and so that made it OK. I was special, I could see fairies and it was magical. That was when I was still six.
When I was seven it was no longer OK to be psychic or intuitive or magical. Up until then I thought it was, because people believed me, but then one day no one believed me anymore.
Not long after my seventh birthday I was walking home with my mum, excited because my grandma was making me a skirt. She’d not told me anything about it, just that it was almost done. We didn’t get new things all that often and I could not wait. My grandma’s house was about a ten-minute walk from ours. I asked if we could go via her house and get it. I was told no.
‘She might not be in.’ My mum tried to hurry me along and get us home.
All I could think about was the skirt. I’d imagined it in my head over and over. And then I saw it lying on the street.
‘That’s my skirt!’ I trilled, skipping over and picking it up.
‘No it’s not. Leave it alone. Put it back.’
‘But I KNOW it’s my skirt. I promise it’s my skirt. It must have fallen out of Granny’s handbag. Please can we take it home!’
How did I know it was my skirt? I just knew. I love how the French have two words for ‘knowing’: savoir and connaître. There are proper definitions of when to use which, but in my mind one is for the stuff you just know, and the other is for the things you learn to know. I just knew all sorts of things as a child. Before I was seven I think I was 100% in tune with who I was; my wild uninhibited intuitive nature was as yet untarnished and in that moment, standing on the street with my mother, it changed. I could no longer trust what I knew because my mum, who knew everything as far as I was concerned, was MORE sure than I was that this was not my skirt.
When we got to our house Grandma was there, having a cup of tea with my dad and brother.
‘Hello darling,’ she said, ‘go and fetch me my handbag, I’ve got your skirt for you.’
I felt like saying ‘No you don’t it’s down the street, on the wall where I left it, waiting for some other little girl to call it hers.’
But she was excited and so I was too. I fetched her handbag, gave it to her and watched as she pulled everything out. She pulled out tissues, then Polo mints, then keys and the coin purse she used to give us elevenses money, but no skirt.
‘Was it pink and blue with little flowers on it and a stretchy elasticated waist?’ I piped.
‘Yes!’ she exclaimed.1 ‘How do you know that? Did you sneak a look?’ She wagged her finger at me.
‘NO,’ I shouted. ‘I know because it fell out of your handbag and it’s down the road!’ I was off, I had already swung open the front door and I flew as fast as my legs would allow back to where I’d seen MY skirt.
That day was the first time I had an inkling of ‘not normal’. It began to register that KNOWING, the kind that comes from deep inside, isn’t normal. I didn’t like how it felt to be different. I wanted to be loved and trusted unconditionally. I began to be curious about ‘normal’.
And it wasn’t long before I encountered an opportunity to make a trade for normality.
I need to set the scene a little more... My parents did the very best they could for us; I guess I’d describe them as innovative ‘now’ age hippies, way ahead of their time. They fed us organic and whole foods; we didn’t have sugar until we were at least three. Unnecessary vaccinations and medicines were a no-no and in education we were gifted to Steiner Schools2 as much as they could afford. Steiner school was great for me at Kindergarten; there were stories and large colourful wax crayons and yoga. It was only later, after I was seven, that it was another thing that I decided made me weird and not normal.
Steiner School meant no television and no plastic toys. Our toys were animals carved out of wood or handmade dolls. It was beautiful, but it was not ‘normal’. One day, I took my handmade doll to the park. The sort of park you got next to every housing estate in England in the eighties: a strip of grass with a swing-set, a slide with puddles on it, a sandbox full of cigarette ends and a couple of ride-on animals on big metal springs. We were at the park with our au pair, a young French girl who sat on a bench and read her book. While she read, we played. For my brother that meant interacting with the equipment and for me it meant interacting with other kids. I chatted to a girl from the estate. She spoke differently to us. She said ‘waughtar’, we said ‘water’. She was normal. She had a television at home and she had Star Wars figures with her in the park and I had a handmade doll. We switched. My mum was furious.
This experience reinforced what I believed to be true. We really weren’t normal.
The next BIG thing that happened when I was seven is that two girls I didn’t know died from anorexia. My dad was reading the newspaper and when he got to the story about these young girls he called me over and we had a conversation about it. Before that day I hadn’t really thought anything about my body. It just was. I can see now that the relationship I developed over the years with food has been for the most part about control and certainty. When I needed to find and gain control, ‘anorexia’ and later bulimic behaviour was what I pulled out of my toolbox. Later I moved on to other things too, but restricting and then rebelling and binging on food has most often been my addictive and numbing technique of choice. I am not an expert on, nor have I studied eating disorders or addiction; I have learned a great deal about food and nutrition over the years but what I recount throughout this book is only my experience and what I believe about my on-going relationship with ‘Self and God’. (One of the best books I have ever read on this subject is Women, Food and God – An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth. I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves restricting or bingeing on food.)
Three months after I turned seven we moved to the south coast, to Brighton. Brighton is my spiritual home. I have lived here on and off ever since. Even when I live somewhere else, Brighton is still my ‘home’.
We arrived the weekend of the hurricane in 1987 and whilst my brother slept soundly through it, I got into bed with my mum and dad and began to realise that the world could be a pretty scary place. While my mum lit tea lights and placed them all around, I crept over to the sash windows and carefully looked outside. Dustbin lids flew up the street, trees had fallen onto cars. It was fierce. It was not normal.
Wild weather like that probably makes everyone think about God. Or the Universe, or the Divine, or whatever. As I lay in bed I really began, probably for the first time, to think in this way. Something MUCH bigger, greater than me, could crumple cars and blow over trees.
As a child I knew a little about Judaism and that our families had been Jewish but the teachings were not passed on to us. Neither of my parents practised any sort of organised faith. Being Jewish is passed through one’s mother and my mum wasn’t Jewish because her mum wasn’t. Both our fathers were, so I saw myself as three quarters Jewish. I felt and still feel that our ancestry is a very important part of my identity. Whilst the faith and teachings weren’t of so much interest to me, the rituals, the story and history was. We didn’t really celebrate the Jewish holidays (apart from the occasional Seder at Pesach with my paternal grandmother.) My mum got us involved with the more pagan holidays – Solstice, Mayday, and Equinox and we sort of celebrated Christmas and Easter like everyone else. I mean we did, but not
