Home School Safari Guide Chapter One

Chapter One

My Family and Other Animals

As a child I devoured Gerald Durrel’s My Family and Other Animals, the first book to make me laugh out loud. The bits about beetles bored me to sobs but I loved the family and I wished that they were mine. I longed to have a mother who would whisk me away to live on a Greek Island and not force me go to school. I longed for older brothers who did dark and mysterious things in their bedrooms. I hoped passionately that I would not suffer from Margo’s teenage acne and hungered for the freedom of mind and spirit the Durrell children had been offered; and for the wit to use it wisely. Frankly it was unfair of me because I had a perfectly good family of my own.

My mother was energetic, encouraging and eccentric, my younger sister was loving and my best companion and my father was stalwart, kind and generous. He was a leading classical actor of his generation and a founder member of the National Theatre. My childhood was spent between Stratford on Avon, Chichester and London, where Dad gave his: Tulus Ophedius opposite Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus, his Kent to John Gielgud's Lear and his Ghost to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet and I grew up watching some of the greatest productions of the time. My mother, always keen to ensure my sister and I sucked the juice out of any cultural opportunity prepared us carefully, offering questionable censorship. As young children we were not allowed to go to Coriolanus for fear that we might find it bit disconcerting watching Daddy hanging by his ankles several feet above the ground, being disemboweled by a family friend. However, we were welcome to watch a four and a half hour uncut version of Hamlet, after which I would have cheerfully have hung myself up by my own ankles and committed hari kari.

We traveled as a family and my mother was brilliant at making new places feel like ‘home’. Due to the nomadic nature of our life by the time I was eight I had been to several different schools and I had hated them all. When my father was at Chichester Memorial Theater, my mother decided to home school my sister and me at the beach front house my parents had rented in Bognor Regis. It was not a success. My mother had come out of the womb knowing how to spell onomatopoeia, aged five she had read Alice Through the Looking Glass to herself and, one wet afternoon, aged six she had learned the Jabberwocky by heart- for pleasure. My stumbling attempts to get to grips with Old Dog Tom and the clearly paranoid Chicken Licken, (who was convinced the sky was falling on her) left my mother cold. She found my inability to read as dull as my Early Readers and all too often our classes dissolved in mutual tears of rage and frustration. It transpired that, like my father, and sister and I was dyslexic but in those days the term, first coined in 1887 by Professor Berlin, in Stuttgart, had not yet filtered into the system. I was just plain naughty and was expected to buckle down and get on with sorting out the confusion of my b’s and d’s, p’s and q’s, magic e’s and where to put my double s’s like everybody else. I still burn out the spell check on my computer and don’t know my deserts from my desserts but by some miracle aged ten I learned to read, and from that day to this I have always had a book on the go.

My parents retained their childlike curiosity and they were happy to answer any questions and if they did not know the answer they helped me to find it. I am sure there must have been times when they said ‘not now Kate’ or ‘for God’s sake give me a break’ but I don’t remember them. I recall their sense of adventure and their excitement in finding new ways to help me understand the world. My father loved Charles Dickens and would take my sister and me on Sunday walks through dock land (in those days unyuppyfied) to trace Florence Dombey’s flight from the rag lady down empty cobbled streets. One afternoon my mother took us to visit the oldest police station on London, a tall narrow building on the edge of the embankment, and so charmed the policemen that they invited us to go on a trip down the river with them in the ‘policeman’s boat’. To my morbid fascination they found a body bobbing up and down in the shallows and the pleasure trip took a nasty turn; my sister and I watched in awe as the body was fished out and placed in a large black bag. One wonders what today’s health and safety experts would have to say about that snippet of life experience.

Despite many varied and creative family outings our world view was somewhat limited and did not embrace the sciences; my mother had a sniffy mistrust of science and assumed that all scientists were cold hearted misanthropes but this did me no lasting harm. My parents gave me the capacity for independent learning and when I discover the wonderful world of science years later, in my early thirties, I had the skill and enthusiasm to immerse myself in a new language and find a fresh way of looking at the world. As a result when I re-read My Family and Other Animals, as I do often, the beetle bits enchant me. Unlike the Durrell children my sister and I were not whisked away to live on Crete but we were taken out of school. For some unfathomable reason our parents felt we needed a governess and set about finding one to teach us the last three years of our primary education.

Miss Johnson was an extraordinary choice. She wore her hair in an Edwardian roll stuffed with horse hair that sprung out from between her salt and peppery, slippery old hair. I have no idea how old she was, probably in her mid forties but to me she was Methuselah. She was a conservative Roman Catholic who did not approve of the ecclesiastic revolution that took place in the 60’s. When the Latin mass was dropped she took no notice and ensured she ‘drowned out’ the English with her high pitched rendition of the mass as it was meant to be spoken! To augment her wages as governess she made surgical corsets in her spare time and occasionally bought one to school to ‘finish it off’. My sister and I were fascinated by these large, flesh pink, structures that bore no resemblance to any body shape we had seen. She carried a large, black patent leather handbag, with a scarlet lining and two inner zips. She kept her fountain pen (in a box), in one zipped compartment and her pencil case in the other. Our school day started with the awful unsnapping of the large metal clasps on her handbag, and the bobbing of her head over the cavernous, lonely insides of her bag while she pulled out the instruments of schooling and put them on our desks. Miss Johnson was never given a table. She sat in an upright position (until the end of the morning when she flagged) on a small chair between our two desks.

We did school in the nursery from 9.00 to 11.00am on the dot, when we would break for elevenses (Ribena and two digestive biscuits) down stairs with Mummy. At 11.15 on the dot we would go back up stairs to class until 1.00 pm when Miss Johnson would depart for the day-on the dot. To our chagrin Miss Johnson never missed a day of school and she dispatched her duties diligently, with a magnificent lack of imagination. We did- Maths: adding, subtracting and fractions, no algebra or geometry. Geog: rivers, countries, capitols and, as I remember, ordinance survey maps. Latin: amo, amas, amat, declensions, vocab and translation. French: J’ai, tu as, il/elle a, declensions, vocab and translation. English: reading, spelling (ha ha), compositions and parsing and History: Our Island Story, read out at the end of the day by an exhausted Miss Johnson who would invariably nod off half way through a chapter much to my sister’s and my delight. It takes a singular skill to spend three years not teaching anything that might be even remotely useful and Miss J had that skill down to a tee. But I loved having a governess, I loved being at home in the warm, hearing Mummy pottering about down stairs. I loved being with my sister and finding ways for us to be wicked to poor Miss J. Our wickedness, as innocuous as our lessons, did no harm. For many happy terms we dutifully: ‘lost’ our fountain pens in the bottom of the dressing up box and wasted glorious time ‘finding’ them; we ‘dropped’ our erasers on the floor so we could pass each other passionate notes or we nonchalantly flicked ink soaked blotting paper pellets at each other behind Miss Johnson’s back. The innocent madness of it all- what were my parents thinking? And what was I thinking? I ache in shame for my cavalier treatment of Miss Johnson; I remember the detail of her plain, flat face and the smile in her eyes but I don’t remember being kind to her-I hope I was. I assume my parents knew what was going on in the anarchy of the nursery –or rather what was NOT going on-but very probably they didn’t. I imagine they put their trust in Miss J, whom they treated with the utmost respect, and simply hoped for the best. As it transpired we were all to learn the error of their ways when my sister and I were plunged back into mainstream school; where we sank without trace.

But I hold no resentment for my risible early education because I was happy. My sister and I used our imaginations to play together and we had good friends who loved coming home to tea with us; my mother taught me all I know about how to make people feel welcome. We had daily fresh air in Kensington garden’s, where we were allowed to roam freely. We spent our pocket money at the Saturday morning pictures watching cartoons and films made by the Children’s Film Foundation. We had riding lessons at Richmond park, skating lessons at Queensway ice rink and dancing lessons at Miss Ballentine’s. We wore prickly wool vests in the winter and soft cotton vests in the summer. We had walking shoes and party shoes and one of our parents read out loud to us each night. We did not know it at the time but we were very privileged.

By some lucky twist of genetic fate I have a high IQ. Enabled by a meaningless capacity to sort out various shapes into chronological order, spot the odd one out, or fill in missing numbers within a prescribed time frame, I got into Godolphin and Latymer Grammar school for girls. I failed the entrance exam, naturally as I knew nothing, but I gave a good interview and the headmistress, a remarkable woman called Margaret Gray, saw something in me worth persevering over. It was she who suggested I sat the IQ test, saying if I passed she might be able to plead my case with the board. I passed with flying colors, much to everyone’s surprise, including my own, and was soon settled behind my desk in the Lower Third; where I remained for two ink stained years desperately trying to catch up. I loved my time at Godolphin and, though I used my skills as a time waster rather than as a learner, the teaching was of such a high standard that I received information via osmosis. I relished my English teachers, loathed my science teachers, adored my history teacher and with consummate creativity I avoided all competitive sports, preferring to spend my time reading tucked up in the library rather than lumbering around a freezing hockey pitch wearing a ludicrously short little grey number that barely covered my arse. Years later I learned from Miss Gray that she knew full well of my duplicity and had given me an unofficial sanction.

Given my background it was not surprising that I shone in drama and in all Shakespeare classes. I don’t remember learning to love Shakespeare because I can’t remember a time without him. From an early age I overheard my father learning his ‘lines’ at home or caught snippets of speeches over the tanoy while eating poached eggs on toast in the Green Room ( the actors canteen) at Stratford on Avon. My mother told me the stories of the plays at bed time and would read out her favorite bits. I learned to ‘speak’ Shakespeare as I learned to speak English and watched his plays as easily as later my oldest son would watch Postman Pat. Age six I sat on my father’s lap every Sunday afternoon for fifteen weeks, my body tense against his tweed jacket, to catch The Age Of Kings, a flickering black and white televised version of the Henry’s, and I remember weeping into Dad’s shoulder when the horrid Prince Hal said to Falstaff “I know thee not old man.” When I was barely thirteen, I screen tested with Leonard Whiting to play Juliet in Franco Zeffarelli’s Romeo and Juliet. I was put on top of the sort list and there was a buzz of excitement among the production team that they had found their Romeo and Juliet. I would have got the part had I not cut my hair to within an inch of my head a few months before the audition in a failed attempt to look like Mia Farrow, in Payton Place. Zeff, as he was known, mulishly refused to have his Juliet wear a wig -no matter how good she was. So Olivia Hussey got the job and I pottered back to school feeling very sorry for myself and decided then and there that I was going to be an actress of note. I also embraced the fatally foolish notion that actresses don’t need to go to university and promptly gave up trying in any subject that did not interest me. Three years later, with supreme confidence, and without finishing my O’levels, a decision I came to regret bitterly, I left school to make my way in the world.

I was sixteen when I got my first job, working in a health food bar in Escalade, a swanky fashion emporium on the Brompton Rd. I shared a room in a flat just behind Harrods and persuaded my father’s theatrical agent to put me on his books. Life was dandy. I soon got work as an actress and over the next twenty years I carved out a respectable career and earned my keep doing what I enjoyed. I was a regular face on the television in various classic series and BBC plays of the Day or the Month playing various ingénues (one reviewer noted that no-one makes an entrance though a French window quite like Kate Nicholls!). I joined the RSC and worked for the National Theater; I appeared at the Old Vic and performed on stages all over the country that once my father had performed on. Dad died when I was twenty three and only saw a few of my performances, sadly none of them my best work. I miss him to this day and he will be a character in this book because he shaped my journey and thus of course he shaped the lives of five grandchildren he never met. But he did hold one grandchild-albeit briefly- Rufus. During my life as an actor I made friends, got married and divorced once, had several other very important relationships with men, all of which failed but most importantly between the ages of twenty one and thirty nine I had six children.

Each of them has influenced my life in different ways and all of them for the better. My first two children were the product of my brief-mostly happy marriage, to Peter Bourke, also an actor. We met in the BBC canteen while we were both rehearsing some costume drama or another. It was love at first sight, we lived together, I got pregnant and we got married. We were wise enough to recognize, before we tore each other to shreds, that perhaps our marriage had been a tad hasty. Our son Rufus died when he was ten weeks old and to this day he binds us together in what has become a peaceful grief. Rufus taught me many lessons, some still raw with recent understanding but he left behind a fundamental legacy that his siblings and I have gained strength from. I learned from him not to miss a moment of my children’s lives if I could help it. My oldest daughter Emily followed him and she has been my rock from the moment she left my body. She was an easy birth, an easy baby, and an easy child. She had a glorious school career and slipped seamlessly and effortlessly from infant school to primary school and onto secondary school.

I want to pause here for a moment to celebrate Emily’s successful school career and to acknowledge the gifted, committed teachers who gave her not only an education, but the confidence to grow into the balanced woman she is today. Emily was born in 1978 and, though I did not know it as the time, she was lucky enough to catch the tail end of English State education in its hey day. Determined not to repeat the well meaning mistakes my parents had made I wanted to ensure Emily had a peaceful school life. I had no intention of sending her to school early and was significantly disconcerted when aged three she made it plain she wanted to go to school. The idea appalled me but she longed to have a satchel and a pink pencil case with sparkly pencils and a My Little Pony eraser-to this day she gets her rocks off in stationery shops.

Recently divorced from her father and Emily and I were living in a minute cottage in Milton Under Wychwood, Oxfordshire. I was very broke at the time and driving an ancient Peugeot 200 with a hole in the exhausted that I had patched with an old baked bean and two jubilee clips. I found a school several miles away that was so perfect for Em that I relented and for the next year we tottered to and fro between Miss Webb’s school in Filkins and our cottage, breaking down with monotonous regularity on the drive to or from school.

Miss Webb was a retired primary school teacher who lived with her husband in a small cottage that looked as if it had been drawn by a child. It had a blue front door, with honeysuckle growing over it. Two windows on either side of the front door and a pitched Cotswold slate roof with a chimney. Retirement was a concept that neither Mrs. nor Mr. Webb understood, they opened their doors to the children in the village and before long found themselves running an infant school of such innocent simplicity that even Laurie Lee could not have envisaged such a place in the height of his nostalgic reminiscences. The children drew at the table in the sitting room, pottered about ‘helping’ Mr. Webb in his kitchen, garden, listened to Mrs. Webb read stories by the fire and when they were tired they were wrapped up in a patchwork quilt in the ‘sleepy time armchair’. Mrs. Webb cooked nourishing food with produce from the garden and to this day Emily’s comfort food is fresh boiled potatoes and salad cream.

When Emily was four I re-established my relationship with Ian McNiece, an actor I had worked with at the RSC. We fell in love and bought Hollybush Cottage in Broad Campden, a small village in Gloucestershire. We lived there for the next fifteen years and between 1984 and 1993 I gave birth to Travers, Angus, Maisie and Oakley. Despite the distance we continued our daily trips to Mrs. Webb until Emily was five and a half when she moved onto St James’ Primary school, Chipping Campden. She was ready for the move and her passion for stationery was nearly eclipsed by her passion for School Uniform. Again anathema to me, who firmly believed that children should be free to wear what they like, and ‘express’ themselves. Emily expressed herself by endlessly sorting out her shiny new PE kit, ensuring that I sewed on the school badge to her jumper and fruitlessly begging me to remember to buy name tags. Poor Emily, she lived her entire school life without name tags, and endured the unmitigated injustice of watching me sew a name tag onto some jersey or another belonging to Travers: the one and only name tag I managed for any of my children!

There were several primary schools in the catchment area and I chose St James’ because I liked the head master. Mr. Jones was more inspiring than his name and he had the respect and admiration of his staff, his pupils and the parents. He ran a tight ship and generated orderly days lived in an atmosphere that was stimulating and compassionate. I was in awe of him and took my meetings with Mr. Jones very seriously. Emily was happy from the beginning to the end of her primary school days and settled down nicely into her position in class; never quite at the top but comfortably maintaining her place at the top of the middle. She talked insensately in class through her entire school career and only learned not to leave her desk for chats with her mates, aged eight. She did her homework, mostly on time, cheerfully engaged in sports days in which she invariably came last in races because she was talking. She sang her heart out at Carol concerts and look leading roles in all her school plays. She made life long friends at school and she met the man she shares two babies and a happy life with, on the school playing fields.

Like most parents I left my daughter’s education up to her teachers, I baked cakes for the school fetes, avoided at all costs sewing costumes for school plays, attended PTA meetings and tried to get Emily to school on time, failing miserably. With each new sibling Emily’s appearance at the school gate grew exponentially late. Culminating in an event none of us have forgotten. Mr. Jones had sent out a directive to all parents to get their little darlings to school on time. As I read his brisk note, that Emily had soulfully handed to me with a knowing sigh, I knew it was chiefly directed at me. I tried, I tried really hard to put an end to my tardy ways but my mornings were spent fielding toddlers, burning toast, digging out lost recorders from under beds, hastily drying PE kits I had forgotten to put in the tumble dryer the night before, with a baby firmly attached to a nipple. One fateful afternoon I arrived, miraculously on time, to collect Emily from school only to find her fuming and sitting on the wall. A public punishment that was meted out very rarely, for heinous crime.

“What have you done Em?” I asked nervously.

‘Nothing.’ She replied darkly.

“Then why the wall?”

‘I was late for school this morning -AGAIN.”

‘That’s not fair” I shrieked

‘Tell me about it.” She responded in measured tones. I dashed into school clutching Maisie to my breast, leaving Travers and Angus hovering anxiously around their glowering, shamed sister, who remained obediently rooted to the spot. I beat upon Mr. Jones’ door and was invited in.

“It’s all my fault that she is late. Please don’t blame Em.”

“I don’t Kate, but something must be done. She missed half a class this morning.” He was not pleased.

“I know, I know,’ I wailed. “ but Angus poured a litre of honey over his head and it took ages to clean him up.”

“I sympathize. But you are not the only mother with toddlers. The others get to school on time.”

“ALL of them?” I gasped in genuine awe.

“Most of them.”

“How do they do it?”

“I don’t know,” he said briskly, ‘all I can suggest is that you get up earlier.” He had me there. I got up as late as possible because I went to bed late. At the time Ian was doing a play in London and commuting. He got home at midnight and I loved the quiet time we had together sinking a glass or two of whisky around the fire talking nonsense and unwinding.

“Ok I’ll try.” I said grudgingly ‘But please take Em of the wall and if you want to punish someone for being late punish me.” He raised his eyebrows hopelessly as if to say what could he do? Give me a detention?

The new regime worked and Ian manfully supported me on the mornings he did not have a mid week show. But a few weeks later I was late again and sent a trembling Emily through the school gates. That afternoon I took matters in to my own hands, I dropped the kids with a friend and got to school early, before the first trickle of more efficient mothers who always bagged the best parking places nearest the gate. I sat on the wall and waiting for the bell to go. Before the last peal had died away the first eager children had spilled out of school and hurried past me. To begin with no one noticed me but after a while the courtyard filled up and a few curious children asked me what I was doing.

‘I’m sitting on the wall as a punishment.” I replied

“WOW -why?’

“Because I made Emily late for school again.” That did it, the news spread like wildfire that Emily’s Mum was on the wall. Within minutes a small crowd had gathered and a few intrigued mothers had ambled over to find out what was going on. A short time later Emily appeared to find me surrounded by a gaggle of giggling children and a few, somewhat amazed, mothers. My memory tells me Emily laughed but I suspect that is an edited version-she was probably mortified. Soon Mr. Jones made his entrance.

“What are you doing Kate?” he said fiercely.

“I’m in punishment.”

“Come into my office” he said fighting back laugher. I duly climbed down and followed him into the office where he told me I had made my point, and in future he would not punish Emily for my crimes.

A few years later I perpetrated a more radical act of anarchy that another headmaster found less amusing. It was the only time I interfered with the workings of my daughter’s school life and it was one of the best decisions I have made. By then Emily was well ensconced at Chipping Campden Comprehensive and starting her second GCSE year and I could see she was feeling the strain. Two of her friends had become ill with the pressure of work, one with glandular fervor and other with ME and I was genuinely worried about Emily who was loosing her luster by the day. I went to see our family doctor, who was also a good friend to discuss a resolution. Emily was not ill but I wanted to take pre-emptive action to ensure she stayed on track. I asked him to write a letter to the school in support of my request to take Emily out of school one day a week so that she could work at home quietly. To my relief he agreed and wrote the letter then and there. I made an appointment to see Emily’s headmaster, also a family friend. He was less amenable and took some persuading. Despite dire warnings that I was about to ruin my child’s academic career, I stuck to my guns and we came to a working compromise. Emily could have a four day week provided that the days were staggered across the term. Thus, if she took Monday off one week she should take Tuesday off the following week and so forth. It worked like a charm. Emily used her home days wisely and worked in her room at her own pace. She caught up with homework and more importantly had time to catch her breath and steady herself. She passed her GCSE’s with mostly A’s, a smattering of B’s, one C and her joyful heart in tact. A few years later she got a degree in psychology and is now a qualified and innovative primary school teacher.

Emily’s siblings had similarly happy primary school days, not at St James’s due to the fact that Mr. Jones left soon after Emily graduated and I did not take to the new head teacher. But during their primary school life the SAT’s were introduced and the dynamic of school life changed visibly. I watched class teachers struggle with a system that took away their autonomy, I saw head teachers loose touch with the heart of their schools while they tried not to drown under a sea of paper work and new directives. And I watched one of my children go down with the ship.

Travers was seven when things started to go wrong. Up till then he had been as cheerful and enthusiastic about school life as his older sister and younger brother and sister. He was the family organizer and ensured that I had lunch boxes in the fridge the night before and under his marshal eye I did not dare to be late for school. He made friends easily, worked hard and I assumed that he would slip through school on well greased wheels. But one summer term his teacher called me to a meeting and was frankly pretty unpleasant about him. Apparently he was not trying: his work had deteriorated, he was being surly and was prone to fits of tears that were disruptive to the class. I was staggered. After some discussion we put his change of behavior down the fact he had a bad case of to glue ear; a condition where the middle ear fills with glue-like fluid instead of air. He was often in pain and his hearing was somewhat impaired by wads of cotton wool. On the days when he did not use cotton wool his ears seeped pusy fluid that did not charm his companions! We decided that it would help him if he sat as close as possible to his teacher to ensure he could hear what she was saying and I would give him extra support at home with his reading in which was falling badly behind. She also suggested that we had Travers assessed at Aston University to see if he had learning difficulties. As soon as she said this things fell into place; like an idiot I had not put two and two together and we soon found out that, like me, Travers was dyslexic.

Word blindness takes many forms and testing showed that he had an extreme level of impairment. We were advised to get him onto a remedial program and, somewhat over dramatically, we were told not to expect too much of him academically. As bad luck would have it Gloucestershire county council, in its infinite wisdom, did not recognize dyslexia and thus no remedial teaching was available. However, a few miles up the road Oxfordshire county council ran an excellent special needs program but we did not fall into the catchment area-go figure!

Travers’ teacher did the best she could at school and I worked with him patiently (my struggles with Old Dog Tom still fresh in my mind); but things went from bad to worse and Travers became depressed. It is a terrible thing to see such a young child lost in sadness and Ian and I were in despair. One morning Travers sobbed tears of grief so desolate that we decided then and there to take him away from school and re-group. I will never forget the look on his face when he realized he had been released from what had become a torment to him. His relief was tangible and over the next few weeks he became his old self again. In those days it never occurred to me to home school one of my children, and so we got a tutor to ensure Travers did not fall behind while I searched for a school that offered support to dyslexic children.

By now you may be feeling a little nauseous. My children’s early education may seem to have been be a cross between Pollyanna and Little Lord Fauntleroy-if so I advise you to skip the next few paragraphs and re join later when the shit hits the fan- because the school I found for Travers was so perfect it must have been created by Pixar for the Walt Disney Home Entertainment channel. Bruen Abbey, originally a Cistercian Abbey, is a graceful 18^th Century manor house nestled in blue bell woods, with rolling Cotswold Hills as back drop. Birds trilled in the branches of ancient trees, wood mice scampered across velvet lawns and shiny happy boys in yellow sweaters and grey corduroy trousers played marbles or British Bull Dog in late afternoon light before being called in for tea, where they are invited by an apple cheeked cook to devour homemade cakes fresh from the aga and lashings on hot cocoa. I warned you-this is not for the feint hearted or those prone to mild dyspepsia.

Only an American would have the audacity, and the money, to create a school that transcended the wildest ideals of the transcendentalists. Sterling Stover was a dapper, urbane Anglophile, Texan lawyer who had a dream and dared to turn it in a reality. He wanted to start a school for boys who had slipped, or who were slipping, through the system because they were dyslexic or dysphasic. He wanted to generate a space in which they could learn in small classes, taught by highly skilled teachers in a homey environment. He was an aesthetic and the boys lived surrounded by beauty, however it was not a manicured don’t touch the furniture environment. The house was their home and they used it freely and with no constraint. Sterlings belief was that if you offer a lovely environment to children they will look after it. He was right. The food was excellent, served on lovely china and on Friday nights the bigger boys were offer a glass of wine from Sterlings excellent cellar. The kitchen was just off the dinning room and when I dined there, which I did often, I noticed that at the end of meals the boys, unbidden, always popped their head round the door to thank the cook in genuine gratitude.

While Disney may have invented Sterling he did not invent the children. The boys, like my boy, had troubles. They came from different backgrounds, indeed during the Serbian Croatian war Sterling rescued two traumatized Croatian boys and fluidly settled them into life at Bruen. Some boys arrived from other schools branded with ‘behavioral difficulties’ or a bad attitude to work and as far as I could see Sterling and his staff did nothing more than embrace the children into the Bruen Community. They left the rest to the boys. Newcomers were welcomed with compassion and any rough edges were soon rubbed away in the rough and tumble of Bruen family life. But woe betide any child that had a bad word to say about Sterling, he was unreservedly loved and respected by the boys; and though he was a man of few words and not particularly cozy or avuncular, he maintained order and peace within his school with fairness, clarity and consistency.

The classes were tiny, which was hardly surprising because when Travers first joined the school there were only 15 boys, by the time he left there were 23. Each child got individual attention and was given his own work program. As the mother of a day boy I was encouraged and enabled to work closely with Travers’ teacher, Janette who caught me much about my son. It was in her sunny class room after school that seeds were sown in my heart that finally germinated in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Jeannette made me feel a part of Travers’ journey into the light. She taught me how to guide him and I put my whole hearted trust into this remarkable woman. In less than two years she turned him around and though he was still a slow reader and struggled with written work he glowed with confidence, he had direction and relished every improvement he made, no matter how small. There is no doubt in my mind that Bruen Abbey was a turning point in Travers’ life; it was there he laid down the strong foundations on which he has built his good life.

It broke the bank of course. School fees were always paid late and Ian sweated into his pillow at midnight wondering where the next term’s fees were going to come from. In this we were not alone; I still don’t know how Sterling kept the place going with so few pupils and so many apologies from parents for bouncing cheques! In an act of deeply confused parenting we offered Angus the choice of going to Bruen or staying at Blockey Primary school. What were we thinking? We couldn’t pay Trav’s fees let alone add Angus. But we felt guilty that Travers was being offered so much privilege while Gus was bobbling along in the local primary; fortunately our seven year old son had more common sense than his parents. At Sterling’s invitation he spent a happy week testing out Bruen, and decided that though it was great it was not for him.

“It’s really, really fun and the food is really, really good but I prefer Blockey.” And that was that. My son proved himself to be a pragmatic socialist and I felt grateful to him. I was embarrassed by how easily I had slipped on the slippery slope of a false premise; paying for something has little to do with excellence or happiness. Blockey primary school offered Angus a loving, stimulating environment and his colorful, if inelegant classroom full of bustling children suited his personality to a tee. Soon his younger sister Maisie joined him and with Angus there to guide her through her first few weeks she settled into school life with ease.

With the children finally sorted in their various places of learning and Ian’s career going from strength to strength I started to unravel. I was happy but significantly unchallenged. I did a few acting jobs that I enjoyed, but guilt at leaving the children seeped in through the edges of my working days. One afternoon standing on stage in Leicester taking a bow after having given my Katherine and the Taming of the Shrew I found myself feeling rather silly. There I was pretending to be someone else when I didn’t have a clue who I was. My children were missing me, I was missing them and much as I loved acting there was something intrinsically unsatisfying about it.

As luck would have it sitting on a train I the winter of 1992 I read a book that changed my life. The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins opened out a vision of the world that had previously been unimaginable. Evolutionary biology offered me answers to questions that I had not even dared to formulate. Here was a biologist, far from my mother’s vision of a dried up misanthrope, who spoke of wonders I did not know existed, in rich language liberally peppered by words I had never heard before, that generated frisson on my skin: mitochondria (a Greek Goddess), endoplasticreticulum (Surely some nasty disease), and my mind boggled with images of Golgi bodies, half man- half beast. But these apparitions were no more or less than riveting bits of machinery inside my cells. How I wished I had paid attention in biology classes and not sat in the back of the class dreaming up ways to blow up the science lab. Evolutionary biology was more than grand theories and fantastical ideas; it was practical, conceptual, and given half the chance, if I worked hard, there was a good chance I could learn to understand it.

I did work hard and over the next year I read all Dawkins’ books and the bulk of the scientific papers cited in his bibliographies. To begin with I had to look up every other word and progress was painfully slow. Initially I was armed by GCSE biology text books, then I progressed to A’ level texts, then onto medical students texts and months later, after many, many frustrating hours I managed to read a paper, on intracellular conflict between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, without stopping. I did not know it at the time but it was during that year that I gained the intellectual confidence that empowered me to teach my children at another time and in another space.

Ian was supportive of my studies but in many ways it drove us apart. He did not share my passion for biology and our night time chats around the fire became more distanced. He was often away for long periods of time, filming abroad and slowly our relationship dissolved into a friendship bound by our mutual love of our children. Hungry to end the isolation of my studies I wrote to Richard Dawkins and audaciously asked him for help. He responded with warmth and generosity and under his patronage, soon I was attending first year lectures in the zoology department at Oxford. He even gave me a few tutorials and he and his wife Lalla became my dear friends.

1993 was a complicated year. Ian and I split up but told no-one, it wasn’t any body’s business. I look a lover and became pregnant. I kept the baby and not the lover and in that I had the best of the deal. Ian was extraordinarily generous and another child was born into life in Hollybush cottage and given the love and support all his siblings had enjoyed. The children knew the baby was not Ian’s and so did the staff at their various schools. Whatever the staff at Blockley primary, Chipping Campden comprehensive or Bruen Abbey, thought of our curious arrangement they kept themselves. To a man and to a woman they enabled a smooth, uncomplicated journey for my children and Oakley was born into a loving, broken home. Soon after his birth I applied for a place at Somerville College, Oxford. I passed the entrance exam with flying colors, and I had excellent references from Richard and various other tutors who had been kind enough to help me but I was turned down at interview. Two O’ levels and five children was not a compelling combination and did not inspire confidence that I could keep my end up studying among the Dreaming Spires. The brisk, authoritative, and dauntingly glamorous, Dean of College was neither impressed by my proven academic dedication nor by a comment on my application form. I had offered a truthful answer to a rather dull question designed for younger applicants:

Q: What achievement are you most proud off?

A: My children.

“Am I meant to find this interesting?” was her withering response.

“It is the truth and the truth is more interesting than a lie.”

She tisked. I don’t know if you have been tisked at by an ex-diplomatist in high academic office, for your sake I hope you haven’t.

“I could have mentioned my season at the RSC and various other thespian landmarks but I am not particularly proud of them and as I won’t be auditioning for OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) they seemed irrelevant.” I said in a voice ominously shrill “I am proud of my children and during the last year and bit I have proved I can be a good mother and a good student.”

“Are you always this confrontational?” she asked. My eyes widened in amazement-what was the woman talking about?

“I’m a tad defensive I’ll grant you that, but I hardly think that justifies your accusation.” And having proven her point in one fell swoop the interview came to an abrupt end. I was livid and heartbroken in equal measure.

I maundered around for a while feeling sorry for myself swinging between aggressive cheerfulness and despair. I was not easy to live with. Ian and I decided that it was best to make a clean break and to start new lives. He had spent some very happy years of his childhood in America and wanted to try to get work in LA. I wanted to find a way to keep the children on solid ground and have an adventure. The sleepy sweetness of Cotswold life was tender and compelling but years of school runs, school fetes and trips to Sainsbury’s stretched ahead of me and I became increasingly restless and claustrophobic. Added to that, I was losing confidence that I was offering my children a useful preparation for a rapidly changing world.

In his book The Self Made Man, Jonathan Kingdon explores the creative role ancestral children played in developing technologies that very probably influenced human evolution. Simple skills that remain unrecorded in the fossil record but have been handed down in the never ending story we humans are still writing. It is probable that children with time on their hands and boundless curiosity were the first technocrats. They may have spun spider silk into thread for a fishing line, woven papyrus grasses into bags to carry home berries and roots, fiddled with bits of wood and generated the first sparks of child made fire or seen the rudiments of a wheel as they rolled round stones across the sand and found them to be faster in a race than more angular shapes. To this day children across the world contribute their efforts to ensure their family’s survival. Collecting water, raising siblings, fetching wood, herding cattle, fishing, hunting, skinning, digging, thinking, learning, loving, trying with all their might and main to belong to the group.

What was I teaching my children about how to survive? When the washing machine broke I called the washing machine man. When the car broke down I called the garage man, when a rat ran across the kitchen floor I down tools, evacuated the house, and called the rat man. The kids dug with me in the garden and helped to feed the chickens but when a fox killed the chickens Ian and I protected them from the truth. I cleared up the gory feathers while he drove to the chicken farm and bagged up six new brown chickens who were to be seen dully peeking away the next day. My deeply loved over protected children were free to climb trees and carry new born sibling up and down stairs, eat dirt and only received a cursitory wipe from a Dettol bottle when they bleed. But a harsher world was knocking on their door and I was fearful that the life I was giving them was not an adequate preparation.

And so one bright, sunny morning, with Durrell like impetuousness, I decided to pack up sticks and move my family and no other animals, to Botswana, in Southern Africa. For the next thirteen years Oakley, Maisie, Angus and Travers grew up wild and free alongside elephants, hyenas, honey badgers, beetles and lions. We learned to live a practical life without electricity and running water. We learned to understand a harsh, magnificent environment and we engaged with a new culture. We saw human suffering and courage, matched by human cruelty and selfishness. We struggled with the elements and disease and learned how to survive among the great survivors. Botswana became our home and our school. I owe Botswana a debt of gratitude for helping me to bring up strong and happy children. Botswana helped to shape my children’s wise hearts and showed them how to look at the world through steady eyes.