Later, just as I was leaving to go to university, Miss Maddron told me, ‘You were naughty, Miriam, but you were never wicked.’ I hope that is true, although I remember once in the lower third putting up my hand in the biology lesson and saying, in between hysterical giggles, to Miss Keay, our rather buttoned-up teacher: ‘Please, Miss Keay, what are [snigger, snigger, giggle] t-t-t testicles?’ Of course, I knew what they were, but I just wanted to hear how she replied, which was, unsurprisingly: ‘Miriam, don’t be silly.’
The school prank I enjoyed most of all happened in gym class. We had been reading about the Greeks tricking the unsuspecting Trojans during the siege of Troy and this had given me the idea for my own wooden horse episode. Our school vaulting horse was constructed in a pyramid shape in a series of wooden tiers, which you could remove or add to in order to make it lower or higher, with the padded suede-leather ‘saddle’ on the top for vaulting. My accomplices and I took the saddle off, I climbed in and the top was replaced, leaving me concealed and snug inside. By the time Miss Leonard, the gym teacher, came into the gym hall asking ‘Where’s Miriam?’ my classmates were already in paroxysms, which, of course, flummoxed the poor soul. I had a perfect view of the unfolding scene from my hiding place, through the grab holes in each of the wooden tiers. My chums could see my eyes darting about, but Miss Leonard didn’t notice a thing — she had no idea I was in there. It was exquisite fun. I moved the horse just an inch or so. I could see that Miss Leonard was aware that it had moved, but didn’t quite believe it. Every so often, I would shuffle the horse forward a little more, inch by inch, watching her increasing befuddlement at every movement. She couldn’t work out what was happening.
Our lumbering game of Grandmother’s Footsteps was one of my best bits of naughtiness. Miss Leonard did bear the brunt of a good deal of my more boisterous behaviour. I can still remember the weariness in her voice — despair tinged with resignation — as she reacted to my antics: ‘Oh, Miriam! Oh, Miriam!’ In fact, it was the usual response to most of my activities at school — ‘Oh, Miriam. Oh, Miriam! Oh, Miriam!’
No other pupil would match me in my outrageousness until Tatty Katkov came to Oxford High School. I was always in detention. I always got caught. I remember when I was given a detention for a Thursday afternoon for some transgression or other, I was obliged to say truthfully, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I can’t do then, as I’m already booked for a detention on Thursday. But I could fit Friday in.?’
Families
Mummy loathed ‘the hovel’ passionately, and was so desperate to have her own house, she decided she was going to build one. She bought a patch of land at the top of Banbury Road and hired an architect to draw up ambitious plans. We moved to it in 1951, when I was ten, Grandma Walters (my maternal grandmother) coming too. It was Mummy’s dream: she had been the driving force behind the plan. Daddy merely followed in her wake — we all did.
It was an attractive mock-Tudor house at the top of Banbury Road, right on the roundabout. For some years after the war, no domestic building was allowed, but Mummy had hassled the authorities so much that a building permit had been granted. Unfortunately, the architect she chose, Major Knight, was an idiot. He’d been recommended but he was hopeless. Construction had been going on for some time before he noticed they’d forgotten the staircase — so much for supervision, one of an architect’s main tasks. Building materials were left unprotected in the rain and finally Mummy realised the fireplace had been omitted. But, once completed, it was a handsome property, fronting onto Banbury Road but set back from its noise.
Outside the kitchen window was a wrought-iron garden seat, which had belonged to my grandparents (it sits now in my south London garden). There were apple trees and gooseberry bushes and roses and it had a fine, broad driveway built by council workers Mummy snaffled from their official duties one summer’s day. The kitchen itself was far too small (again, post-war stipulations limited kitchen size) but it contained enough cupboards and work surfaces, a gas cooker and a fridge. There were bathrooms on both floors.
Just outside the kitchen, Mummy had made sure I had a little ‘den’ — my own personal work space. I decorated it with pictures of the Queen from floor to ceiling. I was a huge fan of the Queen’s. I remember on 2 June 1952, standing at my bedroom window and saying, ‘This is Coronation Day, and you must remember this all your life.’ And I have. It was a very important event in our family and, lacking a TV, we went to watch it at Mrs Harwood’s house. She was one of Daddy’s patients, a sweet lady who every year made Daddy a huge and delicious Christmas cake.
At the top of the first flight of stairs, Mummy had designed a large, stained-glass window of a shepherdess. When the sun shone through the glass, it gave a rosy glow to the stairs and hallway. A small bronze statue of a naked woman holding a glass lantern was on a shelf by the window.
Daddy’s surgery was on the ground floor to the right of the porch, full of books and his old-fashioned medicine cabinet. A hand basin was inset in a little alcove. He put his plate up at the entrance, but he continued to have a surgery at 4 Longwall Street until he retired in 1969, at the age of seventy.
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.