In my earliest memory, I am standing on the doorstep of our house on the Isle of Sheppey, looking out at a group of children playing in the driveway. There is my older brother, Jed, my kid brother, Peter, and our neighbors' children--six of them--all noisily absorbed in games with balls and a scooter. I am watching them and I am thinking: "I am old enough now to look after you all." The thought fills me with contentment. I am four years old.
Mum says I was never a child--always a protector. She tells a story of how, at the age of three, I saw an older boy picking on my brother Jed and ran after him with a large stick. I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be taking care of people. It's the way that I am.
I was a quiet child, an observer. Lanky, skinny, and very pale, I was always daydreaming. At Sheerness Catholic Primary School, I did not join in much until Peter's first day. It was break time and I was playing on the steps in the playground when I heard a commotion. Looking up, I saw a gang of boys on the grass with Peter trapped in the middle.
I ran over and pushed my way in.
"Leave him alone," I shouted. "He's my brother."
One of the boys turned and looked at me derisively.
"What are you going to do about it?"
I smacked him round the face. Then I kicked one of the other boys in the shins and grabbed hold of Peter's hand. As we walked toward the drinking fountain, one of the "it" girls--the one with the most sarcastic tongue and the best clothes--said, "Well done."
Well done? I don't know whether I hurt the bullies or they were just amazed to see a seven-year-old girl up for a fight, but they left Peter alone. After that, all the coolest people in the school wanted to be around me. I was happy in my skin and that seemed to draw others toward me. I became a ringleader without ever intending to.
I was born into a family that stretched its roots between Italy and Lancashire. My maternal grandmother, Grace Smith, was born and brought up in Malta. Half Italian, she fell in love with Jack Armstrong, an English army officer and, against her mother's advice, married him and came to England. She thought (and he led her to believe) she was en route to a life of luxury. Instead, Jack took her to a mining village in the north of England and life in a two-up two-down, with a lavatory shared with six other houses. It was cold and it rained constantly. She had no use for the ball gowns she had brought with her.
Grace had three children in quick succession--Robert, my mum, Kathleen Patricia, and John. She spent most of the war years living in attics in London, working in the ammunitions factory and scrubbing other people's floors. At the end of the war, her husband wrote to say he was not coming home. In barely legible scrawl, he told her he had fallen in love with a female army officer and the two of them were being posted to Germany together.
Grace was furious. The government was keen to reunite families so she wrote to the Home Office, detailing the hardships of a single life with three children and seeking assistance. Her husband was duly threatened with loss of his officer status and, within weeks, tickets arrived for her and the children to join him in Hamburg.
It was a violent sea crossing; everyone was sick. My grandmother was the only passenger on board to sit down to a full cooked breakfast. She was a four-foot-eleven dynamo.
Four years later, Grace, Jack, and their three children were posted to army barracks on the Isle of Sheppey. Barren, flat, and marshy--the island appeared to Grace to be in the middle of nowhere. The docks and army barracks were busy, but apart from a few small densely populated villages, the island seemed empty. Only a third of it was built on.
My mother, Pat, was twelve years old. A few years later, when Jack started managing the Britannia pub in the biggest of the island's villages, Sheerness, she was often seen in there helping Grace run the restaurant.
It was there my father, Gerry Dolan, first saw her.
Pat was a twenty-year-old quarter-Italian beauty with shoulder-length black hair and an hourglass figure. Gerry told his friend, "That is the girl I am going to marry."
"Really?" his mate, George, asked, impressed. "Do you know her?"
"No," my father said, "not yet."
At the disco at the Territorial Army Drill Hall later that night, he asked Pat to dance and then walked her home. Gerry Dolan had just come out of the Merchant Navy--he was thirty-one and had traveled the world. Pat was a shy homebody, but she was quick-witted and known for her wicked sense of humor. They married a year later and, to anyone who ever spent any time with them, it was clearly a marriage of love.
After two years, Jed was born; then I arrived--Marie Elisabeth--and then Peter--all two years apart. We moved around in the very early years--Sheerness, Manchester, back to Sheerness and then St. Helens in Lancashire. When I was three years old, we came back to the island and we stayed there--setting up camp at 55 Darlington Drive.
The Isle of Sheppey is eleven miles long and nine miles wide. Thirty-five thousand people live there but, during the summer, that figure doubles. There are holiday camps and caravan sites near the water. Apart from tourism, the main trade on the island comes from the docks and the steel mill.
Two-thirds of the island is green--and it is flat, very flat. The horizons are enormous. The sunsets fill the sky. King's Ferry is the link to the mainland. Once islanders are on that, they know they're home.
My early years were very happy. My favorite pastime was listening to my parents' record of "The Blue Danube" and making up dance routines. I was tall for my age and agile. At the age of five, I started to learn ballet at Yvonne West's School of Dance and I became her protege. "I had a student before you who went on to be very successful," she used to say. "You remind me of her."
My parents did not really have the money to spare, but they paid for dance classes in church halls several nights a week and scraped together money for the tutus I needed for my exams. Most evenings I took over the front room, pushed the coffee table against the wall, put music on and danced. My parents never coerced me into doing anything--but they did support me, always.
My father, Gerald, was a salesman--a good salesman. Slim and dark-haired, he had incredible charm and gentleness--and he always wore a shirt and tie whenever he left the house. Dad sold everything from central heating and double-glazing to burglar and fire alarms. One year he won the Salesman of the Year award when he sold more books than anybody else at Caxton Books. The prizes on offer were a new washing machine or a holiday in the Bahamas.
Dad said to Mum, "You choose."
Mum was still a beauty, with her wavy brown hair and flowery dresses, but she was always, always busy. She looked round the kitchen at the nappies soaking in buckets and said, "I want the washing machine."
Dad's income was sporadic. Many evenings Mum ran out of shillings to put in the electric meter and resorted to inserting curtain rings. Many evenings, we ran out of those too and so we lit candles and played alphabet games waiting for Dad to come home.
"Animals beginning with A . . ."
"Ant, armadillo . . ."
"B."
"Bear, beaver . . ."
We would go through the whole alphabet with animals, then move on to countries and films, making a joke of it until Dad came in with the deposit for his next job. Then the lights went back on, Dad opened bottles of beer and Mum went down the road for a Chinese take-away before bed.
The Leas beach was nearby--and it was free--so Mum took us there a lot. We were all at home in the water. We spent wonderful lazy days swimming and looking for treasures along the pebbly waterfront. Often we went with our neighbors--the Stents and the Smiths--so there would be ten kids making up games. Meanwhile, our mums sat on deckchairs in straw hats, surrounded by carrier bags and bottles of warm juice (which always seemed to get sandy very quickly).
When we wanted an ice cream because all the other kids had one--Mum never said, "No." Instead, she would explain why we couldn't have one that day, but as soon as Dad was paid . . . We were the poorest family in the street but our house was always full. Everyone wanted to be in our house because it was happy there.
At the weekends, our neighbors would gather around the gnarled apple tree in our back garden and watch the shows we put on. Peter's forte was to hang upside down in the tree--or, hiding his shyness behind the tree, sing his heart out (he had the voice of an angel). Jed, five-foot-seven at the age of nine, was always the strongman, lifting heavy objects. And I made up ballet dances or, when Jed laid a piece of hardboard on the grass, tap-danced a routine.
Dad's dad--Poppa--worked at Warner's Holiday Camp and he used to get us free passes to use the facilities. These included the boating lake and swimming pool--as well as free entrance to the weekly children's feast: chicken drumsticks, sandwiches with lots of butter, and trifles in plastic cases. Every Friday afternoon, we used to come home with party hats, blowers, and streamers.
Best of all, I liked to stay at my grandmother Grace's house. She was tiny and dainty and always looked immaculate; her hair and make-up were flawless. She was a great cook and the house always smelled of baking.
I loved to raid her wardrobe and dress up in her old ball gowns. Lace and crinoline, velvet and damask--her dresses were the stuff of fairy tales. She had boxes full of jewelry too; diamonds and rubies mixed together with plastic beads and bangles. I used to pile it on, smear her scarlet lipstick over m...
