These were placid times of companionship and harmony. Later, my mother would say that they were some of the happiest days of her life, when she had the home she dreamed of and the child she longed for. She felt safe and fulfilled. She wielded little or no authority and I rarely gave her cause to do so. I was, on the whole, as obedient as a bonsai tree. Brooding moodiness came later. When Papa was away, the atmosphere in the house loosened, and we celebrated our temporary freedom by eating with undisguised glee the food he disliked: Couscous! Sorrel soup! Curry! We counted down the days until his return with a mixture of unspoken guilty dread and anticipation: we both knew there would be lavish gifts. But we also knew that our freedom would be curbed as life returned to a stricter rhythm.
CHAPTER 3
The Kennedys and me
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s daughter and I share not only a name but an exact birthday. Both our mothers, elegant and darkly beautiful with similar strong eyebrows, were called Jacqueline. Coincidence? At the ripe old age of five, my deductive powers told me otherwise.
JFK was more present to me than any relative. There were no pictures of grandparents, aunts or uncles in our home but there was a black-and-white portrait of Kennedy in profile in the sitting room and a life-size bronze bust of him in my father’s study. Sometimes on Sunday mornings, if he was writing a speech to give at a conference, he would play recordings of JFK’s most stirring addresses to summon up oratory inspiration. Everything the president said or did was discussed by my parents at dinner in the sort of admiring and affectionate tone you might use about a favourite family member. They talked with indulgent condescension about his plan to send a man to the moon as one might of an eccentric uncle who enjoyed tinkering with vintage cars.
On 22 November 1963, just days before my sixth birthday, I came out of school to the courtyard where mothers assembled to pick up their children. My mother was crying. It was the first time I had seen an adult shed tears. It frightened me like nothing ever had. It had not occurred to me that adults had anything to cry about: they were in control of everything. Even more unsettling was that the other mothers around her appeared to be crying too. With unfamiliar dread I took my mother’s hand and asked, ‘Is today the end of the world?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, without any further explanation.
I rode home in the car drinking in every last detail of the streets around me, thinking to myself that I must observe everything carefully so that when the world ended, I would remember it all. (Presuming, illogically, that I was somehow going to survive the apocalypse and bear witness: was this a precocious foreshadowing of the journalistic impulse?)
When my father came home that evening, he too was in unprecedented distress, sobbing, a sight even more frightening than my mother’s crying. After dinner we watched television and I learned not only what had happened but saw faces around the world that looked as distorted and tear-stained as my parents’. I went to bed expecting no tomorrow.
But the next morning came. Without any discussion, my father drafted a letter to Mrs Kennedy on my behalf, expressing my sadness at her loss. Why from me and not from him? What had I done to be designated as mourner-in-chief and official emissary of his sorrow? No one told me.
Pressing down hard and close to the nib, I signed my name for the first time as opposed to merely forming capital letters, making sure not to smudge the ink with my elbow, a risk of the left-handedness my mother was keen to discourage. Months later I received an envelope from the White House edged in black containing a printed card from Mrs Kennedy thanking me for my kind wishes.
After that, my father sank into a sombre mood as each anniversary approached. He timed his annual business trip to the US so he could make a point of going to Arlington Cemetery to pay his respects on 22 November without fail. It was the most sacred date in his calendar. Even twenty years later, any correspondence he wrote on that day, no matter the subject or the addressee, was headed ‘a day that will live in infamy’, which must have baffled recipients. His grief did not diminish over time: faced with this unprecedented manifestation of sorrow, my internal logic told me that we had lost a member of our family.
Prone in my solitude to imagining the wildest scenarios, I deduced I was JFK’s real daughter, swapped at birth for the pretender bearing my name. My earlier habit of spying on my parents now had a special focus: I watched for the slightest slip and betrayal of their devious plot. There was compelling evidence, like the day in 1967 when, in an unprecedented act, my parents took me out of school. This never happened.
We drove to a place called Runnymede, where we stood for hours in sweltering heat to catch a glimpse of Mrs Kennedy, all in white, accompanied by impostor Caroline, dressed to match her mother (I took this as another sign, since Maman and I often dressed alike. I never rebelled against the copycat outfits as I aspired to her elegance). The Queen dedicated a piece of Britain on which Magna Carta was signed to the memory of a fallen friend. Surely the only excuse for such an uncharacteristic breach of school attendance must be a secret connection, otherwise why weren’t my classmates there too?
I documented all such details in my diary. When Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968, I saw his lithe body lying in a pool of blood on television and felt a disconcerting sensation like a distant detonation. Our house plunged into fresh, raw sorrow, cementing my belief that our link to these two handsome brothers with their lustrous heads of hair and toothy magnetism could only be explained by a blood tie.
As hormones flooded my precociously pre-adolescent body, I wrote overheated letters to my best friend Antonia, who had moved to Hong Kong, documenting my theory and evidence with forensic method. She validated and encouraged my suspicions, contributing her own speculations, which included the inspired hypothesis that the state of Carolina had been named after me, a lasting memorial to the terrible deception at the heart of the American nation. Little did they suspect that the president’s real daughter was growing up captive in Wimbledon.
Eventually, our correspondence was intercepted, as all such incendiary espionage documents must be. I was unmasked, my cover blown. Surely now my parents would confess?
They did no such thing. Instead, they turned on me. How could I come up with such a hurtful, disrespectful scenario? I was sent to my room without dinner. My mother locked herself in her room, where I could hear her sobbing like a mewling kitten. I was forbidden to write to Antonia for a year and all my subsequent letters to her were vetted. Within months, the censorship made us self-conscious and stilted, killing the friendship stone dead.
I was baffled by the extreme overreaction and felt righteous with indignation. Surely I was the one with a grievance, I was the one who had been told a lie and deserved an explanation. None came. There was only the accusation that I was a wicked, ungrateful, bad child. It was not until a decade later that I understood the pain I had unsuspectingly caused with my all-too-classic adoption fantasy.
Fifty plus years after that fateful day, Jackie’s card is propped beside my desk together with a photograph of my parents in their glamorous youth, radiating wholesome hope and vitality. My father has a full head of hair. My mother has killer cheekbones. Both are looking squarely at the camera, fully aware of their charisma. They could almost be Kennedys.
CHAPTER 4
A serious child
After the Kennedy episode, I turned inward, subjecting myself to rigorous self-scrutiny and fault-finding. Serious by nature, eager to please, I committed myself to a program of personal improvement. At the age of ten, I listed my new year’s resolutions in my diary: to stop biting my nails and take more care of the dog. Nothing too bold or daring there.
In the space where I was asked to fill in my chosen motto I wrote ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’—proof that my French heritage and schooling were making a mark. My mother’s insistence that I be sent to a Lycée paid off: I became bi-lingual without even noticing it. And as I read Le Petit Prince, sang ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon’ and recited Les
Fables de la Fontaine, I fell in love with the widening spectrum of meanings that two parallel streams of words could express, and the ambiguity of the gap between them. As a hobby entomologist, I had enjoyed pulling the wings off bees to examine their jointed transparency; now, an amateur etymologist, I discovered words could not be pinned like insects.
The sensual heat of French suited my temperament. I preferred the stirring, bloodthirsty words of ‘La Marseillaise’ to the altogether more reverent ‘God Save the Queen’ we sang at Brownies, probably because the opening line mentioned children: ‘Allons enfants de la patrie …’
Ours was a news-hungry household, whether it came in print, or on radio or television. The issues of the day (Vietnam, the 1969 miners’ strike, the possibility of a European Union) were discussed in detail at dinner—or rather, my father delivered extended commentary on them while my mother interjected occasionally. As absorbent as a paper towel, I soaked it all up.
Reading the newspapers was a family ritual, especially on Sundays, when I would wait to hear them drop through the letterbox with a heavy thud and run down to read them, lying on my stomach on the hall carpet, before they got mussed and disordered by my parents.
I liked to get in early for another reason: due to shared chronic sinus conditions, my parents were both formidable nasal trumpeters. My father was the louder of the two, the bassoon to Maman’s French horn. Despite a plentiful collection of extra-large Swiss-cotton handkerchiefs, he never seemed to have one to hand, or understand how to use it. My mother carried handkerchiefs everywhere, balling them up into the sleeves of her sweaters and cardigans so that they looked like bulging tumours on her arm. When fully roused by allergy into serial sneezing, she swapped her brass instrument for the vocalising acrobatics of an operatic coloratura soprano, never attempting to muffle the volume of her nose’s irritation in the name of discretion or consideration for others. On the contrary, she turned each attack into a performance: a trill of her sneezes sounded like the Queen of the Night’s impossible ascending solo in The Magic Flute compared to my father’s guttural hawkings of phlegm. After the sneezing had climaxed, my mother shifted into vigorous nose-blowing, her rapid-fire alternate nostril exhalations sounding like the quacks of an agitated duck. By puberty, I had joined the snuffling orchestra due to severe hay fever. We were a snotty lot.
Like most only children, I was a precocious reader. Aping my parents’ fascination for tragedy and disaster, I recorded events and facts with a strong preference for anything remotely catastrophic or morbid, noting whatever gruesome details I could harvest from the six o’clock news. Every calamity was meticulously documented, including the number of casualties and bodies recovered.
The first real tragedy to imprint itself on my consciousness was the Aberfan landslide, in 1966. I was eight years old. When a colliery spoil tip in the Welsh village collapsed, it killed 116 children and 28 adults, just minutes after the school day had started. I noted those figures with methodical and grim fascination. The fact of children dying at their desks, mid-lesson, struck me forcefully, as did the terrible detail of them being buried alive in the slag. We held a minute’s silence in their memory in class the next day and were asked to donate our pocket money to a relief fund.
Plane crashes were of particular interest, because my father’s business hinged on the new concept of chartered air travel for groups, so he was always concerned about which airlines had suffered losses. I recorded and updated body counts (‘Four more bodies found from wreckage at sea’) with pedantic and ghoulish diligence.
Our first bomb scare at school during the IRA’s heyday (as the institution of choice for the corps diplomatique we were an obvious target), prompting a slow and inefficient evacuation, was duly noted—the first of many.
The explosion that crippled the lunar module on Apollo 13 provided gripping drama, seen live on television, culminating in the nail-biting re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. This dangerous procedure was accompanied by a longer than usual communications blackout, during which the entire Western world seemed to hold its breath for six minutes wondering whether the crippled craft would burn up due to heat-shield damage. I was no space geek, but it was impossible not to be affected by the fate of the three astronauts and their ingenuity in attempting repairs that meant the difference between life and death. I seem to remember writing them a letter to welcome them home and getting a printed card from NASA, but I doubt I did this under my own initiative, as I was only twelve at the time.
On a lighter note, I also recorded all the songs by Lulu vying to be chosen as Britain’s entry to the Eurovision song contest: ‘Bet Ya’, ‘March’, ‘Come September’, ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’.
Why were my parents so hungry for the headlines? I now think this was a form of hypervigilance. That having lived through terrible events of which I suspected nothing, they were always on the alert for the next crisis that could trigger a state of emergency, the panic buying of currency or the stockpiling of food. They were looking for signs, warnings, indications of unrest and instability. Both of them, I would later learn, had lost everything and were determined never to let that happen again. My father in particular set great store by insurance and security: everything in our house was locked or put away in a safe. And I was never in doubt as to the most valuable property of all: me.
The sense of being a one-off and irreplaceable was drummed into me from the beginning. ‘You’re the only one we’ve got,’ my father repeated over and over by way of explanation for every restriction. It was my responsibility to keep myself out of harm’s way, to recognise potential danger and risk and to stay safe. To avoid situations where uncertainty or the unknown were factors and to steer clear of people who were unreliable or in any way irresponsible (though I had no real notion of what such people might look like or how they might behave). The rule was ‘trust no one’, but that jarred with my own curious and sociable nature. Later, this was the cause of endless friction when, like any teenager, I tested boundaries. I refused to see the world through a lens of wariness or suspicion, verbally scorning and pitying my parents for their cautious overprotectiveness. Challenged as to its cause, they remained evasive and Sphinx-like. This lack of explanation frustrated me but my father remained obdurate. ‘Papa knows best’ was inadequate but invariably shut down all argument.
If only the focus were not entirely and exclusively on me. If only there were other children around to distract and dilute their attention. There being none, I deflected attention by asking questions about anything and everything. The tactic seemed to work. My father in particular loved explaining a headline or a news item in detail, and encouraged me. Positive reinforcement. The message lodged itself unconsciously in my brain: asking questions was good.
Meanwhile, I furnished myself with imaginary sisters (I saw no point in boys for far longer than my peers) from books: Mary in The Secret Garden; Jo, of course, from Little Women; Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind; and Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle. These headstrong creatures nourished my spirit of stubborn defiance and stirred a yearning for freedom. I was praised for being able to sit quietly reading for hours, but under the guise of self-contained compliance I was secretly studying disobedience from the best of them.
As the blank pages in my diary attest, during holidays my social life outside school was immensely limited, aside from Saturday morning at the Brownies. There, I found the endless attention to learning various knots frustrating because of being left-handed but enjoyed the wearing of a uniform—a novelty to me, as French schools do not have them—despite its unflattering colour, somewhere between rust and cocoa powder. I liked polishing the trefoil-shaped toggle that held my scarf and making sure my shoes shone for inspection by Brown Owl. But I made no lasting friends there. My mother picked up one girl every week because her house was on the way, but she was even shyer than I was and smelled off-puttingly of tomato sauce with a ferrous hint of blood.
At school I recorded who sat next to me,
switching loyalty between a coterie of girlfriends with fickle and opportunistic callousness, always repeating the same pattern: a threesome, the shape I was most familiar with. Inevitably, there were fractures leading to a pairing and a sudden rejection: I was fascinated by how quickly these relationships could split and reform like the amoebae we studied in biology.
As methodical as a bookkeeper, I entered my good marks for dictation and my non-attendance at sport, which I contrived through various faked ailments. On Monday mornings I regularly drank a cup of warm soapy water which I made by dissolving Lux flakes to make myself vomit—anything to avoid the terrors of la gymnastique, particularly the ordeals of the vaulting horse or rope climbing. My mother, also not a sporty type, obliged in writing notes to excuse me.
My only other attempt at dishonesty failed miserably when I faked her signature to confirm that she had witnessed the abysmal mark I had got in a maths test. I pressed through the paper too hard and made a hole in the middle of her elegant script, arousing suspicion. The school called home. A frightening lecture followed during which my father told me I could go to jail for such things. I duly waited for someone to come and take me away.
I was always waiting for someone to come and take me away.
When I was naughty, there were two options. In cases of truculence (who even uses that word today?) or disobedience, my father threatened to call Madame Karageorgevich. She was a terrifying witch-like crone who ran a convent institution strict beyond any imagining, somewhere cold and remote, in a never clearly stated country, though I imagined it bordered Austria, where I knew my father had spent his early childhood. Gravely announcing that he was going to call her, my father adjourned to his study. I would listen to his side of the conversation through the door—‘Yes, she’s ready now’—pleading to be forgiven. He would then negotiate terms with me to avert imminent despatch.
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