An Education Read Online Free PDF

all those pine needles buggering the vacuum cleaner and ruining the carpet. ‘For fun,’ I told him, and watched him almost die of apoplexy on the spot. He regarded any form of social life as time-wasting – to him, my mother's involvement in amateur dramatics was dangerously profligate. But this must have been one of the very few subjects on which she ‘dug her heels in’, and when my mother dug her heels in, my father knew to retreat.
    All my rows were with my father – I remember my early teens as one long row with my father, usually about trivia like what time I went to bed. My mother was a passive, occasionally tearful, spectator. Sometimes when he hit me (‘What you need is a clip around the ear’) she would intervene, and often after a particularly loud shouting match, when I had stormed up to my room, she would come sidling up with a hot drink and biscuit as a peace offering. ‘Can't you be more tactful?’ she would urge: ‘Why do you have to enrage him?’ But I despised her peace-making, always too little and too late, and once told her, ‘Look, Mum, if you're really on my side, you'll divorce him; otherwise shut up.’ So she shut up.
    And then Simon entered our lives and everything changed. I met him when I was sixteen and he was – he said twenty-seven, but probably in his late thirties. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre (I still consented to appear in my mother's am-dram productions), when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leaned over to the passenger window and said, ‘Want a lift?’ Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised – Bristols always cruised – towards Twickenham.
    He had a funny accent – later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh – and I asked if he was foreign. He said, ‘Only if you count Jews as foreign.’ Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely, ‘Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed.’ (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had fought in the Israeli army when he was ‘your age’. I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought nineteen. But then when he said, ‘Fancy a coffee?’ I foolishly answered, ‘No, I have to be home by ten – my father will kill me if I'm late.’ ‘School tomorrow?’ he asked lightly, and, speechless with fury at myself, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and said ‘Can I take you out for coffee another evening?’
    My life might have turned out differently if I had just said no. But I was not quite rude enough. Instead, I said I was very busy rehearsing a play which meant that unfortunately I had no free evenings. He asked what play, and I said The Lady's Not for Burning at Richmond Little Theatre. Arriving for the first night a couple of weeks later, I found an enormous bouquet in the dressing room addressed to me. The other actresses, all grown-ups, were mewing with envy and saying, ‘Those flowers must have cost a fortune.’ When I left the theatre, hours later, I saw the Bristol parked outside and went over to say thank you. He said ‘Can't we have our coffee now?’ and I said no, because I was late again, but he could drive me home. I wasn't exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of him as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having