Getting Dressed: Dr Ann Coxon
‘My deepest regret about ageing is high heels’
Some time ago, I was flipping through the weekend newspapers when a picture stopped me in my tracks. It was of a woman, Dr Annie Coxon, who, long ago, had been head girl of my convent. I didn’t recognise her immediately because the glorious red hair she had at school was now white, but her name – and her rather piercing gaze – were the same.
But hang on a minute. As I have just said, she was head girl of my convent but here she was, pictured in an article about Muslim converts. I had to investigate.
Ann Coxon, known in her Muslim community as Amina, is 76, and still practising as a doctor in Harley Street. In fact, she is busier than ever because fellow Muslims tend to come to her.
‘I have an Islamic wardrobe,’ she tells me. ‘Pakistani, Malaysian, Arab clothes – so that I can dress appropriately when I visit these families both here, and in their own countries.’
Dr Coxon remained a Catholic for years after leaving school. Ironically, her search for the ‘right’ religion was triggered by a rather extraordinary visit to the pilgrimage site of Medjugorje in Bosnia, where she’d been asked to accompany a sick priest. She converted several years afterwards.
‘By then, I was divorced from my two husbands – so I could do what liked. But, when my brother heard, he was upset. I said, “Look, we are both facing in the same direction. It’s just that I am looking out of a different window.” ’
At school, Coxon was feisty and daring; she had been expelled from three other schools when she came. ‘Ann has a tendency to exhibitionism,’ said one report. She and I got on well, as we were both from colonial families who’d lived abroad: hers in Egypt, mine in India. One of our last joint escapades at the convent was organising a sumptuous midnight feast (wine, chicken, all the trimmings) which the nuns only learned about the following term, by which time I had left.
‘If they had expelled us, there wouldn’t have been a sixth form,’ she says.
This was the 1950s. Coxon was one of the few girls I knew who went on to university, and the only one who qualified as a doctor. She is a consultant physician but has always had an interest in neurology, particularly the neurology of violence. In a previous job, she visited Myra Hindley.
Her conversion did not alter what she wore each day; Islam only demands modesty. ‘I never intended to wear a hijab at work. For me religion is a personal thing. I didn’t feel I had to identify myself as being of a particular religion through my clothing, any more than having to dress in a certain way for my politics. But there was one thing. When I became a doctor, someone said to me, “Be careful what you wear – at the anguished moment in people’s lives, when you have to tell them terrible news, if you are wearing the latest frilly-spotted-trendy whatever, that is what they will remember, and they will loathe you for that.”
‘Because my job has its dark side, I dress in a beige way – but I like to think I don’t have a beige personality or a beige vocabulary.’ She would never wear a face covering. ‘But I found myself in Medina once at the midday prayer, and the sun was so hot on my pale redhead’s skin that I pulled my veil across. I suddenly realised these face coverings go back to protecting women’s faces from the scorching sun of the Middle East.’
Coxon buys everything online. ‘I can’t remember when I last went into a shop.’ Her favourite source is Peruvian Connection.
‘I have cardigans from them that go way, way back. Trousers
and sweaters I get from Pure Collection. My scarf is from White Company but I like buying scarves from the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the RA in London because they are a bit crazy. My deepest regret about ageing is high heels. I adored stilettos. The last time I wore them was for the first night of a James Bond movie. I have never been in such pain and I realised my love affair with them was over. I think women’s legs look wonderful in high heels.
‘Now I wear anything with a decent spongy sole. I found Carvela on line. Thank God for the internet. You type in ‘shoes for bad feet’ and someone else does the thinking for you.’
Ann Coxon lost the glorious red hair in her fifties when she developed breast cancer. ‘My hair fell out with the chemo and, when it regrew, it was soft and white. I decided not to dye it. But it is odd: the person who looks back at me in the mirror should have bright red, curly hair but instead has grey, straight hair.’
Like all Muslims, Coxon prays five times a day. She does this in her office. ‘My secretary is used to stepping over me,’ she says, grinning. Once a month, and every day in Ramadan, she prays in a mosque in south London, which she likes because it is ‘very poor and very pious’. There, she puts a black abaya over her clothes and covers her head. ‘I have a kind of knitted ski hood with a veil over it. I can get in and out of the whole outfit in about three nanoseconds.’