Bonkers: My Life in Laughs Page 4

Looking back, I don’t quite understand the attraction of small mammals. They are cute and you want them so badly to love you. You want to be able to cuddle them. You want them to behave like they do in films: live in your pocket and be your friend and do tricks. But really all they do is bite and scratch. Try to catch a gerbil by the tail and it will, like a ninja, turn itself in mid-air and land its tiny teeth into your flesh. A rabbit being cuddled will kick you in the chest with its hind claws and leave you looking like you’ve had a night out with Freddy Krueger.

  So I had the mice. For the whole summer. In the shed. One of the mice turned out to be pregnant and gave birth to a lovely litter. I was in heaven. No one in the house was really even aware of the mice until, one day at breakfast, my father started to pour some cornflakes and a very small mouse jumped out into his bowl. ‘What the bloody hell?’

  How had a mouse got into the cornflakes?

  But I knew. I knew where this miniature mouse had come from. Something apocalyptic had happened in the shed and I was no longer in control of it. The baby mice had been escaping through the bars of the hamster cage and, no matter how hard I tried to keep the sexes apart, they were breeding out of control. Every day, there was another litter of tiny, peanut-sized babies, and because they were breeding so young, they were gradually getting smaller and smaller and becoming a mutant strain. Then the inevitable happened, and wild mice started coming into the shed and breeding with them, so now there was a wild mutant strain. It was the stuff of nightmares.

  Eventually, my mother had to be told, and she helped me sort them all out. School mice were separated and taken back to the lab, and the rest disposed of practically but humanely. The relief was enormous, and I have never wanted to see a mouse since.

  When I was eleven, I got my first pony. It was nearing the time to go to ‘big school’ and the possibility was mooted that I might go to a nearby girls’ boarding school called Stonar. A few of my friends were going there, but I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t even going to be a boarder, but I hated the idea and was no fan of Malory Towers, or The Ten Marys, or whatever it was called. And this was obviously going to cost my parents money! I told them that I didn’t really want to go and perhaps they could buy me a pony with the money that they would be saving? Happily, they agreed, and I went to the local comprehensive.

  I had been riding since I was little at various riding schools and on friends’ ponies, but I was desperate to have my own. Having my own pony was a dream that became an obsession. All I did was read books about horses (My Friend Flicka, The White Stallion) and watch programmes about horses (Champion the Wonder Horse, White Horses). I had models of horses and pictures of horses. I had horses on the brain. Of course, we had nowhere to actually keep a pony, but my best friend Debbie Brown lived on a small farm not far from the school. Most nights I would go home with her and ride. So when Topaz arrived, he was kept there.

  Topaz was 14.1 hands high, dapple grey and excellent at gymkhana. My poor mother must have spent her life in a car, taking me to or picking me up from Lagard Farm. Some nights I would stay over with Debbie. Everything became about ponies. Riding out after school to meet other girls with ponies and talk about their ponies, and other people’s ponies, and ponies we’d read about or seen on the TV.

  When not in school uniform, I spent my life in my other uniform, which was jodhpurs and jodhpur boots. I used to love jodhpurs, and at that time there were no such things as stretchy jodhpurs; they were tight down the lower leg and baggy above. When stretchy jods came in, the whole effect was much less pleasing, and girls used to wear them so tight that nothing was left to the imagination.

  Dear reader, I have not forgotten that I’m still on a step in Chelsea. JoBo isn’t back with the papers yet. I don’t mind, because the step is the perfect place to start or continue a daydream. I am a serious daydreamer, never happier than when I’m alone in my own head.

  Riding your pony out on your own is one of the greatest times to daydream. Back when I was first riding Topaz, my daydreams weren’t exactly sophisticated. The main character who featured in them was my ideal man: tall, dark, good-looking and mysterious. He was a mix of James Bond and Mr Rochester, and he had an aristocratic title that he never liked to use. When I was a little older, and reading Victoria Holt novels and other bodice-rippers, I gave him a Cornish name. Lord James Petroc.

  James Petroc was sometimes a spy, sometimes an Olympic rider, sometimes a racing driver, but always rich, unpretentious, carefree, funny and sensitive. No one quite understood him, but everyone fell in love with him. I think he was probably basically ‘me’, which was why he was never very successful at romance (there was no sex): he was actually just in love with himself.

  By the time I was fourteen, all my daydreams starred me, and often Topaz. James was killed off. By then, I was in love with Marc Bolan anyway. Marc had replaced Donny Osmond, and Peter Tork of the Monkees. Marc was up there with George Best, whom I saw once, at Haydock Park Racecourse on Merseyside. Mrs Pritchard-Barrett, Belinda’s mum, wouldn’t let us speak to him. This was a source of great sadness because, as my fourteen-year-old self wrote in her diary, he did ‘look super in the flesh’.

  When I was growing up, I was genuinely more into ponies than boys. My greatest heroine was the showjumper Marion Coakes. She had taken her childhood pony, Stroller, into adult competition and won just about every big event going, including the silver medal in the Olympics in Mexico. Stroller was 14.2 hands high and the smallest horse jumping. Marion was actually living every pony girl’s dream. Stroller was a hero and, in the minds of lots of pony girls, their pony could be that hero too …

  Topaz and I have been jumping in local shows and he’s been winning. All the other competitors really wish I wasn’t there, because their ponies don’t stand a chance. And then, one day, I arrive home and my mother tells me that I had a phone call. That’s odd, because I rarely get phone calls. I ask who it was, and she tells me it was the Head of the British Showjumping Team.

  I ring him back. He tells me that there has been a problem. They are due to fly out for the Olympics, and Stroller has gone lame. They need a replacement. Someone has seen me and Topaz jumping at the Cuddington Show and Gymkhana, and I am now the only one they are considering. Would I agree to become a member of the British team? They need an answer now! It would mean time off school, but I’m sure that would be OK, as it would be for Britain …

  And so it was that I went to the Olympics and won gold. I don’t want you to think that this daydream was a quick moment in the head. Sometimes, daydreams could take weeks. Each scene was rewritten and improved, and jeopardy added. Once they were fully formed, it was quite nice to run through them more than once.

  When I was older, my daydreams became a little more sophisticated, with more complicated relationships. Once I had my first car, the best time to daydream was when I drove it, particularly as the cassette player meant that I could add my own soundtrack. In my head, I was generally a friend of the star, Emmylou Harris or Joni Mitchell, and had – for a bit of fun – sung on one of their albums. Now they found that they couldn’t sing those tracks without me. My gap year was spent just hanging out with all these musicians, but it was never going to be a serious career …

  Joni is onstage, playing to a huge crowd. I am standing at the side of the stage and she doesn’t know I’m there. After a few numbers, she announces that she’s going to sing ‘The Boho Dance’. This is one of the tracks I half-wrote and sang on for the album. She starts the song and then, just as she’s getting to the first chorus, I walk on and, at the microphone slightly to the back of the stage, I join in, singin’ my familiar harmonies. The crowd go mad, and Joni turns and smiles. She asks me to stay onstage and sing the whole album with her.

  Which I do. In my car.

  In all my daydreams, I am a version – an ideal version – of myself. I can do anything. I speak many languages, i.e. I have many tongues at my disposal, and I am often the perfect spy or secret agent, with a myste
rious past. This person could be worked into any scenario. She was in an episode of Prime Suspect once. Not the one on the telly. The real one.

  The other thing I am in my daydream is thin. Immaculately dressed in outfits that are given to me by all my designer friends, and Ralph Lauren.

  If I could go back and say one thing to my younger self it would be: YOU ARE NOT FAT.

  I started diets when I wasn’t fat, but diets were becoming the in thing. Calorie counting was everywhere, and my mother had caught the bug. Everywhere you looked in our house, there were tea towels and chopping boards with calorie charts on them. In the back of my schoolbooks, there were lists of what I had eaten that day, followed by their cal numbers. Black coffee, one piece of toast no butter, salad. At school we were all at it, off and on. Dieting for a week and then forgetting about it and just eating Mars bars for the next four.

  There were things called Ayds that were like little toffees full of sugar and appetite suppressant, which frankly never worked and we just ate them like toffees. They were quite moreish.

  My mother drank PLJ, which is a vinegary lemony cordial that she was convinced burned fat.

  Luckily, I exercised, so the Mars bar binges never took a terrible toll. I knew that, if I rode for a day, I could lose three pounds. It happened. And the pathetic thing is that I still think I can. I can’t.

  I still do a bit of exercise though, and that does seem to work, extraordinarily. Who’d have thought? I mean, really, who would have thought that eating a bit less and taking more exercise would be the solution?

  Nowadays, I try to do a big walk every day. I don’t wear tracksuits or exercise gear any more as I find it raises people’s expectations. And mine. They seem to think I should be moving faster. I do wear trainers. I have to, because they have orthotics in them to stop my knees collapsing. I am in the early stages of crumble but pushing this body to its very limits.

  In the house, we have a machine that you stand on and it vibrates until you think your teeth will fall out, and a big rubber ball that I sit on occasionally. Exercise fads and personal trainers have come and gone, and I have drawers full of weights and bits of elastic, and devices that electrocute your stomach trying to find a hidden six-pack. I am at the age when mostly what I do is stretch and take glucosamine and complain about the noise my joints make as I walk upstairs. It’s so loud I sometimes have to stop, because I think someone is following me.

  It’s all a kind of hell, but it keeps the old bod in a shape that vaguely resembles a female human.

  I never wore dresses as a teenager. I wasn’t a girly girl and generally went around in wide baggy jeans and my brother Tim’s old Sea Scouts jumper. It was tight-fitting because he had been in the Sea Scouts when he was about ten. It was wool, with a round neck.

  I bloody loved this jumper. My going-out outfit, when I went to the local disco, was red cord jeans and the jumper. If I had worn it a lot, it started to smell BO-ey so I washed it by hand, but always at the last minute. With ten minutes to go before I had to leave to get the bus into town, I would wring it out and lay it on the boiler, willing it to dry. After ten minutes, I would pick it up, still steaming and heavily damp, and put it on. I steamed all the way on the bus and all the way through the disco. By the time I got home later, it was only moist. No one had many clothes then, and the new items were rare. Desired items were Ben Sherman shirts and a pair of platform shoes. I had one of each, and a maxi-length denim coat that I bought on a trip to London and never took off. I wore it with jewellery that was made out of horseshoe nails. Otherwise, it was basically back to jodhpurs.

  My social life moved between girls I knew locally whom I would go riding with, and a Saturday disco in Northwich called Stan’s. Girls I knew at school went to Stan’s, which was conveniently near the bus station, and we would dance around to Slade and T. Rex for a few hours and then hang about near the buses, smoking. Boys from the town would come and talk to us, boys we knew were a bit dangerous.

  There was one boy, nicknamed Joe 90, who was a real skinhead. He wore the uniform, and the rumour was that he was very bad and had been in prison. Other boys were afraid of Joe 90. He hung around, but always in the distance. Then, one day at school, a girl came up to me and said that Joe 90 wanted to go out with me. Huge aghast-ness from all my friends and even the girl telling me. Surely this was a joke? Why would Joe 90 want to go out with Sea Scouts jumper?

  It was always a mystery to me, but it was true, and we started to meet. We would meet outside Stan’s – he was too cool to go in – and go for walks around the precinct in Northwich or into the pub. He was quiet, but terribly nice, a good kisser, and we dated for a while. He was nicer than a lot of other boys I went out with, who would just spend the whole evening trying to stick their tongues down my throat or touching my boobs. Boys who would take you to the cinema and then never want to watch the film. I had to push them off.

  ‘Will you stop it! I am trying to watch The Exorcist!’

  When school ended, I was at home, with nothing on the horizon and nothing much to offer the world. I did attempt to get some work locally, mucking out stables, but to no avail. A lot of my friends had landed temp jobs at the local Ski yoghurt factory, which was something of an eyesore and would occasionally discharge various yoghurt flavours into the nearby waterway. Our house – a big Victorian grange – was built just above a millpond that was filled by said waterway. Sometimes we would wake up in the morning to find the whole pond was blackcurrant flavour and – on occasion – banana. Despite this, I applied for a job, but even they wouldn’t have me. I couldn’t believe it! I mean, everybody got a job there.

  It was my mother who pointed out that I couldn’t just hang around at home, as lovely as that was. And it was. But something had to be done. I had to be moved on. I was obviously going to have to have a gap year, although such a thing didn’t really exist then (it was just called ‘wait-a-year-and-try-again year’). My mother discovered an agency that set up au pair jobs in Italy, and I was eventually found a job working for a family in Milan. I was fairly placid, so this didn’t seem too terrifying, despite the fact that I had never been to Italy, spoke not a word of Italian, would be gone for six or seven months and only really knew how to look after animals.

  So, thanks to my mother, I found myself in Milan.

  I arrived at night, armed with only a piece of paper with the address written on it – Via Cappuccio 21 – and some traveller’s cheques. A cab took me through the city and plopped me out in a narrow, deserted little street. This couldn’t be right. The family I was going to work for were supposed to be rich. They were called Zucchi and had made a fortune in linen. He was a tablecloth magnate. (That’s magnate, not magnet. He was not attractive to linen.)

  The driver pointed through the gloom to a pair of double doors and I faintly made out the number 21. He drove off and I pressed the buzzer. A tiny door, set into the big doors, opened and I was admitted by a doorman, who led me into a beautiful courtyard surrounded by what appeared to be a palace. I was directed to the back door, where I was met by Signora Zucchi. As it turned out, they only owned half the palace. It was a semi! And it would be my home for the next three months.

  I was given a tiny room off the kitchen, which by day was full of maids and a cook called Jana, who would talk at me incessantly. By the time I had learned enough Italian, I realized that they were just gossiping about the Zucchis’ relationship, the fact that he had other women, and that one of the two sons took drugs and had girls staying over.

  The Signora was a frightened-looking woman who was obviously making herself sick with nerves. Neither of the two sons, Luca and Paolo, wanted anything to do with me at all. I didn’t push it. I did general tidying in the morning and took the Signora a breakfast tray that was prepared by the cook. I went to the baker and got the daily bread. I was expected to have lunch with the family. This was eaten in a vast room with nothing in it except the dining table – and generally eaten in silence, because the rule was that
conversation at lunch had to be in English.

  They struggled to find things for me to do, and the atmosphere in the house was never less than strained. I was eventually relieved of the silent lunch duty and given the job of opening and closing all the shutters in the house every day. This I loved because I was on my own and doing something practical. The rooms were the size of ballrooms and never used by the family.

  Luckily, I had been signed up for Language School, and was later surprised when a diary I wrote at the time suggested an extremely complicated social life. My memory was of being fairly solitary but, as it turns out, I had a string of boyfriends and was going out with two or three at a time.

  This extract sums up a typical day:

  1 March 1977

  Got up at 7 when the alarm rang. No school this morning, so no desperate rush. Took my nightshirt off the rack where it had been drying. Still a bit damp, but I had to wear something to wake Paolo.

  Did the Signora’s breakfast as usual. She wants coffee now, instead of tea. Got dressed at 8.30. The boys’ rooms weren’t in too bad a state so they didn’t take long. Listened to Labelle, Nightbirds.

  Finished the rooms about 10.30 and had a fag before tidying myself up to go to the library. My ticket arrived this morning. Caught No 1 tram to Via Manzoni, then walked to the library. Decided I must read some Ernest Hemingway, so I took down Old Man and the Sea and Farewell to Arms, which I didn’t think I would enjoy. So I sat and watched the American lady in the black dress with the awful American accent watching a video tape of Jimmy Carter. I think I looked conspicuous, so I moved across to the poetry section, selected Robert Frost, and then went into a daydream for about quarter of an hour. Got up to leave, whereupon the man sitting opposite me asked me how to spell ‘definitely’.

  Decided to walk home. The sky was clear but it was slightly chilly. Arrived back at 1.00. Ate in usual silence. Didn’t want to go out in the afternoon so stayed in and read Robert Frost.