This Much Is True

Upstairs there were four bedrooms: Grandma’s, mine, the au pair’s and my parents’ — their bedroom suite was my mother’s choice, fashioned in a garish bird’s eye maple hardwood, it was hideous: a hectic yellow, and gigantic. A large bathroom was in pink and blue terrazzo mosaic, modern then but definitely a period piece now. For my bedroom, Mummy had gone to High Wycombe, furniture capital of England, and had bought a conventional walnut suite. I hated it: it bore no relation to what I needed or liked. The headboard of my single bed was absurdly styled; I’ve always disliked headboards. Nothing else there was to my taste. In the living room there was an Esse stove, with little see-through doors giving the room focus and considerable warmth. Eventually, we had a TV there and a canteen of cutlery, a wedding present from Daddy’s parents.

The house was Mummy’s castle. We all enjoyed the space, the garden, and having two lavatories. Her special delight was the parquet flooring throughout — in a herring-bone pattern, and partially covered in the drawing room by a Chinese blue and beige carpet, made of a material that Mummy called ‘unwashed silk’. That’s where the piano went — and The Cherub. The Cherub was a six-foot-high Cupid in Carrara marble, on a turntable you could move with one finger. Cupid was seated on a pair of doves, reaching for an arrow from the quiver on his back. It was a piece of high Victoriana which I imagine my grandfather had purchased in an auction. Mummy loved it and so Daddy accepted it. Now I gaze at it with pride in my kitchen in Clapham. At one time, I thought of selling it and Phillips auction house advised me it would fetch £50,000. I entered it in the auction, but then realised I couldn’t bear to part with it. From America, I telephoned Phillips and withdrew my cherub from their auction. They were furious and understandably charged me for the publicity they’d arranged to help the sale. But I never regretted it. Cupid will stay with me until I die. It represents home.

After Daddy came to live with me in London, I decided to sell the Oxford house. A local dentist, Mr Pick, bought it and subsequently sold it on to a development company. It has now been pulled down for horrible flats. If I’d known he was that sort of man, I would never have sold it to him.

Just across Banbury Road from us was the Cutteslowe Estate. A ‘class wall’ was built between the bottom of Carlton Road and the beginning of the estate, because it was not thought appropriate that North Oxford should have to deal with ‘hoi polloi’ living in what they considered to be vile council housing. That’s what Oxford was like when I was growing up — and it hasn’t changed much. Oxford is a place that pushes people away, which has divisions — divisions of class, divisions of intelligence. It’s a place of harsh judgements and little compassion. The wall was finally pulled down in 1959, but snobbery is harder to demolish.

I know that my parents keenly felt discriminated against in many situations, and yet I don’t think they ever considered moving away, chiefly because I was at Oxford High School. They always put my well-being before theirs and made many sacrifices for me.

When I started to become the person that the High School created, it was a complicated situation for my parents. My mother had come from a lower middle-class background, but by becoming a doctor my father was now middle class, and so my mother had remade herself. She did a lot of charity work, and gave parties for the synagogue. And they always voted Tory. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, consider anything else.

Once I was at Oxford High School, however, I would confront them about their voting Tory. Through school, I had formed strong friendships with people like Anna Truelove, Catherine Pasternak Slater and Liz Hodgkin, that have lasted all my life. The Hodgkins, in particular, were an intellectual family: Hog’s grandfather (she was called Hog at school) had been Provost of Queen’s College, and spending so much time in the company of Liz’s large and vociferously opinionated household led me to question aspects of my upbringing.

I have been friends with Liz since we were eleven. After school, we both went to Newnham College, Cambridge (Old Hall), and have remained close ever since.

Liz lived with her parents, her two brothers, and her aunt and five cousins, in one of those vast, Victorian houses close to the school in Woodstock Road. Liz’s father was Thomas Hodgkin, the Marxist historian of Africa at Oxford, while her mother was the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin. There were only three female Nobel Prize winners for chemistry: one was Marie Curie, one was Irène-Joliot Curie, and the other was Dorothy Hodgkin.