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Out of Africa My parents met and married in Johannesburg, South Africa. My father moved out there from the UK after the second world war with his first wife. He went to set up an American Express office. My mother had gone there with her family.
They met at a dinner party on Valentine’s Day. My father was divorced and hadn’t felt like going, but he remembered his mother’s advice, “You can cut a cocktail party, but you can never cut a dinner party.”
My mother was 17, a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, and he was 39. They fell in love and married a year later. I was born in September 1960. The Sharpeville massacre had happened in March that year and my parents decided they didn’t want to bring me up in South Africa, so left when I was nine months old.
We moved first to a flat in Earl’s Court, London, and then to Weybridge, in Surrey. My first memory there is of being frightened of thunder and my grandmother explaining that it was angels playing cowboys and Indians in the sky. That soothed me.
Ghost house I have four half-sisters from my father’s first marriage and a younger brother. From Weybridge we moved to Little Bounds, in Kent, where we had the ground floor of a Georgian dower house. It was a bucolic Kent childhood – as seven- and eight-year-olds we would be out of our parents’ sight for hours, roaming the countryside.
The house was built on the foundations of a monastery and was haunted by a friendly ghost – a monk. I never saw it, but I felt it strongly and even as a small child there would be moments of absolute religious bliss.