Defying Gravity: Jordan's Story

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SEAFORD BOULEVARD

Childhood on the wild Sussex coast (1955–66)

A dance to the music of time

Simon Barker said he could remember the night before we shot the Jordan’s Dance sequence for Jubilee at the flat at St James. Everyone was there – the Pistols, Sid, Adam – and there’s me sewing all these ostrich feathers on a tutu at three or four in the morning! It was my original tutu, which I’d worn when I used to perform in competitive ballet, along with the tiara, which was made of crystal and bought at great expense for me by my mum. It’s the one part of the outfit that I still have today. I did all that myself, the night before we shot the scene. I should have been thinking about the next day’s shooting! But I still remember the smell of new ballet shoes, new satin. It’s a most wonderful smell. And it takes me back in time…

I was probably about 6 the first time I encountered it. There was a little shop called Dancia, just off the Western Road in Brighton, not far from my hometown of Seaford on the East Sussex coast, which was probably the most exciting thing you can imagine for a little girl who loved ballet. I got a tutu made to order there with a satin top and Fabiola ballet tights in very, very pale pink. Some of the shoes were kid leather, the little flatties, whereas the pointe shoes were pink satin. It smelled beautiful when you walked in.

Before I was taken to this emporium to buy proper dancewear, I would make my own outfits. Chiffon scarves were very fashionable and Mum had several; they kept your wash-and-set in place because they were light, and they came in so many colours. So I would put all of hers together, tie them to a little belt around my waist and do the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ on the landing! The soundtrack was my first ever record, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, floating out from my sister’s little record player. I would dance away up there, back and forth… It wasn’t the carpet and the banister I was seeing – in my mind I was dancing in the middle of an amazing stage set. Those are my earliest memories of really being in love with a piece of music, and it’s probably not what people would expect. But, in many ways, my childhood was like one long fantastic dream.

My heart Cinque

Seaford, in East Sussex, where I was born, is a place with a history of rebellious behaviour. In a part of the country that was most open to invasion by sea, it became one of the region’s Cinque Ports¹ that have banded together to defend the coast since Saxon times. That spirit still lingers in the salty air. The seafront has barely changed at all since I was born, on 23 June 1955, though there have been some awful storms out at sea. In 1987, they built the beach up level with the promenade. It cost millions of pounds, and about a week later, the hurricane hit and all of it disappeared overnight. I think it ended up somewhere like Dungeness – in Derek Jarman’s garden, probably.

But, when I was little, it was a lovely big drop down to the beach with lots of groynes going out to sea. I had many very happy days down at the beach – as well as one memorable day of terror, when I was 8 years old and the lilo I was floating on got caught in a riptide. My brother Roger had to swim out to sea, catch it and haul me back to shore – risking his own life in the process. But in those days, parents would let their children go off on their own like that, and I used to spend hours down there. It’s a feeling of freedom. It probably sounds strange, because I know the sea is a sort of full stop in a way, a full stop to the land. But to me it feels different; it feels like freedom and I don’t feel hemmed in.

From out of the past

The night I made my entrance into the world, there was a dense sea fog hanging over the town. We didn’t have a car, so Dad had to ring for a taxi, an extravagance for us – but the hour was late and my arrival was imminent. Mr Squires, the taxi driver, got to East Dean, about halfway from Seaford to the hospital in Eastbourne, and announced that he couldn’t go any further, the visibility was too bad.

My dad went mad.

What do you think we’re going to do? he asked him. We can’t turn back, she’s having a baby! Obviously, the driver was persuaded to soldier on. My brother Roger, who was 8 at the time, remembers the next morning, when Dad got home:

ROGER ROOKE: He seemed quite pleased with himself. But the only thing he would say was that you looked like a skinned rabbit! He didn’t say what a bonny baby or beautiful little girl you were. I remember the day that you were brought home from the hospital, because it was a lovely day, very hot and sunny. We’d been out, all us children who lived round about, to a Donkey Derby in the fields past the hedgerow. And when I got home, you were there. I remember being a bit mystified by it all, because times were different then. I was kept right out of the fact that Mum was even pregnant. I knew nothing about it until about four days before you were born.

Perhaps this is not so surprising – there is a lot of mystery in our family, some of which we still have yet to get to the bottom of. As the newly arrived Pamela Anne Rooke, I was the youngest in a tightly knit, self-sufficient family. My dad, Stanley James Rooke, was a proper Cockney, originally from Tottenham, who had been billeted in Seaford during the Second World War and preferred to settle down there than return to London. My mum, Rosalind Jean Needham – although everyone called her Linda and she was actually christened Rose – was originally from Islington, the area around King’s Cross and the Caledonian Road. A professional seamstress, she was the driving force in the house. Later, when I was a teenager, she often got very, very upset about how I looked. But Dad always, in his own way, tried to smooth things over and stand up for me. Not that I needed it, really.

I was born very late in my mum and dad’s life – Mum was 41 when she had me, which in those days was really risky. I was the fourth of four children, one of whom didn’t survive. I had my brother Roger and my sister – also called Rosalind, but we’ve always called her Jeannie – and between them was a little boy, Michael, who died at 18 months of scarlet fever. My mother took him to the doctor and he told her there wasn’t anything to worry about. Then, twenty-four hours later, Michael died in her arms. It made her dislike doctors for the rest of her life, she was never able to trust them. Jeannie remembers that she wouldn’t have any painkillers when she gave birth to me, which shows you how deep that distrust ran and how long it lingered.

JEANNIE CRAVEN: That was a dreadful burden for Mother, dreadful. That’s my first memory of us moving to Seaford… her crying, not wanting to get out of bed, because she had lost Michael that way.

So I was brought up as a bit of an only child really, but with an older brother, and a sister who was quite boyish – Jeannie liked to play cricket with the boys. That was an era when kids could play cricket and football in the streets without anyone worrying about them.

When I say we were close, I really mean all I’ve got is my parents. I never knew my grandparents; I never had any family stories from them, which are really quite valuable when you’re growing up, though Roger’s research into the family tree, as well as his own longer memory, have shed some light on matters.

A family affair

Nobody seems to know how Mum and Dad met, although we think it would have been when they were still in London. Roger says that Mum always went a bit coy when he asked her. It was an unusual sort of relationship in the fact that, while Dad was only 5′2″, Mum was over 5′6″, which was considered strange then and probably still is today, with the ridiculous parameters people put on relationships. But she loved him because he was a good man. I also get the feeling that he made her feel safe, and that going to Seaford was a way of getting away from her family, who she fell out with irrevocably after the death of her father.

ROGER ROOKE: Our grandfather, Edwin Needham, committed suicide on 25 August 1929, when Mum was only 13. He put his head in the gas oven and Mum was the one who found him. His wife Jane had died two years previously, leaving him to bring up seven children, and it was two days after what would have been their wedding anniversary, so I think that was the possible reason. It states on his death certificate that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas, administered by his own hand while of unsound mind. Jean Goddard, the daughter of Mum’s sister Daisy, told me that he died of a broken heart. There was a big stigma about suicide in those days: it was a crime, and if he hadn’t succeeded in taking his own life he could have been locked up for it.

Mum never directly told me anything about it, but she mentioned it to a friend while I was there, one of our neighbours, Gladys Rose, a ‘cup-of-tea-confidante’ who used to drop in every now and again – a big old lady with grey hair and a pinny with only one of her front teeth left. I think Mum was feeling a bit down and she said she felt like doing away with herself. Gladys said: Oh, don’t be so silly. And I remember Mum saying: Well, my Dad did. And I was the one who found him.

My maternal grandmother Jane died of erysipelas, also known as St Anthony’s fire, which today would be cured easily by penicillin. It’s basically cold sores that burst and get into your bloodstream – something as simple as that could kill you back then. She was 51. And, with seven children, he had quite a job on his hands, did my grandfather Edwin, who worked making wheels in a cycle factory. Roger’s research pointed to the fact that Edwin, who was born in the workhouse that served as a hospital in those days, probably had an Italian father, but he was illegitimate, so this has made tracking down his birth certificate impossible so far.

Mum had three sisters, Lilian, Bertha and Daisy, and three brothers, Sidney, Frederick and George. Roger thinks Sidney was her favourite and I can remember seeing a photo of him, dressed in a naval uniform, that she kept in her purse. She would take it out from time to time and look at it with a wistful expression. But, whatever happened between Mum and her siblings, she never had anything more to do with them.

I did hear that one of the sisters came down to Seaford and Mum wouldn’t go to the bus stop and meet her. And I have one very strange, abstract memory of being taken up to London to see one of them, who lived in the sort of tenement block you’d see in 1960s ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, with no decorations indoors, just stone walls. It was pouring with rain.

Mum was tight-lipped about her family, but Roger has since discovered we have a second cousin on her side, Derrick Howlett, who was the son of her sister Daisy, born when she was 16 and given up for adoption. They met when Derrick’s daughter started to do some research into his birth mother while, at the same time, Roger was researching our family tree. Sadly, they didn’t get to meet Daisy, but according to Roger she had lived quite a life. She had three partners and seven children, of which Derrick is the oldest. Because she kept changing her name, by the time they tracked her down, Daisy, now calling herself Elizabeth Karim, had already died in a care home, so Derrick never did get to meet her.

We do know a bit more about Dad’s family. His father, Arthur, was a leather gilder, who engraved book titles in gold onto the leather bindings. By strange coincidence, the place where he worked on Poland Street would later become Louise’s, the key club of the Sex Pistols era. Arthur was married to Sarah Jane, who came from a small Hampshire village called Denmead, where her family worked as farm labourers. Jeannie said that Dad thought the world of his mum, and that she worked herself to death – she died in her sixties of cancer. All that remains is some photos of her as a tiny, pretty young girl and a worn-out old lady looking much older than her years. Arthur became a bit of a drinker, and legend has it that he died on the way back from the pub. Dad told me once that he was reading a report in the back of the Evening Standard, on a section of the paper they printed last for breaking news, about a man collapsing and dying in a certain area of London, and he just knew it was his dad.

Dad had two brothers and both of them were rather strange. Uncle Ted was a philatelist who actually made a living out of collecting stamps. Ted lived his whole life with his older brother, Uncle Frank, who was a racetrack bookie and was married to Auntie Maud. She was quite unusual, as she only ate bananas. Even at weddings! At the reception on Roger’s big day, she gave me her coq au vin, and got her bananas out of her handbag to eat instead! I don’t know where he found her. In a fruit shop?

ROGER ROOKE: Auntie Maud was a bit of a one-off, and I often wonder whether Ted was actually gay. I had a surprising insight into their lives when I went to stay with them in London for a week on my own when I was about 16… Maud came out with some extraordinary things. Right out of the blue, she said: Some people think that Ted’s a dirty old man, but he’s not you know, he’s just going to see his friend. I didn’t quite know what that meant. And then another time, over breakfast she said: My marriage has never been consummated, you know. I was trying to reach for the dictionary to check she meant what I thought she meant. I was absolutely gobsmacked. She followed that up with: You know, they sit and watch television and if there’s anything about sex on they both look away, as if it’s disgusting. I only went up there for a week to get over splitting up with my girlfriend. I thought it was going to be a refuge!

But actually, I got talking to Ted a couple of times during that week and was quite amazed at his depth of knowledge in politics and literature, when he was in the mood. They’d both worked as tic-tac men, mostly at the dog tracks, working for bookmakers.

Dad also had a sister, Auntie Grace, who was a lovely woman. She and her husband Leslie adopted a little boy, Barry, but it was a hard life for Grace, too, as Leslie died quite young and she never remarried, bringing Barry up alone.

My old man

It’s fair to say that my dad, Stan Rooke, was the adventurer in his family. Before the war, he’d worked as a Prudential insurance agent and, from when I was born until his retirement, he worked for the NHS Dental Board. But, in those wartime years between, he’d certainly seen enough excitement. Dad joined the regular army in 1940 and volunteered for the newly formed No. 4 Commando, a highly skilled combat force raised to carry out raids on German garrisons in occupied France. He rose in rank to Quartermaster Sergeant, in charge of appropriating troop rations and provisions. He’d originally wanted to be in the air force but, because he was short, he wasn’t eligible, which in retrospect probably saved his life. When you think how many of those airmen actually came back, I probably would never have been born.

He was one of the very few who stuck the whole war out in No. 4 Commando. If you couldn’t hack it there, which many people couldn’t, you could be Returned To Unit (RTU) without anything bad going on your service record, because you had volunteered. Dad was perfect for it – any self-defence moves were useless on him because he was so short you couldn’t get purchase on him. There was no leverage; he was like a rock. Adam Ant would always jokingly say to him: Stan, admit it, you’re in the 4s.

He told me a lot of funny stories about his unit. Once, they were on a ship going to do a raid on a German fuel depot in the Lofoten islands, in the Norwegian fjords. The cook had roasted all these legs of lamb, but the weather was so bad that most of the soldiers onboard were dreadfully seasick. So Dad sat in the mess and ate everybody’s lamb! Then he was almost sick too, from eating so much.

He nearly died on a training exercise, where he had to jump off a landing craft with a Bren gun and run up the beach – and he just plummeted to the bottom of the sea with this big weapon on his shoulders and had to pull it off to stop himself drowning. Then he was up on charges because he’d lost a bit of important equipment! He was let off, but that’s how serious it was, as he had to go through the whole process of proving he had to take this gun off to save his life.

He was suited to the life of a quartermaster, as he was a bit of a wheeler-dealer. If they had too much butter to carry around with them, for example, he’d go into the local community and do some deals – he said he could remember buckets of oysters in Amsterdam. Once, he managed to appropriate an entire ration of butter that had been designated for pregnant women – that was one I think he had to hand back. Another time, he had a lot of cigarettes that he swapped for a beautiful ring, solid gold with a big diamond inset. Funnily enough, back at home in peacetime, he lost the diamond ring gardening and spent years looking for it. I still think about that ring. A mole could come up one day like Paul Simon, with a diamond on the end of his nose!

While Dad was out in the field, Mum was left to have their first child on her own. They moved around a lot in the war, making life even more difficult and uncertain. From London, Dad’s first posting was Weymouth in Dorset. Mum told stories of being chased down the street there by a Messerschmitt when she was pregnant with Jeannie. Dad sent her his army pay so she could save up and buy what she needed for herself and the baby. When he came home on leave, she went to meet him wearing this silver fox fur – the full works, with the head and paws all dangling down. He looked at her awestruck. That was where all his money had gone.

My dad was short, strong and very, very tough – though not in his heart. I remember him usually being the peacemaker at home. Roger’s memories of the times before I was born and when I was only a toddler reveal darker currents to my parents’ marriage than I had realised before I started work on this book.

ROGER ROOKE: I must admit we were a family who got a little bit dysfunctional. There was a bit of conflict between our parents. I think Dad would have preferred it if Mum would have been a stay-at-home mum. I remember them having, let’s say, lively discussions about her going back to work. I mean, she was a great mum, she was an excellent cook and really did feed us well, proper, home-cooked food, and she was always darning socks and sewing buttons on, nothing got thrown away quickly. But I think she really liked the buzz of working in the pub, the banter and just the liveliness of it all. She was not comfortable with just being at home. She was more aspirational than Dad was, ever. I can always remember them talking about decorating the house, and her saying to him: I suppose you’d be quite happy with orange boxes for tables and jam jars for glasses, wouldn’t you?

Dad would take me to the library every Saturday and, on the way back, we’d stop at the garage and he’d spend about quarter of an hour looking at the cars, all black and shiny and new. We never had a car, but obviously it did cross his mind… But it was all too much money out of his budget.

We didn’t even have a fridge for ages, and when you think there wasn’t a shop on the estate… the shopping had to be done every one or two days and then carried home on the bus, I don’t know how Mum kept on top of it.

There were periods, quite frightening to me, when she went through a time of not getting out of bed and the whole of the bedroom floor was littered with cigarette packets. There was a very difficult period where there were a couple of fairly vicious rows. Not physical, verbal, but enough to make me feel really uncomfortable, awkward and not know where to put myself. That coincided with Mum disappearing.

I was probably the last person to see her before she went. I have a recollection of being at home as she came back from work in the pub in the afternoon. I can’t remember what she said to me, but she went upstairs and then fifteen minutes later she’d gone again and that was it. She didn’t come back.

She’d had an affair with a person she worked with, the landlord of the pub, the Hole in the Wall, and he left his family too. They went to Hastings and she was gone for a couple of months. Of course, Dad was devastated. He went down with shingles.

But I think what must have happened was, at the pub they put two and two together, that they must be somewhere together, and somehow they found out where that was. Now I guess Dad persuaded her to come back, which everybody must have known – Seaford’s only a small town. It’s quite a big thing to do, isn’t it? To forgive somebody and say: The family needs you here. But he wanted to keep the family together at any cost, so he eventually persuaded her to come back. I can remember a great feeling of relief because there were no more rows, and I think the teachers all knew at school what had happened, so I was given a bit of leeway, a bit of sympathy, I guess.

I have absolutely no memories of any of this happening, but it explains a lot. I remember, in later life, Dad telling me that he had called the Salvation Army to help him find her – he had been absolutely distraught, he loved her desperately. He was a bit at sea, a bit lost without her, and once she died, he started to drink even more than he did before. He didn’t know what to do with his life except drink. And as a poignant coda to Roger’s story about the cars, in the last few days of Dad’s life, when he was in a hospice, he had some intensely vivid dreams, one of which was about buying a motor from a car sale on Seaford seafront and driving off in it. Maybe that was his vision of what heaven was really like.

But I had no idea Mum had been so depressed that she’d considered taking her own life. I can only guess that, when I came along, Mum thought it would mark a new beginning. That it would be really nice if I was a sweet little girl, not like my tomboy sister Jeannie, who was not your average schoolgirl of 1960, but the little girl she’d always dreamed of. A girlie-girl.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way…

Dance, ballerina, dance

My first memory of clothing, which would have been when I was little more than a toddler, was a little pink cape I saw in a shop. It was fuchsia, or even cerise, bright wool, with a mandarin collar in black velvet and a little cap that went with it. It had lovely lining too. Another thing I can still smell to this day.

My first soundtrack to dressing up came courtesy of my Triang, a child’s record player that played nursery rhymes on brightly coloured red and yellow plastic discs. ‘Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron’ is one that I really remember, that I used to play over and over again. Jeannie had a record player – it wasn’t a real Dansette, because I don’t know if Mum and Dad would have been able to afford one – but Jeannie made it look like one, by covering the maroon lid with white Fablon, putting it all round the edges. It looked so good by the time she finished that it became a source of real argument when she split up with her boyfriend Morris and he claimed it was his in the first place. Jeannie remembers it costing £27, a fortune in those days! It was on this customised contraption that I would play my first proper record, The Nutcracker Suite, which came from a whole album of excerpts of ballet music, and which meant so much to me.

I was probably about seven or eight when I started doing ballet classes with Angela Bolsch, at Miss Angela’s School of Dancing in Eastbourne. When they knew I was really taking it seriously, Mum and Dad let me have Dancing Times, an expensive, glossy monthly that had the results of all the competitions in it. It also had lots of articles about dancers, and it was there that I first read about Margot Fonteyn.

There are, in my mind, very few dancers who had everything. Margot Fonteyn is one, and so is Natalia Makarova. These dancers were perfect in their technique but also showed great verve and character. Then I saw the film Romeo and Juliet with Rudolf Nureyev and Fonteyn, and I was just enchanted.²

One of the most exciting moments of my life was one day when I’d been to school, done my athletics practice, got on the bus, been to my ballet practice, and Mum suddenly turned up at the ballet school. She had never done this before: I would normally get the bus back home. But she said: We’re going somewhere. She was taking me, for the first time ever, to see a ballet. It was the Royal Ballet in Coppélia at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne. She just turned up and said: We’re off! I finally got to see real ballet dancers on-stage and I was in total ecstasy.

Mum and Dad always went the extra mile to get me the ballet lessons and the beautiful clothes and shoes that went with it. I could never thank them enough for that, and I encourage anyone who’s got a child with such an inclination to scrape the money together somehow, because you’ve opened up a whole different world for your child. Ballet was everything to me, really.

When I was a little girl, the country was still recovering from the Second World War, when people had been dying in their thousands and cities had been bombed night after night. What my parents’ generation went through was incredible; they felt lucky just to have survived. So I was a product of that post-war environment.

‘Make do and mend’ is one wartime slogan that has stayed with me. I always used to darn all my own ballet shoes, because they’re very expensive, new pointe shoes. You can’t just let them wear out quickly – a few dances and all that satin would go. With a special thread, you’d make a chain stitch going round in a circle, right round in the middle, and that reinforced the whole tip of the pointe shoe. I spent hours doing it on every new pair. I can darn a pointe shoe with my eyes closed now. Then you had to put your own ribbon on, just angled right for your ankle with no puckering, double-sewn over the top, because it takes a lot of stress as well. That’s how I could spend all night stitching before the major scene in Jubilee – it was like second nature to me by then.

Prima ballerina: Dame Margot Fonteyn

Dame Margot Fonteyn was the daughter of an Irish mother and Brazilian father. She took her first dance classes at the age of 4. She showed such talent that, at only 14, she was enrolled at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. Margot began performing with Ninette de Valois’s Royal Ballet and devoted her entire career to the company.

Her debut was as a snowflake in The Nutcracker in 1934, followed by parts in Sleeping Beauty, Giselle and Swan Lake. Her first major role was in Sir Frederick Ashton’s Le Baiser de la Fée in 1935, and she became Ashton’s muse. He created leading roles for her in Apparitions, Nocturne, Les Patineurs, A Wedding Banquet and The Quest, among others. During the Second World War, she continued to perform a full schedule, including entertaining the troops.

In 1961, when Margot was in her forties, she had just started to think about retirement when she met the Russian Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected at the age of 23. They became the most dynamic and popular couple in the ballet world, performing Swan Lake, Giselle and Romeo and Juliet. For the next fifteen years, they performed together all over the world, until, at the age of 60, Margot gave her farewell performance at the Royal Opera House.

The reason Margot danced on for so much longer than any other ballerina was for love. In 1955, at the age of 36, she married a man she had met in her youth, Roberto Arias, the son of the former president of Panama. He led her into a life of trouble and danger. She was arrested in Panama in 1959 while helping him attempt a failed coup against the government and then, in 1964, a rival politician shot Arias, leaving him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. Margot retired to Panama to be close to him. With no pension, she spent her savings looking after him for the rest of their lives.

Margot received the title of prima ballerina assoluta from the Royal Ballet in 1979, one of only three women to receive that distinction in the twentieth century. This brave, brilliant, remarkable woman took her final bow on 21 February 1991.

Playground twist

I started school at Chyngton Primary, conveniently located at the end of my road. I can still remember some of the first clothes I really liked to wear. Along with the pink cape, I used to wear these little sticky-out dresses and, because of that, I was regarded as being unusual and even started to get into a bit of trouble.

Luckily, I had a good friend in Glynis Rundell, an older girl who was a bit of a minder, so if anyone did anything to me, she would have them – she once had someone up against the wall by their throat because they were picking on me. And that had a knock-on effect because, by the time I got to secondary school, if anybody picked on one of my friends, I’d be the person to protect them. It taught me about standing up for people who can’t do it for themselves.

I was average, I should think, at primary school. I would say, truthfully, I was rather more into literature than maths. Though I did get picked for one special occasion. There was a big school celebration, I guess it might have been an anniversary, and the headmaster wanted somebody to present a bouquet to his wife. So there was a curtsying competition to see who was graceful enough for the task and I won. I’d done a lot of ballet practice by then.

My main focus was on sports. I was training daily. I won a race down my street and first prize was a pencil case, second prize was a pencil case, third prize was a pencil case. It was hard to see the incentive in that. I should have at least had some pencils in my pencil case! That may have been the beginning of the trend in which no one can be a loser, which then results in no one being a winner. You should really, really encourage talent. You can’t do that if you’re trying to equalise everyone.

The time of the season

The summers of my early childhood were spent at the pubs where Mum worked. I spent hours and hours of my life at the Cinque Ports, in Seaford – which is still open, quite something in these days of pubs closing hand over fist. I would be upstairs with the lady who owned it, Ma Turner, while Mum ran the bar. There used to be a great big wooden gate, where the brewery people came in to deliver, and my Dad got worse for wear there once and tried to jump over it! He’d had a works do with the Dental Board and was so drunk that a work colleague tied him to the back of a motorbike and drove him home from Eastbourne.

Then there was the Old Tree, which is now a mobility scooter outlet – a burgeoning enterprise on the south coast, unlike the pub trade. Mr and Mrs Reed owned that and, although it was pebble-dashed on the outside, inside it had all the old beams and low ceilings. It was really lovely.

For many summers, Mum and Dad used to take over a pub called the Brewers Arms in Mayfield, a little village up in the High Weald of Sussex with an intriguing history. In the eighteenth century, it was at the heart of silk and brandy smuggling, a practice they used to call ‘owling’. Very much a hotbed of dissenters, the village was also involved in the Swing Riots in 1830, when agricultural workers revolted against landowners across the south and east of England, striking terror into the ruling class, who feared a replay of the French Revolution on English soil. It still has the feel of a Hammer horror film about it, especially on Bonfire Night, when the town takes part in the Sussex tradition of torchlight procession and fireworks display.³ We used to stay there for our summer holidays while the landlord went on his, living in the pub for three weeks or a month. I remember the mynah bird they used to have that would copy the things you said to it; and long hot days spent playing in haystacks and scrumping apples, and my dollies Linda, Diane and Miré, who Dad bought me one time when we were staying there. It was only me who would go with Mum and Dad to the Brewers Arms, and this was really the closest thing I had to a family holiday. Jeannie had already married her first husband James and gone to live in Scotland, where he worked for British Aerospace; and Roger, now an amorous adolescent, had his own plans for staying home alone.

ROGER ROOKE: I was particularly pleased one year, because I had a girlfriend, and I thought: Yes, at last! We don’t have to go in the bus shelter! Of course, I didn’t waste any time: the very first day you were away, I told this girlfriend she could come up to the house. So I went to where she lived and walked back with her, and as I walked around the corner there was Jeannie’s car parked outside. She hadn’t told me, but Jeannie had this plan that while they were away she would redecorate the bathroom. So that was that. I had to turn straight back round and walk this girlfriend home.

JEANNIE CRAVEN: Well, it was a week’s work, and it was hard work. When it was done, I gave Mum and Dad the bill – £19, it was. I had to pay for the paint. I had no idea that Roger was going to bring his little friend round.

After the pubs, Mum worked for years in a haberdasher’s shop, selling curtains, towels, linens, all sorts of things. She made me a dress with Velcro cuffs, which amazed my schoolfriends when I pulled them open to show them how it worked. Over the road from that shop was the salon where she used to get her hair done. Mum was always very careful about her appearance, and her hair was central to that. The proprietor was a guy called Michael Anthony, who used to do her hair in rollers, with the hood dryers, the whole thing – and, of course, the Marcel wave, made with special iron tongs. She had a lovely head of hair, my mum, really thick, and she stayed dark, she never went grey. I’ve inherited that.

Wondrous place

Dad prided himself on always being able to provide for us. The generation who came back from the war made sure their gardens were full. Out front was always planted with regiments of beautiful flowers, like dahlias and roses, but the back was the veg, the business end of the family plot. I used to get sent out on Christmas morning to get the Brussels sprouts. And he’d always say: Pick the big ones! I’d have to look at every stalk, so they’d fit on the plate with the twelve other vegetables.

JEANNIE CRAVEN: James once whispered to me at Christmas dinner: There are thirty-one Brussels sprouts on my plate! In his house it was the opposite: his mother never gave him enough to eat. Twelve vegetables including thirty-one Brussels sprouts. Food was the best part of the family, wasn’t it?

Although Dad had green fingers, he was useless at any kind of DIY. I once came home to find him wandering around looking puzzled. One of the Bakelite tiles had come off the skirting board and he’d tried to fix it with the type of glue you have to put onto both surfaces and then leave for ten minutes before pressing them together. Dad had wandered off to have a cup of tea and come back to find the tile had vanished. He looked everywhere for it – even in the airing cupboard – until I saw that it was stuck to the back of his waistcoat.

He didn’t like to spend any money on tools, either. He had one handy screwdriver, which Roger watched him lose while trying to put a tile back on the roof. It went straight down a drainpipe, at the bottom of which it probably remains to this day. I’ve had similar excruciating experiences watching him try to change a plug.

But one thing he was brilliant at was catching shellfish. He used to pick winkles, take them to Eastbourne to a fishmonger’s there and sell them, to pay for Jeannie’s cricket coaching. He also used to go prawning, so we had fresh prawns for ourselves. This was quite an alarming feat, because you had to work with the tides and sometimes it can be pretty dangerous. If the tide was right, he would go out at one in the morning, in the dark, and it’s really treacherous down there, all jagged rocks covered in seaweed. He used gin nets, which are the ones you dip into the water and wait for the prawns to take the bait, so it wasn’t just a matter of scooping a big net along the sea bottom. This took patience, skill and daring.

There’s a kind of link to London in it, too – it was always a very big London thing, getting cockles and winkles and jellied eels to be served in the pubs. So there was probably something there that fed Dad’s own memories of childhood.

As soon as he considered I was old enough, which would have been when I was about 10, I would join him. Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent under the gullies of the Seven Sisters, perhaps the most wondrous – and dangerous – spot on the Sussex coast.

Grab the crabs! Kill! Kill! Kill!

We used to ride down to Seaford Head on our bikes, with the nets on the handlebars. A steep enough journey through the heathland going up the cliffs, but that was nothing compared to coming down. They’ve got proper steps here now – health and safety, of course – but then it just used to be rugged, irregular pieces of stone that you had to pick your way around. The prawns were all down there in the gullies to the north. The whelks were over to the south somewhere. They were separatists.

Once we were in the prawning grounds, we’d get straight down to business. Dad had a round net, and he would make a little rod that went through it, with a notch cut into it, so that you could rest it in the net. You’d catch crabs first, bait them with some old fish or whatever he had to hand. They would go straight for it, then you’d grab the crabs, crack them open, break all their legs off, halve them and spear them on this stick, put the stick in the net and that’s what the prawns go for. It was a killfest!

You’d have a little float on the end of your net, so you could see where it was, though at night-time it was quite difficult, and there have been many times where I’ve had to wade out, quite dangerously, in order to get the prawns – you could just see the cork bobbing where they were biting. Otherwise you’ve lost your net.

I didn’t have any special waterproofs for these manoeuvres, just a pair of trousers and some wellies, which weren’t really all that good for it. The best thing would have been hobnail boots, because you can so easily jam your ankle between the rocks. And it’s a real ankle-breaking sort of place. I used to get so wet, and so cold!

If I bunked off school, I would always go somewhere around the Seven Sisters. My best friend Sally Reid and I used to walk all the way along the cliffs, with my big bag of Tom Thumb drops and Tizer, like the Famous Five or the Secret Seven. When I moved back to Seaford in the eighties, it was a kind of therapy to see it all again; to be out in this wild place, with the skylarks and the swallows all ducking and diving around. Dad’s still with me when I come back here now. It’s where we scattered his ashes, down where he used to go prawning.

After a long night’s vigilance, once we had gathered our nets, Dad used to put all our bounty in an old Second World War gas-mask bag. I’ve still got it, and his Commando knife in its leather sheaf. I feel perfectly safe with that in the kitchen drawer…

Then we’d bring back the prawns to the sink at home, still alive.

Put ’em in a box, tie ’em with a ribbon

One special occasion I’ll never forget was buying my first ever bras, in Colliholes on the High Street. I was well endowed for a young child of 9, quite far ahead of some of the girls in my primary school.

Funnily enough, the experience was very much like going into the SEX shop would later be. It had those lovely big old wooden cabinets, sometimes with a glass front on the door, and stocked very large ladies’ knickers and Cross Your Heart bras, and a lot of support garments – this was the era when women had to wear their girdles. Again, this was a thing that you’d later see in SEX, models wearing corsets and suspender belts. Malcolm McLaren appropriated a lot of things from those days.

My first bras were Berlei, size 30AA, in a sort of nylon fabric – it was that time when everything changed from old cotton into drip-dry fabrics. One was turquoise and white; the other one was lilac checked gingham. They were little tiny Doris Day bras, and very good-quality garments. My parents’ approach to clothes was always to save for something that would be better made than the cheaper alternative, and it’s something that I’ve stuck to all my life.

Dad’s biggest outlay was the suit that he had to wear to work, and you couldn’t just get suits off the peg. Montague Burton started the idea of being able to buy your suit piece by piece, until you’d got the full monty from his chain of Burton’s shops, but Dad used to go to a little place called Hepworth’s, which made suits to measure. It would have cost him a month’s wages, a serious consideration, but it would be made to last for years and years. This is why I am in total agreement with what Vivienne Westwood has always said about clothes – that you should buy things in a considered way. They might be expensive, but they’re something that you will really love and