The Real Me is Thin

How accurate a report that is of what actually happened, I can’t tell. It is true that we rowed all the time and were both miserable and confused. Me because I didn’t understand why Dad had gone away and we hadn’t gone with him, and Mum, as far as I understand, because separating from Dad had not turned out to be the instant solution to her misery that she’d expected it to be. It is also a matter of fact that I did go and live with Dad in Bahrain while my siblings and mother stayed behind in England. I can remember, despite the rows, being shocked that she was ‘getting rid of me’ so easily. I knew I was a thorn in her side, but I didn’t know what it was I was doing that pricked her. I only knew that she found me unbearable and didn’t want me around.

As it transpired, the few months I spent living with Dad were one of the happiest, if not the happiest, times of my childhood. Bahrain is a small island in the Persian Gulf, on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. At that time Western diplomacy was finding its feet in the Middle East. Presumably, with a mixture of sensitivity to local customs and a wish to maintain independence, foreigners lived in compounds. These were made up of a group of houses, some offices, and a pool built by their own architects. They were, by design, little bits of Britain, UK oases in an entirely foreign land. Our small compound resembled a housing estate in the Home Counties. Dad’s house was a two-storey, archetypal Sixties – lots of glass and wood – functional box. It had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, with a large hall downstairs, a small study, a living room, and a dining room. There were servants’ quarters beyond the dining room, accessed by a swing door like those in restaurant kitchens, which were made up of a kitchen and two tiny bedrooms beyond it. Dad employed two servants: Bundoo and Bourey, Pakistani men he’d inherited from his predecessor. Having servants might sound terribly grand and from another era, and maybe it was, but it didn’t feel like that. With diplomats’ budget for ‘help’, that’s just the way it was, particularly for a man with no wife in tow. Bundoo and Bourey didn’t wear white jackets with polished buttons, or serve gin and tonics clinking with ice on silver salvers. They were part of the household. I’d often sit cross-legged on the kitchen counter watching them making curries or ironing Dad’s shirts or mending or darning – Bourey was a great needleman.

I went to school in Bahrain. The only establishment where the British curriculum was taught was 20 minutes’ drive from home and run by the RAF. Dad had also employed a nanny, Carole, to keep me company during the day. The weather was fiercely hot and there was no air conditioning at school, so lessons started at 7.30 a.m. and ended at 12.30, after which I’d go home, have lunch with Carole, and then spend the rest of the day at the communal pool or the beach or riding in the desert. There were very few other children on the island. All the other British diplomats’ kids were at boarding schools back home. And although there were a few Forces’ kids around – hence the need for the school – they lived miles away in the Forces’ compound. There was a minimal public-transport system for locals, but it would have been out of the question for a ten-year-old foreign girl to travel on it, alone. Consequently, I spent all my free time with either Carole or Dad, but I don’t remember ever being lonely, or, oddly, missing Mum.

During the time I spent with Dad out there he was indulgent, kind, and affectionate. In fact, he was wholly unlike the dad I’d known hitherto, who’d been remote, hardly ever there, and often bad-tempered when he was. I realise now that this softer dad was a result of a unique combination of things that were true for him at the time: he was still hopeful of a reconciliation with Mum, and uncharacteristically grateful both for my company and, I think, for the opportunity to be a full-time parent to me – something which he surely realised was very likely to end shortly. Perhaps the separation, unofficial though it was, made him more acutely aware of the loss of his children, or maybe he felt guilty about my being out there with no contemporaries; I don’t know, but the end result was that I spent more time with Dad than I’d ever done before or ever would again.

And I absolutely adored him. During that time Dad was never critical, never competitive, and always had time to talk to me. Looking back, I think I was Dad’s companion as much as his daughter. I was certainly aware of his dependence on me, and this sometimes made me uncomfortable, because I started to worry about him and if he was lonely. It’s probably not ideal for a ten-year-old to be in a position where she’s looking out for her father’s emotional welfare, and this too shaped a lot of my future relationships – but at the time I was just so pleased to be with my beloved father all the time.

Dad’s job in Bahrain involved having talks, ‘representing Britain’s interest’, with various dignitaries and leaders from Arab states around the Gulf. Sometimes he’d take me with him. On one occasion Dad was due to make an official visit to a very important man in the region: Sheikh Zaid, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and one of the principal architects of the United Arab Emirates. As the visit was scheduled to coincide with my eleventh birthday, Dad took me along. This was the kind of unworried-by-what-others-might-think, relaxed, loving easy-goingness with which I was very unfamiliar, and it was an unexpected joy every time I experienced it. A tiny propeller plane took us from Bahrain south-east to the Buraimi oasis in Oman, where the Sheikh lived in relative modesty.

After Dad and the Sheikh had had their talk (about the Saudi claim to Abu Dhabi’s southern and western territory, I learnt much later in life), our host invited us to join him, his sons, and his entourage for supper. Despite huge wealth gained from the discovery of oil, the Sheikh led a simple, traditional Arab desert-dweller’s life. Supper was served just as it would have been for hundreds of years. Dad and I were shown to a long kilim stretched out on the roof of the Sheikh’s fort, around which blazed flame torches, embedded into sand, providing the only light apart from the hundreds of twinkling stars filling an inky black, cloudless sky. Three huge unidentified limbless torsos stuffed with rice sat on massive plates equally spaced along the carpet. Between each ‘roast’ lay plates piled high with delicious-looking rice made with sultanas and pine nuts (I’ve had that before, I said to myself), plates of okra (I was OK with that, too) and dishes overflowing with what looked like tiny balls of white and black jelly. The Sheikh took his place in the middle and indicated that Dad should sit to his left. Taking my cue from Dad, I settled down cross-legged on the floor next to him, and waited for someone else to start.

Although by now I was familiar with Middle Eastern customs, I had never yet eaten Bedouin-style and didn’t want to make a wrong move. A china plate (surely not traditional) sat in front of each place, but there was no cutlery. I wasn’t quite sure what to eat or, without cutlery, how to go about it. As Dad was deep in conversation with the Sheikh on his right, I decided to watch what others were doing. Casually tossing his headdress behind him, presumably so that it wouldn’t trail in his food, the young man opposite me rolled up his right sleeve and thrust his hand into the hole his side of the beast’s torso. He grabbed a handful of rice and then proceeded to scrap the ribcage of the animal from the inside, eventually emerging with a fistful of meat and rice which he plopped on to his plate before helping himself, with the same hand, to the okra and some of the jellied things.

So that’s how it’s done, I thought, and followed suit. I thrust my hand into the beast and successfully landed some food on my plate. It was delicious: the meat was tender and moist and the rice perfectly cooked. (I later discovered it was camel and that the jellied balls, which I didn’t sample, were cooked camels’ eyes.) I was hungry and ate some of the okra and flavoured rice happily, too. It was then, for the first time, that I looked up and around at the other guests. The entire company was staring at me. Every single male face was staring at me in astonishment. (In keeping with tradition there were no women present, since the women ate separately from the men – my presence being a gracious concession to Dad.) I couldn’t fathom what I’d done to warrant their reaction. Soon, noticing that I seemed to have drawn everyone’s attention, Dad looked round at me. Seeing my dirtied hand, he smiled and whispered into my ear, ‘You’re eating with your left hand; that’s the hand they wipe their bottoms with. Most of them will never have seen a girl eat before, and they probably think you haven’t got very nice manners.’ I made a ‘sorry’ face to the assembled men, which mercifully was met with some kind smiles and a few laughs. Even then Dad wasn’t cross with me.

In fact, this period of living alone with Dad is the only time in my life I can remember him not nagging me about my eating habits and my size. It’s occurred to me, since becoming an adult, that this might have been because he was low and lonely at the time, and was therefore less inclined to criticise me for something that, after all, didn’t matter that much – certainly not as much as a disintegrating marriage. Maybe depending on me and enjoying my company meant that he was less inclined to be constantly noticing what was wrong with me.

Dad and I returned to London together in the summer of 1969 for a family holiday. I also had to start secondary school later that September. Thereafter I’d see him in bursts when he was home on leave, for visits, outings, slightly grim meals in cheap caf$eAs – the typical things estranged dads do with their kids. But in our case it was even more fractured because Dad, as it turned out, wasn’t going to live in Britain again until 1974. Estranged dads are bad enough, but longdistance ones, especially in an era of poor or non-existent phone lines and no email, are much worse. From then on I had what you might describe as an on-off relationship with Dad where, it transpired, there was little room for bad times. Seeing Dad very rarely, I soon learnt that best behaviour was expected at all times. There was no tolerance for Bad Fat Me – only Good Thin Me was welcome.

Happiness is a warm scone

During all these early years of upheaval, disapproval, and the growing sensation that I wasn’t ‘good’ enough, there was always Granny She-She, my mother’s stepmother. Despite living in Scotland, miles away from London where we now lived, she had a hugely reassuring effect on me.

Every single time I bite into a slice of bread spread with raspberry jam I’m hurtled back into the freezing, stone-floored larder in Granny’s house in Melrose. I’m standing close by her as she puts the last touches on the scores of jars she’s just filled with her home-made jam. She covers each differently shaped jar, accumulated over the years, with carefully cut circles of greaseproof paper secured in place with a rubber band, followed by circles of remnants of faded material. Each one is then tied tight with old bits of ribbon she’s saved. On the top goes the handwritten label: ‘raspberry jam’, and the year. The jam’s still warm and glass around the tiny bit of space between the top of the liquid and the lid steams up. The jam’s been made in a ‘jam pan’ using raspberries Granny picked on her daily walks in the countryside around her house, Eildon Bank. ‘There we go, all done,’ Granny says, stepping back from the cold stone draining-board that fills the back larder, now covered with jam jars of all shapes and sizes. She puts her arm around me, gives me a loving squeeze, and I draw in that familiar smell of Granny – slightly musty Chanel No. 5, combined with many-times-washed lambswool. Adored and adoring Granny She-She, the first relative to show me unconditional love.

My mother’s mother, Eilidh, died when my mother was only 18. The story my mother told was that her mother ‘let herself die’ once she and my grandfather had retired from the boys’ school they ran, apparently saying she had ‘nothing to live for without her boys’. At this distance it’s hard to know how accurate an account that is. But whatever the circumstances of her mother’s death, it’s fair to say that my mother, an only child, had always felt unloved and untreasured by her parents.

Mum was brought up in the school – St Mary’s, a boys’ prep school of about 60 pupils – in Melrose, a pretty Borders town around 35 miles south of Edinburgh. The school had been established by her mother’s father in an attractive, large house with generous grounds.

By the time Mum was born in 1926, the running of the school had been handed over to her parents, and she was born in the house. It was a boarding school, and most of the boys saw their parents infrequently, since they lived either in colonial outposts or on remote farms too far away for even weekly visits. Mum’s parents took the view that the boys’ needs, particularly emotional ones, took precedence over those of their only child, the thinking apparently being that her parents were on hand whereas these boys had ‘no mummies’.

Shortly after her mother’s death, my mother went to university while her father went travelling to recover from his loss. When he returned he married a childless local woman, Sheila Fairbairn, who acquired a stepdaughter in my mum, whom she cherished right from the start, calling her ‘a gift’. And so it was that when Mum had kids, Sheila became, naturally, our Granny She-She, the abbreviation formed by her niece, who’d been unable to pronounce her proper name. Mum’s dad died in 1958, but Mum stayed close to her stepmother for the rest of her life. This was easily done, since Granny was the most generous-spirited, loving person imaginable. She was warm, cuddly, and physically affectionate – something that we, aside from during those few early years spent in Innes’s care, were not accustomed to. However, she harboured a dark secret, the evidence of which she kept closely guarded – so closely that I only found out about it after she died.

As a family we usually holidayed in Scotland, incorporating dutiful visits to both our grannies. First to Granny Nancy’s, Dad’s mother in Dunfermline (where we stayed as short a time as possible since she was so difficult and unfriendly), and then on, much more willingly, to Granny She-She’s. Later on, from when I was around nine years old and with different school holidays from my brothers, Mum would send me up to Granny’s alone.

It is those treasured times I recall best. My mother would put me on a coach at Victoria Station, nervously asking a random old lady if she’d keep an eye on me. An interminable 11 hours later Granny would pick me up in Galashiels, about 4 miles from Melrose, which was the closest the bus stopped to Granny’s small town. Coaches were very slow in those days and didn’t have toilets on board. Given the cost of coach travel compared to trains, it stood to reason that virtually all the passengers were OAPs, meaning the driver was required to stop every ten minutes for what was graphically announced over the tannoy as a ‘toilet visit’. Only the excitement of seeing Granny made the journey tolerable – that, and the knowledge that the kindly old lady into whose care I’d been entrusted would, upon seeing the meagre supplies Mum had given me, take pity on me and share her sandwiches with me or, better still, cake. Those old ladies always had cake – perhaps not the best cake, but cake is cake, especially to a child for whom cake has recently become off limits. Even half a slice of stale Battenburg was always gratefully received.

Mum would grudgingly concede that I probably had to have ‘something to eat’ during the long journey. She would equip me with a rancid piece of fruit in a wrinkled old plastic bag, still slightly moist inside from God-knows-what, an ancient, smelly Thermos flask filled with watery juice (‘not too strong because squash is full of sugar and that’s the last thing you need’) and, if I was lucky, a piece of sweaty Cheddar wrapped in re-used clingfilm.

But it was all worth it because everything was lovely at Granny’s. There she’d be, waiting for me at the bus terminal, with a slightly anxious, searching look on her face until we caught sight of each other, when I’d hare off the bus and throw myself into her arms and she’d squeeze me tightly. Granny felt like soft wool. She always wore the same thing – a ‘good tweed skirt, made to last’ and a twinset made of lambswool (or cashmere if she’d found a decent second in the local tweed merchants’ sale). Granny was healthy and strong from lots of hearty walks, but, like her sweaters, everything about her was soft and giving.

We’d go back to Granny’s house on the local bus and as soon as we walked through the front door I could smell the boiled mince and overcooked potatoes. Ever thoughtful, Granny would have prepared the meal before setting off to collect me. Boiled mince and overdone potatoes aren’t most people’s idea of a lovely supper, but to me this was a feast: hot food in plentiful quantities prepared by someone who loved me and wanted to feed me. Granny’s food tasted like what it was – unconditional love. It had all the necessary ingredients: care, forethought, and kindness.

Looking back, what I appreciate now is that Granny loved me enough to think, in advance, about what I might need following a whole day’s travelling on a coach which reeked of old people’s wee. Granny didn’t want me not to eat; she expected me to want to eat. Me eating didn’t make her cross. She thought I was entitled to be hungry. I loved her mince and potatoes. I loved anything Granny made, and some of her cooking was absolutely heavenly.

Nothing in the world comes close to her drop scones, still warm from the griddle, smothered in her raspberry jam, sweet and packed with fruit. And she always made cucumber sandwiches for tea. This was proper tea – cucumber sandwiches, followed by something sweet, usually the drop scones and jam. A proper tea to tide you over until supper. Thinly sliced cucumber sprinkled with a little salt on buttered bread. A snack so simple yet so tasty. When I slice a cucumber now and get a whiff of that fresh, wet smell, Granny’s teas by a roaring fire in her living room (even in summer – this was Scotland) immediately spring to mind.

Every morning of my stay, before I woke up, Granny would creep down the windy staircase to the cold kitchen. There was no central heating – she wouldn’t have dreamt of going to such an indulgent expense. She’d make two soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers, accompanied by tea for her and, for me, orange juice in a small can that tasted like aeroplane juice but which I loved anyway. She’d set the breakfast on a tray laid with a linen mini-tablecloth and bring it upstairs, where I’d hop into her bed to eat it with her and chat about what we’d do that day. It was the cosiest, safest place I’d ever been. I was with someone who wasn’t irritated by everything I did or said, and who fed me un-questioningly. I was never nervous with Granny, never worried that I might make her cross. She used to say she loved hearing me cry out, ‘Granny, where are you?’ – explaining that, as she’d never been a mother, she’d never expected to be a granny, and when she heard me call she was reminded of how lucky she was.

Granny’s dark secret, which I knew absolutely nothing about at the time, and which makes Granny’s capacity for unconditional love and consistent nurturing even more remarkable, was that she was an alcoholic. Granny was drinking so much that she had to get her booze delivered from the next town along, once she’d realised that the store in Melrose had noticed she was regularly ordering an unusual amount. As Granny knew only too well, a small town is a hard place to keep a secret and gossip abounds. Tongues would have wagged, and I could just picture Mrs Laidlaw, the grocer’s wife, arms crossed over her pinny-covered bosom, hissing into the ear of Mrs Muir, the baker, ‘See, Mrs Walker hasn’t had visitors for a good long while but that’s another bottle of gin goin’ up there with her messages and it’ll be the third this week!’ It was the norm to do your ‘messages’ (shopping) by visiting each shop, choosing what you wanted, and the goods would be brought up later in a box. That way there was a fair chance everyone would know what you’d ordered. Granny was a proud person and an active member of the church, St Cuthbert’s, situated just behind her house. She sang in the choir and did the flowers for all the weddings, funerals, and christenings. I can’t imagine she’d have found it possible to talk about her dependency with the minister.

Yet Granny’s drinking never affected my visits. She always seemed calm and in control. We had long walks with her beloved Labrador, Pani, and chatted away to each other happily, never short of topics, mainly the important question of what I wanted to be when I grew up (nurse, pop star, bride, then actress). Granny was never, ever cross or short-tempered. Every night, she’d fall asleep in the armchair by the fire while I watched TV – but all grown-ups did that as far as I knew, drunk or otherwise. So, here was an alcoholic, childless woman of strong Presbyterian faith, that most unforgiving of religions, the only notable joy in her life having been her marriage to my grandfather and the acquisition, thereby, of a cherished stepdaughter and four beloved grandchildren. Yet she harboured no rage, no nastiness, no frustration – outwardly anyway, since clearly the drinking was her antidote to whatever turmoil was going on inside.

Mum adored Granny, too; we all did. But when, after returning home from one of my stays with her, I mentioned to Mum what a good cook Granny was, Mum laughed and said, ‘Sheila is many lovely things, but she is not a good cook.’ I know now that what Granny cooked was wartime British meals, the very meals from which Mum’s generation was trying to escape, but at the time I was confused and upset. To me Granny was the perfect cook. She was my idea of that, at least: someone who provided regular food without resentment but instead with enormous love and affection. And, above all, she was happy for me to eat it. This was the complete opposite to Mum’s increasingly terrifying reaction to my need to eat.

Cooking blind

Without Dad or the boys around, Mum and I very quickly fell into a pattern of constant, extremely loud, bitter rows, punctuated – intermittently – by miserable meals invariably provided with rage and resentment.

But when the boys came home from boarding school for visits, Mum always made an effort. Suddenly, there’d be fresh bread, a variety of salamis, meat, lovely cheeses, salads – you know, proper, nourishing food. And if they happened to be there still on a Sunday, we’d sometimes get roast chicken followed by apple pie. However, lest I give the impression that my brothers never experienced Mum’s whimsical approach to food provision, let me recount the following story.

I’ve already said that Mum wasn’t a bad cook; in fact, she was extremely accomplished but only when she chose to be. She was knowledgeable about good-quality ingredients and was capable of producing an impressive variety of complicated dishes. However, in the Sixties the fashion for feeding children the same-quality fare as adults hadn’t yet evolved, at least not in Britain, so my awareness of Mum’s skills mainly came from being around when she prepared for dinner parties while she and Dad were together, or on the very rare occasions she gave them once they’d split up. Her culinary talents were hardly ever wasted on her kids. Except for one memorable day when the boys were home from school.

It was lunchtime and Mum announced that she’d made some ‘delicious lentil soup’. Ah. Now, this would be a good few years before the lentil had managed to shake off its reputation as the unremittingly dull pulse of choice for the kind of hippies who baked bread using their own placenta and wove their own shoes out of bark. Back in 1968, only Claudia Roden and a tiny minority of truly talented cooks well versed in the exotic ways of rendering a lentil palatable could possibly have dreamt of eliciting a positive reaction from four recalcitrant children who were already slightly wary of their mother’s idea of ‘delicious’.