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hippies with a verve that born-the-first-time ones often lacked. My mother’s armpit hair was so long I’m sure she took pills to hurry it along. And my father never wore underpants and didn’t notice if his harem pants had holes in them.
    I was a total throwback. I didn’t mean to be. It just turned out that way.
    They begged me to call them Beth and Archie but all I ever wanted was Mummy and Daddy.
    They dressed me in hemp and gave me wooden blocks to play with; I wanted pink frills and Barbie dolls. They loved acting out politically correct fairy tales and baking their owncement-like five-grain loaf; I liked
The Brady Bunch
and white bread. I dreamed of getting married and wearing a one-piece in the summer; they didn’t believe in marriage (although they were themselves married — the photos are hilarious) and loved any excuse to get their kit off and parade around in the nude.
    When Poppy came along, she proved to be their perfect child. This could have caused some resentment on my part except that Poppy was and continues to be the most adorable creature in the world. Plus, her arrival got me off the hook. I had been a major disappointment to my mother by weaning myself off the breast when I was seven months old — a crime tantamount to eating a Wimpy hamburger and enjoying it in her world — but pliable Poppy kept suckling away until she was four. A bit beyond the pale, if you ask me, but no one did.
    So, my parents, with their philosophy of knit-your-own-peanut-butter-and-wear-a-poncho-while-you’re-doing-it, thought (in a loving way of course) that I was something of an oddity — but my grandmother, Rose, did not. She got me. She just plain old got me and you are so lucky to have that as a child, I think: an adult from the grown-up world who thoroughly understands who you are and assures you that it’s perfectly all right to be that way. Take my name, for example. My parents had christened me Florence thinking I had been conceived in that most romantic of Italian cities. It was quite a way-out thing to do in those days although they had to constantly explain that I was named after a shagging marathon in the Hotel Caravaggio on Piazza Indipendenza, not some dusty old maiden aunt. Anyway, when I was six months old they were reminded by the friends with whom they’d hooked up in Italy that they’d actually missed their first connection. They subsequently realised my beginnings were most likelyformed in the ladies’ loo at Luton Airport. As a result of this blunder, they veered away from Florence and tended to call me Flower or Effie, two names I never really liked even though obviously they were both a lot better than Ladies’ Loo at Luton Airport (depressingly likely to be shortened to Lula and loved by one and all if given half the chance).
    When I was three, I told Grandma Rose that I did notlike being called Flower or Effie. I liked being called Florence because that was my name. Grandma agreed it was the better choice and said that as we were on the subject, she didn’t particularly care for Grandma and would I be ever so kind as to call her Rose. It was the first real conversation of my life.
    This must have irritated my poor mother enormously, given that I wouldn’t call her Beth. But in my eyes Rose could do no wrong.
    It was Rose who took me to Hamleys to buy toys because my parents didn’t believe in them; Rose who bought me a pair of bespoke red Mary-Janes after Mum gave me orthopaedic brown sandals for my birthday; Rose who let me bake cakes with white flour (outlawed in our house) from her enormous supply of recipe books; Rose who let me play tea parties with black tea instead of garden clippings in the front room with her best china.
    In my teens I would visit her as often as I could in the house across the road from the Warwick Castle. I lived with my parents in a ramshackle house in Primrose Hill that was painted psychedelic colours and furnished largely with beanbags. We lived on mung