Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me

by Pattie Boyd

  My new school was St. Agnes and St. Michael, another convent. I was driven there at the beginning of the first term, crying all the way, and for the first few nights I was so disturbed I wet the bed. I felt so humiliated and ashamed. At ten or eleven I knew I was much too old to do such a thing. Desperate that no one should know, I covered the damp patch with a towel each night in the hope that the sheets would be dry by morning; and if anyone did find out they never told me so.

  The dormitories were divided into cubicles with a curtain around each bed, like in a hospital ward. We slept on thin mattresses, and beside each bed there was a chair for our clothes at night and a little chest of drawers. My only comfort was Teddy, my beloved bear, who lived on the bed and listened patiently to my secrets every night. The uniform was navy blue; pinafore dresses with wide pleats worn over white shirts and ties—all neatly marked P. Boyd on the white name tapes that my mother had painstakingly sewn into every last sock. My tie was only ever tied at the beginning of each term. At night I loosened the knot and slipped it off over my head. We had a bath three times a week, according to a rota, and I have a feeling we changed our knickers three times a week too.

  At that school I felt like a fish out of water. I had nothing in common with the other girls. I hadn’t read many books in Kenya and television was still a revelation to me—I had only watched it for a couple of months. I couldn’t even discuss my family: no one else had divorced parents. All I knew was Africa—I could talk about lions, zebras, and elephants, and snakes coming into my bedroom, which didn’t go down at all well. They would say to each other, “Don’t talk to Pattie Boyd. She’s mad.”

  The convent was an old building with no central heating, just a few big radiators, which we used to sit on in an effort to keep warm—we were told not to because that would give us piles and chilblains. I was always cold, particularly in winter. Sometimes I would feign illness to get a couple of days in bed where I would be warm. I would go to the matron, who would take my temperature. While her back was turned I would whip the thermometer out of my mouth and run it under hot water for a couple of seconds. It worked a treat every time and I would be packed off to bed. The only compensation for winter was the daily dose of Radio Malt with cod-liver oil, the most delicious, sweet, sticky gloop that apparently kept colds away. Every day we would go to the dispensary and line up for a spoonful. Most people hated it; I thought it was nectar.

  I couldn’t wait for the holidays when I went home to Colin and Jenny. In the absence of my mother, emotionally, they had become all-important to my sense of security and I to theirs. We developed a strong bond, and when I look back at photographs of us as children, we always seem to be leaning on each other. That was how it felt at the time: it was “us” in the family and “them.” They were the grown-ups and represented everything that was unsafe and untrustworthy.

  Jenny had been the first to leave Kenya, and at six, shy and on her own with no older siblings to support her, she was compliant. When I arrived I think my stepfather could see trouble ahead and decided to nip it in the bud. He called Jenny to his study one night after she had gone to bed and wouldn’t let me in. He told Jenny that she was the good girl in the family and Pattie was the naughty girl and that she shouldn’t listen to me because I was a bad influence on her. Jenny remembers going back upstairs and realizing, even though she was so young, that he was trying to divide and rule us, and that she had a choice: she could either be on their side or mine and Colin’s. As far as she was concerned, there was no contest. She had felt so unloved by our mother in Kenya, even before she left us there, that she had stopped looking to Mummy as a source of comfort and transferred that expectation to us. We were her family, not the adults; we were her safety net.

  I remember the incident vividly: sitting upstairs in my bedroom, furious that I had been excluded, unable to hear what was being said behind the closed study door, and desperate to know why Jenny had been called down without me. And then finally, after what seemed like an age, she came into my bedroom, closed the door tight, climbed into bed with me, and told me exactly what our new father had said.

  My stepfather was a frightening character, and we were all scared of him, including, I think, my mother, although she would never have said so. I thought he was a bully. He had loved his time in the army and treated us as though we were his own personal foot soldiers, wanting his boots polished, his food on the table, the children silent, and everything just so in the house. He was always telling us to stand or sit up straight, always finding fault. Mealtimes were excruciating. I have no memory as a child of ever hearing or being a part of cheerful family banter around a dining table. No one had spoken in my real father’s house, and now we were not allowed to speak in my stepfather’s. We ate in the dining room, which felt very stiff and formal, with hard, heavy chairs. And if any of us did anything at the table that displeased him, we would be sent to the corner of the room to stand with our hands on our head. We had to stay like that for a long time and after a while it was agonizing. I remember Jenny once being sent into the corner for stirring her Instant Whip too vigorously. One minute she was harmlessly stirring her pudding and suddenly, “Go to the corner with your hands on your head!” Of course, there were some happy times as well. Christmas was always fun and Bobbie would play Santa Claus—I know because one year I saw him.

  One day he was cross with all of us, Paula included, and said he’d had enough. He lined us up and took a photograph of us, which he said he was going to send to our father in Kenya and ask if he would take us back. For weeks and weeks I waited anxiously for my father’s response, terrified that I would be sent away. On another occasion he lined us up in the garden, holding hands, and told me to put my hand on a part of the car engine. A shock surged through me and, via our linked hands, through Colin, Jenny, and Paula. It might have been his idea of a joke, but it seemed odd to me. I also found it rather odd when he set fire to the ends of my hair, saying it was very good for hair to be burned.

  We were occasionally beaten for small misdemeanors. He would tell us to bend over, and we would say we were sorry, knowing what the sting felt like. Paula remembers him delaying the beating. He had clipped the edges of the lawn around the flower beds and asked her to pick up the clippings. She decided it would be simpler to bury them, which she did. Bobbie was furious and told her he would beat her in three hours’ time. Three hours later he sent Jenny to find a stick, but he said the stick wasn’t thin enough and the whole thing turned into a sick game. Paula begged him not to hit her. She promised she would give him all of her pocket money for the rest of her life if he didn’t, but her pleading fell on deaf ears.

  One day he asked Jenny to close the drawing room door. She didn’t hear him, and continued whatever she was doing, so he repeated himself, and again she didn’t hear him. Interestingly, he was partially deaf: he had lost much of his hearing during the war, so he tended to shout. Finally he ran out of patience. “If I have to ask you to close that door one more time,” he threatened, “I’m going to beat you.” Poor little Jenny still didn’t hear and ended up being beaten. He said, “It’s not like you, Jenny, to be so rebellious. What is the matter with you?” The matter with her was that she had been camping the night before and had stuffed cotton wool into her ears to stop earwigs climbing in and forgotten to take it out. It was only when she developed a temperature and earache the next day that a doctor was called and the problem discovered.

  My mother never intervened in my stepfather’s punishments. I think she was too frightened; and if you ask her about it today she denies it happened. She will say what a kind and generous man Bobbie was. I think she was eternally grateful to him for rescuing her after Jock, and was always eager to please him. She was also a product of her age, the last, perhaps, of the generations of wives who vowed to love, honor, and obey their husbands and meant it, without question. So there was no point in going to her for protection. We had to look after ourselves, and we developed our own strategies for coping. A
s the eldest I felt a great sense of responsibility for my siblings. And now, with the wisdom of age, I realize Bobbie was simply a product of his own upbringing. His father beat and bullied him, so he repeated the pattern and feels no shame about it. He now says that corporal punishment would sort out the young of today.

  Colin was probably beaten more than the rest of us and, as a boy at boarding school at that time, he was used to it. But even he finally snapped. He had wanted to play a game with David in the garden one day and Bobbie said he couldn’t: he was teaching David to read. Colin must have said something or made a face to provoke him. Next thing Bobbie took out a golf club and whacked Colin a couple of times. Colin grabbed the stick, which snapped in Bobbie’s hand and, as they wrestled, cut a jagged line into our stepfather’s flesh, so deep he had to go to hospital for stitches. Later Bobbie told Colin that if he had still had a Luger in the house, which he had until a recent postwar amnesty, he would have shot him.

  Bobbie had no idea how to handle us. The real problem was that he couldn’t relate to children, didn’t understand them, and probably didn’t like them very much—at least, not the rebellious, ready-made family he had acquired. He seemed to have a knack for bringing out the worst in us. If we didn’t behave, the only way he knew of bringing us into line was by force. It didn’t occur to him that showing us a little kindness might have earned him some respect, and we might have done willingly what he asked. His childhood must have been very Victorian. His parents were austere, and children, in their eyes, were to be seen and not heard. Colin and I went to stay with them once and it was ghastly. They didn’t like us, and their idea of a fun day at the seaside was to drive to Eastbourne, where we had to sit primly in the back of the car, which might have been a Daimler, with a flask of tea and a chocolate cornflake cake. We were only allowed onto the beach for half an hour. Bobbie’s sister became a nun, and eventually committed suicide.

  Eventually Bobbie became sales director with Dunlop Tires. He was proud of the company and I remember whenever we were out in the car we played a game spotting Dunlop signs.

  Wherever we lived, Lilie came with us. She had been in service since the age of thirteen and used to tell us proudly that she had had half of her stomach removed. She wore a nylon housecoat with a pinny over the top and was seldom far from a cigarette. She had been with Bobbie’s parents for years and had no family of her own. She was wonderful: everyone else in the house was uptight, but you could talk to Lilie. The food she cooked was deeply dull and disgusting but we loved eating in the kitchen with her on the rare occasions we could escape from the dining room when our parents entertained. Lilie’s joys in life were her weekly copies of Woman and Woman’s Own and her cigarettes. I used to go into her room, lie on her bed, and look at her magazines—all the more exciting because my stepfather forbade me to read the love stories.

  Colin never let me down. Each holiday he would bring home from his boarding school some new boyish torture that he practiced on me. I remember Chinese burns being a special favorite. But my hours spent drying the cutlery after supper were not unproductive: I was a master at flicking a damp tea towel and regularly caught him on the back of the legs.

  I was not allowed to wear jeans (too revolutionary), experiment with makeup, or go out with boys. I remember joining a tennis club once so I would meet some. There were two I fancied, Andrew Miller and Anthony Milner, and when one invited me to the cinema, Bobbie wouldn’t let me go unless Colin and Jenny came too—I was sixteen! He even censored what I watched on television. I was allowed to see the news and I Love Lucy. And he absolutely forbade me to see Jailhouse Rock, Elvis Presley’s first film. It caused such a stir. Audiences went crazy, getting up and dancing in the aisles. I loved Elvis but my stepfather thought I shouldn’t be exposed to him and that was that. My mother wouldn’t allow us children to go to the cinema on our own—to this day I never have been inside one alone. She also said we were never to sit next to little old ladies in case they were to stick hypodermic needles into us and spirit us away into the white-slave trade—where she got this idea from I shall never know. But she had double standards: when she put me on the train to go back to boarding school she would say, “Let’s find a little old lady to look after you.” One minute they were potential abductresses and the next they were guardians.

  I was only ever driven to school at the start of the first term. After that I took the train. I don’t think it made me feel unloved—I could see that my mother was too busy to drive me to East Grinstead. She now had five other children. Less than two years after David was born, she’d had Robert (known as Boo). Occasionally they would come down on a Sunday to take Colin and me out to lunch and we would go to the Felbridge Hotel in East Grinstead, where everyone else went with their parents. It was agony to watch all the other parents and children chatting over their roast beef while we sat in the usual silence.

  I was hopeless at English, hopeless at math, loved history, geography, and art—but that was due to the teacher, Miss Hill, who decided she would pay me some attention. She was the only teacher who was not a nun. My piano teacher was a nightmare. Every time I made a mistake she would hit my hand with a ruler. Religion, inevitably, played a large part in my education. We had to go to church on Friday evenings and twice on Sundays. I have no idea why I was sent to Roman Catholic convents: we were Church of England. My mother was quite religious and we went to church every Sunday. Yet at school I had a very different experience with priests, nuns, and lots of incense, which I loved. However, I had difficulty accepting much of what I was taught. How on earth could Jesus have been born from a virgin? How could he have risen from the dead? None of the nuns was prepared to explain anything: we had to take it all at face value. None of it was inspirational because they weren’t—except one, Sister Mary, who, I decided, had probably had a tragic childhood or a crisis in her late teens. She had a passion for poetry and the written word. She helped me understand and learn to love it too.

  In 1958, when I was fourteen, we moved house again. My stepfather had bought a rather grand eight-bedroom Edwardian house called Gosmore, in Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire. And I moved schools again. Later I discovered that my sudden departure from St. Agnes and St. Michael had led to rumors that I had been expelled. Nothing so glamorous: I wasn’t nearly naughty enough for that. So my mother had to go through the usual last-minute panic of sewing name tapes onto the new uniform, and I had the trauma of that first day at a new school, getting to know a new building, a new routine, and having to make new friends.

  St. Martha’s Convent was in Hadley Wood too, but I was sent there as a full boarder—and I remember, yet again, saying goodbye to my mother and fighting back tears as I watched her car disappear down the drive. I stood awkwardly with my trunk, not knowing a soul and watching the other girls shrieking with excitement at the sight of their friends, than regaling one another with their exploits during the holidays.

  My dormitory had twelve narrow beds each screened from the next by a curtain, with a washbasin at one end and a notice board with a list of dos and don’ts pinned to it. Lights-out was at nine, and no talking. That first night there was no talking—just muffled weeping as the less robust of us got into the ghastly routine.

  Every morning we were woken by a small nun wielding a large loud bell, which she rang up and down the corridors and in the dormitories. Ten minutes later she appeared again, chanting prayers. That was our cue to scramble into our uniforms, strip our beds, and race off to breakfast. There was compulsory chapel on Friday evenings and twice on Sunday, as there had been at my previous school. Different priests would take the services each week, while muttering incantations, swinging an incense burner. I found the heavy scent and smoke quite intoxicating.

  I never got over the dread of going back to school—and the ubiquitous smell of floor polish, ink, and pencil sharpenings, and the melancholy sound of someone in a faraway room practicing scales on the piano—but I enjoyed my time at St. Martha’s. I made some good friends
; I joined the Girl Guides, which I loved—I had been a Brownie at St. Agnes and St. Michael. I played netball and tennis, and was on the school teams. The best bit about matches was the orange quarters they gave us at halftime, and the tea we had at the end, when we entertained a visiting team. Cucumber sandwiches and all sorts of cake. Delicious.

  One weekend at school I was bored and found myself licking the honeycomb out of a Crunchie bar. I licked until I had created a wonderful hollow inside the chocolate shell, and kept on until there was virtually no honeycomb left. Then I had a brilliant idea. I wrote to Fry’s, who made Crunchies, and explained that I was lonely and unhappy at boarding school and my only pleasure was a weekly Crunchie bar. This week, I continued, I had taken a bite and discovered that my weekly treat was hollow. I finished off my letter, “Yours weeping, Pattie Boyd,” put it into the post, and thought no more about it. Three weeks later a huge parcel arrived, with “Fry’s” stamped all over it. It contained one of every chocolate bar they made, and a letter saying how sorry they were that I had had a faulty Crunchie; they hoped this collection would help to restore my faith and make amends. My feelings of guilt lasted about thirty seconds—and I was suddenly very popular with my friends.

  Toward the end of term we would stockpile our tuck for a midnight feast. One person would be designated to go around the dormitory waking everyone up and we would make our way in dressing gowns and slippers, whispering and giggling, to the appointed secret destination. How we were never caught remains a mystery. I suspect the nuns recognized it as a bit of harmless end-of-term fun and turned a blind eye. Sadly, they viewed my having a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover hidden under my pillow as a much more serious offense. I was made to report to the reverend mother, who was furious. She threatened either to expel me or to tell my stepfather. I couldn’t decide which would be worse. It was the first sexy book I had read and I found it riveting.