‘Was it pink and blue with little flowers on it and a stretchy elasticated waist?’ I piped.
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed.1 ‘How do you know that? Did you sneak a look?’ She wagged her finger at me.
‘NO,’ I shouted. ‘I know because it fell out of your handbag and it’s down the road!’ I was off, I had already swung open the front door and I flew as fast as my legs would allow back to where I’d seen MY skirt.
That day was the first time I had an inkling of ‘not normal’. It began to register that KNOWING, the kind that comes from deep inside, isn’t normal. I didn’t like how it felt to be different. I wanted to be loved and trusted unconditionally. I began to be curious about ‘normal’.
And it wasn’t long before I encountered an opportunity to make a trade for normality.
I need to set the scene a little more... My parents did the very best they could for us; I guess I’d describe them as innovative ‘now’ age hippies, way ahead of their time. They fed us organic and whole foods; we didn’t have sugar until we were at least three. Unnecessary vaccinations and medicines were a no-no and in education we were gifted to Steiner Schools2 as much as they could afford. Steiner school was great for me at Kindergarten; there were stories and large colourful wax crayons and yoga. It was only later, after I was seven, that it was another thing that I decided made me weird and not normal.
Steiner School meant no television and no plastic toys. Our toys were animals carved out of wood or handmade dolls. It was beautiful, but it was not ‘normal’. One day, I took my handmade doll to the park. The sort of park you got next to every housing estate in England in the eighties: a strip of grass with a swing-set, a slide with puddles on it, a sandbox full of cigarette ends and a couple of ride-on animals on big metal springs. We were at the park with our au pair, a young French girl who sat on a bench and read her book. While she read, we played. For my brother that meant interacting with the equipment and for me it meant interacting with other kids. I chatted to a girl from the estate. She spoke differently to us. She said ‘waughtar’, we said ‘water’. She was normal. She had a television at home and she had Star Wars figures with her in the park and I had a handmade doll. We switched. My mum was furious.
This experience reinforced what I believed to be true. We really weren’t normal.
The next BIG thing that happened when I was seven is that two girls I didn’t know died from anorexia. My dad was reading the newspaper and when he got to the story about these young girls he called me over and we had a conversation about it. Before that day I hadn’t really thought anything about my body. It just was. I can see now that the relationship I developed over the years with food has been for the most part about control and certainty. When I needed to find and gain control, ‘anorexia’ and later bulimic behaviour was what I pulled out of my toolbox. Later I moved on to other things too, but restricting and then rebelling and binging on food has most often been my addictive and numbing technique of choice. I am not an expert on, nor have I studied eating disorders or addiction; I have learned a great deal about food and nutrition over the years but what I recount throughout this book is only my experience and what I believe about my on-going relationship with ‘Self and God’. (One of the best books I have ever read on this subject is Women, Food and God – An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth. I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves restricting or bingeing on food.)
Three months after I turned seven we moved to the south coast, to Brighton. Brighton is my spiritual home. I have lived here on and off ever since. Even when I live somewhere else, Brighton is still my ‘home’.
We arrived the weekend of the hurricane in 1987 and whilst my brother slept soundly through it, I got into bed with my mum and dad and began to realise that the world could be a pretty scary place. While my mum lit tea lights and placed them all around, I crept over to the sash windows and carefully looked outside. Dustbin lids flew up the street, trees had fallen onto cars. It was fierce. It was not normal.
Wild weather like that probably makes everyone think about God. Or the Universe, or the Divine, or whatever. As I lay in bed I really began, probably for the first time, to think in this way. Something MUCH bigger, greater than me, could crumple cars and blow over trees.
As a child I knew a little about Judaism and that our families had been Jewish but the teachings were not passed on to us. Neither of my parents practised any sort of organised faith. Being Jewish is passed through one’s mother and my mum wasn’t Jewish because her mum wasn’t. Both our fathers were, so I saw myself as three quarters Jewish. I felt and still feel that our ancestry is a very important part of my identity. Whilst the faith and teachings weren’t of so much interest to me, the rituals, the story and history was. We didn’t really celebrate the Jewish holidays (apart from the occasional Seder at Pesach with my paternal grandmother.) My mum got us involved with the more pagan holidays – Solstice, Mayday, and Equinox and we sort of celebrated Christmas and Easter like everyone else. I mean we did, but not the religious part. I was fascinated by my friends who went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I had another friend who went to church every Sunday and if I stayed the night at hers I wasn’t allowed to come up and take communion with them so instead I remained alone in the pews eating her penny sweets, contemplating why anyone would want to eat the body of Christ. Our Jewishness or non-Jewishness confused me. It added to an array of things that confused me. I had so many questions. I was so curious. I needed answers and Google hadn’t been invented yet. So I went to my dad. Sometimes when I asked a question he would answer and other times, he would throw the question back to me and I would say: ‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t know is a lazy answer.’ He sent me off to look in an encyclopaedia.
Encyclopaedias are enormous and these days you can’t give them away, but back then owning a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas was a big deal. They were huge and they had no pictures; they were boring. So often, after what felt like forever of trying to find the right book and the right section, I would just make something up.
In my adult life this is something that I am thankful I learned, I am now proud of my ability to find out or blag it. I believe that saying YES and finding out how to execute something afterwards is one of the most commonly shared attributes of entrepreneurs.
My childhood – the liberalism, the organic and wholefood diet, yoga, open mindedness, lack of TV and encouragement of creativity in both thinking and expression – were fantastic. NOW I am hugely grateful and thankful for the attention, consideration and energy my parents gave us, but in the 1990s? Not so much. I wanted NORMAL. I wanted a normal name. I wanted a TV. I wanted plastic toys. I wanted a hairdresser or someone qualified to cut my hair. Being the hippy child with hand-me-down clothes and hedge-like frizzy hair who made up answers about things she didn’t know was not cool and it was not normal.
Being normal meant belonging, and I didn’t feel as though I belonged. I didn’t belong anywhere. We were a sort of nothing, in between everything and everybody else. We weren’t council-estate poor. We weren’t rich enough to eat whatever we wanted out of the fridge. We weren’t real Jews but we weren’t atheists. We didn’t believe strongly in politics. There wasn’t a family motto, or a football team. We didn’t have a band that we were publicly in support of. In fact we didn’t do anything publicly. We kept ourselves to ourselves, but we weren’t a team either. I constantly felt like I had something to be ashamed of, but I wasn’t sure what. I felt like we had to hide, but I wasn’t sure why.
Take Halloween. In most people’s houses it was a fun time, for dressing up all spooky, having fun, and eating sweets. In our house it was an evening when we stayed in, at the back of the house, with all the lights