of myself. My mother used to say, ‘You’re absolutely fearless, I don’t know where you get it from.’ Even as a young child I wanted to go out on my own, do my own thing. I longed to be independent. Before I was boarding, I took the bus to school from an early age, and on Saturdays I’d go to Wood Green, not far from where we lived, which had a high street and a bit of bustle. I think eventually my parents just thought, Oh, get on with it – I was a bit too much for them.
When I was about 14, I’d tell my mum I was going to stay the night with my best friend, Charlotte, who would tell her mum she was staying at my house. Then we would meet up with our clothes in carrier bags, get changed, take the Tube into central London and go out in Soho. When everything closed we’d walk around until the Tube restarted in the early morning and go back to our borough, Enfield, walk around until 10, then go home. Mum would say, ‘Well, you look very tired.’ But she never knew.
Years later, when I told her, she was shocked, but I was even more shocked by what she said to me. She looked at my daughter and said, ‘What goes around, come around.’ I went very cold and felt terrible about what I had done. But at the time I couldn’t have cared less. Nothing was going to happen to me: I was in control, I was safe – or, at least, I thought I was. But if I imagine my 15-year-old going out all night now, well …
But back then I was at that point when you’re not a child but not quite an adult. I thought I knew everything and I would voice my opinions all the time. If someone said black, I’d say white, just because.
Once, my father invited me to some do with a lot of businesspeople. I’d heard him say that one of them had gone bankrupt twice and had ‘knocked’ a lot of people, then set up in business again. I didn’t quite know what that meant but I knew it wasn’t very good. Dad was talking to this man, who made a negative comment about someone I knew.
‘How can you say that when you go round knocking people?’ I asked. Everyone stared at the floor and my dad tried to laugh it off. I continued, ‘But it’s true, though, isn’t it? How can you criticise somebody when that’s the way you do things?’ I think Dad secretly liked it, because I was saying what everyone was thinking. Mind you, it was the first and last event like that he ever took me to!
I wasn’t naughty or spiteful or vindictive, but I was quite demanding, opinionated and defiant. I like to think I was free-spirited, but my parents obviously didn’t agree! All in all, I must have been quite a nerve-racking daughter, and maybe that’s partly why my parents sent me to the nuns – they couldn’t rein me in.
My school, Poles Convent, was in the middle of nowhere, in Hertfordshire. The school doesn’t exist any more – the building is now a golf club and very beautiful.
People will say, ‘This is your school?’
And I say, ‘It really wasn’t like this then.’
It was an unhappy place, a bit like something out of Dickens. There was a long drive up to the school with two cattle grids and you knew when you’d gone over the second that you were past the point of no return; it was just awful. My closest friend, my-all-night-in-Soho companion, who went there too, says that her lasting memory of the school is that she was always unhappy and hungry, which just about sums it up.
It was very religious, with mass twice a day. Everyone was bored and restless, and it wasn’t as though you were even getting a really good education, because the teaching was variable. And you had no life experiences, because you never met anybody. It was very isolating and I was a bit of a loner. I didn’t have many friends because I didn’t want many friends. There were a lot of geeky, closeted girls who’d never seen anything, never been anywhere, never done anything, for whom going into Ware town centre nearby was the most amazing thing you could imagine. I just found the things they were into mind-numbingly boring. They thought it was great to stay up all night reading Jackie magazine, or watch Wimbledon all day.
Still, some of the girls did things that I would never have dreamed of doing. I was feisty and spirited but I wouldn’t smuggle boys or booze into the bedroom. There were lines I didn’t cross and that was as much about my father’s wrath as anything. My parents were easy-going to a point, but if you crossed that point … I would get as close to the barrier as I could and push against it, but I knew when to stop.
In those days my father had interests in the music business and I would take my friends to pop concerts. We’d have backstage passes to everything from Live Aid to Paul Young, which created a bit of jealousy at school, where the atmosphere was very emotional – girls got worked up about trivial things, unable to take a mature view. You can imagine, with all those teenage girls cooped up with too little to do, things would get out of proportion. But I’m not that sort of person. I don’t get