through catalogues to make her purchases. Tupperware was the latest thing, and she invested in lunchboxes and drinks containers that I could take with me to school. At long last we got our first fridge, powered by gas, and the milk came in from its saucepan of cold water on the window ledge. While I experimented with fruit-cordial ice cubes my mum, who had never been much of a one for shopping or cooking and had at last been emancipated by a threestar ice compartment, embraced the new frozen-food options with enthusiasm. Out went the old staples of corned beef, spam and tinned ravioli and in came exotic convenience meals like fish fingers and crinkle-cut chips.
The flat itself, though, was deteriorating further. The roof had sprung more leaks, a paisley patch of damp was spreading out across the bedroom ceiling and there was even more subsidence in the living room. Uncle Will had brought home a cute mongrel puppy he christened Judy and in the summer holidays I escaped most days to walk her in Victoria Park and teach her tricks. Or I would go to the local Odeon for an hour or so to be whisked off to considerably more glamorous locations a galaxy away from Mile End: Istanbul in the to-catch-a-thief caper Topkapi, or the beautiful American mansion, with its stables and horses, to which handsome Sean Connery brings ice-cool Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie.
At home I shut myself off from whatever was going on around me and worked on my Olivetti typewriter, which my mother had bought me for my birthday six months earlier. It came with a smart grey case containing a neat pouch where I could store pens, paper and envelopes. I loved every task associated with it, no matter how small—changing the ribbon, feeding in the paper, snapping down the bar to keep it in place—just like those men who are never happier than when they are tinkering with their cars. When I was ready I would position my hands above the keys like a concert pianist before allowing my two forefingers to dance across them, impressing on the paper poems and stories set in places I had only ever read about or seen at the cinema: Mediterranean islands like Rhodes, home to the Colossus, and beautiful Capri, where the emperor Tiberius had thrown his enemies off a high cliff.
By the autumn the Macmillan government, still reeling from the Profumo affair, was listing as badly as 25 Lefevre Road. My father was now confident that a Labour prime minister would soon be in power and the class barriers would come crashing down.
The seeds of such a revolution had already been sown. In what seemed like a strange reversal of the natural order, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, the Beatles and Peter Sellers, working-class heroes all, were mixing with the likes of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. London in the 1960s has been described as the place where our modern world began and we were seeing the emergence of a new meritocracy, where talent mattered more than who your parents were. One of its first stars was the photographer David Bailey, born in Leytonstone, while the East End’s own Vidal Sassoon, who had given the fashion supremo Mary Quant her iconic bob cut, was famous all over the world.
Throughout the summer a pristine satchel has been sitting permanently by the door, filled with blank notebooks: the unwritten story of my career at the Central Foundation School for Girls. On 14 September 1964 I put on my new uniform, slip the strap of the satchel across my shoulder and set off for the bus stop.
The stiff white blouse puffs up out of the loose waistband of my skirt as I raise my arm to hail the number 8. Unsure how I should wear my beret, I’ve tried it several ways: at jaunty French angles, like a workman’s cap and, lastly, drawn down at the back like a snood. I catch sight of my reflection in the bus window as I jump on board. The beret looks like a flat, green dinner plate perched on my head. Climbing the stairs to the upper deck, I spot an empty seat but before I can reach it I am pounced upon by a swarm of older girls, all wearing the same bottle-green uniform as mine.
Panicked, I fall to the floor and a scuffle breaks out. I’m kicking and struggling but someone grabs my beret and when I eventually manage to break free it is tossed back at me. I see that its stalk is missing.
‘You’ve been bobbled!’ they scream, clattering down the stairs, cackling.
A third of the pupils at my new school are Jewish, most of whom live in Stepney and Whitechapel. Many are from families that fled Poland and Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s and have relatives who survived concentration camps. They have dark hair and strange names like Bobravitch and Baruch. The only two ‘foreigners’ I have ever known before are Mrs LeWars and a boy called Remo Randolfi whose family run a café and ice-cream parlour in Roman Road. Now I am about to become ‘foreign’ myself, albeit only for half an hour, when I am wrongly seated on the kosher lunch table, perhaps because I, too, am dark-haired and have an odd surname.
Years later I would discover that my roots are a mixture of French Jewish and Irish Catholic, but on my first day at senior school, I was happy to be whatever they wanted me to be.
The CFS had stood in Spital Square since 1890, but dated back to a much earlier era. It had been endowed as a free charity school for boys and girls in 1726, but had very probably existed as a parochial charity school since 1702. The Edwardian red-brick building was bordered on one side by Spitalfields fruit market, where I had to pick my way through squashed, sometimes rotten fruit to reach the gates. Often I would come across hard-up East Enders or refugees sorting through it to rescue the more edible specimens. On the other side was Bishopsgate, gateway to the City, its banks and its money, and a couple of miles further on, the West End.
This location, at the midway point between East End and West End, seemed an apt metaphor for how I would come to see myself in my grammar school years: suspended in a no-man’s-land between a past I was being educated out of and a future still beyond my reach.
At primary school I had benefited from a progressive approach that treated education as a springboard to social mobility and mirrored the changing times. Walking through the door of the CFS, by contrast, was like stepping into the past. The grammar school (motto: Spe Labore Fide—by hope, by work, by faith) clung resolutely to its traditions and its illustrious history. Instead of drama there was elocution, long afternoons spent trying to recite Keats’ odes without giving yourself away with the merest suggestion of a flattened Cockney vowel. Latin mistresses led us through the tedious declension of nouns. The only hint of the Swinging Sixties was the occasional polka-dot mini-skirt a brave young supply teacher might dare to wear. Our headmistress, the jealous guardian of the school’s antiquated standards and customs, was apparently unaware of any smashing down of class barriers. Her pride and joy was the board that hung outside her office displaying, in gold lettering, the names of all the girls who had gone on to Oxbridge. Katharine Whitehorn’s later description of tradition as ‘habit in a party frock’ would have found no resonance here.
In truth the school was already an anachronism by the time I entered its hallowed portals. The expansion of the comprehensive system, where state schools did not select their pupils on the basis of academic achievement, was already underway and the election of a Labour government the very next month escalated the demise of the grammar school in all but a handful of areas of the country. The Central Foundation School was duly obliged to go comprehensive and in 1975 would relocate to new premises in Bow.
In my first year I worked hard and came top of the class in nearly all subjects. Subsequent years were a different matter, however, as it became increasingly evident that I’d been hot-housed by my trendy primary school and then dumped in an institutional backwater. It was Goodbye Mr Chips minus the charismatic teacher. The school refused to acknowledge that I was finding certain subjects difficult: in their eyes, I was simply not trying hard enough. I had been put into the top stream to work towards O-Level maths, for example, but when the lessons became more advanced and I began to lag behind they refused to allow me to drop down into the CSE stream. If they had done so, I might have coped better. It would also have given me the opportunity to study other subjects for which I showed more flair and interest, such as music. It was as though the school was determined I should not be permitted to benefit from my lack of effort, even though the reason behind it was a lack of aptitude.
My dad still bragged at the Bridge House about his clever kid but the only subjects in which I maintained good grades were English, foreign languages and history. In other lessons I acted the clown, entertaining my classmates with my updated repertoire of impressions, which now included Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw. My school reports showed how badly I was