Autobiographical Sketch

I was born in Kent, all among the hop gardens and cherry orchards. In the summer, gypsies came to help with the picking and plucking (hops can tear your hands to shreds). I remember sitting with them in the dusty sunlight, and admiring their gold teeth. When the time for me to have crowns, I chose gold rather than white in memory of the gypsies.

My father had a chicken farm. I was the fourth of five children, and we ran completely wild in the countryside, including spending a lot of time looking at chickens. One Sunday the parents had friends for lunch and served chicken. ‘Is that the one with the swollen face?’ asked my eldest brother Charles.

My best friend was called Robin. We shared a cigarette behind the cow sheds on his family farm. We tried to sail a zinc bath on the stinking silage drain. We rode a compliant cow with a sack tied onto its back with binder twine. I remember his elder brother Andrew running across the field, and the stitches in his knee tearing open.

We all went to what must have been the last of the Dame Schools. Run by an old lady called Mrs Macaldownie, it consisted of 19 children aged from 4 to 8 sitting in her front room learning nothing much. They gave me a disgusting book called The Little Half Chick to read, where the chick gets cut in half, dunked in tar and used as a weather vane. I didn’t read it. I think this is why I didn't learn to read until I was seven. The clearest memory is of the taste of raffia from the crafts table – sort of sour.

It was all very conventional and included church on Sundays, with my father reading the lesson (and leaving out anything that might cause a blush).

That all came to an end when I was seven and went away to prep school. From then on I only saw my mother three times a term. This was because of upheavals in the family and my mother taking on a more than full time job. The parents ran an A Level college in an old house on a hill - they took 1960s kids - including Caspar Fleming (son of Ian), and Stanley Baker's sons - chucked out from public schools still stuck in the 1930s.

I was already pretty independent having led such an unsupervised early childhood and anyway my parents lived in a completely unfamiliar house which I hated, so I just accepted it all and got on with it. I met two of my closest friends there.

There were some excellent teachers, one of whom encouraged my writing from an early age. She had a split personality – in the classroom she thought I was wonderful; on the rounders pitch she was exasperated with me. Once, she threw a ball at me as I stood dreaming at third post, hitting me in the eye.

Boarding secondary school followed, back in the village where I was born and where I had been so happy, which was an odd experience. Seeing my old home behind gates that I could not pass through. Then Cambridge, where I read English.

In my last year, I did the Vogue Talent Contest and was a finalist. The lunch where the winner was decided was the day after the end of my finals. I was too traumatised to do anything but gulp and stare. But they did offer me a job later on, and I started my career under Alex Kroll in the book department. I spent a lot of time in the dusty and disorganised treasure house of a library in the basement of Vogue House, writing captions for a Christian Dior biography, loving every minute and emerging black with book dust at the end of each day. And watching in amazement as people walked out with irreplaceable original photographic prints and drawings by Cecil Beaton under their arms.

I met my husband, Thoby Young, in 1984. After leaving Vogue in 1985 (although I went back in 2006), I took a late gap year and travelled in India for six months with a couple of friends.

Riding a logging elephant on a beach in the Andaman Islands was a highlight. When I slipped down her flank, I was covered in red mud right through to my underwear. Thoby followed me there, and when we got back, we married, and had three offspring – now comprising one adult, one teenager and one child.

We live in West London, and I write freelance for magazine and newspapers; design and redesign websites for magazines and businesses, and try to squeeze in as much fiction as possible – which is my first love.