my chinese pattern dress

this is a picture of me in my chinese pattern dress. my mum made me this. i remember choosing the fabric and being amazed at how silky it felt. the pattern was of chinese ladies in a chinese landscape. it always felt very special when i wore it.

my mum made me a lot of clothes. she and her sisters were all very good at sewing. their mother had been a widow and they had been brought up in north wales on national assistance. my mum's younger sister dot made hats. she probably still makes them, although i am not in touch with her these days. my mum's twin made identical outfits for them to wear when my cousin got married. my mum always looked like a film star. i have pictures of her in fabulous tailored suits that she made herself.

i used to be embarrased by how smart she was. my mum worked full time as a secretary and sometimes came to meet me from school in her work clothes. once she came in a flowing black cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat with a silk rose. she told me that i once asked her to put her hair in curlers and come to meet me in her slippers like the other mums. we lived on an estate where everyone had been moved out of east london as a result of slum clearance. the families were cockneys and were pretty tough people. the other mums were very different to my mum. she read new society and the guardian and had opinions about all sorts of intellectual things. she had left school at 14 but had educated herself by reading everything she could lay her hands on. when she died i was given some of her books. they included plato's republic and dante's inferno.

in this picture you can see my vest so i assume it was taken in cold weather. it would have been taken when i was about 6 or 7. i think this must be a school photo as the background is plain. i look quite happy.

a long time ago

this is me. it was taken, i think, outside the flats where we lived. i always look really hard at old pictures of me to try and see if they give any clues to what was going on inside my head. in most of them i am just a little girl looking at the camera.

this one would have been when i was about 5. i would have already been at school.

i remember on my first day at school my dad was living somewhere else. my mum said he was living in a flat in camberley with a woman. later on he came back. my mum told me she did not want him to come back but he had threatened her that if she would not let him he would never see me again. i was devoted to him and she could not bear the thought of this. when he was living away from us i used to sit by the window on the old sofa waiting for him to come home. my dad had grey hair and i used to call him my ghost. my mum told me that i kept saying "where is my ghost?" which broke her heart.

for my first day at school my mum bought me a wooden pencil box with a sliding lid. i spent ages playing with the lid. it had a little dent like a handle so you could pull it open. i had an apple and got into trouble for eating it in the class. no-one told you that apples were for break time.