‘We will both go along together,’ she ruled when I told her about it. ‘I will judge whether or not it is suitable.’
I imagined her charging in, wearing her fur coat and full make-up, turning up her nose at the club, announcing that they were the ‘wrong sort of people’, while I tried to hide behind her in my embarrassment. Cringing, I said, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll bother after all.’
I hadn’t forgotten my love of horses, and I found that if I turned up at the local stables every weekend to muck out, they let me have a ride every now and then. There was a field of horses very near our house and sometimes I would sneak out with a halter I’d made out of string and ride around on one of them. I was never happier than when I was out on horseback with the wind in my hair. When you’re out there on a horse, you have to be able to deal with whatever happens, and I was learning a lot about being self-sufficient. I was getting good at it.
After leaving Devizes Road Primary I attended Devizes Grammar School, a co-ed some distance away from home. Every morning I had to catch a bus then walk a mile and a half, which inevitably got me there late, doing the same on the way home. It was difficult to make friends since I lived so far from school and wasn’t allowed to invite anyone home, or to take part in after-school activities. Billie had other plans for me: unpaid housework. I did the washing, the ironing, the cleaning, fed the dogs, prepared the vegetables for dinner every evening and washed up afterwards. I guess she’d had servants to do all these things in India, and in West Lavington I became the substitute punkah-wallah.
Soon I began to rebel, and we clashed bitterly. I was distraught when I came home from school one day to find that Billie had retrieved my old doll’s house from the attic, driven a stake through it and turned it into a bird table in the garden.
‘What are you so upset about?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t play with it anymore.’
‘I wanted to keep it. It was my special thing that Pop made me. How could you destroy it?’
‘At least it’s doing some good now instead of just taking up space.’ She failed to understand its emotional significance, and when I told Pop that evening he just shrugged and sighed and opened his paper. He’d do anything to avoid a fight.
Billie didn’t ever beat me but she locked me in my bedroom as punishment for misdemeanours, not realising that I could slither through the bars at the window and jump down onto the roof of the goat shed below. I suppose in retrospect I was a bit of a rebel.
One flashpoint was clothes: whereas my mum had bought me a new coat and new shoes every year because I was a ‘growing girl’, Billie complained about the cost of things. She would never buy me the correct school uniform, instead sending me to school in a hotch-potch of garments, for which the teachers told me off. My out-of-school clothes were all frumpy hand-me-downs from Billie’s sister, which Billie insisted that I ‘make do with and mend’. When I complained, she retorted, ‘What do you want nice clothes for? You’ve got a face like a spade.’
One of our worst fights came after I got home from school one day to find that Grizelda was gone.
‘Where is she?’ I screamed. ‘What have you done with Grizelda?’
‘She got on my nerves, eating everything in the garden,’ Billie said, ‘so I gave her away to a farmer.’
‘Which farmer? Where is she?’ I wouldn’t stop my persistent questioning until Billie gave in and told me where Grizelda had been rehomed, then I charged out of the house and walked all the way there. When Grizelda saw me she got so excited she tried to leap over the fence. I hugged her and cried, but had no choice but to leave her there when it was time to go home again. I missed her terribly after that.
When I asked, in typical teenage fashion, ‘What about me? Don’t my feelings come into it?’ Billie replied, crushingly: ‘You? You’re less than a grain of sand in the universe.’
Only once did Pop stand up for me in a fight with Billie. We were in the car and I was begging her to buy me some summer stockings rather than the awful 60-denier nylon pair I was supposed to make last for an entire school year. ‘Who do you think you are? Lady Muck?’ Billie rebuked. ‘We’re not made of money, you know.’ Suddenly, Pop screeched the car to a halt and yelled, ‘You will not treat her like that. Get out of the car!’ There was a blazing row, but for once he stood his ground and made Billie walk the three miles home.
When I was around fourteen, Pop was made redundant from his job as representative of Fairey Aviation when they closed down that branch of the aircraft testing site at Boscombe Down. He could have retired at that stage, but Billie persuaded him that they wouldn’t have enough money to live on from his pension. She had very expensive tastes, particularly in home décor, constantly changing our carpets, curtains and upholstery for the latest shades and styles. She insisted that Pop went back to work in the aerodrome storeroom, which was a huge climb-down for someone who had been in charge, and I could tell he hated it. We downsized to a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, and I moved to the South Wilts Grammar School for Girls for my third year onwards.
The overwhelming feeling in my teens was loneliness and isolation. My contemporaries in the late fifties and early sixties were listening to pop music, wearing the latest fashions and going to dances where live bands played, but I had no social life except accompanying Pop and Billie to evenings spent playing cards with their friends. Every day after school my classmates hung out in the Red Cockerel coffee shop, chatting to boys and having a laugh. I yearned to join them but my pocket money was all taken up paying for school lunches, and besides, I’d have been in big trouble if I missed the bus home. I sat in the window seat of the bus watching them all clustered round a table in the Red Cockerel and felt like an alien species. It was such a lonely feeling.
In the early years of their marriage they had talked, tantalisingly, about adopting a child because Billie couldn’t have any of her own, and she said she’d always wanted to have a son. They made enquiries but Billie found the adoption agency’s assessment procedures rude and intrusive.
‘These flipping people, they want to come and inspect our house and ask all sorts of personal questions about us, and they haven’t even let me see what kind of child they might have available. I’m not putting up with this!’ she exclaimed.
My chance of gaining an ally, someone I could be close to, were dashed. After that my only hope was escape, to start a life of my own somewhere I could make my own choices and determine my own fate.
4
I passed two A Levels in sixth form and hoped to study agriculture at college, to pursue my love of animals. Billie objected to this plan, though – ‘It’s no career for a young lady’ – and instead I was signed up to study horticulture at Nottingham, which she deemed more fitting. That summer Dad and Billie moved to Deal in Kent (he had finally retired completely from the aerodrome), and it was while we were living there that Billie decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness.
She had always had her religious fads: there was a spiritualism phase, then a faith-healing phase to help ease the arthritis she suffered from, but the Jehovah’s Witness phase was the worst of all. She was obsessive about reading The Watchtower and going out to try to convert our neighbours, which was a total embarrassment. She banged on about modesty and virtue, railing against drunkenness and promiscuity, gambling and tobacco, and it was like listening to a record with the needle stuck in a groove. I don’t know how Pop put up with it; all I could do was leave home.
It was a requirement of my horticulture course that I completed a year’s practical work, so I managed to get a job at Mount Nurseries in Canterbury where my life became fun for the first time since Mum died. I moved into digs, and soon I’d made loads of friends among the other staff at the nursery. We all went to the pub together in the evenings after work. There were a few boyfriends, nothing serious,