It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  Mum – Rachel Ursula Lundell – was born in 1934 in the heat and dust of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, in a tiny village called Tsolo. My grandfather, George, was a Dutch builder, while his wife, Ellen, was the granddaughter of a woman of the Xhosa-speaking Pondo tribe. Ellen was the last of seven children and my mum, too, was the youngest of seven. According to folklore, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is capable of great magic, and Mum has always been convinced by her ‘powers’. She will tell you about the time she cured the local butcher of his warts and healed her neighbour’s eczema with just a touch. But whether or not Mum really does have supernatural powers, I definitely think there’s something a little bit magical about the story of how this young African girl ended up travelling to the other side of the world and falling in love with my dad, who lived in leafy Surrey.

  From a young age, Mum had a headstrong streak. She was sent to a convent boarding-school, where she got up to all sorts of naughtiness. She once broke into the convent pantry with her friend, Audrey, and the pair smuggled some sugar out in their bras. Weeks later, by the time the nuns broke up the racket, Mum and Audrey had turned professional, taking orders and selling the sugar to friends. Mum got 16 lashes with the sjambok, a heavy leather bullwhip. She’s still got the scars, but she reckons it cured her sweet tooth for good.

  When she was 12, a witch-doctor read her fortune and told her she would travel overseas, but it wasn’t until she was 17 that something happened to seal the deal. By this time South Africa was in the grip of apartheid. The population was segregated by skin colour: black, white or – in Mum’s case, as she was mixed-race – coloured. Shortly after leaving school she applied for a typist’s job in a bakery where her brother, Desmond, was already working. The bakery woman couldn’t have been nicer to the pretty, golden-haired girl with the Dior-style lace dress and quickly offered her the position, but just as they were walking to the door, Mum spotted Desmond and waved to him.

  ‘Do you know that man?’ the woman asked her.

  ‘Yes, he’s my brother,’ said Mum.

  The woman stared at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, ‘but I can’t give you the job.’ She hadn’t realized that Mum wasn’t white.

  In 1951 Rachel waved goodbye to Africa and went to England to stay with her sister, Joan, who was living in Surbiton with her English husband, a press photographer named Tony Booker, and got a secretarial job with the Milk Marketing Board. By now, she had grown into a very beautiful young woman – and had left a few broken hearts in South Africa. Shortly before leaving for England she had been working at her auntie’s grocery in Umtata and one of the local lads would come by every week on the pretence of buying a few bits and pieces so he could stare at her. Then one day he handed her a love letter. ‘Lots of garbage about how lovely I was,’ is Mum’s typically no-nonsense memory of it. It was a shame she didn’t keep the letter as it was signed ‘Nelson Mandela’.

  A year after she’d arrived in England it was Mum’s turn to fall madly in love. She was helping Joan in the garden when a friend of Tony’s, Michael Karslake, stopped by. That evening, Michael – six foot two, with thick dark hair and a lovely smile, according to Mum – took her to the cinema. She can’t remember which film was on because they snogged the whole way through it.

  It was love at first sight for my dad, too. Born in 1932 in Surrey, Michael Howard Karslake was working as an architectural model-maker, after an apprenticeship at the London County Council’s model-making department. He proved incredibly gifted at his chosen career. Nowadays, the intricate architectural models he built – ranging from the Thames Flood Barrier to a prototype helmet for racing driver Stirling Moss – would be created on a computer, but back then no project could do without the kind of skills he possessed.

  Three years after that snogging session at the Surbiton Odeon, I came along, the first child of the newly wed Mr and Mrs Michael Karslake. (Scandalously newly wed, in fact: the ink had barely dried on my parents’ marriage certificate when I was born just four months later, the surprise result of a romantic jaunt to Devon, with Dad on his Lambretta scooter and Mum in the sidecar, her pin-curled blonde hair wrapped in a silk scarf. I was a love child! I’ve been a bit of a romantic ever since . . .)

  Our first home was 44 Vange Hill Drive, a redbrick council house in Vange on the outskirts of Basildon, with chickens in the garden and acres of climbable trees in the woodland just beyond the fence. Mum’s African heritage didn’t even register with me when I was a kid. Growing up she spoke English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, but I don’t remember her having a strong accent (although she must have done, as I can hear the South African twang in her voice to this day) and, apart from being head-turningly beautiful, she didn’t look very different from any of the other mums in our white, middle-class neighbourhood. In my mind, the only unusual thing about our family was the deerskin shield with crossed spears on the living-room wall, and the avocado tree that Mum was struggling to grow among the pansies in the herbaceous border.

  It wasn’t until her mother came to stay for the first time, when I was nine, that Mum’s heritage really hit home. Granny Ellen was much darker-skinned than Mum and her manner was very African. I remember Mum putting on her favourite Miriam Makeba records and Granny would stomp around the kitchen, throwing her arms up and singing: ‘Woo! Da-ba-da-ba-da-ba!’ It was hysterical. And there was the sudden, amazed realization: ‘Oh, my God, Mum’s from Africa!’

  I didn’t get to visit my mother’s homeland until years later, after Dad died in 1990. I was desperate to get away, and Ronnie suggested we go to Kenya. As soon as I stepped out of the plane, I was aware that I had some sort of connection to Africa, a bond I’d never felt with any other place. I fell in love, really. Many years later, I used Xhosa words, including tula, meaning ‘quiet’, and langa, for ‘sunshine’, as the names of the scents in my Jo Wood Everyday Organics range.

  As a little girl, I was perfectly happy in my dream world, and didn’t have that many friends; I still don’t really. I’m actually very shy. I’m fine once I get to know you, but it takes me a bit of time to trust people; maybe that came from living with Ronnie for all those years. Even as an adult, if I was in a hotel and room service brought the wrong order, I’d always say, ‘Oh, please don’t worry, that’ll be fine!’ rather than make a fuss. It used to drive Ronnie mad.

  Apart from my siblings – Paul came along when I was two, Vinnie when I was six, and then, when I was 10, my baby sister Lize – my main playmate when we lived in Basildon was a girl called Linda Wood. She was the daughter of Mum’s best friend, Auntie Lily, and lived a few doors down. Linda was six months younger than me and quite spoilt. We used to play together with our dolls, but Linda had a real Sindy and a Barbie, whereas I just had Sindy’s cheaper cousin, Tina. I wasn’t a nasty child, but I suppose there was a bit of resentment there. On one particularly jealous day I made up a poem and chanted it to her in the garden: Linda Wood, is no good, chop her up for firewood. Linda had the last laugh, though. Years later, when I married Ronnie, she came to my wedding and was one of the first to congratulate me. ‘So, Jo, now you’re a Wood, too . . .’ Talk about karma.

  For the first years of my life, I was Mum’s little shadow. I thought she was unbelievably glamorous, with her pencil skirts, stilettos and red lipstick. She loved clothes, and the house was always filled with pattern magazines from which she’d make the latest fashions on her sewing-machine. For a time she was an Avon lady and I would spend many happy hours playing with her makeup box, smelling the perfumes, patting the face powder so it puffed up in fragrant pink clouds and testing the lipsticks until I had tiger-stripes of Scarlet Lady and Passionate Plum up my arms. This girlie side of me frequently clashed with my inner tomboy. I loved climbing trees, so would go out looking immaculate and within minutes would have mud all over my skirt. There’s a photo of me aged five dressed as the Christmas-tree fairy for a school play, an angelic little girl with white-blonde hair, a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile, a sti
cky-out dress – and a pair of filthy plimsolls poking out of the bottom. To this day, that’s me all over.

  As I barely left her side, Mum roped me into helping with the chores so I learnt really young to clean and cook. One of my earliest memories is of perching on a stool at the kitchen table while Mum made chocolate fudge, testing whether it was cooked by dropping a little bit into a glass of water to see if it formed a ball. To me, it was like magic! When I was eight, Mum went to South Africa to visit relatives, and for the next six weeks I helped Dad run the house: ironing his shirts, cleaning the kitchen, caring for Paul and Vinnie. At that age, six weeks seems an eternity, but I remember Dad being so proud – and I loved playing the little housewife.

  We were a very tight unit: just Mum, Dad and us kids. We didn’t see much of our extended family, apart from summers spent at Auntie Mary’s beachside house in Devon and occasional trips to see my paternal grandmother, Grandma Karslake, in Surbiton. She must have been only 37 when I was born (she had my dad ridiculously young, at something like 16) and with her pinky-mauve set hair and moles that sprouted wiry hairs, she always seemed such a jolly woman. One day I was sitting on her lap, playing with her necklace. ‘Each bead is a different flavour,’ she whispered, with a wink, blowing my five-year-old mind. I sneaked a lick when she wasn’t looking.

  But that’s not to say the Karslakes lived a quiet, solitary life – quite the contrary. Every weekend our house was full of people, united by one all-consuming passion: Lambretta scooters. The soundtrack to my childhood is revving engines and the clatter of crash helmets, while the smell is petrol. If we didn’t have a houseful of Lambretta fans at the weekend, we’d be heading off to a rally somewhere. Every summer we’d go to the Isle of Man for the famous TT motorbike races and watch Dad tear round and round the course for hours, thrilled by the noise, speed and smells.

  A few years ago I fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by getting my car racing licence and zipping around the track at Silverstone in a Morgan turbo classic. In 2012, I went on a fantastic charity road trip with 55 remarkable women in a fleet of Maseratis, Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys; my sister Lize and I were in my Mercedes AMG. The route took us from London to Monte Carlo, via Paris, Geneva and Milan, but my own adventure very nearly ended at Dover.

  ‘Passport, please,’ said the officer at the border.

  Oh, God. I’d forgotten my passport. ‘I’ve got my driving licence,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘You can’t get into France without a passport,’ he said.

  Lize and I begged and pleaded with him and he must have taken pity on us because in the end he waved us through. ‘I haven’t seen you,’ he said, with the ghost of a smile.

  By the time Dad died he had built up a museum of at least a hundred scooters, every model Lambretta had ever made lovingly restored. He was such a craftsman. When I was eight he took me to the scrapyard where we found an old bike frame and parts. He took them back to his workshop, put them all together, renovated it to mint condition and–ta-dah!–I had a beautiful new bicycle with a basket on the front. I loved hanging out with him in his workshop, watching him make incredible models of new towns, marvelling at his steady hand as he painted tiny windows or the lines down the middle of the street. Sometimes he’d let me help, teaching me how to make bits of foam into trees and spray-paint them green.

  If there was one cloud on the otherwise blissfully clear horizon of my childhood, it was school. I hated it with a passion, and would do anything I could to avoid it, until the magical day when I could finally escape at 16. The only reason I learnt to count was so that I could work out how many days I had to endure before I could leave. All that ‘sit up straight, don’t talk, learn this’ just didn’t sit with my dreamy, romantic nature. Even at my primary school, Swan Mead, I would often sneak home for beans on toast, with Mum as my willing accomplice: ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she would say. ‘You can stay and have lunch at home.’ Dad never found out because he was at work.

  It was a good job he didn’t: I don’t think he’d have been pleased. Dad was in charge of learning – and he was quite the disciplinarian. I remember him shouting at me because I could not (or would not) understand how to tell the time. When I was struggling to learn my times-tables he wrote them out on rolls of wallpaper and stuck them all around my bedroom so when I lay in bed I could memorize them. I didn’t. Maybe one of the reasons I rebelled against school was because he tried to push me so hard.

  Dad and I had a wonderful relationship but, God, he was strict. I think that came from his father, who was extremely tough with him, and Dad’s two years’ national service with the RAF after leaving school. You crossed him at your peril. When I was seven I sneaked a tin of drinking chocolate out of the kitchen cupboard. Dad discovered me eating spoonfuls of it and I got the wooden spoon, seven strokes on my bum, as you always got the same number as your age. Another time, my brother Paul found a crowbar – he was a cheeky little boy and very funny, but always up to mischief. Well, I came round the corner to see him smashing it on the vicarage wall and freaked. ‘Dad’s going to kill us!’ We all got the wooden spoon that time, even though I hadn’t done anything. After another misdemeanour we had to choose our own stick from a tree and then he hit the back of our legs with it. It was absolutely terrifying, the prospect of knowing that this awful thing was about to happen to you – and there was no way you could get out of it.

  We were all scared stiff of Dad, even the four-legged family members. I remember once he found Mum’s cat eating food off the kitchen work surface. He picked Fusty up and threw him out of the window. That cat never went near him again. Dad was strict with us, but I learnt discipline, politeness and manners. I had the utmost respect for him.

  I love animals but I’m not good at keeping pets. When I was little I had a rabbit called Snowy, but I soon got bored of taking care of him and forgot to feed him, so Dad told me he was giving him to the postman who lived down the road. ‘Okay.’ I shrugged. After a few days I started to miss Snowy and his soft white fur, so I trotted down the road and knocked on the door.

  The postman’s wife answered. ‘Hello, Josephine.’ She smiled at me kindly.

  ‘I’ve come to see Snowy.’

  She looked confused.

  ‘My rabbit?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m afraid we’ve eaten him, dear.’

  From then on I vowed never to have another pet. I wasn’t going to go through that again.

  Although they were always very sociable, my parents didn’t really drink – apart from maybe a few at Christmas – and Dad never smoked. I remember watching Ready, Steady, Go on telly – I must have been about 10, and the Rolling Stones came on. Dad looked on disapprovingly. ‘Disgusting lads.’ He tutted into his tea. You can imagine how he felt when, years later, I brought one of those very same lads home to Sunday lunch – although by that time I’d caused him and Mum so many anxious, sleepless nights that my dating a rock star probably didn’t seem so terrible, after all.

  2

  ‘Not far now, kids, just up this hill . . .’

  It was a few weeks before Christmas 1964 and we were crammed into the back of Dad’s Singer Gazelle, with the little silver antelope that seemed poised to leap off the bonnet, on the way to see our new home. Dad and Mum were in the front (Lize was a large bump under her maternity dress), while Paul, Vinnie and I sat in the back, our excited chatter fogging up the car windows. We had only gone a few miles from our old house but, as the road twisted up through a dense green tunnel of trees, it seemed a world away from the suburban neatness of Vange.

  A property developer Dad worked with had commissioned him to build a model for a development of six new homes in Benfleet on the site of the village’s old vicarage. While Dad was going through the plans, which included a new home for the vicar, he noticed a large building at the back of the site – the old vicarage, which the developer was planning to pull down. Intrigued, Dad went to have a look at the place and immediately fell in love with it.
Now he was taking the rest of us to see it.

  We turned onto a muddy driveway, then the trees opened into a clearing and there it was. The Old Vicarage. I jumped out of the car, gasping with delight. The house looked like a miniature castle, with Gothic archways, church-style windows and a pointed red-tiled roof with high chimneys sticking up, like candles on a birthday cake. We heaved open the front door, and soon Paul and I were running from room to room, with Dad recording every shriek of excitement on his little 8mm cine camera. Inside, the house was a maze of small, oddly shaped rooms with stone fireplaces and wooden floors. It was cold and dark, the only light coming from bare bulbs that cast eerie shadows and revealed strange marks on the walls (we found out later that the vicar’s son had played indoor football). After years of dreaming I was a princess in a fairytale, now I would live out that fantasy for real – and I certainly didn’t care that my castle was more Brothers Grimm than Disney.

  The house needed to be completely redecorated, but we moved in anyway and the renovations kept my parents occupied for the next few years. They were both pretty groovy and they kitted out the house with a mix of vintage finds and contemporary pieces: an antique refectory table and thrones with turned legs, a bright orange couch for the living room and a space-age copper lampshade on a coiled cable that I’d pull down over my head, like a spotlight, and belt out Hendrix’s ‘Hey Jo’. I got the interior design bug too, deciding on imitation bamboo-design wallpaper for my bedroom to make it look ‘tropical’. Not exactly appropriate for an old stone vicarage in rural Essex, but I’ve never been one for sticking to the rules. My new home in Primrose Hill is decorated with vintage carpets, metallic skull-and-crossbones wallpaper, modern art and antique fringed lace shawls at the windows: I love the contrast and clash of styles, mixing the old and the new – my taste is very eclectic.