My Brilliant Career

When I turned fifteen things changed. I was suspended from school for having evil hair. Immediately after that I had an operation on my spine. Suddenly I didn’t like school any more — and it didn’t like me. I scraped through my O Levels and then dropped out. I told my parents I wanted to be a hairdresser. They weren’t impressed. I lounged around the house until my Mum and Dad called a meeting. They said, ‘Time is money.’ I’m still trying to work out what they meant. The bit I did understand was that they weren’t going to waste their time earning money in order to give it to me. I had to earn it myself. So I got a job making lampshades in the basement of a shop in Kensington Church Street. It was hair-tearingly boring, incredibly hard and the people weren’t nice to you.

Boy George

The only good thing about it was that it was down the road from a hairdresser called Antenna, who did Boy George’s hair. Because I had no money I offered myself to them to experiment on and, from then on, I had a different weird hairstyle every other week.

I quit the lampshade shop and moved into market research. The great thing about telephone jobs is that you can look as strange as you like because no one can see you. The office was full of transvestites and freaks. Apart from the work, it was fun. But the work was quite a big part of it.

Thanks to the weird hair, an ex-secretary of my Dad’s got in touch. She was working for a publisher and they wanted a young person to do a book about hairstyles. It was the eighties and hairstyles were much better than they are now. I wrote some sample pages and they gave me an advance of £1000. Straight after that I wrote another book about vegetarianism. It was preferable to having a job, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to write teen books for the rest of my life. Plus the money was terrible. While I was writing the books I made jewellery for some small shops, worked as a sales assistant and carried on getting free haircuts.

Terry Hall

One day the hairdresser just happened to mention that Terry Hall, of The Specials and Fun Boy Three, was looking for a girl guitarist. He passed on my number and I got the job. It was quite well paid —£700 a song. We made an album and then immediately stopped working together.

Sometime during the album-making I went to visit a friend in Manchester for the weekend and ended up staying for three years. When the band disbanded I signed on and started going to art evening classes. I put a portfolio together and got into a community college. From there I managed to get a place at Goldsmiths’, in spite of my lack of A Levels. In those days they gave you money to study, but not much. After a brief stint in a hostess bar (unbearable!) I decided to supplement my grant by working as a receptionist (at least the clothes were better).

At Goldsmiths’ they made us read Freud and Lacan. It was almost impossibly exciting. I remembered the conversation with my father; maybe I really did want to be a shrink. I spent three years at art school writing about psychoanalysis and then went on to do an MA in modern literature. I also worked in a shoe shop.

But after four years of being totally spoilt by university I suddenly found myself out on my ear again. I was twenty-five. I got a more permanent job as a receptionist and almost went out of my mind. In order to try to fix this I got married, wrote a novel and started seeing a shrink. The novel sold and I didn’t have to think about jobs again for a while. I wrote a second one. But sitting on my own every day writing about imaginary people doing things in the world started to get to me. In order to inject a bit of reality into the situation I had a baby. The problem with that was that I immediately stopped being able to write. I could go through the motions of it, but nothing came out right. So I was suddenly an unemployed mother — with a husband who didn’t understand the time/money thing either. We lived in a miniscule flat and shopped at Kwik Save. Sometimes we couldn’t afford the bus fare there. I found it all extremely frightening. I spent the last of my savings on learning how to be a subeditor. I hated the work — I couldn’t stand correcting some journalist’s sloppy article about their marvellous weekend in the Cotswolds or whatever. I almost died of envy every day.

The Costwolds

Then a very lucky thing happened. My great aunt died and left me a small amount of money. It was the sort of amount I could have used to put a deposit down on a flat. Given the state of our living conditions it seemed like the right thing to do. But then a second very lucky thing happened. A friend of mine, who is a psychoanalyst, insisted quite fiercely that I should use the money to train as an analyst. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it. It seemed selfish. I was meant to be providing a proper home for my daughter. But I had been telling people I wanted to do it on and off for twenty years. If I didn’t do it then, when would I? I decided it probably couldn’t wait any longer.

During my analytic training I also had to work. It never stops! And just to make things more cheerful, my marriage ended. I taught creative writing, edited psychoanalytic texts and did the odd bit of my own writing. And when that didn’t work I had to have my rent paid by the state. It wasn’t exactly a breeze. But after five years I was a psychoanalyst. It was worth it.

The fact that it all came together still seems like a bit of a miracle to me. But life has definitely taught me that you mustn’t get too comfortable. Sometimes the people I work with say to me, ‘It’s alright for you — you’re sorted.’ (They are generally not crazy, but clever and troubled.) I look back at them opaquely, as my training has taught me to do. I wonder whether I will ever do another job again.