Armstrong, Aldrin and the other one set off for the moon. I flew to Paris, all by myself, on an early morning business flight. A plane full of suits, and me, sick and shaking with fear. The first time I’d flown… Armstrong, Aldrin and the other one had the whole free world on their side. I had nobody. Michael Collins, by the way, not to be confused with Michael Collins, Irish patriot / traitor, delete according to taste. Everybody calls the Apollo Collins, ‘the other one’. I only remember because of Michael Collins, my sort of family would.

Somebody should have come with me to the airport… It wouldn’t have killed them, would it? Inconvenient, a day out of their precious holiday, but I was sixteen, skinny, scared, told which plane to catch, then abandoned at Norwich station. To be absolutely fair, I don’t think it crossed their minds that anything could go wrong. They’d planned all this because it would be good for me. I never did like things that were good for me, maths, extra Latin, sensible shoes, nice Catholic boys.

The minute this French idea caught fire, everybody kept saying it would be good for me. Everybody… Sister Teresa, who was my headmistress, acerbic Sister Hild, glad she wouldn’t be teaching me next term, the neighbours, the aunts, and of course, my parents. Their idea, so it had to be good. I must spend the summer in France, come home poised and fluent. Why they believed this so fervently I wouldn’t know. I think they just wanted me out of the way, and France was convenient. It was still, just about, considered to be part of a nice girl’s education. Not that I was a nice girl, but French of Paris could only improve me. Speaking French was something we were expected to do, like the Queen. People still fall about, incredulous, when the Queen comes out with her word perfect French. In her day, I suppose she was a nice girl too.

They didn’t need to ship me to France, because I could speak perfectly good French already. At my school, fluent French wasn’t an option. Vocabulary tests every morning, score 80% or face an hour’s detention after school. We scored 80%, minimum. Now schools have to give twenty-four hours notice before a detention. Most parents beg the kids off, tell the teacher where to go. Nobody does detention. The rules have changed. Detention used to mean on the spot, no appeal, miss the school bus, walk home, and, like as not, face a slippering from your dad. We were all quite extraordinarily good at French. Belgian, actually, like Hercule Poirot. Soeur Marie Jean-Baptiste, who taught the lower school, came from somewhere called Popinghe. Other schools plodded through text books. Soeur Marie’s methods were ruthlessly advanced. From the first day, she never spoke a word of English And I knew, perfectly well, that 1969 was the year of the soixante-neuf. So would any eleven year old, but I was sixteen, naive, knowing, angry. Not counting small brothers, I’d never been alone with a boy. Men are from Mars? In 1969, men, boys, anything male, lived in some distant barred-spiral galaxy. At least, they might as well have done… Boys were kicked out of my first convent the minute they turned seven. After that, they didn’t exist. We didn’t meet or breathe the same air till the sixth form. Then, and very grudgingly, we might be allowed to dance, dodging vigilante monks and nuns, cruising the dance floor, looking for sin. Sex Finders General, said Patsy, who knew everything.

In 1968, the French idea would have been a nonstarter, something about student riots, paving stones smashed into gendarmes’ faces, bloody and hideous. A year later, students and the news had moved on. Sixteen and wordless with anger, I was being sent to France, because that’s what they’d decided. Kate would be paid £7 a week, packing knickers for a firm that supplied Marks and Sparks. Clare had a job as a waitress, serving ladies who lunch in a posh department store. The posh department store, all the others definitely B list. The ladies had any amount of money and no manners. Only £5.10s a week, but the tips were supposed to be good. £. s. d, this was a long, long time ago. Marie had to look after the younger ones, give her Gran a break, while her mother worked. Seven weeks hard labour, no pay, offered or expected. And Patsy? Everybody knew Patsy would get ten Grade One passes. That’s straight A*s now. Patsy would spend the summer hitching around Europe with her boyfriend, washing up or picking grapes when they needed money. Patsy was still the only girl in our class who wasn’t a virgin. Yes, it was the Sixties, no, of course we couldn’t get the pill. In our end of town every single GP was Irish, Catholic or my dad. Jewish, by the way. Dr Joe Green, a useful name that hid so much. Not practicing or even believing and married to a shiksa, at a register office. Which meant two sets of angry parents, the worst of all possible worlds. Easier, surely, if they’d just lived in sin? Married or not, my mother had six children. Enough, surely, to please any Pope? No chance… Living in sin, she wasn’t allowed Holy Communion. As for my dad… Marrying out ran in the family. The God of Abraham is a realist. To be Jewish, you really should have a Jewish mother. Negotiable, according to more enlightened rabbis, but either way, we didn’t belong.

Why bother with all this tedious begatting? It’s traditional. Jesus wouldn’t need ancestry.com. (See Matthew, Chap 1) Thanks to all the marrying out, the city where I lived teemed with cousins I never knew. Convent school? Sex apart, school was actually a refuge with its own safe rules. Perfect French is a minor skill. Any decent parrot can do accents. I learned far more useful crafts at school, including lip-service and how to keep the very darkest secrets. Clare too, the Clare who spent a whole summer serving so-called ladies. Clare was my mirror, half and halfer, but the other way round, Jewish mother, Irish father, their marriage too was only legal. Not that we knew, either of us. Years later, we met, briefly, the day our youngest daughters coolly assessed the same college. Hiding from the sun, in the Botanic Gardens, we edited the years, exchanged truths at last, promised to meet again in October. It didn’t happen, because Clare’s daughter and mine said no to dreaming spires and refused to budge. Nice to look at, they said, if you like that kind of thing, but no thank-you. I never chase old friendships, try, usually, to leave lost time alone. Easier said than done and some memories refuse to die.

That July evening in ‘69, Dad drove me to Norwich straight after supper, not that I’d eaten any. At the table I’d stared at a few sticks of samphire, brittle as glass, half a slice of bread, the butter rock hard from the ancient cottage fridge, the crust baked black. Globus hystericus, in the medical textbooks, sick evil lump in the throat, if you’re sixteen, trying to choke down food, then travel alone to another country. My niece doesn’t turn a hair, nine years old, flying alone from Kuala Lumpur to her prep school in Kent. So why was I rigid with fear, only crossing the channel? Not fear of flying, that’s for sure. Since the world began, I’d wanted to fly. Even sparrows take the wings of the morning… In the long feathered grass, Clare and I used to lie on our backs, watching the skywriters. We were about five. Adverts in the sky were on the way out, killed off by ITV. We wanted to loop the loop, write our names across the sky. When I told her I was flying to Paris, Clare hated me. All my fault, beating her to the sky, because my family was richer than hers. Doctors, that is, not teachers, meaning, not very rich at all. In 1969, six-figure pay for a G.P. was light years away. Speeding along those Norfolk lanes, I knew exactly why I was so sick with fear. Really sick, begging Dad to stop the car. Being a doctor, he didn’t fuss, waited, calmly, till it was obvious I was just retching, wouldn’t really throw up. Felt my pulse, lightly touched my forehead. Left hand, because he always did these things left handed, left was for anything he cared about. Dad wrote with his right hand. Five years old, he’d been forced to. He always gave patients his best hand, left arm around their shoulders, if the news was bad. To be fair, I don’t think he realised how terrified I was or how cruel they were being. Or my mother… Leaving the rented cottage, three weeks of boats and birds and sandcastles, I hated them, my parents, and the five younger children. They would have one kind of summer, I was being packed off to another kind entirely, in another country. They were sending me off like a parcel.

The Duchamps were something to do with the war, something secret and dangerous, a long time ago. The Resistance? My dad never talked about the war, and it’s too late now. Pierre and Suzanne had one daughter, no other children. This seemed extraordinarily tidy of them, so much better than my own sprawling family, too many children, badly arranged. I liked the idea of being an only daughter. But they’d called her Edith. In England, in 1969, Edith was either Piaf, who sang like a strangled starling, or an aged aunt, a spinster neighbour, grey cardigans, false teeth, skirts all the wrong length. Edith was almost a year older than me. We were to speak English together for one hour a day, so she’d get top marks in her baccalaureate next year. The rest of the time, of course, we’d speak French.

I hated even the idea of Edith. She’d be sleek. No, wrong word, Edith would be chic. I imagined her in Yves St Laurent, clothes seen in a school copy of Paris Match. YSL was the only French designer we’d ever heard of. Sixties schoolgirls, Paris Match was our Hello?, our Heat, our Grazia. Edith was used to being the one and only, so she’d hate a stupid foreign waif, invading her summer, a nuisance, shipped in by her parents. An evacuee, without even the excuse of a war. It was the war that made our parents almost-friends. Apart from a handful of names and dates, Churchill, Hitler, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima, the war was a mystery. In history lessons, my own daughters studied little else. Two of them read Mein Kampf, in German. They knew every battle plan, every hideous detail of the death camps. At the village school, eight year olds question the old about evacuees. Past eighty, people are shameless, they’ll tell you anything. It’s on tape now, chucking stones, half drowning evacuees in the pond, planting lice in their hair…

Fighting rising panic, Norwich only ten miles away now, I knew exactly how Edith would treat me, so alien, so English, so impossibly gauche and naive. The French invented those words purely to insult English girls. Think about it… A gauche, naive Italian? Or German? The French call the Germans plenty of other things, but naive? Edith would despise me. Of course she would.

All the way inland, except when I felt so sick, I hadn’t spoken to my dad. I didn’t even know how to. Daddy, for instance, would stick in my throat. At school, you learn, quickly, what you can get away with, definitely not Mummy or Daddy. People like Patsy could say Mam. Patsy, our Bible on all points of etiquette, pointed out that Ma’am, for the Queen, is pronounced ‘Mam’. I couldn’t call him Father, Daddy was pathetic, he wasn’t used to Dad. So what had he called his own father? Then I remembered. Dad hadn’t called him anything, left with one savage memory, his soldier father, waving goodbye. Dad was two and a half, the memory only there because it was October, 1918, his father repaired at last and returning to the front. Made it back in time to be killed on November 10th. Five foot nothing, until they changed the rules, he wasn’t tall enough to die.

Horsham… In ten more minutes, we might be at the station. If the plane crashed, we’d never see each other again. Back at the cottage, my mother had managed a few words of advice, not looking at me, as she hinted, did I have enough towels with me? Meaning, sanitary towels, authorised version, in 1969 still bulky and hideous. She didn’t know I’d used tampons since the first bloody day of my first ever bloody nuisance period. Good Catholic girls didn’t use tampons, they might lead to impure thoughts. Thank God for Patsy, mentor to her ever-grateful friends.

But I’d nodded, muttered something, managed the awkward kiss, just before she picked the baby up to feed him. I was her eldest daughter, and we had nothing to say to each other. Anna was only ten, lying on her front on the sofa, reading Tolkien. Patrick and Michael were eight and almost seven, attacking driftwood with flints from the beach. Imogen was nearly five, already reading well enough to tackle ‘The Tale of Samuel Whiskers’. She didn’t even look up. The baby, Ben, was six months old. My mother was bottle feeding him. One day, someone might explain that bizarre six year gap between me and Anna, and why they went on to have another four. My mother hardly ever came to Mass, but she was supposed to be a Catholic. That might or might not account for the five young ones, but why that unbridgeable six year gap? A difficult birth, with me? Miscarriages? Separate beds? Whatever the reason, it was impossible, and had been since the day Anna was born. Aged six, I’d pushed the squawling newborn round the living room in my doll’s pram. Now the law said I could marry, or at least, sleep with anyone I liked. My sister was a little girl with tin ribs, skinny legs, ankle socks. The thought of only-child Edith terrified me more than ever. Ay-deet, the French said, someone terrifying, all savoir-faire and sarcasm. I knew so exactly what she would be like.

Two miles to Norwich, on a thin old fingerpost… The Man in the Moon came down too soon, and asked the way to Norwich… My dad said, suddenly… ‘Maddy… You don’t have to go. If you’d rather not, we’ll ring, I’ll take you back to the cottage.’

This was extraordinary. France had never been discussed, not as something I might or might not do. Being a waitress or packing Marks & Sparks knickers couldn’t happen, because I was going to France. Now he was saying I could choose. He’d left it too late, of course. Flight only didn’t come cheap then, and there’d be no refund on the train ticket. The Duchamps’ were expecting me. Only last night, he’d walked down to the call box at the end of the lane, talking to his friend Michel, who would pass on everything to the Duchamps’. Their address had been pinned to the kitchen board since March. Tomorrow morning, I’d fly to Paris. Apollo would be less scary. On the moon, at least there’d be no Edith… But I said, as we swept into the station car park, ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry. France has to be better than packing knickers.’

His watch was slow, we’d timed it all wrong. A minute later, the London train was in, and we had one of those panic-stricken dashes along the platform. Wrenching the door open, almost throwing my luggage in after me, he shouted something, far too late. The ticket collector came, punched my ticket without a word, moved on down the train. When he’d gone, I started to cry, cried like a baby for at least five minutes. Then vanity kicked in. Crying does terrible things to your face. If you can’t wash, the salt dries in silvery slug trails. Total waste of time anyway, because there was nobody to kiss it better. At the next station, an old lady got in, sat opposite me with a howling cat in a basket, and all the rest of her luggage. It’s very hard not to look at things straight in front of you. I wasn’t staring, but her cases were old leather, tattered with the bright remains of labels. She’d been everywhere, Nairobi and Cairo and Singapore and Venice… Addis Ababa? She’d lived. Or at least, the cases had.

The last few days at home, and in Norfolk, the rules had been more complicated than ever. Strange men, obviously, manners at mealtimes and every other time, going to Mass, doing everything the Duchamps’ asked, at once, and never, ever wandering off on my own. In 1969, all English parents lived in terror, all children lived in terrible danger. It had happened quite suddenly. At eight, nine, or even younger, we were still allowed out to play, only came home at bedtime. I was eleven, the year innocence died. Odd, to be able to date it so precisely. Anna never knew the old freedoms. My mother hid the newspapers, hinted at unspeakable things. She could never tell the truth about anything and neither could I.