An Education Read online

  Puffing and blowing,

  Chuckling, clapping, crowing,

  Clucking and gobbling,

  Mopping and mowing,

  Full of airs and graces,

  Pulling wry faces,

  Demure grimaces,

  Cat-like and rat-like,

  Ratel- and wombat-like,

  Snail-paced in a hurry. Et bloody cetera.

  I mean what, for godsake, is a ratel, and how do you pull a demure grimace or achieve ‘snail-paced in a hurry’?

  Of course it was my mother's dearest wish that I should fulfil her own lost dream and become an actress, so she started me on the zinty-tintys almost as soon as I could speak. By nine or ten, I was a veteran of LAMDA exams and poetry-reading festivals. Almost every Saturday my mother and I would set off to some faraway suburb (Wimbledon, or Surbiton, or Bromley) to spend the afternoon in an echoing hall listening to children recite ‘Up the airy mountain’. I was outwardly compliant but my body betrayed my inner rebellion: on the morning of any major competition I was guaranteed to wake with a golf-ball-sized stye on my eye. These styes were invariably blamed for my failure to win gold medals – I sometimes won bronze, and always came away with a certificate saying Commended, but I think everyone got those.

  To make matters worse, my mother had a pupil called Lynn Hope who was the same age as me. Our mothers fondly referred to us as ‘the two Lynns’ and told other people that we were best friends though the most cursory observation would have shown that we loathed each other. I regarded Lynn Hope as hopelessly thick; she no doubt regarded me as stuck up, which I was. But because we were the same age, we were entered in the same competitions, where Lynn Hope would always win a gold medal to my silver or bronze to my Commended. With her foghorn voice and unshakeable confidence, her nauseating dimples, white frilly socks, black patent shoes, and yukky habit of clapping her hands excitedly and saying ‘Oh I can't believe it!’ every time she won, she was the Shirley Temple of the Middlesex poetry-festival circuit. And every time she won, there was a ghastly charade when my mother would rush over to Lynn Hope and hug her, and Lynn would cry ‘Oh thank you, thank you, Mrs Barber!’ and they would hold hands and do a little bow to the audience, whereby my mother asserted ownership of this prize pupil, and I would skulk and glower behind my golf-ball stye. I once overheard another elocution teacher saying, ‘It must be so sad for Mrs Barber that her daughter never wins.’ Once or twice, I noticed, my mother contrived to put me in for competitions without entering Lynn Hope. But even then I didn't win, and my mother would have to invent ever more fantastic excuses for my infallible failure.

  I realised quite early on that this upset my mother far more than it did me. She really had set her heart on my becoming an actress. And she had a whole litany of hopeful projections to keep the dream alive – ‘when you are older’, ‘when your voice deepens’, ‘when you fill out’ (I was still skeletally thin in those days), then I would emerge as the shining thespian I was surely meant to be. But the great difference between my mother and me, then as now, was that I had no aptitude for self-delusion. Even at seven or eight, sulking through those interminable poetry readings, listening to the tenth and twelfth renditions of ‘Your green glass beads on a silver ring’, I could see that there were other children who were simply better than me. They were clearer, louder, bolder, altogether more dramatic. They skipped onto the stage where I plodded; they beamed at the audience where I scowled; they were prettier, winsomer, charminger and quite frankly more talented. Sometimes I even felt a twinge of admiration.

  When I started secondary school, I managed to persuade my mother that I no longer had time to enter poetry competitions – and anyway, I think by then even she was discouraged. But she would not give up all her dreams for me. Instead, she wrote to the BBC to ask them to give me an audition. I had prepared a scene from Androcles and the Lion, or was it The Boy with a Cart? – some unspeakable bilge anyway – and at the end the producer said thank you, in a way which I knew betokened no thanks. But then he asked me to do some sight reading and, rather to my horror, gave me top marks. The upshot was that I was sent to Children's Hour, to read children's letters under ‘Uncle’ Adrian Thomas. This was good fun, in fact a complete doddle. Every few weeks I would have an afternoon off school to go to Broadcasting House where, with three other children, we would spend an hour in a basement studio reading out letters from listeners. There were always four readers, two boys and two girls, of which one would take the letters from younger listeners and one from older. This was fine when I started – I was eleven or twelve and although it was demeaning to have to read illiterate drivel from six- and seven-year-olds, I was always delighted with the cheque and the afternoon off school, and confidently looked forward to graduating to ‘senior girl’ eventually.

  Then came the day when Jane Asher arrived. I was by this time fourteen, Asher was two or three years younger, but alarmingly poised and pretty. The producer said they just wanted to check sound levels and gave Jane a letter to read, and me another letter. Then, after some muttered conferring, they gave me and Jane a pile of letters each and told us – as usual – to go into the green room and practise reading them. But what was this! My pile was still full of idiot scrawls from six-year-olds, whereas Jane was reading stuff from teenagers! How could this be? ‘There must be some mistake,’ I said to the producer, ‘I'm senior girl! I'm older than her!’ ‘Yes,’ she said sweetly, ‘but your voice sounds younger than Jane's’ ‘No!’ I cried. ‘It's not fair. I won't do it!’ I threw a full-blown tantrum, complete with tears and shouting. They calmed me down and somehow got me through the broadcast. But I was never asked to read letters on Children's Hour again.

  That was the end of my elocution career. But alas, I am left with this terrible legacy – my accent. It is the classic elocution accent, homeless and inauthentic, suggestive neither of grouse moor nor shop floor, an accent that screams ‘phoney!’ the moment it opens its mouth. It is by far the most repulsive thing about me, and I notice that people meeting me for the first time are often taken aback. I have no idea what my natural accent should be – my father still speaks broad Lancashire, my mother elocution. But perhaps it was because I so hated my voice that I chose to become a writer. By thirteen or fourteen, I was writing regular children's columns for the Richmond and Twickenham Times and being paid for them. And that was something I arranged entirely by myself, with no help from my mother. I felt, as Julie Burchill memorably remarked, that when I discovered writing it was as if I'd been speaking a second language up till then and had finally found my mother tongue.

  An Education

  By the time I was sixteen, I had ‘filled out’ as my mother always promised I would, and, with my new curves and hair no longer in plaits, was beginning to become quite a looker. Also, I'd swept the board at O-level and was well on track to do English, French, Latin at A-level and go on to Oxford. The only fear was that my Latin would ‘let me down’ – in those days you had to have A-level Latin if you wanted to read English at Oxford – a fact that still makes me go white with fury. I could probably speak four languages now if I hadn't had to waste all those years learning Latin.

  Meanwhile, my mother had stopped giving elocution lessons and become a proper schoolteacher. It started when Twickenham County Girls' School over the road asked if she could give occasional elocution and drama classes, which she did, and then asked her to fill in for an absent English teacher. In no time at all she was a full-time English teacher and then head of English. I always found it shocking that she could be head of English while privately preferring Georgette Heyer to Jane Austen, and Walter de la Mare to Wordsworth, and occasionally thought of writing to the education authorities to denounce her. It was only because I didn't, I felt, that she was able to continue her remorseless rise up the educational hierarchy. But anyway she rose so successfully that she ended her career as deputy head of a sixth-form college.

  My father also kept getting promoted so we must have been quite well
off, but we were never allowed to feel it because my father could never shake off his desperate childhood fear of poverty, and was eternally saving for ‘a rainy day’. (In the exceptionally wet winter of 2000, when their house was flooded to a depth of six inches, I cheerily remarked to my father, ‘Well it looks like your rainy day has finally come.’ Despite his being blind by this stage, in his mid-eighties, and handicapped by water lapping round his ankles, he still tried to wade across the room to hit me.) His great fear was ‘fecklessness’, which seemed to mean any form of fun. Thus – why did I want to have a Christmas tree? Terrible waste of time, money, all those pine needles buggering the vacuum cleaner and ruining the carpet. ‘For fun,’ I told him, and watched him almost die of apoplexy on the spot. He regarded any form of social life as time-wasting – to him, my mother's involvement in amateur dramatics was dangerously profligate. But this must have been one of the very few subjects on which she ‘dug her heels in’, and when my mother dug her heels in, my father knew to retreat.

  All my rows were with my father – I remember my early teens as one long row with my father, usually about trivia like what time I went to bed. My mother was a passive, occasionally tearful, spectator. Sometimes when he hit me (‘What you need is a clip around the ear’) she would intervene, and often after a particularly loud shouting match, when I had stormed up to my room, she would come sidling up with a hot drink and biscuit as a peace offering. ‘Can't you be more tactful?’ she would urge: ‘Why do you have to enrage him?’ But I despised her peace-making, always too little and too late, and once told her, ‘Look, Mum, if you're really on my side, you'll divorce him; otherwise shut up.’ So she shut up.

  And then Simon entered our lives and everything changed. I met him when I was sixteen and he was – he said twenty-seven, but probably in his late thirties. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre (I still consented to appear in my mother's am-dram productions), when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leaned over to the passenger window and said, ‘Want a lift?’ Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised – Bristols always cruised – towards Twickenham.

  He had a funny accent – later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh – and I asked if he was foreign. He said, ‘Only if you count Jews as foreign.’ Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely, ‘Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed.’ (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had fought in the Israeli army when he was ‘your age’. I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought nineteen. But then when he said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’ I foolishly answered, ‘No, I have to be home by ten – my father will kill me if I'm late.’ ‘School tomorrow?’ he asked lightly, and, speechless with fury at myself, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and said ‘Can I take you out for coffee another evening?’

  My life might have turned out differently if I had just said no. But I was not quite rude enough. Instead, I said I was very busy rehearsing a play which meant that unfortunately I had no free evenings. He asked what play, and I said The Lady's Not for Burning at Richmond Little Theatre. Arriving for the first night a couple of weeks later, I found an enormous bouquet in the dressing room addressed to me. The other actresses, all grown-ups, were mewing with envy and saying, ‘Those flowers must have cost a fortune.’ When I left the theatre, hours later, I saw the Bristol parked outside and went over to say thank you. He said ‘Can't we have our coffee now?’ and I said no, because I was late again, but he could drive me home. I wasn't exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of him as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father.

  My father's grillings were notorious among the Hampton Grammar boys. He wanted to know what marks they got at O-level, what A-levels they were taking, what universities they were applying to. He practically made them sit an IQ test before they could take me to the flicks. But this time, for once, my father made no fuss at all. He asked where Simon and I had met; I said at Richmond Little Theatre, and that was that. He seemed genuinely impressed by Simon, and even volunteered that we could stay out till midnight, an hour after my normal weekend curfew. So our meeting for coffee turned into dinner, and with my father's blessing.

  Simon took me to an Italian place on Marylebone High Street and of course I was dazzled. I had never been to a proper restaurant before, only to tea rooms with my parents. I didn't understand the menu, but I loved the big pepper grinders and the heavy cutlery, the crêpes Suzette and the champagne. I was also dazzled by Simon's conversation. Again, I understood very little of it, partly because his accent was so strange, but also because it ranged across places and activities I could hardly imagine. My knowledge of the world was based on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës and none of them had a word to say about living on a kibbutz or making Molotov cocktails. I felt I had nothing to bring to the conversational feast and blushed when Simon urged me to tell him about my schoolfriends, my teachers, my prize-winning essays. I didn't realise then that my being a schoolgirl was a large part of my attraction.

  Over the next few weeks, it became an accepted thing that Simon would turn up on Friday or Saturday nights to take me to ‘the West End’. Sometimes we went to the Chelsea Classic to see foreign films; sometimes he took me to concerts at the Wigmore or Royal Festival Hall, but mostly we went to restaurants. The choice of restaurants seemed to be dictated by mysterious visits Simon had to make on the way. He would say ‘I've just got to pop into Prince's Gate’, and would disappear into one of the white cliff-like houses while I would wait in the car. Sometimes the waiting was very long, and I learned to take a book on all our dates. Once, I asked if I could come in with him, but he said ‘No, this is business’ and I never asked again.

  Besides taking me out at weekends, Simon would sometimes drop in during the week when he said he was ‘just passing’. (Why was he passing Twickenham? Where was he going? I never asked.) On these occasions, he would stay chatting to my parents, sometimes for an hour or more, about news or politics – subjects of no interest to me. Often the three of them were so busy talking they didn't even notice if I left the room. I found this extraordinary. It was quite unprecedented in our house for me not to be the centre of attention.

  In theory, Simon represented everything my parents most feared – he was not one of us, he was Jewish and cosmopolitan, practically a foreigner! He wore cashmere sweaters and suede shoes; he drove a pointlessly expensive car; he didn't go to work in an office; he was vague about where he went to school and, worst of all, boasted that he had been educated in ‘the university of life’ – not a teaching establishment my parents recognised. And yet, inexplicably, they liked him. In fact, they liked him more than I ever liked him, perhaps because he took great pains to make them like him. He brought my mother flowers and my father wine; he taught them to play backgammon; he chatted to them endlessly and seemed genuinely interested in their views. I suppose it made a change for them from always talking about me.

  Yet none of us ever really knew a thing about him. I think my parents once asked where he lived and he said ‘South Kensington’ but that was it. I never had a phone number for him, still less an address. As for what he di
d, he was ‘a property developer’ – a term that I suspect meant as little to my parents as it did to me. I knew it was somehow connected with these visits he had to make, the great bunches of keys he carried, the piles of surveyors' reports and auction catalogues in the back of his car, and the occasional evenings when he had to ‘meet Perec’, which meant cruising around Bayswater looking for Perec Rachman's Roller parked outside one of his clubs. Rachman would later give his name to Rachmanism, when the press exposed him as the worst of London's exploitative landlords, but at that time he was just one of Simon's many mysterious business colleagues.

  Simon was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them. The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect – I blame Albert Camus. My normal instinct was to bombard people with questions, to ask about every detail of their lives, even to intrude into their silences with ‘What are you thinking?’ But just around the time I met Simon I became an Existentialist, and one of the rules of Existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated. And, as it happened, this suited Simon fine. My role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden: implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did. To ask questions would have shown that I was interested in him, even that I cared, and neither of us really wanted that.

  Simon established early on that I was a virgin, and seemed quite happy about it. He asked when I intended to lose my virginity and I said ‘Seventeen’, and he agreed that was the ideal age. He said it was important not to lose my virginity in some inept fumble with a grubby schoolboy, but with a sophisticated older man. I heartily agreed – though, unlike him, I had no particular older man in mind. He certainly didn't seem like a groper. I was used to Hampton Grammar boys who turned into octopuses in the cinema dark, clamping damp tentacles to your breast. Simon never did that. Instead, he kissed me long and gently and said, ‘I love to look into your eyes.’ When he kissed me, he called me Minn and said I was to call him Bubl but I usually forgot. Eventually, one night, he said ‘I'd love to see your breasts’ so I grudgingly unbuttoned my blouse and allowed him to peep inside my bra. But this was still well within the Lady Eleanor Holles dating code – by rights, given the number of hot dinners he'd bought me, he could really have taken my bra right off.