Life in London

We have been in Cambridgeshire for over a week by now. But I haven't finished with London. If you are only here to read about Cambridge, you could skip this chapter.

I have a photograph (black and white) of myself and my cousin Margaret feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square. We both have our hair in long plaits and we're wearing double-breasted gabardine raincoats. It must have been taken around 1955. My mother took me up to London regularly when I was a child, and from my very first visit London became a magnet that constantly pulled me forward into an imagined glorious future. I didn't want to be anywhere else but London. Only London. So after finishing a pre-diploma year at Cardiff College of Art, I sent my portfolio of work to three London art schools: the Central School of Art and Design, St. Martin's School of Art, and Kingston College. Central was the most prestigious, and I was thrilled to be called up for an interview.

While I was waiting to discuss my work a young man walked over and began to talk to me. He was tall. And dark. And very handsome. He had the confident air, pure vowels and deadly arrogance of a top public-school product. When they came to take me to the interview room he said "I hope you get in," and my heart was lost.

I did get in, and at first spent every day nervously expecting him to appear. But he didn't. My hopes were dashed.

There was someone persistently paying me attention though. He looked fairly odd, dressed in a khaki army-surplus greatcoat, wearing John Lennon glasses with one lens shaded darker, and with a straggly beard, the whole effect topped with a khaki knitted toque. But older students seemed to treat him with respect, and there was something charming and attractive about him.

Paul and I started sitting beside each other when our groups went to the pub after school. Then we started walking together to the tube station. I'd just adopted a new baby cat, the fabulous Deborah, and one evening at the pub I asked Paul whether he'd like to come back to my flat in Hampstead to meet my kitten (I realise how daft that sounds but it's the truth).

Later on that evening, while we were talking and drinking tea, the moon came out. It shone through a crack in the curtains, illuminating his cheekbones, and I suddenly recognized him: "It's you it's you! I was looking for you, I didn't know you were you!"

During the summer holidays before starting my first term in London, there had been a horrible story on BBC television. Three students were attacked in London by three Irish labourers. At the trial, the judge said he had never before tried a case of such extreme violence. He sentenced them to 25 years without chance of parole. When they heard their sentence, one of the men threw a chair through the courtroom windows.

Paul told me what had happened. His brother Nick had just come back from an archeological dig in Jordan and looked very brown. That night he and his girlfriend had just met up with Paul in Westbourne Grove and all three went out to pick up some fish and chips. While they waited for their order Paul heard somebody say "I'm gonna get you!" Paul turned to look at the only other customer, a small man. "Not you," said the man, "that foreign-looking guy there," pointing at Nick. The man left the shop and they thought no more about it.

They were walking away when the three Irishmen charged out of a side street and knocked into them. Paul felt them punch him in the back and somehow had to fall down. In fact he had been stabbed, with both lungs punctured. He started drifting in and out of consciousness. He saw Nick being punched. He heard Nick's girlfriend screaming "Stop! Stop!" then she was hit in the face hard enough to break her nose, and she ran off up the stairs to the bridge over the railway tracks. Then he felt someone pulling his hair to lift his head, and heard them say "Let's cut his face." That's the last he remembered until he heard the ambulance siren coming.

Later on at the hospital, it was Nick's job to tell Paul that he was lucky to be alive but he'd lost an eye. Paul said he cried because he was an art student and his vision meant everything. He grew a beard to hide the scars on his cheek and upper lip, and had one dark lens in his glasses to hide his cut eyelid and prosthetic eye. In due course, when the scars had calmed down and he'd had a better eye made that moved realistically and looked at things more or less in alignment with his real eye, he shaved and got rid of the dark lens and looked like my confident public school boy again. But he was changed, of course.

We were still students at the Central when we got married on June 7th 1967, We were married at Chelsea Registry Office, and our reception was held in the sunny back garden of my mother-in-law's house at 141 Old Church Street. I remember walking down the King's Road from the registry office to 141, with my best friend Carolyn, Paul's brother Nick, my mother, Paul's mother and my brother Keith. I was 21 years old; Paul was 25. My father had died the year before, and Paul's father was stuck in East Jerusalem in the middle of the Six Days War.

For me, it was a fairy story coming true. You have to understand that I had come to London from Pontypool, Mon. My parents had a shabby pub just opposite the covered market. The Salvation Army Band stood under my bedroom window and played hymns every Saturday night. My best friend Rita (Rita Maria Louisa Lucia Sidoli was her full name), lived over her parents' egg and chips café just down Crane Street from my pub.

At 10 years old a scholarship to the Haberdashers Monmouth School for Girls tore me from where I belonged in Pontypool and injected me into a terrifying world where almost every single teacher was a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. All but two were unmarried. They lived in pairs in Georgian houses in Monmouth or singly in one of the school's three boarding houses. The only two married teachers, Mrs. Lloyd who taught Mathematics, and Mrs. Bobbit who taught Domestic Kitchen (cooking, cleaning, sewing and cake decorating) were somewhat despised by we girls because they'd sold out and got married instead of dedicating their lives to a pure academic path. It was expected that each one of us would make her mark in the world. Many students did.

But the teachers looked down on me because I lived in a pub, talked with a South Wales accent, and had inferior manners. The only teacher who befriended me was my piano teacher Miss Thompson. Pontypool was a market town at the head of the Valleys, meaning it was the shopping town for people from the South Wales mining villages. It was rough, tough and filled with poverty and deprivation. My parents had left school when they were fifiteen like everybody else in Pontypool. This was the first time I'd been made to feel inferior and not good enough, and it was devastating. I'm ashamed to say that I worked hard to lose my accent until I sounded more like the boarders at my school.

London was to be my Mecca, where I transcended the very English stigma of class inferiority and became a member of Paul's fabled family. Let's be honest, I was dazzled by my new social position.

But why (I hear you ask), why did this chapter begin with a picture of the Houses of Parliament seen from a boat? Well, I meant to make this part shorter, then quickly continue on to our trip down the Thames to Greenwich, but I really had to get this preview off my chest. It took longer than I thought it would. There is just a bit more coming about my newly assumed identities as Paul's new wife, as London film editor Sue Vester, and as young Mrs. Vester of Jerusalem. This will explain the photographs you'll see of houses and other places we visited last week, and why our trip to London resulted in something of a personal catharsis.

Part 2 of what we did last week in London coming soon. Then a complete switch to Cambridge and what's happening now, I promise. Well, after just a little bit about my best friend Carolyn Gilmour who lived in the middle of Cambridge Botanical Gardens. But it's only just a very little bit.