A few years ago I fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by getting my car racing licence and zipping around the track at Silverstone in a Morgan turbo classic. In 2012, I went on a fantastic charity road trip with 55 remarkable women in a fleet of Maseratis, Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys; my sister Lize and I were in my Mercedes AMG. The route took us from London to Monte Carlo, via Paris, Geneva and Milan, but my own adventure very nearly ended at Dover.
‘Passport, please,’ said the officer at the border.
Oh, God. I’d forgotten my passport. ‘I’ve got my driving licence,’ I said hopefully.
‘You can’t get into France without a passport,’ he said.
Lize and I begged and pleaded with him and he must have taken pity on us because in the end he waved us through. ‘I haven’t seen you,’ he said, with the ghost of a smile.
By the time Dad died he had built up a museum of at least a hundred scooters, every model Lambretta had ever made lovingly restored. He was such a craftsman. When I was eight he took me to the scrapyard where we found an old bike frame and parts. He took them back to his workshop, put them all together, renovated it to mint condition and – ta-dah! – I had a beautiful new bicycle with a basket on the front. I loved hanging out with him in his workshop, watching him make incredible models of new towns, marvelling at his steady hand as he painted tiny windows or the lines down the middle of the street. Sometimes he’d let me help, teaching me how to make bits of foam into trees and spray-paint them green.
If there was one cloud on the otherwise blissfully clear horizon of my childhood, it was school. I hated it with a passion, and would do anything I could to avoid it, until the magical day when I could finally escape at 16. The only reason I learnt to count was so that I could work out how many days I had to endure before I could leave. All that ‘sit up straight, don’t talk, learn this’ just didn’t sit with my dreamy, romantic nature. Even at my primary school, Swan Mead, I would often sneak home for beans on toast, with Mum as my willing accomplice: ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she would say. ‘You can stay and have lunch at home.’ Dad never found out because he was at work.
It was a good job he didn’t: I don’t think he’d have been pleased. Dad was in charge of learning – and he was quite the disciplinarian. I remember him shouting at me because I could not (or would not) understand how to tell the time. When I was struggling to learn my times-tables he wrote them out on rolls of wallpaper and stuck them all around my bedroom so when I lay in bed I could memorize them. I didn’t. Maybe one of the reasons I rebelled against school was because he tried to push me so hard.
Dad and I had a wonderful relationship but, God, he was strict. I think that came from his father, who was extremely tough with him, and Dad’s two years’ national service with the RAF after leaving school. You crossed him at your peril. When I was seven I sneaked a tin of drinking chocolate out of the kitchen cupboard. Dad discovered me eating spoonfuls of it and I got the wooden spoon, seven strokes on my bum, as you always got the same number as your age. Another time, my brother Paul found a crowbar – he was a cheeky little boy and very funny, but always up to mischief. Well, I came round the corner to see him smashing it on the vicarage wall and freaked. ‘Dad’s going to kill us!’ We all got the wooden spoon that time, even though I hadn’t done anything. After another misdemeanour we had to choose our own stick from a tree and then he hit the back of our legs with it. It was absolutely terrifying, the prospect of knowing that this awful thing was about to happen to you – and there was no way you could get out of it.
We were all scared stiff of Dad, even the four-legged family members. I remember once he found Mum’s cat eating food off the kitchen work surface. He picked Fusty up and threw him out of the window. That cat never went near him again. Dad was strict with us, but I learnt discipline, politeness and manners. I had the utmost respect for him.
* * *
I love animals but I’m not good at keeping pets. When I was little I had a rabbit called Snowy, but I soon got bored of taking care of him and forgot to feed him, so Dad told me he was giving him to the postman who lived down the road. ‘Okay.’ I shrugged. After a few days I started to miss Snowy and his soft white fur, so I trotted down the road and knocked on the door.
The postman’s wife answered. ‘Hello, Josephine.’ She smiled at me kindly.
‘I’ve come to see Snowy.’
She looked confused.
‘My rabbit?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. I’m afraid we’ve eaten him, dear.’
From then on I vowed never to have another pet. I wasn’t going to go through that again.
* * *
Although they were always very sociable, my parents didn’t really drink – apart from maybe a few at Christmas – and Dad never smoked. I remember watching Ready, Steady, Go on telly – I must have been about 10, and the Rolling Stones came on. Dad looked on disapprovingly. ‘Disgusting lads.’ He tutted into his tea. You can imagine how he felt when, years later, I brought one of those very same lads home to Sunday lunch – although by that time I’d caused him and Mum so many anxious, sleepless nights that my dating a rock star probably didn’t seem so terrible, after all.
‘Not far now, kids, just up this hill …’
It was a few weeks before Christmas 1964 and we were crammed into the back of Dad’s Singer Gazelle, with the little silver antelope that seemed poised to leap off the bonnet, on the way to see our new home. Dad and Mum were in the front (Lize was a large bump under her maternity dress), while Paul, Vinnie and I sat in the back, our excited chatter fogging up the car windows. We had only gone a few miles from our old house but, as the road twisted up through a dense green tunnel of trees, it seemed a world away from the suburban neatness of Vange.
A property developer Dad worked with had commissioned him to build a model for a development of six new homes in Benfleet on the site of the village’s old vicarage. While Dad was going through the plans, which included a new home for the vicar, he noticed a large building at the back of the site – the old vicarage, which the developer was planning to pull down. Intrigued, Dad went to have a look at the place and immediately fell in love with it. Now he was taking the rest of us to see it.
We turned onto a muddy driveway, then the trees opened into a clearing and there it was. The Old Vicarage. I jumped out of the car, gasping with delight. The house looked like a miniature castle, with Gothic archways, church-style windows and a pointed red-tiled roof with high chimneys sticking up, like candles on a birthday cake. We heaved open the front door, and soon Paul and I were running from room to room, with Dad recording every shriek of excitement on his little 8mm cine camera. Inside, the house was a maze of small, oddly shaped rooms with stone fireplaces and wooden floors. It was cold and dark, the only light coming from bare bulbs that cast eerie shadows and revealed strange marks on the walls (we found out later that the vicar’s son had played indoor football). After years of dreaming I was a princess in a fairytale, now I would live out that fantasy for real – and I certainly didn’t care that my castle was more Brothers Grimm than Disney.
The house needed to be completely redecorated, but we moved in anyway and the renovations kept my parents occupied for the next few years. They were both pretty groovy and they kitted out the house with a mix of vintage finds and contemporary pieces: an antique refectory table and thrones with turned legs, a bright orange couch for the living room and a space-age copper lampshade on a coiled cable that I’d pull down over my head, like a spotlight, and belt out Hendrix’s ‘Hey Jo’. I got the interior design bug too, deciding on imitation bamboo-design wallpaper for my bedroom to make it look ‘tropical’. Not exactly appropriate for an old stone vicarage