childhood
“Humpy's parents were music lovers – especially her father who, on my visits to their house, would sit at the table during dinner, 'conducting' to whatever piece of music they happened to be playing. Her parents were eccentrics in many ways, and these stays opened my eyes to other ways of living as a family (after all, wasn't ours the perfect one?!) Playing with Humpy in her bedroom – I can only remember her getting on top of me on the bed and half-suffocating me while she pressed her already large breasts into my face – mine being still pretty much non-existent at the time...”
“Both Joan’s parents were Hungarian, in fact, and she had a Hungarian granny, who supposedly only ate goose fat and who was bullied by everyone. Joan wasn’t always very nice to me, either, but I did learn to swear in Hungarian and to eat paprika. Joan’s bedroom was also where I learnt to play monopoly and was the site of my first tentative sexual explorations...”
“I have happy memories, unlike you, Kate, of playing in the garden with my brother – round and round the front and back of the house on our tricycles, painting the garden sheds with water…”
“The house (a railway house): more pebble-dash, the front garden gloomy with cotoneaster and the worst kind of hydrangea, the back cracked crazy paving and rows of alternating alyssum and lobelia. Inside, dark rooms and a stairway of ivy wallpaper that reduced my mother to tears the day we arrived. I had bars on my bedroom window. My brother – by this time I had a brother, a pale boy with wispy blond hair who hoped, I imagine, that his brave smiles would take the sting out of his sister’s bullying (they didn’t)…”
“I loved the music that was played at the Wembley ice rink where we frequently went skating on Saturdays before heading on to Covent Garden in the afternoon. I had my aunt's old beige boots, Helen used to have to hire the brown ones. We both longed for the real thing – white with silver shiny blades as Noel Streatfield wrote about in 'White Boots'.”
“There was also the ice rink, where we saw skated versions of Christmas pantomimes, tawdry even to our impressionable eyes, the stockings of the twirling dancers full of holes. Only yesterday, I found out that the ice rink was a permanent fixture where you could skate on Saturdays – if you had parents who permitted that kind of thing.”
“There was also the ice rink, where we saw skated versions of Christmas pantomimes, tawdry even to our impressionable eyes, the stockings of the twirling dancers full of holes. Only yesterday, I found out that the ice rink was a permanent fixture where you could skate on Saturdays – if you had parents who permitted that kind of thing.”