And then one day Pop brought home a tall, scary-looking woman with carefully curled dark hair and a very posh accent, whom he introduced as Billie.
‘Billie’s been living in India,’ Pop told me. ‘And now she’s back here, she’s driving ambulances.’
I gazed at her.
‘Do you know anything about India?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t that where they have tigers?’ I blushed. That’s all I could think of.
‘What’s your dog’s name?’ she asked, and I told her it was Bunty. ‘I have a bitch called Floogie,’ she said. ‘She was a stray and we found her one day when we were out in the ambulance, so I snuck her back to base and kept her.’
‘Why did you call her Floogie?’
She smiled. ‘Don’t you know the song “Flat-footed Floogie with the Floy-floy”?’ She turned to Pop. ‘It was originally “Flat-footed Floozie”, but they had to change it so the radios would play it.’ They both chuckled.
I didn’t know what a floozie was, never mind a floogie or a floy-floy, and I felt a bit left out. She and Pop seemed very friendly with one another and I didn’t like it one bit. She was smiling at me and trying to appear kind, but there was something about her I didn’t trust right from the start. I think it was because her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Maybe I knew she was only pretending to be nice and didn’t really feel it.
Over tea I learned that Billie had been married to an officer in the Indian Army but they’d got divorced. And then Pop dropped the bombshell. ‘Billie and I have some very exciting news for you,’ he said. ‘We are planning to get married so that she will be like a new mummy for you. Isn’t that nice? What’s more, you can be the bridesmaid at our wedding.’
I grimaced. Billie was nothing like my mum and I made up my mind then and there that I would certainly never call her Mum. I didn’t mind being a bridesmaid because I’d never been one before, but I worried about what their being married might entail.
‘Does that mean you’ll come to live in our house?’ I asked, and I suppose my tone of voice didn’t sound very enthusiastic.
‘Don’t be rude,’ Pop said. ‘Of course she will. We’ll all be one happy family.’
It seemed to be no time at all after they broke the news that we were all trooping off to Salisbury Registry Office, me in a short flouncy dress that stuck out at the sides, and it became official: Pop and Billie were married. They took me with them for their honeymoon in Belgium, where we stayed with friends of theirs, and I felt utterly lost and alone in the world. Pop had been my only ally and now he was lavishing all his attention on this posh woman I hardly knew. We were in a strange country, with strange people speaking a different language, and I felt completely cut off. If only I had a brother or sister, I thought. At least we’d be in this together. We could have ganged up and played tricks on her, and kept each other company.
Billie was nice to me on the honeymoon, trying to play-act at being my new mum, but on the way home we stopped at a hotel in Dover, where she decided to cut my shoulder-length hair. ‘It’s far too much trouble to look after,’ she said by way of explanation. She had been a hairdresser herself before she got married the first time, and she wielded the scissors, giving me a short crop that made me look like a boy. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror, remembering all the care Mum had lavished on my hair, and I knew things were only going to get worse from here on in.
3
My Closest Friend, Grizelda the Goat
At first Billie’s influence was just felt in terms of strictness about the way she ran the household. She was constantly chiding me to speak ‘properly’ and adopt a posh accent like hers instead of the Wiltshire one of my schoolmates; I wasn’t allowed to mix with anyone she didn’t consider to be of ‘our class’; and at seven shillings a week she decided that my riding lessons were far too expensive and had to be stopped. I was distraught about this and begged her to reconsider, but she said things like ‘needs must’ and ‘don’t be a spoiled little girl’, which meant there was no room for discussion.
Before long I was constantly on edge, waiting to be told what I had done wrong, and Pop never intervened to support me; he was a gentle, go-with-the-flow person who was soon totally under Billie’s thumb. We hardly had any time alone together anymore because he was out at work during the day, and when he came home Billie was there. I remember once he took me to the airfield at Boscombe Down, and I was allowed to climb into the cockpit of Fairey Delta 2, a new plane that had just broken the world speed record. It had a long pointy nose and was very narrow. Inside, I sat in the pilot’s seat, holding onto the steering column and looking at the figures on all the dials; one of these dials had recorded the speed of 1,132 miles per hour that it had achieved to break the record. I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be in the pilot’s seat then as the world whizzed past. That was a pretty special treat.
After I showed an interest in Fairey Delta 2, Dad told me about the rickety little planes he used to work on in the First World War. ‘Like string bags made out of balsa wood and cloth treated with dope,’ he said, which made them terrible fire hazards. He’d been a Flight Sergeant with 56 Squadron and had fitted out planes in France, then when the war ended he’d gone on a goodwill flight to South Africa with dozens of stops along the way – he showed me them on the map. After that he went out to work on planes in India for a couple of years. I was in awe of this. It seemed terribly glamorous to be an aeroplane fitter back in the days when aviation was in its infancy.
Sometimes Pop would sneak into my bedroom and wake me in the middle of the night if there was a nightingale singing outside, or if there was a particularly dramatic thunderstorm he thought I’d like to watch. We were both fans of thunder and lightning. But otherwise Billie was always around and always criticising both of us.
With Pop, her main complaint was that he didn’t earn enough money to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed in India. Our Salisbury home was a perfectly nice semi-detached house with a beautiful garden, but Billie wanted something grander where she could be a lady of the manor. She persuaded Pop to buy Glebe House in West Lavington, a gorgeous old property which was actually three cottages knocked into one. It stood in three-quarters of an acre of garden with a trout stream running through it. I think this was a stretch for them to afford because Billie insisted that I paid for my own bedroom with the £200 Mum had left me in her will, which was in a building society account in my name.
I liked the West Lavington house, especially after Billie got a goat, which we kept in a shed in the garden. I became very close to that goat, who was named Grizelda. I never talked about my emotions to any human beings – I saw it as a sign of weakness now, something that could be used against me – but I always found solace in animals, and Grizelda was an exceptionally good listener. Every day, when I got home from school, I’d take out the vegetable peelings for her and sit telling her about my day: I’d talk about any girls who’d been mean to me, or teachers who were cross, or complain about the amount of homework we had. Grizelda would munch on her carrot tops, regarding me with a wise expression, then bend her head for me to scratch it. She genuinely was my best friend and confidante through those early teenage years.
I did try to make other friends. Someone told me about a youth club in West Lavington, something