Better Broken Than New

By Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Following a successful career as an award-winning, best-selling novelist, in 2004 Lisa St Aubin de Terán retreated to a remote village in northern Mozambique. There she found her own African roots, founded a charity, and confronted new challenges. Much has been written about her life and escapades with a trio of Venezuelan exiles, life on an And

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amaurea Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781914278143

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Lisa St Aubin de Terán is the prize-winning author of 20 books, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. She is Anglo-Guyanese, and was born and brought up in London. Aged 16, she married an exiled Venezuelan freedom fighter and landowner. After two years travelling around Italy and France, she moved to the Venezuelan Andes, where she managed her husband's semi-feudal sugar plantation for seven years. Much of her writing draws on that time and place. And time warps, rural communities, isolation and grace under pressure are still the dominant themes in both her life and work.On the strength of 'Keepers of the House', she was chosen as a Best of British Young Novelist in 1982.After leaving the Andean hacienda, she lived as a perpetual traveller for the next twenty years. Then, in 2004, she settled in north Mozambique, establishing the Teran Foundation to develop community tourism. She lived there until 2021, returning to London with a bag full of manuscripts, including her autobiography 'Better Broken Than New', and two new novels, 'The Hobby' and 'Kafka Lodge'

Book preview

Better Broken Than New

a fragmented memoir

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

First published in Great Britain by Amaurea Press 2024

Amaurea Press is an imprint of Amaurea Creative Productions Ltd.

www.amaurea.co.uk

Copyright © Lisa St Aubin de Terán 2024

The right of Lisa St Aubin de Terán to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Acts, no part of this book may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN

978-1-914278-12-9 (hardback)

ISBN

978-1-914278-14-3 (eBook)

British Library Catalogue in Publishing Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover, book design and typesetting by Albarrojo

Kintsugi crack © Tartalia/Adobe Stock

Kintsugi

n. 1a Japanese art form in which pottery and porcelain are broken and put back together with all the fissures filled with liquid gold. b The art of repairing metal with gold or silver lacquer. 2 (colloq.) understanding that something is more beautiful for having been broken.

3 (poet.) Better broken than new.

Contents

On the Edge of the Indian Ocean

On the Outside Looking In

Kintsugi

The Love of My Life and Longing

Dreaming of Palaces

JAGS

On Not Belonging Anywhere

The One that Got Away

Granny Mabel

Unfit Spawn

What’s in a Name?

Mossuril, Simon and Garfunkel

On My Not Making Rain

Following Dreams

Granny Mabel Again

A Revolutionary Groupie

Travelling, I Could Be Anyone

Living in a Slice of Paradise Behind God’s Back

Just Another Case of Lookalike

Some Trials and a Lot of Errors

The Casa Grande

Selective Memories

Phantoms, Mentors and Miracles

Deck the Halls with Sprigs of Holly

What Was Weird and Not Always Wonderful

Our Hammer Horror Set in the Fenlands

‘There is no Success like Failure…’

‘The Good is Oft Interred with their Bones’

Old Habits (Like Bolting) Die Hard

Normandy and the Bay of Silence

Joanna and the Roots of Rhythm

Villa Quarata

Tropical Bonding

A Recalcitrant Tropical Garden

My First Foray as a Widow

An Heir and a Spare

Lullabies

Banged up Abroad

Yet More Boring Bureaucracy

The Hourglass

I am Thankful for Small Mercies

On Other Prisoners and Prisons

On Chocolate and Jan’s Ghanaian Prison Break

Redefining ‘Fine’

‘There was Worse in the War’

Love, O Careless Love

Trawling Down Memory Lane

Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

Insomnia

Freedom

What is Left of my Wanderlust

1

On the Edge of the Indian Ocean

Here in the North of Mozambique it feels as though nothing really happens except for the tide filling and ebbing, and the moon waxing and waning, and darkness falling like a curtain at half past five every evening funneling another day into the realm of myths, wailing bush babies, cicadas and tree frogs.

I have been living on the edge of the Indian Ocean for nineteen years now, and the place imbues everything with a dream-like quality. Lulled by the sheer intensity of nature and my isolation from everywhere and everyone I had known before, I live by the tempo of Makua drums, wrapped up in a microcosm filled with survivors from a war on want and a gruelling civil war.

Then ten years ago, when technology finally reached the bush, the internet, mobile phone coverage and a stirring of travellers to neighbouring Mozambique Island reopened my potential links to the rest of the world. Even now, the habits of the first isolated period we spent there prevail. We lived in a safari tent on a deserted beach for a year or so before moving into the ballroom of a ruined palace in Cabaceira Grande with virtually no links to the outside.

We became more and more like the villagers: living for the day in a bubble which excluded contact with ‘Out There’. Anywhere beyond the parameters of the next village was ‘Out There’, and little could happen beyond our parish boundary to penetrate the collective dream pod. Myth, traditional ceremonies, the Makua oral tradition and what happened to immediate friends and family were the only local realities. With no electricity, no post, newspapers or television, and virtually no visitors, the village was a hidden world wrapped in poverty and living by its own agenda. Aid agencies and charities never reached it. But such isolation also had its perks: because sixteen years of civil war never reached it either.

I sloughed off my former social and literary life to move here with my youngest child, Florence. Virtually the only people I stayed in touch with were my two older children, my sisters and three close friends. Cutting off contact wasn’t so much a choice as a necessity: from Cabaceira, we had to either sail to the neighbouring island or travel overland for twenty miles along a pitted and bone-shaking mud track, followed by a further eighteen miles of proper road to Jambezi. There followed a further two miles on a dangerously teetering single-lane road bridge which felt like entering Venice over the lagoon. Built by optimistic Portuguese colonisers during the country’s protracted War of Independence only to be abandoned in 1975 when Mozambique’s Liberation Front won.

Upon arrival on Mozambique Island (known here as ‘Ilha’ – the island – as if there were no others), we’d head for the telephone company’s office next to a palatial but deserted museum and opposite the (then) ruined pier.

There was invariably a small queue for the use of one of two cumbersome and temperamental computers. Until a network of fibre optic cables was later spread over the entire country, no other computers, including our own laptops, could access the internet here on the coast. So back then, if there was no power cut and if the company’s network coverage was working, emails could be sent or received. In those days, on a good day it took ten minutes. And sometimes, as a plus, our mobile phones would work. But always there would be fresh tuna fish or lobster and chips and chilled Portuguese wine in one of the island’s two restaurants.

On Ilha, dozens of extended families lived as squatters in its many ruined mansions. Most of the windows were boarded up and the doors were solid Portuguese affairs made long ago to show off the grandeur of their former owners. So, on the outside, the narrow tree-lined streets were flanked by palatial ruins, while inside, glimpsed only through chinks in ancient wood, squalor prevailed. Some rooms sported little mud huts, while others hosted mini shanty towns, and some families just opted to camp amidst the rubble and debris.

Despite its hundreds of squatters, and the state of disrepair of so many of its buildings, Ilha had an innate elegance and its thick walls had been made to last. Most of its flat, Arabic roofs had caved in over a century of neglect, but almost all the facades were intact. Every time we sailed from our village, locked, as it was then, somewhere in the nineteenth century, arriving felt like stepping out into a magic lantern show, because Ilha had shops and a bank, hotels and restaurants, offices and pavements, electricity and running water. No matter that the tiny island was a sort of Noah’s Ark of a town with two of everything – two shops, two computers, two cash points, two hotels and two restaurants – it was still a sliver of another world and a peephole back into the twenty-first century.

Once, long ago in Wimbledon, I put my eye to a small hole in our garden fence and was fascinated to see another eye staring back at me on the other side. In Wimbledon we lived in a rambling house on a hill over an underground stream.

Once, on the Caribbean island of Nevis (in a house built on the ruins of Lord Nelson’s Montpelier House), I heard a strange noise and put my eye to a hole in a window shutter to see who was outside our newly-rented abode. The eye that greeted me on the other side was veined and bloodshot and so enormous it terrified me. I screamed in alarm and my scream caused the intruder to flee by crashing through the garden. Armed with a metal rod, I ventured out to protect eight-year-old Florence from the giant Peeping Tom, only to see a herd of donkeys stampeding away. One turned its head back and stared at me with a huge, veined and bloodshot eye.

Our back garden in Wimbledon shared a fence with the Newbys. Eric Newby had climbed mountains and sailed on the high seas, and he wrote books and raked up enormous piles of autumn leaves on his side of the fence. If he or anyone else from his side spoke to me as I spied on their garden, I’d run away. Jan, my father, once took me to a Sunday lunch over the fence and I remember being so shy that I not only didn’t say a word, but I also hardly ate any of the proffered lasagna.

In Mozambique, though, it felt surprisingly comforting to be so cut off and yet so close to another world. This feeling was compounded by also living on the edge of the intricate web of ceremonies conducted daily by witch doctors and drummers, traditional dancers and the régulos: the hereditary chiefs. The seemingly endless rites and ceremonies were conducted openly like the live pageants and nativity scenes so beloved of Italian villages.

2

On the Outside Looking In

In another life, our family used to live near the famous Tuscan nativity pageant of Volterrano, which borrowed Florence when she was a baby to star as Baby Jesus and then practically worshipped her for it for the next decade. At the time, we had just moved into the village of Morra and we were camping on the mezzanine of a five-floored ruined palazzo called Quarata, which was one hundred and seventy metres over the county boundary into Umbria. Despite the two villages being only a mile and a half apart, the Volterranesi despised the Morrigani, calling them ‘Papalini’ (servants of the Pope) while the Morrigani were convinced that their Tuscan neighbours were thieves and vagabonds.

And yet, notwithstanding their centuries-old feud, the Volterranesi buried the hatchet for a few weeks and a delegation came over the ‘frontier’ to beg for the use of our baby in their forthcoming nativity which most of the village had laboured on the entire year. I pointed out that Florence was already five months old; while they pointed out that she was the only local baby small enough to pass for newborn. As the alternative was a strapping eighteen-month-old lad with pronounced attention deficit disorder, we reluctantly agreed. So on Christmas Eve, after a lot of fussing back stage, I handed over my tiny bundle and trudged to the front to watch from ten steps away as I leant against the icy bark of an Umbrian oak tree getting jostled this way and that by the crush of spectators for the next three mind-numbing hours. I stood in frost and snow and stared at her in her heated stall, like a freezing hobo watching a TV screen through the barrier of a shop window.

Even as a child and teenager in London I had been able to watch a world within a world as a tolerated spectator without having to participate in its complicated rites. My father was best friends with the Polish painter and cartoonist, Feliks Topolski, who had an enormous vaulted studio under the railway arches beside Waterloo Bridge. Although I had an absentee father, Feliks was a constant and exotic substitute. He was short, chubby and bald, and both sexually and socially insatiable. He hosted a weekly salon in his studio, which he prided himself on being able to pack with Lords and Ladies and the occasional Duke. He would also lure visiting dignitaries, theatre idols, top models, movie and pop stars, as well as a stream of willing nymphs to roll with him on the highly insanitary bear-skin rug that covered the double bed he held court from.

I used to drop in on Feliks once a month or more, reasonably safe from his predatory pawing by his (probably misplaced) fear of my father’s retaliation were anything sleazy to happen to me. From an early age, I could attend his salon as a silent observer. The entrance, via one of the arches under Waterloo Bridge, was almost blocked by a double lane of printing presses and stacks of old, yellowed issues of his Chronicle, which he published with the help of doting and nubile acolytes of either sex, and two wealthy patrons. The acolytes came from all over the world to hover around him like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Besides copy editing and (I imagined) bedroom duties, they were also in charge of producing endless mugs of tea in a squalid kitchenette tucked away from the lanes divided by hanging canvas, tables laden with drawings, and an astonishing collection of memorabilia and exotica.

On the days of his salon, and sometimes when visiting celebrities dropped in at other times, I would sit behind an ornate screen by the unsavoury fur-clad bed and leaf through Feliks’ priceless collection of art and theatre books until they left. Sometimes he would force me to emerge and be introduced. That was usually to show me off to some younger stud from the pop or movie world, allowing them to think they had interrupted us in something other than the telling of his life. Mostly, though, ensconced in the folds of one of his many theatre sets, I could hear and see the antics of a cross-section of the so-called Beautiful People of the 1960s and 70s as they gathered and gossiped at his salon. Despite my being twenty-six by the time I was gathering his life story, I was socially ignorant. I had jumped from school to marriage and a long sojourn on an isolated Andean Hacienda and thus didn’t know who André Previn, Mia Farrow, Roman Polanski, Jeanne Moreau, or any of the other stars were who graced Feliks’ studio. But later I would sometimes recognise faces in movies or on newsreels from those times when Feliks still had the power to draw the famous and powerful into his underground web.

Feliks liked to hold court. And, tugging on the sides of his rancid sheepskin waistcoat, he liked to strut and boast. But, as I learned over time, he had a lot to boast about: from his boyhood in Poland as a child prodigy to his close friendship with Picasso and a litany of heads of state, royalty and stars worldwide. He had been a Guest of State in many countries. But he particularly rejoiced in recounting the torrid affair he’d had with Indira Gandhi.

Under the glamour and derring-do, though, there was a thread of sadness which he traced back partly to the indelible horrors witnessed during his years as Britain’s Official War Artist. But he also traced that sadness back to the day in 1917 when, aged twelve, he was banished from the Eden of his privileged and sheltered Warsaw childhood after accidentally, but fatally, shooting his best friend. That victim was also the cherished son of one of his mother’s closest friends; and since the accident happened in front of them all, it was never quite forgiven or forgotten.

That was the first of many secret dramas he told me about when the Polish director, Andrzej Wajda, commissioned me to write a movie script about Feliks’ life.

That commission was my lifeline after I had newly returned to London with literary aspirations but not a hope in hell of getting my foot through the literary establishment’s door. Yet Feliks always introduced me at his salons as though I were as famous as half his other guests. He introduced me to Andrzej and assured him that I was just the writer they needed for the great Polish biopic they both wanted.

Both director and subject put the onus on me, and I loved it, revelling in it and shamelessly name-dropping to all the doubters of my personal star: which meant everyone I knew except for Joanna (my doting mother) and far away in Venezuela, Otto (my oldest and dearest friend) and my Argentinean paramour. It was a job with a deferred payment (a term I first heard from Feliks, but which I was to hear a lot more later on). And while I knew that Feliks was famous, I confess I had never heard of Andrzej Wajda until then, but within a week I had seen Man of Marble and Kanal twice, and had become a walking encyclopaedia of the director’s curriculum vitae from his birth to the death of his father in the Katyn Massacre, to his own years in the Polish Resistance, and his subsequent studies and movies.

When I started going out and about in Literary London with George Macbeth, at the many parties and events I attended as his groupie, I was saved by my Polish commission. When asked what I was working on, instead of having to own up to honing my Bezique skills with my mother and my Snap-timing with my six-year-old daughter, I was able to say, ‘I’m writing a screenplay for Andrzej Wajda’. In the Third World and among prickly Latinos in general, and ultra-pride-sensitive Andeans in particular, to lose face was to lose everything. After living with an old-school Venezuelan Andean for nine years, some of that fear of losing face must have rubbed off on me, because I can still recall the waves of gratitude that used to practically overwhelm me every time I was saved by my Wajda scenario.

I had run away from the Andes and gone home after years abroad only to find a city I hardly recognised, and my family and friends scattered across the globe. None of my hard-won practical skills were of any use to me in London where no one cared that I could score eight out of ten avocado grafts, or that I could dip sheep, milk cows, lower fevers, or boil sugarcane juice. Having lived for years next door to death and the outlandish passions of the inbred Terán family, I found it hard to settle into London life. Not least, because once I stepped out of this or that party, there was drama enough in my parallel life and it was just waiting to pounce. On the one hand, I had kidnapped my five-year-old Venezuelan daughter whom the British Home Office was now battling to deport, and on the other hand, my mother was on a terminal roller coaster, surging in and out of arcane but deadly diseases.

I have rarely been more aware of my social ineptitude than in those first few seasons in London. Yet with so much going on for me beyond the doors of those parties, I felt that if I let anything at all get under my skin, it would flay me. The only way I knew how to deal with the violence and heartbreak of both my marriage and the place I had fled from was to keep going: to keep running into the future because I wasn’t ready to confront the past.

And if anyone at all managed to prick the bubble I’d made, it would burst and smother me bringing back memories of being drowned, of being raped, of being strangled, of hurting others and my being hurt. So the bubble had to stay intact with me being the writer who had just come back from the Andes to take London by storm. I had a hundred and one stories that didn’t sail into the Dragon Zone, and George Macbeth loved every one of them. I became his exotic creation, wheeled out to top everyone’s tale with something funnier and wilder. Egged on by George, I talked about the weird and wonderful things that had happened to other Teráns, carefully skirting around what had happened to me. But as I danced with denial, as with all good fabrications, I needed a grain of truth to work around. That was where the Wajda script fitted in. It protected me like a suit of armour from having to deal with too much reality. And at home, denial was the order of the day: so no one was dying and no one had been kidnapped, and I wasn’t on the run. Instead, we were just three generations of women playing cards in my mother’s flat in Clapham.

Meanwhile, my tenuous connection to Andrzej Wajda also had the chastening effect of making me feel like an ignorant pig. The first time I met him, I’d just been delighted to have something to do: something to write that someone else was asking for. But from then on, I vowed, I would make myself worthy of his attention.

Feliks and I then spent countless hours and days closeted in his studio on his unbelievably smelly bearskin rug, or, more agreeably, in his palatial penthouse in Dolphin Square overlooking the Thames from a number of Victorian turrets and balconies.

During those sessions, Feliks dropped his bombast and most of his boasting to reveal facet after hidden facet of both his life and his character. These ranged from his longing for the attention of his actor father, the trauma of having to leave his mother so suddenly and so young, and the greater trauma of having disappointed her. And they ranged from his friendship as a teenager with Pablo Picasso in Paris, to his later, intense friendship with George Bernard Shaw. Feliks talked about his having been Britain’s Official War Artist and the awakening that produced in him. And then, having abandoned his homeland, there was the irony of his having become a cultural icon for Poles and the star of their Diaspora.

From time to time, he would interrupt one of his monologues grabbing me in an attempt to consummate our ever-closer relationship. But he was old and short while I was young and tall. And while he had undoubtedly wrestled hundreds of attractive flies into his web on that very bed, I had honed my own wrestling techniques in the Andes. There, with two notable exceptions, I had learned how to chop and knee my way out of the Kung Fu grips of sexual predators far stronger than the roly-poly old painter.

Living in Mozambique has lifted what felt like a constant pressure to fit in. To do that elsewhere always required me to change fundamentally. In most other places, my rebellious heart has tried to meet that requirement halfway, but it was never without an inner struggle. But here, where so much of life seems to make sense, and where people laugh because they are glad, and sing whenever they feel like it (regardless of the quality of their voice) and dance whenever and wherever they like, and wear the most dazzling and clashing colours with nothing but pride, I feel free to be me. And despite a handful of petty regulations that infringe occasionally, such as not being allowed into government offices in sandals and having to practically kowtow verbally on every official written request, there is a great deal more freedom here than in the Western world. As I grow older, I have fewer and fewer treasures or possessions and what I treasure most is my (and other people’s) freedom. Within that, my own version of paradise is to be lost in thought in my garden, either tending plants, landscaping, or setting mosaics into the garden paths.

3

Kintsugi

It took me almost forty years to set foot in Africa. My first brief forays were to Ghana, Nigeria and Mali. But long before then, both my own heritage and circumstance had been propelling me towards its shores. As in a love affair, I felt a combination of fear, fascination and attraction, with the former prevailing. Instead of travelling there, I read voraciously about others who had. And yet, I knew next to nothing about Mozambique except that Livingstone buried his wife by the Zambezi River. But when the chance to live in Mozambique cropped up, I think I was predisposed to accept it just as, decades before, when the chance of living in Italy cropped up, I had been groomed to want it. And in both cases, it was not just a matter of wanting to see Africa, or to see Italy, it was a visceral longing and the bite into the tree of knowledge I had been craving.

Before we were banished from the Garden of Eden, or rather from my father’s rambling four-floor house in Wimbledon draped with wisteria front and back and hemmed in by damson and pear trees and a magnificent copper beech, it had been our home for over three years. We lived there with Jan from 1954 to 1955 and then stayed on without him. Both his literary and academic careers started to take off around 1954. So when he wasn’t away, he was often busy broadcasting for the BBC World Service, networking and partying. His debut novel, Black Midas, was published in 1958 followed in the same year by The Wild Coast. Both novels brought him fame and fortune.

Joanna was his first wife. There would be three more (Sylvia, Pauline and Joy) and so many fiancées that I, and I think he, lost count of them. Jan was Joanna’s last of four husbands. I was too young to witness the tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship they had but I later gleaned that mixed in with their shouting matches and fights, there was also an enormous amount of mutual passion as each loved the other in what turned out to be the wrong time and place.

Joanna yearned for the tropics and a landscape transposed from the Palm House at Kew into an exciting new world. She longed to travel to the West Indies and British Guiana and told me she felt cheated by being excluded from that side of his life. Meanwhile, Jan was enamoured not only of Joanna, but also of the doors she opened into a literary world he yearned to be a part of. Once the door was open, he was both able and ambitious and rose from occasional contributor to Assistant Editor of The Kensington Post.

But he was also working his way through cycles of manic depression and ‘pseudo schizophrenia’ at a time when such things were less understood by the medical profession. In early 1952, when things got out of hand, he went into a mental hospital for treatment. The medical care was not much help, but it was there that he continued his affair with a stunning redhead who was hospitalised for her suicidal depression. Somehow, they managed to be together and by the time Jan was released, Joanna was pregnant with me.

She told me that she felt an instant loathing for him, repulsed by his sheer size and the fact that he was so arrogantly aware of his charm, and she said he laughed too loudly and had a big nose.

I have read Jan’s letters from America during the period when he was on tour with Laurence Olivier, and they are the letters of a man in love. It is too late now to know what happened in the months after Jan’s return or what led him to the bleak fenland hospital where he and Joanna were both treated and where they continued their tempestuous love affair.

Joanna told me, on her deathbed, that her own breakdown was triggered by her one and only visit to her mother in the lunatic asylum where Miss Kitty had been incarcerated since 1943. Joanna was eighteen years old when she left home after threatening her abusive mother with a breadknife and swearing to kill her if she ever hit her again. Who knows what Miss Kitty said to her pregnant daughter to make her try to take her own life? Whatever it was, it was enough to make Joanna head home and stick her head in the gas oven.

It was after that suicide attempt that she was hospitalised, paralysed from the waist down. Meanwhile, Jan moved into a flat in London’s Sussex Gardens together with one of Joanna’s ex-husbands and one of her former lovers. And then they became a quartet as Forbes Burnham (the future President of Guyana) joined them for a few months until Joanna recovered and went home to have me. Jan told me that a few days before she arrived, the guys scrubbed out as many traces as they could of their recent debauchery.

In the meantime, my sisters were all farmed out to friends and family.

Finding and putting back the pieces of that time from April 1952 to October 1953 when I was born at the Princess Beatrice Hospital in Kensington is a random process. A few months later, things begin to clarify. Joanna worked at The Kensington Post while Jan looked after me until we all moved to Dover; and at some point, with or without Jan, we went to St Ives in Cornwall for an extended holiday. It was there, on Porthmeor Beach, that I got left out in my pram and had to be treated for severe sunburn as the West Country sun turned and caught me while my exhausted mother and sisters all fell asleep on the sand. Apparently as a result of that roasting, I was photophobic for the next twenty years.

I remember the sound of my father typing on an old field typewriter. And later, people coming round to Wimbledon to visit and eat curries while my mother was at work. And I remember the sound of his laughter; and the wisteria that grew front and back over the bay windows, the crab apple and greengage trees, the conference pear in the corner, the damson by the Newby’s and the enormous copper beech tree that took up almost all of the rest of the back garden.

Long before I began to live in the ruins and castles that would set me apart, I knew that there was something innately different about me without my really knowing what it was. I looked different because I was a different colour, but something more than that triggered extreme emotion. From early on, since my mother had four daughters, it puzzled me why she treated me so differently. And it puzzled me, as I grew up, why so many people treated me as though all I needed were wings to fly. Just as it puzzled me why a handful of others disliked me on sight. It was at my Wimbledon nursery school that I first became aware that there was something about me that could unleash passion and trigger aggression. It was called ‘Mrs Henderson’s’ and it was in a pretty house with an even prettier garden. Mrs Henderson liked children: she called us ‘her children’ and kept little treats for her favourites. She was fond of my sister, Lali, and often gave her treats, but she didn’t quite like me. As a result, I kept out of her way as best I could.

Until one day, over a minor incident, months of irritation were funnelled into a head-on collision and a punishment that was out of proportion to the crime. I have always had an aversion to being told what to do. Ask me nicely, and I’ll do practically anything for anyone including the most menial tasks, but if anyone tells me to do something, I get that defiant ‘shoot me’ blockage, which, when I was younger, I was prepared to take to any lengths rather than back down. For all her experience as a nursery teacher, I don’t think Mrs Henderson had come across quite such extreme stubbornness in a three-year old before. Three-year olds have tantrums and will refuse to do things out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but then they will either scream themselves sick, get distracted, or back down. I presume Mrs Henderson expected me to act my age and scream, shout, cry or eventually comply with her command.

However, I refused to take up any of those options, so her simple order to me to sing something in class escalated into hours of conflict. Once the stand-off had started, neither Mrs Henderson nor I could back down. What was supposed to have been a public humiliation for me turned the tables, mocking my teacher’s inability to make me obey her.

I had never been slapped before that day and never had my hair pulled or been knocked down or even punished. I remember that the nursery assistant tried unsuccessfully to intervene. And I remember Lali and some of the other children crying, and I remember telling myself that no matter what my tormentor did to me I would not cry and I would not sing for her: ever!

Before she started shaking me, there was a long wait. It was one of those waits you get at school when the whole class stops until the culprit confesses or surrenders. I had nothing to confess: I was guilty as charged. She had said ‘Sing’ and I had refused. So we waited and waited and despite my tender age, I remember watching sparrows through the window, as I concentrated on the garden to get through my ordeal. And I remember the time dragging so slowly I could hardly breathe. And I remember how uncomfortable and restless all the other children were. What I don’t remember is why it mattered so much to me not to sing that day.

But I do remember being dragged and shaken. And I remember being locked into a broom cupboard full of dust, and feeling claustrophobic and asthmatic and passing out in there as a way of escape. Before Joanna came to collect me, I was pulled out and cleaned up, but I have always bruised easily. And I remember that afterwards, Mrs Henderson was mortified and almost as shocked as I was.

Aged five, Lali didn’t know how to describe what had happened and I was in silent mode until Joanna withdrew me from the nursery school. Once I was safely spending my days with Anne, our housekeeper, I got over it; and by occurring so early on, the incident was a salutary warning to me to keep whatever stubborn beast I had inside me leashed, at least in public.

Despite that incident, for everyone who has spontaneously loathed me, there have been many more equally spontaneous and undeserved doters. Thus, on the whole, my life has been helped more than it has been hindered by the impulsive reactions of relative strangers.

At primary school, being different resulted in some mild bullying by a handful of kids spurred less by colour prejudice than by xenophobia because any foreign kids got bashed at Bonneville Primary School. There were also a couple of teachers who insisted that I thought I was better than them, when actually (as one of those teachers liked to inform me) ‘I was a fatherless half-caste’. To some adults, my just being there or anywhere constituted what they termed ‘dumb insolence’.

When I was about seven, upon hearing how badly I was faring on the social front at Bonneville, and the truanting that had grown out of it, Joanna started the process of moving me to a private junior school. During the following months she showed me how to laugh and shrug off my detractors as she groomed me for stardom, imbuing me with a confidence I probably did not deserve and an indifference to our enemies. Her daily mantra to my three sisters and I was,

‘Ignore them, darlings, they’re just jealous’.

And into that category of ‘just jealous’ went all the nay-sayers who disapproved of my mother’s multiple marriages, of my mixed race, of all our airs and graces, and all the minor snobberies she insisted on as she clung to whatever she could salvage from her granny’s teaching as we spiralled down into penury.

Despite having grown up as the victim of serious physical and verbal abuse, Joanna broke the mould and both nurtured and loved her four daughters. Food was scant and money scarcer, but we grew up with hundreds of books, and a cabinet full of antique Chinese porcelain (the ‘Aunt Connie Cabinet’). This chinoiserie consisted mostly of nineteenth-century reproductions which Joanna guarded as though each item were a priceless relic from the Ming Dynasty.

And although we didn’t go so far as to change for dinner, Joanna insisted that our meals be laid with all the protocol of a banquet and there were always flowers. Apart from Sunday lunch, Christmas and Easter dinners and on our various birthdays, the meagre food we served didn’t warrant such elaborate presentation. But woe betide any of us who failed to place the crested Murray silver (which was actually only silver-plated) correctly! And to take soup from the front of our bowl was tantamount to a crime. For someone so lax in discipline in other matters, Joanna’s obsession with table-laying and table manners stood out as one of her own idiosyncrasies. Later, I realised that she was merely perpetuating the way that she had been brought up by her Granny from Jersey who had lost almost all her worldly goods and much of her social status, but who had retained a few of the trappings from her much grander earlier life which she clung onto like props to guide her through what must have seemed like an endlessly bewildering and humiliating exile.

Long after Joanna died, which was even longer after Florence Roberts (née Martin), her Granny, died, their combined effort continued to flow in all the small ways she relied on to sustain grace under pressure. Here in Mozambique, I hear her in me as I instruct my granddaughter, Che, to chew with her mouth closed and insist she say ‘Please may