There was always someone more important in our house.

Having lost our main breadwinner, we took in a lodger to help make ends meet, Mr Foord, who slurped his soup, and had, as a young man,  glimpsed my French  Dance teacher dressed only in a towel (and she was a good - looking woman). Every Christmas, he pegged an envelope to the Christmas Tree addressed to each of us children, from H. W. Foord. We speculated as to what the initials H. W. might stand for. I suggested Hairy Wazzock, or Huge Willy, to great hilarity. I can't recall now what they really stood for. When my Mother remarried, my new Dad couldn't stand the soup slurping, so Mr Foord had to go. It was a shame because he was  very fond and took care of our dog, sadly neglected by everyone else. He was good natured, but rather bald, with a black worm for a tail.

Struggling to make ends meet, we took in students. Most of them were older, so  they weren't much fun. We had a Frenchman who suffered with some kind of  nasal problem  and had to blow his nose rather loudly at frequent intervals. He had a best friend he hung out with who was very handsome and drove a flash car. But our Monsieur was rather mournful and it turned out that he had suffered a terrible tragedy, losing his girlfriend in a car crash, driven by her inebriated father. He then went and smashed up the Father in law's apartment, for which he got into a whole mess of trouble, but you couldn't really blame him.

I think he might have had a bit of a thing for me though. He was sleeping in my bed- room, surrounded by my drawings and teenage trinkets and the life - size figure of Betty Grable I had painted on the back of the door.

I slept in the cellar, with the coal and the hum of the freezer, but I liked it there. I played the guitar and sang, wistful songs, but I couldn't do it in front of anybody. I would be sabotaged by nerves. I was a talented little thing, but I was by now crippled with nerves, like a terrible stage - fright of life.

One day Monsieur invited me to go with him to see Leonard Cohen in Brighton. Lovely Lenny. But I couldn't go. I sensed his yearning and his loneliness, although I was only fourteen. He was Twenty - six.

We later had a couple of female students, one was from Germany and the other from South America, and my mother kept commenting on what nice girls they were and how attractive. I think she had hoped they might be good role models for me and maybe bring me out of myself, but whenever she said how nice they were, I took it as  a criticism of me. A kind of  " Why can't you be as pretty, feminine, accomplished, gregarious, charming and poised as they are? "

Oh Mama, I remember when you bought me two little nighties, with flowers and pixies dancing across them, but it was too late. You didn't like me sleeping naked with my mattress on the floor, as was the fashion in those days. But how could I be the fragrant young lady you wanted me to be, when I had glimpsed the dark underbelly of life?

If it wasn't students or lodgers or step siblings, it was prayer - meetings , coffee  mornings or dinner - parties. When all your Doctor and Dentist and Solicitor cronies would come and haw haw haw [italics] and how are you at us, and we were so socially inept, 
we would just make ourselves scarce. I didn't understand how we had gone from being wild and free and feral, to being suddenly this middle - class family.

Looking back, I didn't feel very comfortable in this new family, so very different from what I was used to. And the identity of my family had got lost somewhere along the  way. I have a photograph of the three of us children, bright, beautiful children. And I sometimes think ," Why couldn't they just have loved us ?  

Why was there always someone more important ? "