Family secrets: author Esther Freud reveals the inspiration behind her new book
After Esther Freud was whisked away on a Moroccan “adventure” by her hippie mum, it would later inspire the movie Hideous Kinky. But that journey played out in the wake of a dark family secret which Esther reveals is at the heart of her moving new novel.
Esther Freud confesses she has no idea what prompted her mother to leave England with her two young daughters in tow to swap their suburban existence for 1960s Morocco. “My mother was always full of adventure, loved to travel and loved other worlds,” she recalls. “We’d moved out of London by that time and my parents were separated. Her best friend had gone off to India with her little girl, who is still my best friend. She was the only other unmarried teenager my mother met when they were these two pregnant girls, and I feel that must have influenced her.
“But it’s so frustrating. Even though I spoke to my mother all the time about everything, I didn’t ever ask her specifically that question: ‘What was it that made you go?’. It just seemed inevitable and a good idea to leave where we were living, which was Tunbridge Wells [a genteel town in the south], to go to Marrakesh. Why not?” she muses with a wry smile.
Esther was four, her sister Bella (now a fashion designer) was six, and the 18 months they spent on the North African hippie trail were life-changing, though not equally welcome for the siblings. “It had a huge effect. I’d say it’s really a big part of me,” notes Esther. “For my sister, I don’t know. She had already had a bit of a life in England. She’d already started school, she had friends, so she was taken away from something. I was at an age where everything was my life. Bella used to say, ‘When are we going to go home?’ … For me it was very positive. It opened my imagination and made me feel that I had a story inside me.
“I collected up Bella’s little caftan and mine, her Arabic textbook, and kept them all these years. I have everything I could hold on to. I still have beads and things to tie in your hair. I don’t think she kept anything,” continues the author, whose semi-autobiographical debut novel Hideous Kinky, written in her 20s, was all about the seminal experience and became a successful 1998 film starring Kate Winslet.
The trio’s time in Morocco was magical, challenging and often scary as money ran out and culture clashes deepened. “I felt very close to my mother and quite protective of her, because I saw that she was young and she seemed pretty vulnerable. There were often fights and tears, and I felt we were growing up together. I do remember feeling we were three outsiders, in another world, and it felt there wasn’t a huge separation between parent and child. It might be unfair to say that, but she was still only about 24.”
When they returned to England, Esther felt like an entirely different person with a life experience that set her apart. “I spent a lot of time when I came back living in the memories,” she smiles. “At school we had something called ‘News’ every day. Anyone could put their hand up. People usually said, ‘My nan came for tea’ and I’d say, ‘In Morocco … ’ – which became my nickname.
“I couldn’t let it go. I felt as if my mother and sister were more able to live in the present and move on, and I just used to think, ‘Isn’t it amazing that we climbed up a hill and I sat in the saddlebag of a donkey, and then when we got to the top …’ I just used to think about it all the time, think about the square, all the friends we’d made, how little girls used to carry their baby brothers and sisters on their backs with a piece of cotton. England seemed so dull and grey.”
As we talk today Esther – who is the daughter of one of Britain’s most lauded and famous artists Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis – is sitting in the comfortable white-walled study of the English home where she lives with her own three grown-up children. Despite rifts back then – which we’ll come to – family is the heart of Esther’s creative work and a mainstay in her life.
She was always very close to her mother, Bernardine Coverley, but it was only in writing her new novel I Couldn’t Love You More, and with her adult’s understanding, that she has started to fill in some of the gaps of what was going on when the family left for Morocco.
The novel is about three generations of women including lead character Rosaleen, who seeks help from a mother-andbaby home in Cork, Ireland, only to face brutal judgement and desperately cruel treatment. While the outcomes
in her novel are very different from those in her mother’s life, the issues at play and some characters are founded in her family story.
Looking back, it’s clear Bernardine was at a turning point. At 17 she met painter Lucian, 20 years her senior. They began a relationship, and Bella and Esther were born in the years that followed.
Lucian was charismatic, exciting and a prodigious talent, consumed by his art. But he had already been married twice and fathered other children, and theirs was far from a conventional love match. As the daughter of devout Irish Catholic parents, Bernardine was crossing many lines, and even though she was rebellious and courageous by nature, she chose to keep her children secret from their grandparents.
It is this part of her mum’s story that sparked Esther’s new novel.
“At 18 [Bernardine] found herself pregnant and unmarried living in London. Terrified she’d be discovered and sent to a ‘Home’ – a workhouse for morally defective women – she kept the news a secret,” reveals Esther in the book’s acknowledgements. Bernardine went home for Christmas concealing her bump, and when Bella was born the following April and then Esther two years later, she continued to keep their existence a secret. Then Bernardine and her girls were spotted at a bus stop by a family acquaintance, who wrote a letter back to Ireland.
Her parents were horrified.
“That family story is central to my inspiration for writing the book,” says Esther, adding that she can’t remember exactly when she became aware of the dark family secret. “It’s so strange when you really think about what you know about your parents and when you started to know things. It’s rare that there was a moment where there was a conversation. I accepted it completely, that my mother was estranged from her parents when we were very young and I just knew somewhere along the line,
I don’t know how, that she felt it was imperative that she keep a secret.
“When I think about it, I actually feel as if I heard it from my father. He loved to tell a story, as long as it wasn’t about him, and I remember him telling me that her parents had been very disapproving of the way she lived her life.”
When the family returned from Morocco, Esther remembers meeting her grandparents for what she thinks was the first time. “They came over to England to see their estranged daughter, whom they at that point wouldn’t have seen for years. But in those eight years since my mother first became pregnant, prejudices had started to loosen and the world was beginning to change a little bit, and they were ready to embrace us. I think that’s what’s really sad about shame and about the dictates of the Church where people feel, ‘That child must be absolutely vanished away.’ When a grandparent is faced with the actual reality of a grandchild, their heart softens almost always.”
Once she had met them, Esther’s
experience of her grandparents was of warm, kind people, so I wonder if, especially following her research for her novel, she understands why her mother felt she had to harbour such a big secret from them.
“I do,” she says quietly. “I think her parents, who I came to know and love, and who were really good people, were very much people of their time. They were good Catholics, they worked very, very hard, they brought up their children to do better and to have jobs, they spent money educating them and sent them off to convents very early.
“My mother was evacuated during the war, as a little child, and then when she was seven she went to boarding school, and she spent a lot of their summer holidays with the nuns in the country. I think she just felt as if her parents weren’t on her side, that there was a sort of schism between her and them. She always said she longed to be taken away from the convent and they wouldn’t do that. She’d write to them begging.”
In the book Rosaleen embarks on an affair with Felix, a charming, seductive, bohemian sculptor, clearly based on Esther’s famous father Lucian. “I loved writing Felix,” she says. “I wanted to write about someone who’s completely consumed by the need to be creative, how that interferes with the ability to be a loving partner. I have used my father in a few different ways in a few of my novels. He’s an irresistible character to write about.”
Although Esther is sure she met her father as a baby, she has no memory of him until they returned from Morocco. They were living in Sussex in the south of England and Lucian “would roar up in a vintage RollsRoyce and astonish everyone”. He was charismatic and beguiling, and both Esther and Bella adored being around their father. “It was like you were very lucky that the most glamorous and exciting boy in the class would say, ‘You can be in my gang!’ I was about nine or 10 when he decided to take me and my sister to Scotland to visit some people. It turned out that of course there was some kind of romantic interest for him in that direction or he wouldn’t have bothered.
“But however impoverished he was and living in a tiny flat with one metal bed, he always had an old flashy car. We were very, very excited, the three of us, and drove incredibly fast, and then we were pulled over by the police who said, ‘We’ve been following you for half an hour, you’ve never once looked in your mirror and you’ve been going 100 miles an hour.’ Dad said, ‘Oh, terribly sorry, we’re just in rather a hurry to get to Scotland!’ It was such marvellous fun being with him.”
I wonder if Esther felt her education suffered from her early years in Morocco. “I was such a dreamy child, it suited me,” she says. “I didn’t learn to read till I was about 10. All I was interested in was stories and knitting and making things. So no, I didn’t feel I missed out. Then I went to a Rudolf Steiner school in England, which was very creative and artsy. The great thing about Steiner is that they give you a lot of confidence, so I left school at 16 knowing virtually nothing but having no idea I knew nothing. You’re given a lot of praise. I was very good at spinning and dipping candles … these things have never been useful in life, obviously,” she laughs.
“But when I did learn to read, suddenly I got it instantly. It just happened. I must have had some form of dyslexia which I was able to find a way through and then I could read. I read and read and read, probably more than anyone else in the house. It doesn’t hold you back. I think people are forced to learn things much earlier than they need to, and they’re tested. It makes me very sad, the idea of a five-year-old having to learn maths and English.”
When she was 16, Esther moved to London and started modelling for her father’s portraits. “It was wonderful. It meant I had a job and he gave me a bit of money every time, some money for a taxi, and I always obviously got the bus. I really got to know him. I sat from 16 to my early 30s, when I had my first child.”
Lucian painted a lot of nudes – including of her – and his world was of artists and London’s avant-garde set, but
Esther wasn’t at all fazed. “I think what’s wonderful about children is they accept the reality, don’t they? A few years ago my husband [British actor David Morrissey] and I separated, and I said to my youngest son, who was about 13, ‘How are you feeling about this?’ He said, ‘I guess I’m more flexible than I thought.’ I think it’s a bit like that. We have this idea that children are stuck in their ways and they’re not.
“I always remember going to
[my father’s] studio and there wasn’t anything else to do but look at the paintings, so I knew that’s what he did. It wasn’t really that he lived in an artist’s world; it was just his world. What I learned and saw was discipline and patience. It was very helpful for me and I think for all his children to understand that if you want to make something that you’re pleased with, that’s as good it can possibly be, as good as you can possibly make it, you have start at A and trundle right the way through, even if it takes years and years. I saw him do that.”
Esther says her favourite of his paintings of her is one with her sister Bella sprawled on a sofa. “It was a special year or so that meant the three of us were together in a way that reminded us of our childhoods.”
Esther did eventually go to college and take exams after deciding she wanted to be an actress, and then in her mid-20s wrote that first novel which kickstarted her career as a writer. When Kate Winslet was cast in the film of her book, Esther was thrilled. “She’d made Titanic but it hadn’t come out so she was on the brink of this incredible fame but she was still just a normal girl and young, maybe 21. Her boyfriend had given her a copy of Hideous Kinky and she’d loved it. She was unusually mature for her age, and very interested and curious. We spent time talking and she also spent time talking to my mother. In fact,
I’m wearing this silver bangle that my mother wore when we were travelling in Morocco, and always wore. When she died I started to wear it, and
Kate wore it in the film.”
While her parents never got back together, Esther says “they got on remarkably well. There was never any badmouthing from either of them ever.” And in the last 10 years of their lives they became more friendly and started swapping cards. “If I was staying with my mother in the country, she’d give me something to take up to Dad. It was very tender. I think she appreciated, against all the odds, what an amazing father he’d been to her daughters. She wrote and told him that, and he was really touched.”
In a cruel twist of fate, Lucian and Bernardine died 10 years ago within four days of each other. “It was so strange,” says Esther. “We were very prepared for my father, who was 88; he’d been slowly getting weaker. We had a rota system, all his children and some of his grandchildren who were old enough. We all spent half a day or the night, so we all had so much time with him in that last six months.
“But then my mother, who I’d seen a few weeks before, seemed completely fine, only clearly she wasn’t. I think because she was so strong, maybe she also hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t well. Anyway, suddenly she just was so unwell and she went to hospital and they diagnosed her with advanced cancer, and within a week she died.
It’s everyone’s dread, but I think the doctors said it’s what you’d wish for yourself, if you saw all the other ways. But it was dizzyingly shocking for us. She was only 68.”
While she has been grounded in COVID, Esther says she does still love to travel, although her three children haven’t really caught the bug. “I have travelled quite a lot with my own children and they don’t love it. They love security, they like things to be more the same, they like to go back to the same holiday place.
“I did take my children to Morocco and my younger two were quite scared by it. It’s still quite a menacing place. You walk through those squares, there’s people shouting out, playing pipes and drums, and they were quite afraid of it. You’re going into an ancient world of Arabian Nights … my little one, who was only about three or four then, really clung to me. He was even scared of the minarets and the call to prayer five times a day. And it did remind me how afraid I was, often, there.”
And today Esther says, despite her wanderlust, she does understand the attraction of permanency. “I think my childhood gave me a great desire for a home. I’ve always been really keen on a house – a really nice beautiful, ideally white-painted solid house.”
I Couldn’t Love You More by Esther Freud, Bloomsbury, is on sale now.