This Much Is True

My other aunt in Scotland, my father’s sister, Evalyn (always called Auntie Eva) was wonderful. As a child, I loved staying with her and her husband, Uncle Harold, who was also a doctor. He had a charming personality, urbane and comical, with a little moustache and smiley eyes. His great passion was watching wrestling on television. We didn’t have a television when I was little, so it was a great treat to watch the wrestling with him; he taught me all the moves. He would point them out, and I remember that I was very impressed by the Boston Crab. (It’s a hold that is very difficult to get out of, in case you ever need it.) I became quite the expert; we would sit together watching a match, and I would say, ‘Oh, look at that, Uncle Harold! He’s just pulled off the Boston Crab! (Or the Half Nelson Choke, Cobra Clutch, or Tongan Death Grip, or whatever feat had just been performed.) And Uncle Harold would proudly say, ‘Yes, that’s it, Miriam. You’re right there. He’s got him.’

Auntie Eva was jolly and kind and had enormous breasts — obviously a family trait. I can remember her washing her bosoms in the bathroom at the basin, lifting up the pendulous flaps and sponging beneath them. I gazed fascinated, but doubted I would ever have such encumbrances. How wrong I was!

Once she asked me, ‘Miriam, do I have a Scottish accent?’

‘Yes, Auntie Eva, you do.’

She was a little put out. ‘Och, I do not,’ she replied.

How wrong she was!

Perhaps in response to these tense times in Pollokshields, in addition to Mummy’s burgeoning property empire in Oxford, my parents bought a small house by the sea in east Kent, in Kingsgate, a suburb of Cliftonville, which is itself a suburb of Margate. My first holiday, that is to say my first seaside holiday, was to set the pattern for all my most enjoyable childhood excursions.

I was four and a half. We drove from Oxford to Kingsgate in the Standard Eight car — a most unreliable and cluttered vehicle, it stood for years in our front garden unused, until someone bought it for £50 and called it ‘vintage’. It took six hours, going through the Blackwall Tunnel, which had white tiled walls and a roaring sound and went under the River Thames. On the way we stopped for fish and chips in Lewisham; wrapped in newspaper (it always tasted better, why did they change the law?) with liberal dashings of salt and vinegar eaten sitting in the car. Then on to Percy Avenue, a long ribbon of a road ending with a clifftop and THE SEA.

I’d been promised that I would see THE SEA, would swim in it, and make sandcastles in the sand. Daddy had bought me a bucket and spade and I was told to wait till the morning. But, of course, I was up before my parents — I wasn’t going to wait for them to awaken, I needed to see this phenomenon for myself. So, at about 8 a.m., having dressed myself, I opened the front door and down the road I went.

Soon I couldn’t help noticing a huge, blue expanse facing me at the bottom of the street. It seemed to go right up to the sky. I had never seen anything like it before and I remember that blinding moment of recognition, that light breaking into my brain: ‘Of course! This must be THE SEA.’ I headed onwards to the edge of the cliff and, at that moment, heard screams from behind me up the street, and turned to see my distraught mother racing towards me. ‘Miriam, Miriam, stay where you are, don’t move, you bad girl, what are you doing, don’t move, don’t move!’

We both got over it, but I never forgot my first sight of the sea, its immensity and sparkle, the sound and the smell. I’ve loved it ever since. Much later, when I was thirty-six, I bought the nearest house to France to gaze at it always: across that same English Channel, for me as magical as any ocean.

And now I never get spanked for getting up early and rushing towards it.

Going to School

When I was little I was ravishing. I was glorious — truly gorgeous, impish and mischievous and adorable. I have no doubt at all that I would have fallen in love with myself. When I look at photographs of myself as that little girl, and then I look at myself now, I think, ‘Oh, dear!’ but that’s what happens. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

In 1945, when I turned four, I started at Greycotes School, which was a good private day and boarding school for girls in north Oxford. I was only there for half a year. It had a reputation, I learned afterwards, of receiving girls who hadn’t got into Oxford High School and might be classed as ‘slow learners’. Mummy may have known this and been all the more determined to get me into Oxford High School at the first opportunity.

The headmistress of Greycotes, Mrs Cunliffe, was tall and kind. Greycotes had a meadow. I’d never heard that word before, but it turned out to be a large patch of green behind the high wall of the school, minutes away from ‘the hovel’.