So, flanked by Slim, I marched into the man’s Soho office.
‘Hello, Adrian,’ I said.
‘Oh, Miriam, how lovely to see you.’
‘Well, I don’t know if it’s that lovely to see you. I’m a bit pissed off because you haven’t paid me yet.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you a cheque, Miriam. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, sometimes these things get a bit delayed,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it, honestly. I’ll send you a cheque, it’ll be coming soon.’
‘Do you know what? It’s going to come even sooner than that. It’s actually going to come now, right now,’ I said, rather masterfully.
‘I can’t do it absolutely right now because—’ He stopped.
‘Oh, yes, you can. Do you know how I know you can? Because Slim here…’ I turned to Slim, and continued: ‘He wants you to give it to me now, don’t you, Slim?’
‘Oh, yeah, if you owe somebody money, you have to pay it, don’t ya?’ Slim said, menacingly.
It had an instant effect. Slim was obviously not someone to mess with and my debtor was visibly rattled.
‘Right. OK, then,’ he said, nervously, as he got up and fetched his cheque book, hurriedly writing out my cheque.
It was quite useful knowing Slim, but that was the only time I had to call upon him to put the screws on. Slim didn’t even do anything — he just stood there, and I knew that would be enough. So, Clapham was house number two.
Then, in 1977, I bought the Gun Emplacement, a cottage by the sea in St Margaret’s Bay, Kent. My mother had left me two, small farm-workers’ cottages, side by side in a little village called Minster-in-Thanet, three miles from Birchington-on-Sea. She had bought them in the fifties to rent to holiday makers, but when Mummy died, I decided to let them out to students at the University of Kent. Within eight months, I had a letter from the Council to say that they were having great difficulty with blockages in the septic tank: my student tenants, it transpired, were using newspapers to wipe their bottoms, and not lavatory paper. If this practice continued, the Council informed me, I would be liable for the cost of unblocking any subsequent obstructions. That was a headache I did not need: having to tell tenants how to wipe their bottoms was not something I thought a woman of my talent and experience should have to do. I put the cottages on the market and sold them within a week. With the money, I thought I must buy another place in the country. I didn’t know quite how to go about it, so I enlisted the help of Peter Ashenden, a retired surveyor who lived on a houseboat on the river at Sandwich.
‘I want to buy a house, near the sea, totally unreconstructed but it must be quiet; I don’t want any neighbours,’ I said.
Within a week, Peter had found me the Gun Emplacement. It wasn’t on the market yet, but he had popped into the local estate agent and they told him they’d just received the instruction to sell it. Heather and I drove up to St Margaret’s Bay and Peter showed us around. It was perfect: the sea view was exactly what I wanted, and there were no other houses nearby. It was an ugly, little, flat-roofed bunker, a one-storey concrete structure with a chimney, but its selling point was the unique location: in unspoiled countryside, perched on Lighthouse Down, overlooking the white cliffs of Dover with fabulous uninterrupted views across the Channel to Calais. We rushed all around it (that’s something, I realise, that Heather and I do: when we see a house we like, we run; we run all around it and up and down), and I bought it right there on the spot for £10,500.
It was constructed by the Army in 1910; Sir Peter Ustinov had been billeted there during the Second World War and he later bought the house from the Ministry of Defence as a writing retreat in 1946. I’ve had the Gun Emplacement as a seaside home for more than forty years; because of its wartime history, when I’m in residence there, I like to be addressed as ‘Bombardier Margolyes’.
Two years ago, and of course unbeknownst to me, a Merseyside gang of drug smugglers rented it from me. They were using it as the secret helicopter drop-off point for millions of pounds-worth of cocaine; they had Dutch pilots who would fly in over the North Sea, and drop the drugs onto the flat roof of the house or in the garden.The gang escaped to Thailand before the police had cottoned on to their ruse. The arms of the law are long, however, and they were eventually arrested over there and flown back for trial.
The first I knew about it was when I was phoned by a policeman. He said, ‘Do you own the Gun Emplacement?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I had to tell him that I’d rented the place out in all innocence, and certainly was not a member of the drugs gang. I don’t like drugs at alclass="underline" I wouldn’t know if a gram of cocaine got up and bit me, so I was upset — but it was also quite thrilling, like something out of a Bond movie. Their trial was reported in the Daily Mail (‘The White Sniffs of Dover’ was the headline). Everyone on Twitter thought that I must be part of the gang, and I was renamed Miriam Escobar.
Too Fat to Go to Bed With
Actresses are often obsessed by the way they look and I’m no different. I love my face; I’m disgusted by my body. I loathe it. If I could migrate my whole personality and my face onto another body, I would be delighted. My weight has been a constant in my life — a negative constant. I bitterly regret it, but I haven’t done enough to change it; it’s still a nuisance and medically unwise, and yet, here I am, still fat: somehow over my eighty years I’ve managed to eat my way to 94 kilos. And now, to add insult to injury, lengthwise, I’m shrinking — I have lost an inch in height and am now 4ft 10ins.
I fully understand that most people would say: ‘Get over yourself and stop overeating.’ But it’s not so simple. I worry about it all the time. Whenever I shop for food I think, ‘I mustn’t have that.’ It’s a constant battle. It’s a hard, miserable fate being fat. And there are loads of fat people who would agree with me. They might not want to be perfect, but they don’t want to be fat, either. And they’re right.
A lot of people say, ‘Oh, if you were skinny, Miriam, you wouldn’t be the same.’ And, no, I wouldn’t be the same but, maybe, that’s what I’d like. I sometimes feel it would be so nice to be the sharp, nasty but devastatingly sexy, skinny person for a change. In my late twenties, a lovely voice-over actress called Norma Mitchell said to me, ‘Miriam, if you weren’t fat, I would jump into bed with you in a minute.’ I know she meant it in a nice way. ‘Not much I can do about that,’ I thought. I’ve never forgotten it; in fact, I nearly called this book ‘Too Fat to Go to Bed With.’
Moderation has been something that I have shunned and run away from, so mine is an appetite untrammelled. Greed is the flaw in my make-up. A modicum of discipline, a reining in is needed, a breaking of these desires and needs and longings. It makes me think less of myself, so when people make fun of me, inside I’m shouting along with them. I see what they mean and even though I think it’s wrong to ‘fat-shame’ people, I almost want to do it to myself, because I think I deserve it.
In this way, as in so many, I resemble my mother. Despite all her style and passion for fine things, Mummy was too fat and she knew it. She was an excellent cook and her suppers and lunches were legendary. No one else I have ever known has made tomato and onion sandwiches, lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper, with such care and attention to detail. I can almost smell now her chicken soup served hot as soup must be, with matzo balls, or vermicelli, lots of carrots, onion, celery, and the feet, heart and gizzards of the bird, and my favourite, the neck — all to be sucked dry. Every Thursday she’d make delicious fish by dipping it in egg and matzo flour and frying it in olive oil. I used to love watching her, but all that rich, fried Jewish food wasn’t good for her, as it isn’t for anybody. She loved all the wrong food, cooked it well, and rewarded herself with it, for the things she didn’t have.