How a skiing trip turned me into a megalomaniac

In the instant I first became aware of the unpleasant nature of the cosmos we all infest, my megalomaniac nature and a desire to marry Rupert Murdoch, I was on a school trip to Gstaad. Now and then the night train stopped at snow-capped stations, which I could see from my lower bunk. My teenage illusions of glamour were invested in that journey: echoes of Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express – Hungarian counts looking like Michael York, imperious German princesses with toy dogs in the dining car…

My expectations were rudely curtailed when someone threw up. Two splodges of vomit landed on my stomach, before sliding to the floor where they lay there staring at me. ‘Oh God,’ said the 15-year-old schoolgirl responsible. ‘Too many mixers. Somebody clean it up.’ She vomited again. My fellow classmates seemed ossified, like little people in jars. ‘Petrashit will do it,’ giggled a sharp-faced girl who thought it amusing to give me toxic nicknames. She was so toxic herself she could have been dropped on Hiroshima.

I got down on my knees, gagged and mopped up the mess with a blanket, wondering where my dreams had gone. When I had put my name on the list for the St Paul’s Girls’ School skiing trip, I had imagined I was on a sort of beautiful cusp. My workday teenage existence would become the café society world of gilded Gstaad aficionados. The Agnelli family skied there, as did Alain Delon, David Bowie and Roger Moore. Only it was turning out to be cold Nescafé society, with compulsory vomit-cleaning.

I was painfully shy with people my own age and inhabited an unfathomable abyss of nonentity. I had grown up with my father’s friends, who often stooped to kindliness. But with my schoolmates I was a dud. Worse, we were on the trip with pupils from the boys’ school, and one youth on the train looked like a young Montgomery Clift. Boys my own age filled me with terror, but to fight against my hormones was futile. My crush seemed similarly futile as the class prefect, a self-assured redhead, had been glued to his lap for six hours.

When Pandora bashed off to the attic and opened her box, perhaps it would have been kinder if hope had not been left behind. When the train pulled into Gstaad, we were met by pretty horse-drawn sleds, and I wondered to which modish hotel we would be transported. We were taken to the nearest youth hostel. My classmates let out a moan and the redhead became dyspeptic: ‘What the hell? My parents pay a fortune in school fees.’ I couldn’t help thinking she had a point. There were very few of what Americans call ‘amenities’.

Looking back, it was perhaps a mixed blessing that I made it on my own to the ski hire shop, and then to where I thought novices like me were to have lessons. Of course it was the wrong slope. I found myself on the summit of a black run. The skier in front of me fell and broke both her legs. Someone shoved me in the back and I had no choice but to follow. I couldn’t even snow-plough. How I reached the bottom I don’t know, but I was startled to be met with loud cheers.

This sudden adulation was both caressing and splendid. I should have remembered what Beethoven thought about applause. Walking with Goethe, he heard its sound and moved briskly away. I didn’t even turn my head to the wall. For me, a seesaw had upended. Monty Clift turned his affections from Ms Ginger to me. I was thin and had fabulous legs, even though they were hairy. ‘You should be a model,’ he said. We walked in the snow and he kissed me. I had never been kissed before and had nothing to measure it against. His tongue seemed to have suction pads, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Worse, having once experienced the approval of my peers I became addicted to it and began to show signs of megalomania. I wanted to be acclaimed by yelling multitudes, and became incapable of recognising the futility of worldly riches and success. My father complained about this. ‘My daughter wanted to be a historian, now she wants to marry Rupert Murdoch! Worse, he’s a family friend, and every time he comes round she tries to hold his hand.’

Though I have since penetrated the imposture of most things, I have never quite lost the feeling that Rupert and I should be married. Now he’s single again, perhaps there’s hope.