It was a lightbulb moment for me. Let me rewind and explain. When I was about eight years old, (late 1970s) my maternal grandfather, “Thin Grandpa” died. I was devastated: He loved horses, as I did, had been a daring steeplechaser among other things, and I worshipped him. I didn’t stop crying for weeks, it seemed. He was about fifteen years older than my maternal grandmother, Madeleine Goad, which left her a widow in her mid-fifties, still living in the large farmhouse in the bucolic Kent countryside where she had raised her own four children in the 1940s and 50s. She had done this with the aid of one Winifred Philpot, who had arrived in the early forties, aged fourteen, initially to work as a lady’s maid. Winnie’s fiancée was killed in the war and she had remained with the family ever since, becoming the nanny to the four children, one of whom was my mother Valerie. It seemed obvious after Thin Grandpa died that my parents and their six children (yes, six) should move in.
Moving from London to Granny’s house was a dream, and I took to country life. My three brothers and two sisters and I roamed the meadows and hills and attended the village school, which we could walk to in summer. It was Granny who taught us to ride and took us with her on her rounds to feed the chickens and milk the Jersey cow. (As a ration-weary war wife, Granny had become self-sufficient and even after the war ended she was never without a cow.) Winnie cooked us huge teas and baked endless cakes which we wolfed down every day after school.
While my parents were wild and fashionable (my mother was a designer, my father an art dealer), Granny and Winnie were cosy and always around and, frankly, took over the child-rearing to a large degree. Life revolved around games of Monopoly or Scrabble, summer holidays in Devonshire (with Granny and Winnie, of course), sewing, gardening, and a menu of exclusively English literature: Books like The Railway Children, The Secret Garden, and Ballet Shoes got me interested in reading, and I was soon plundering Granny’s bookshelf and borrowing her copies of Rebecca, The Pursuit of Love, Pride and Prejudice, and Brideshead Revisited. I grew up thinking that the old-school British value system—honestly, loyalty, hard work—was universal. If a man was a rake he’d be found out and hung out to dry—after all, that was what happened in all Jane Austen’s novels. I had never even heard of the books my peers in America were digesting—Less Than Zero and Bright Lights Big City— and which were analyzing the cut-throat world of the 1980s in a new way. The only movie I remember seeing as a teenager was Grease and since we weren’t allowed a VCR, and lived miles from a cinema, most modern film and television didn’t reach us either. When my parents decided, in the mid-80s, to install a dishwasher, Granny insisted a machine could never wash up as well as a person. She refused until the end of her days to have one in her own kitchen at the other end of the house.