Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms full of us and them, paintings on the walls, politics at the table. I moved amongst it all being pretty and clever, a seventies childhood of lentils and greens and feeling unseen, the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely there. I went to the local ILEA, The Marlborough, my mother was a governor. I was the only pupil in my year who lived in a private house. Everyone else came from the council flats across the road. I remember this because when I made the mistake of inviting a friend over, rumour spread in the playground that I lived in a museum. I hated school. I was lonely and uninspired. For a short time lovely Mrs Turner let me sit with her in the library learning to read but this was soon rumbled and I was thrown once again into the bear pit of the English state school playground, British Bulldog, Kiss Chase, and porn mags in the outside toilets. At eleven I went to Queen’s College, a private girls’ school, and started smoking. At thirteen I started clubbing, the Wag, The Mud, the Opera House and Heaven. I don’t remember who came with me but I remember my brown dress, tight and dangerous on a dark west end street, waiting for the night bus home. From Queens I went to Westminster, a place of six hundred boys and thirty girls. Day One in Little Dean’s Yard had a boys’ faces at every window choosing who would be theirs; I looked up and decided which would be mine. My sister asked me to water the plants in her flat while she went to America. I told everyone I was having a party. My father was supposed to be leaving for France that night. He kept his car in the garage below. He owned the flat. There was scaffolding on the building opposite. The party started, hoards came, many more than I’d invited, teenagers from other schools, word had spread. We barricaded the door but they hung off the scaffolding and threw bottles at the window. They kicked the door in. The music raged, bodies pressed, none of this bothered me; I was sixteen and only interested in the boy and the hurricane inside. I didn’t notice outside the wind that raged across England, tearing the land apart, stopping the ferry with my father on it from leaving.
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Holy shit.
Thank you for your brilliant writing - my new discovery !
Women are so wired- in romantic .. it’s our mega - pulse - our antennae that blinds us from all weathers - I see myself in your writing here and forgive myself for the weekends that my parents house got trashed because I wanted a particular boy. .. and often ended up with the wrong one when I got too drunk .