This Much Is True

Mummy despaired of my lack of style. ‘Take a pride in your appearance,’ she would say repeatedly. I never did. Growing up, I hated our necessary, but often fruitless, shopping trips. I detested the shopkeeper telling us, ‘I’m afraid we’ve nothing in her size.’ And so we went to Miss Norridge, Mummy’s dressmaker just off Walton Street in the centre of Oxford. More than anything, though, I wanted to have a man’s suit, male in every particular. Was I ‘butch’ as a little girl? No — I simply wanted not to have to wear dresses. Now, I adore the little summer frocks I have, always made to the same pattern. There is a subtle difference between a frock and a dress. Mine are all ‘frocks’. They’ve all been made for me by various wardrobe mistresses on every film and play I’ve ever done. I look like a throwback to the 1950s, but they’re comfy and suit me and they ALL have pockets. Pockets are essential in my life, and every garment I own must have them.

When I look back to the 1940s when I was a child, it seems an impossibly distant landscape, much simpler, less adorned. The only times we left Oxford was to see family or to go on holiday. Most of our times away were spent in Scotland with my father’s family. These were not exactly relaxing breaks: my mother really didn’t like my father’s family and they didn’t like her. She thought they were hard and mean; they thought she was vulgar.

My father’s brother, Jack, had married an Irish girl called Muriel and they had one daughter, my cousin Philippa, whom I adored for most of my life. I think Auntie Muriel was far more vulgar than Mummy. My mother called her ‘the scum of the Liffey’. And she was a Jewish Irish girl! I remember Mummy saying to her once, ‘When you go past a dustbin, you don’t lift the lid.’ I don’t know what that means but it is obviously an insult.

Uncle Jack and Auntie Muriel came down from Glasgow to Oxford to visit me when I was very little. I must have been about one and still in my playpen in the back garden at Banbury Road. I wasn’t wearing a nappy and I had done a poo on the ground. This nice lady, Auntie Muriel (actually, she was a complete cunt, but I didn’t know that because I was only a baby), came over to the playpen and said, ‘Oh, what a sweet little lovely.’ I must have thought, ‘What a nice, friendly lady!’ because apparently I toddled over to my recently laid turd, picked it up and gave it to her. To her credit, she was polite: she accepted my gift, saw what it was, gave a great scream and then ran away. I think that was it, as far as Auntie Muriel and I were concerned. She never showed me much affection after that.

One holiday, when I was about nine, I stayed with Uncle Jack, Auntie Muriel and cousin Philippa in their home in Albert Drive. My parents were staying around the corner in Aytoun Road with Auntie Eva, Uncle Harold and Grandma Margolyes. I was in my bedroom and I remember vividly that Muriel came in and shut the door behind her, then she stood in front of it, her back against the door, the way they do in Hollywood movies. She said to me in her Irish accent, smiling slightly: ‘Your mammy doesn’t love you.’

What a shocking thing to say to a child; I knew that even then. I replied, ‘Of course she does. What do you mean?’ She said, ‘No, your mammy doesn’t love you, because if your mammy loved you, she’d buy you nice clothes, and she’d do your hair nicely and then you’d look nice, but you don’t look nice. So your mammy doesn’t love you.’ Such a statement could have been incredibly destructive for a child, but I had complete confidence in my mother’s utter devotion to me. I replied, ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Of course, she loves me. You’re quite wrong about that.’ The power of our ‘fortress family’ meant that I knew she was talking rot and that for some reason — beyond my childish comprehension — she wanted to hurt me. Nothing more was said — then or ever. She opened the door and I went out. I told my parents, and it merely confirmed their opinion of Muriel Margolyes, née White. I never stayed there on my own again.

This didn’t affect my friendship with Philippa, their much loved only child who was a few years older than me. Our only wobble came when I picked up the phone to her boyfriend who was so taken with my educated voice and cut crystal tones, that he couldn’t stop talking about it. I was around thirteen and seventeen-year-old Philippa was not amused at all: ‘Och, what sort of conversation did you have with him?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember, I just answered the phone.’ She said, ‘Well, he thinks you’re pretty hot stuff but you’re just a schoolgirl.’ But I found that so funny that eventually she burst out laughing too.