I would think of the Old Vicarage as home until my parents moved out 20 years later. It was a wonderful place. As its appearance suggested, it was alive with history, secrets and magic. The walls were built of stones from the ruins of Hadleigh Castle on the Essex marshes and were up to three feet thick in places. I remember exploring the attic one day, squeezing under the eaves to find a secret room in which there was a stack of great, thick Bibles and newspapers from the 1800s. There was even rumoured to be a body buried under the doorstep, which was a huge lump of grey rock that certainly had the look of a gravestone. I’m surprised we never ran into any ghosts.
The house was surrounded by ancient trees, with thick, low branches that looked like they’d been put there for the sole purpose of climbing. One evening shortly after we moved in, I remember scaling the huge conker tree (it would later become the focal point of my teenage love life) at the bottom of the drive and gazing out at the sunset over Canvey Island, marvelling at how beautiful it was and wondering what extraordinary adventure life had in store for me.
First, though, I had to get school out of the way. After screwing up the eleven plus at Lindisfarne College – I only wrote my name – I was sent to the local Catholic convent, St Bernard’s, in the nearby suburb of Westcliff. I still hated school, but was fascinated by the nuns. What did their hair look like under their veils? What sort of knickers did they wear? One day, curiosity got the better of me: I scrambled up the high wall that surrounded their living quarters and peeked over to see their pantaloons hanging on the line in the yard, billowing voluminously in the breeze.
Although I had no interest in learning, I had a best friend at St Bernard’s, Dympna O’Brien, who looked as Irish as she sounded, and shared my dreaminess and love of adventure. We used to get up to all sorts of mischief together. When an extension was being built onto the school, Dymps and I spent the whole term flirting with the builders. This was a strict Catholic convent, remember, with male visitors few and far between, so to have a load of fit young blokes to gawp at was the best. Every break-time it was the same: ‘Ooh, let’s go and see the builders.’ We’d wave and they’d wink at us.
One day we decided to go up and talk to them properly, face to face. It must have taken weeks of planning. On the fateful day, we rolled our pleated navy skirts above our knees (it must have looked horrendous, great rolls of material stuffed around our waists), then sneaked up the stairs – out of bounds – and into the newly built corridor where the men were working away.
Dympna went boldly to the best-looking one. ‘So,’ she said, flicking her hair, ‘d’you have a girlfriend or a wife?’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘But I do have a kid.’
Dymps and I looked at each other, wide-eyed in disbelief. How on earth had that happened? Not even married and he’d got a child! We didn’t find out any more as, just then, Sister Mary caught us and put us in detention, but I remember being pretty shocked.
Mum and Dad had tried to teach me about the birds and bees when I was nine, but it had gone in one ear and out the other. It was around this time I went back to ask Mum for a recap: I needed to check out a rumour doing the rounds at school that you could get pregnant by kissing. This time I listened to every single detail. I went to school the next day and told Dympna the whole thing. ‘I just can’t imagine doing that with someone,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Your wedding night must be awful!’
I loved Dymps – and we’re still friends to this day – but, sadly, we weren’t in the same class. I was in the stupid group. The only subjects I was any good at were art and cookery. (Ironic, really, as my least favourite teacher took us for Home Economics: a slim, grey-haired Welsh woman who was a non-nun or ‘regular’ – she once gave me the ruler for making faces at Margaret Kennedy because she smelt of wee.) The teachers kept sending home reports saying, ‘Josephine doesn’t apply herself,’ and they were right. I just wasn’t interested in learning. My parents were so worried that they took me to have an IQ test and were surprised to discover I was in the top 10 per cent in Essex. But while Dad was tearing his hair out at my lack of scholastic enthusiasm, it didn’t worry me in the slightest.
I was barely twelve when my daydreams began to sharpen into a single focused ambition – and I certainly wouldn’t need to know quadratic equations or the date of the battle of Hastings to achieve it …
It was the end of the 1960s and everywhere you looked – on magazine covers, newspapers and our little black-and-white telly – you saw a model called Twiggy. From the very first moment I saw that girl with Bambi eyes on the pages of Jackie magazine, I knew I wanted to be her. I thought she was wonderful. I started reading everything I could about her (this must have been after my reading had improved!) and it dawned on me that the skinny Cockney kid who had come from nowhere to become a huge star was really just like me. Hey, Jo, I thought, you could do this, too!
There was only one small thing standing between me and model superstardom. My face. I’d been an angelic-looking little girl, but since my second teeth had come through things had gone badly wrong. I was so conscious of my new, huge, gappy teeth that I wouldn’t smile with my mouth open. Around the same time, Mum started cutting my fringe really short – ‘so we won’t have to do it very often’. Almost overnight I became this big-toothed, geeky-haired, skinny-legged kid. It was like the story of how the ugly duckling became a swan, but in reverse. All I needed was a pair of NHS glasses to complete the look.
I was 13, at the height of my Twiggy hero-worship, when my class was asked to write an essay with the title ‘My Future Career’. With unprecedented enthusiasm, I wrote all about how I was going to be a top model and live in a flat in Knightsbridge, and how my brother Paul, a famous painter, would come to visit. The next day I came into class to find a group of girls reading my essay aloud in fits of laughter.
Determined to prove the bullies wrong, that weekend I holed myself up in our bathroom, propped a picture of Twiggy against the mirror and got to work with a black kohl pencil. As I had fair eyelashes and small eyes, it was quite a transformation. I got rid of the hated fringe by pushing it to the side and put on some lipstick. If I kept my mouth shut so you couldn’t see The Teeth, I didn’t look at all bad.
I walked into the kitchen where Mum was having tea with Auntie Lily, Linda’s mum. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she stopped mid-gossip to stare at me.
‘Oh, my goodness, doesn’t she look beautiful?’ said Auntie Lily.
‘She does,’ smiled Mum. ‘Just like Twiggy.’
Suddenly – miraculously – I could see I had potential. Now that the idea of becoming a model didn’t seem quite so crazy, it occupied my every waking hour. I would stand in front of the mirror re-creating poses from magazines and daydream about being a model. It wasn’t the money or fame that appealed: I just wanted to wear fabulous clothes, be in beautiful pictures and shimmy down a catwalk. Celebrity had a certain innocence back then.
I don’t suppose my parents ever thought I’d really make it as a model. Mum was more up for it than Dad, though. When I first told him what I wanted to do with my life, he said that modelling was just another word for prostitution. I was confused. ‘What’s prostitution, Dad?’ He shut up pretty quickly – but I didn’t, and when Dad realized that this wasn’t just a passing phase and that I really did have my heart set on the catwalk, he decided I should at least get some sort of qualification in it. To him, that made it more respectable. So, in the summer of my 14th year, my parents sent me – oh, joy! – on a course at the London Academy of Modelling.
The academy was on Old Bond Street and every morning I would get the train up to London by myself, feeling so glamorous and grown-up, striding through Mayfair like some groovy Biba girl. The tutors were former models and taught us etiquette, makeup skills and how to walk with stacks of books on our heads. Back then it was all about deportment – keeping your shoulders back and chin up – and nothing like the slouchy strut of today’s models. There was no bitchiness or rivalry among the other