Summer’s end

Growing up in the West Country in the 1960s and 1970s, summer left me cold. There was only one place where I could bear to be when the sun shone — the lido at Weston-super-Mare, the nearest coastal town to my Bristol home. Unlike most of the banal backdrops to my childhood, it seemed a suitably grand place in which to plan my escape to get to That London and be famous.

I would swerve my companions — at first my parents, then later my friend Karen — and hide on the upper level of the lido, slipping in and out of sleep in sunshine, dreaming of freedom. There was always voiceless music blaring from speakers — my favourite was a tune which I later discovered to be Dimitri Tiomkin’s ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’, which sounds happy but I later learnt is about living and dying and all that sobering stuff.

I did escape to London at 17. There I lived by night, writing and becoming notorious; days were for sleeping through and the only difference in the seasons was that spring and summer days were unpleasant to have hangovers on, while autumn and winter ones were delightful. I got married, but then in 1995 I fell in love with a girl. During the subsequent divorce, I was surprised to read my husband’s statement that I had had ‘a string of lovers of both sexes’ during our marriage, when I could have sworn he knew I’d only had the one; I lost custody of my beloved son, Jack, and left London for Brighton in order to chase my girlfriend’s younger brother (now my husband of many years) — thereby going some way, admittedly, to establishing my estranged husband’s imaginative claim that I was a depraved person and unfit mother.