I became very urban as an antidote to growing up in the wilds, and read English at University College, London. I did the 11-plus and passed.My parents announced that we would go back to Somerset and I went to Bishop Fox's Girls Grammar in Taunton I adored it. I wanted to take my 11-plus and was getting really worried.A friend of my parents was setting up a home-school in her amazing Dartmoor house. There were just seven of us, aged from seven to 13, children of hippies, with an unqualified 21-year-old teacher and lessons sitting on the tors. Even in the top class some of the children couldn't read and the teacher used to sit on the other side of a little hatch making telephone calls and rapping on the glass at us.
I was there for only a year and then went to Catcott Primary, again in Somerset, for five years I hated it and was very unhappy. They said I was "posh" (it was just because I wasn't a farmer's child) and I was the only one in the school who wasn't christened (it was a C of E school). There was a great cult of the horse; all the girls went round neighing. I just wasn't interested in ponies.I was a bit of a sad, friendless child I loved the teachers like mothers.
I read well and early and was always quite good academically. When I was 10 I thought about being a writer; I thought I would be a poet, which I have never thought of since.We left because my parents fell in love with a house in Dartmoor. I went to the primary school in Widecombe-in-the-Moor but I was there for only half a term. My only memory is of saying, "I want Carol" - we used to call our parents by their Christian names - and my relief at the teacher saying, "She's over by the doll's house". I rushed over - and it was a child called Carol. We moved to Ashcott near Street in Somerset and I went to the local primary, where I was smacked on the first day for not eating my lunch.