church every Sunday and if I stayed the night at hers I wasn’t allowed to come up and take communion with them so instead I remained alone in the pews eating her penny sweets, contemplating why anyone would want to eat the body of Christ. Our Jewishness or non-Jewishness confused me. It added to an array of things that confused me. I had so many questions. I was so curious. I needed answers and Google hadn’t been invented yet. So I went to my dad. Sometimes when I asked a question he would answer and other times, he would throw the question back to me and I would say: ‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t know is a lazy answer.’ He sent me off to look in an encyclopaedia.
Encyclopaedias are enormous and these days you can’t give them away, but back then owning a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas was a big deal. They were huge and they had no pictures; they were boring. So often, after what felt like forever of trying to find the right book and the right section, I would just make something up.
In my adult life this is something that I am thankful I learned, I am now proud of my ability to find out or blag it. I believe that saying YES and finding out how to execute something afterwards is one of the most commonly shared attributes of entrepreneurs.
My childhood – the liberalism, the organic and wholefood diet, yoga, open mindedness, lack of TV and encouragement of creativity in both thinking and expression – were fantastic. NOW I am hugely grateful and thankful for the attention, consideration and energy my parents gave us, but in the 1990s? Not so much. I wanted NORMAL. I wanted a normal name. I wanted a TV. I wanted plastic toys. I wanted a hairdresser or someone qualified to cut my hair. Being the hippy child with hand-me-down clothes and hedge-like frizzy hair who made up answers about things she didn’t know was not cool and it was not normal.
Being normal meant belonging, and I didn’t feel as though I belonged. I didn’t belong anywhere. We were a sort of nothing, in between everything and everybody else. We weren’t council-estate poor. We weren’t rich enough to eat whatever we wanted out of the fridge. We weren’t real Jews but we weren’t atheists. We didn’t believe strongly in politics. There wasn’t a family motto, or a football team. We didn’t have a band that we were publicly in support of. In fact we didn’t do anything publicly. We kept ourselves to ourselves, but we weren’t a team either. I constantly felt like I had something to be ashamed of, but I wasn’t sure what. I felt like we had to hide, but I wasn’t sure why.
Take Halloween. In most people’s houses it was a fun time, for dressing up all spooky, having fun, and eating sweets. In our house it was an evening when we stayed in, at the back of the house, with all the lights turned off. There was no jack-o-lantern outside our house, no answering of the door if it was knocked on. I didn’t understand what we were ashamed of, or why we couldn’t interact. I felt like a misfit.
As soon as I was old enough to sleep over at other people’s houses I did. As soon as I could eat TV dinners, or watch Neighbours and study normal at someone else’s house, I did. I was really good at fitting in. I discovered that I could be a wonderful chameleon. Other people’s parents loved me. I was polite, I offered to help out. I created rapport. I mirrored and matched them way before I had any idea about NLP3 or what it was I was doing. I just wanted to be part of something, and feel like I belonged.
My beautiful little sister was born in February 1990. She was not the kitten I had asked for, and I didn’t know what we needed another family member for, but my parents seemed excited.4 The upside of my sister’s arrival for me as an independent nine-and-a-half-year-old was that I could get away with being out more often.
I spent most of my time with the kids up the street. They were SO normal. The kind of normal I wanted to be. They were my first surrogate family. We watched TV. We started ‘the babysitters club’ like in a book we had read. We recorded our very own radio show on the boombox my grandmother gave me. (My brother joined in too sometimes.) We made up dance routines and sang tunelessly to Madonna and New Kids on the Block. I had my first crush (Joey McIntyre – he was only 16 and I figured that wasn’t much of an age gap). I knew every single word to every single song on Hanging Tough, Step by Step and The Immaculate Collection.
Sometime in 1991 it was time to wean my sister off breast milk and so my mum and I went on a holiday. It was a whole weekend in France, and it was just the two of us: I was so excited! Spending time just my mum and me was so rare. This and one other weekend that we went to Monkton Wyld Court5 are the two memories I have from my childhood and teens where it was just the two of us and we weren’t seething or screaming at one another. That weekend was lovely. It was also the next time that I had a profound (and life-saving) intuitive and unexplainably magic moment. The place we visited was a commune of creative people who were seeking to bring a version of Tipi Valley6 to France.
I remember a tiny fluffy black kitten who followed me everywhere, I felt honoured. Organically grown tomatoes that I picked myself, which tasted amazing. Fresh duck eggs, with the largest and most golden yolks I had ever seen, and Wolfy. Wolfy was a four-year-old girl who was also there with her mum. She was awesome, we went exploring the epic grounds together. We were the only kids, except for a local boy called Jay. Jay was about my age and he spoke a little English but he was a boy, so we hung out for a while and then we went off on our own. In the grounds there was a forest and we walked in it, we walked and walked and walked. We found a stream and moss and made totems out of rocks. It was magical. At some point I realised that I was the ‘adult’ and that it was probably time to go home. We began walking back the way we’d come. After a while I realised we were lost. Really lost. The kind of lost where you try to find, but can’t see, the sun to make a guess at your bearings. I was eleven and I had a four year old with me and it would start getting dark soon. Fuck. I don’t know why I did what I did next, but remembering the fairies in the garden that the adults couldn’t see, I instructed Wolfy to sit down cross-legged opposite me. I explained that we were lost, and that we needed help.
‘Do you remember Jay?’
‘Yep.’ She nodded her little dreadlocked head back at me.
‘OK, good. I need you to think about him. Think really hard. We’re going to send him a message. We’re going to tell him with our minds that we need him, and we’re going to tell him where we are.’
She didn’t even flinch at this bizarre request. She closed her eyes and did it.
I did too. I concentrated with all my might on telling Jay how important it was that he listened and that we needed him.
‘How long do we wait?’ a little voice broke my thoughts.
‘As long as it takes. He won’t be long. He’s just got to find us.’
It was about twenty minutes I think. He appeared with a smile on his face.
‘Bonjour. Ça va?’
I actually have no idea what he said, but he took us home. When I asked him how he knew we needed him and where to come, he told me he just knew. Something came to him and told him we needed his help. I mentally noted that some other kids could connect to the knowing too, and then promptly forgot as soon as we were back in England and our old lives again.
I had a good childhood – I was loved and cared for – but I also always had an angst inside me waiting to get out and explore. Some of you will really be able to relate. I wanted to go and discover the whole world, right now! I felt too big for our little life. I felt destined for grandeur and at the same time I felt a duty of care to my family. I was torn between running
