Rock matriarch writes about life, family & more

My father didn't dare tell his family he was married until 1951, when my brother David was born. Even then, as he expected, his mother went insane and only finally agreed to meet my mother when I came along. Sally, as everybody called my grandmother, was herself divorced from my grandfather, so maybe he thought she'd be sympathetic — in fact I later found out that she'd been dumped in very similar circumstances to my mother — but she never really accepted having a shiksa as a daughter-in-law, and that went for my father's sister, my auntie Eileen, as well.

I can't remember a time when there wasn't turmoil within the family: fights between his mother and my mother, between his sister and my mother. And then, back in Brixton, there was my half sister, Dixie: always some drama with her. And different sorts of problems with my half brother, Richard. In fact, my father detested both his stepchildren, who by the time I was born were fifteen and ten respectively. According to him, Richard was always a dimp and a schmuck and Dixie was always a tart. But I was very close to them when I was growing up. With both my parents involved in the business, they relied on Richard to babysit and Dixie to cook and make my clothes.

The house on Angell Road was always overflowing with people. Not just us: my parents and me, David and Richard (Dixie had been sent away to school — my father got rid of her as soon as he could), but, to bring in extra money when it was needed, they continued to rent out rooms, mainly to other artists. In the basement next to the kitchen there was a permanent lodger, a young man named Nigel Heathhorn, who lived there until we moved. He had been orphaned during the war and put in the care of my mother by the bank that acted as his legal guardian. I never really knew what he did, but he used to spend money like water. My father had a record player he'd bought at Boots, and Nigel would buy all these classical records and stand there conducting them with a baton while admiring his reflection in the window. He even got hold of a proper film projector, 35mm, and would rent out movies from Wallace Heaton in Victoria and show them on the back wall of the yard, with a sheet pinned up for a screen, and everyone on the street would be hanging out of their windows watching.

Apart from Nigel, the only people who ever came into our house were artists or people connected with that world. The first room on the right when you came in was used as the office, and behind that was the sitting room, which opened onto the conservatory, and this was where friends and business associates were entertained. My mother's pride and glory was a bar that she bought at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Earl's Court, made out of wine barrels cut in half, which was stuck in the corner of every home they ever owned. There was a part you lifted up to go behind, and there was a corner shelf for the miniatures. And I can picture my mother there now, leaning on that bar, a gin in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

School was about half an hour's walk up Brixton Hill, but we usually took the bus from the end of our street. It was a preparatory school called Clermont, and the owner and only teacher was Miss Mayhew, a survivor of the Titanic. It was tiny, never more than thirty children, and we did our work in two rooms at the front. Our playground was the yard.

I was five when I started. David, being eighteen months older than me, had gone the previous year. My mother took us for the first week, to show me how to take the bus, but then we were on our own, rain or shine, sometimes with a packed lunch, usually not. My mother was never an early morning person. I'd go to my parents' bedroom to ask for a shilling for my lunch and she and my father would both be still sleeping and it was like: "For fuck's sake, Sharon, can't you see your mum's sleeping?"

Even when I was older and could make my own sandwiches, half the time there was no bread in the bin. So we'd buy some fries from the fish-and-chips shop, or pick up a bag of chips from the corner store. In the summer, we might walk to the cafe in Brockwell Park, an old building that seemed very grand in the middle of all that green and trees, and it was on top of a hill, so you could see right over London, and David would watch the birds.

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