When I was five, my parents took me to my first pantomime, which was Aladdin. Of course I loved it, but I was very frightened of the wicked wizard, Abanazar. I had nightmares every night for a week. Finally, my parents decided to take me backstage to meet the actor, so that I would see for myself that he was only pretending. That’s the magic word — pretending. It is the beginning of imagination.
Mummy also adored music. Her favourite singers were Conchita Supervía, the Spanish mezzo-soprano, and Gracie Fields. My mother insisted on having a piano, and she and I used to sing music-hall songs together. We often sang ‘Sally’, Mummy sitting at our Blüthner baby grand piano in the drawing room, tears rolling down her cheeks. I used to ask her, ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’ and she’d say, ‘I can’t help it. It’s so beautiful.’ And now I’m exactly the same: I weep uncontrollably at a piece of music, an operatic aria, even a military band marching past. She filled my memories. Filled my heart. And she always will.
I loved Daddy, no question; he was a dear, dear man and it’s from him that I get my love of words, but we never understood each other. Mummy flooded me. She was fun to be with and so we were always in cahoots, in that sense.
Every morning when I wasn’t at school — weekends, or holidays — when Daddy was up and going off to work, I’d go to my parent’s bedroom and climb into Mummy’s bed. They had two beds pushed together. Mummy always slept naked and I liked hugging her generous adipose tissue. We talked about everything. It was during one of our bedroom talks that she told me she had not been in love with Daddy when they married. We had unlikely conversations: politics, people in synagogue and what they were wearing, what furniture Mummy wanted to buy, or about the tenants in her houses. I loved hearing about life in London before the war, and her days as a sales girl in Madame Flora. I had no filter with her. We talked about school and the people that I went to school with and what they were doing. There was no subject that was taboo; we were completely open with each other and we would often just lie in helpless giggles. Mummy had big plans. She was always talking about moving out of ‘the hovel’ and building our ‘family home’ — what the bathrooms were going to be like and what the size of the kitchen would be.
The time she spoke of most, though, was when her parents moved to Underhill Road, in Dulwich. They had previously lived in Camberwell, which was considered a lower-class area at the time — Dulwich was a step up. From the beginning, Mummy instilled in me who were the people to be friends with and who were ‘common’ (and so to be avoided). My ear became attuned early to the minute gradations of class, indicated by a thickening and mangling of the vowels, a dropping of the consonants. She also talked often about who, amongst our acquaintances and Daddy’s patients, she considered to be ‘the best people’. She had that concept in her mind, which I think a lot of poor people have — that there actually is such a thing as the best people, but by that she didn’t mean the socially important. She actually meant the sort that I would call the best people: the thinkers, the philosophers, the historians — because the life of the mind was very important to my mother.
At the same time Mummy enjoyed making money. It allowed her to indulge her passion for fine things. She always wore the original 4711 Eau de Cologne. She often wore a cape instead of a coat and I remember my embarrassment sometimes when she came to school. As a child, you want your parents to fit in with everyone else’s parents — Mummy never did. Now, of course, I’m very proud of her individuality. She liked to wear Cuban heels, duster coats, and in the days when fur coats were politically acceptable (not that she would have cared), she had minks, ermines and a glorious leopard-skin coat, all made for her by one of my father’s patients, Sam Dimdore, a furrier from London who had also settled in Oxford during the war and had a shop in High Street. His wife Lil made the best cheesecake I’d ever tasted. She had multiple sclerosis and was a sad figure, always seated in the back of the dark shop. Later, their son, Mervyn, contracted the same disease. I knew early of tragedy.
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.