Grace Read online

  We were open from May to October but the hotel was guaranteed to be one hundred percent full only during the relatively sunny month of August, the time of the school summer holidays. Many vacationing families from the not too distant towns of Liverpool and Manchester made the effort to come and stay with us because, although it might have been easier for them to reach the more accessibly popular holiday spots of North Wales, our charming beach and village were that much more individual. At other times we were mostly empty or visited by parents who had come to join their sons for special events at the school.

  Each year tumultuous clouds and fierce equinox gales announced the end of summer. A mad scramble then ensued to rescue all the little wooden sailing boats belonging to the locals that bobbed about in the bay. Llewellyn, the lobster fisherman, was in charge of having them hauled out of the sea and beached beneath the protective seawall. All winter long, while we were closed, thick mists enveloped us and rough seas pounded our shoreline. The entire place became desolate. On foggy nights you could hear the sad moan of a foghorn coming from the nearby lighthouse. It hardly ever snowed, but it rained most of the time: a constant drizzle that made the atmosphere incredibly damp, the kind of dampness that gets into your bones. So damp that, as a child, I swear I used to ache all over from rheumatism.

  In the afternoons, I took long walks along the cliffs with Chuffy, my mother’s Yorkshire terrier, and Mackie, my sister’s Scottie. Stormy waves foamed and crashed over the gray rocks along the seafront, and if you missed your timing, you were liable to come in for a complete drenching whenever you dashed between them.

  Throughout the endless weeks of winter, the hotel was so deserted it wasn’t worth the bother of switching on the lights. My sister and I would play ghosts. Wrapped in white sheets, we hid along the dark, empty corridors, each containing many mysterious, shadowy doorways from which you could jump out and say, “Boo!” We would wait and wait, the silence broken only by the tick-tock, tick-tock, of our big grandfather clock. But in the end, I couldn’t stand the gloom, the suspense of waiting, the sinister ticking. It was too scary, so I usually fled to the warmth and comfort of the fireside.

  I was born on the twentieth of April 1941 in the early part of World War II, the same year the Nazis engulfed Yugoslavia and Greece. I was christened Pamela Rosalind Grace Coddington. My elder sister Rosemary, or Rosie for short, was the one who chose Pamela as my registered first name, which then became abbreviated to Pam by most people we knew.

  Marion, my maternal grandmother, was a Canadian opera singer who had fallen in love with my grandfather while visiting Wales on a singing tour. He followed her back to Canada, where they married and where my mother and her brother and sister were born. For a while they lived on Vancouver Island, which was heavily wooded and filled with bears. Then they moved back permanently to Anglesey, where my grandmother grew more and more morose and wrote terribly sad poetry. I’m told my grandfather was somewhat extreme when it came to what he perceived as correct behavior. Apparently, he once locked my grandmother in the downstairs bathroom—which he had designated for gentlemen only—for an entire day when she had used it in an emergency.

  Janie, my mother, inherited this strict, no-nonsense Victorian attitude and believed that children should be seen and not heard. She demanded absolute obedience but never lost her temper or raised her voice. It was a given that I would make my bed and tidy my room, and that I had my chores to fulfill. She was the strong, stoic one who held our family together. Photographs of her from the 1920s show a sleek and prosperous-looking woman. She drew and painted rather well in watercolors and played the piano and the Spanish guitar. Welsh—although she preferred to think of herself as English—she could trace the family lineage back to the Black Prince. (In fact, we weren’t encouraged to think of ourselves as Welsh at all; more as foreigners, émigrés from Derbyshire.)

  My father William, or Willie, was impeccably English: introverted, preoccupied, and oh so very reserved that you would have to draw the words out of him, as you have to with me. I remember him sitting in the hotel office for hours and hours, but I don’t remember him actually doing anything. There always seemed such an air of sadness about him.

  He dabbled in mechanics. His hobby was making toy boats and airplanes that he would build in the hallway outside our bedroom, using a small lathe to fashion the tiny engines. He gave me my third Christian name, Grace, in remembrance of his mother. When I eventually left home at eighteen, an old friend in London called Panchitta—who was, to me, very glamorous because she studied acting—told me she considered my third name far more useful than my first in order to succeed in the big city. “I think Grace sounds very good for a model,” she enthused. “Grace Coddington. Pretty impressive.”

  I was a solitary and sickly child, suffering from frequent bouts of bronchitis and the croup. I was stricken so often that my doctor thought I might have tuberculosis. Because of this, I missed at least half of each term in every school year. My parents even tried building me up in those pre-vitamin days by feeding me glasses of Guinness and a dark, treacly substance called malt extract that was totally delicious. I was pale, freckly, and allergic to any significant amount of sunshine. Luckily, whatever sun we had during my youth in Wales was filtered through heavy gray clouds. Later, when I was in my twenties, if I had too much exposure, my face would swell up. But I did love the outdoors. And right through to my teens I was always more outside than in, sailing, climbing, and clambering over the rugged slopes of the nearby mountains of Snowdonia, or wandering along our island’s country lanes, their hedgerows dotted with wildflowers.

  Our family lived in what was known as “the annex”—the self-contained part of the building just beyond the hotel kitchen. We had our own private front door, a pretty clematis-covered porch, and a garden filled with roses and hydrangeas that was my mother’s pride and joy. In the back we grew vegetables and kept geese, ducks, and chickens.

  The annex was our own enclosed world within a world. It was furnished in a similar style and in the same taste as the rest of the hotel, but everything was on a much smaller, more personal scale. The paintings and tapestries on the walls, for instance, were all my mother’s work. It was also extremely cluttered, because she could rarely bring herself to throw out so much as an empty jam jar. And so the clutter grew, to the point that, despite its getting piled into cupboards or hidden out of sight behind curtains, I was too embarrassed to invite any school friends back home.

  It wasn’t until much later that I was stunned to discover our little Tre-Arddur Bay Hotel never actually belonged to us but to my mother’s brother, Uncle Ted, a bluff military man who inherited this and many other neighboring properties from my grandfather. And it was thanks to him that we were living there at all. In true Victorian fashion, every property belonging to my mother’s family—and there was a considerable amount—had been passed down to him as a male, despite his being the youngest child. Nothing whatsoever went through the female line, which in this case consisted of my mother and her sister, Auntie May.

  Uncle Ted’s son, my cousin Michael, stood to inherit the estate. A year older than me and an easygoing boy with a great smile, Michael and I were inseparable for a time as children. Then the family was posted to Malaysia for several years. On their return, Michael resumed his role of protective big brother. We sailed together, and when he graduated from bicycle to motorbike, I would hop on the back to ride about with him. We even vowed we would wed each other if, by the time we were fifty, we were not otherwise taken.

  Great-grandmother Sarah Williams, 1899

  Grandmother Grace Coddington, 1897

  My father, William, with Grandmother Grace Coddington, Leslie (with Jack, the dog), Robert, and Grandfather Reginald Coddington, at home at Bennetston Hall, Derbyshire, England, 1912

  Auntie May, Grandmother Marion Williams, my mother, and Uncle Ted, about 1911

  My mother and father’s wedding, 1934

  My home: Tre-Arddur Bay Hotel, Angles
ey, North Wales, 1964

  My father, sister Rosemary, mother, and me in the garden in front of our Wendy house, Tre-Arddur Bay, 1941

  With my sister, Rosemary, in my mother’s knitting, beside the hydrangeas, Tre-Arddur Bay, 1945

  About to go sailing in full-on Audrey Hepburn chic, and probably in love, Tre-Arddur Bay, 1955

  In a modeling mood at home, wearing an A-line dress, Tre-Arddur Bay, 1954

  Rosie looking glamorous, just prior to her engagement, Tre-Arddur Bay, 1955

  During the war, it was generally assumed that if the Germans tried to invade Britain, they would set off from Ireland and disembark on some part of our unassuming little Welsh beach. And indeed, in the year I was born the German Luftwaffe bombed Belfast, just across the sea from us, in the biggest air raid outside the London Blitz. So the army commandeered our hotel, closing it down but allowing us to stay on, even though we were left with no real means of earning a living.

  The soldiers installed gun towers all along the coast, on headlands, and over the hills, while the area in front of the beach became a parking space reserved for army tanks. Meanwhile, every evening, as a wartime ritual, we dimmed the lights and drew thick blackout curtains across our windows to avoid detection by enemy aircraft.

  I was about three years old when an entire troop of Americans arrived at the hotel to join the squaddies already quartered there. These GIs were barracked in temporary huts they built out front, right across the hotel grounds. They were friendly and kind to my sister and me, showering us with sweets in a time of scarcity and ration books, and helping us back onto our push bikes whenever we fell off—because we did ride fast, two daredevil young sisters racing up and down the hotel driveway, now heavily pitted with potholes thanks to the coming and going of army trucks.

  In 1945, when the war ended and the soldiers packed up for home, they left the place in the most god-awful mess. They really trashed it. Floors were destroyed, mirrors broken, walls pitted with holes. For the longest time, my parents tried to get the army to reimburse us. And finally, they did—at prewar prices, a fraction of what the repairs would actually cost.

  As peacetime settled in, we fixed up the hotel in a simple, affordable way and opened once again for business. Our village then carried on much the same as before. We still bought our newspapers at the general store. I continued to regularly put my pocket money in the post office savings bank run by Robin the Post, where I also stocked up on favorite sweets such as mint humbugs, dolly mixtures, and sherbet fizz. Our general provisions still came from Miss Jones’s shop, which was as cramped and dark as ever, and filled with everything from sticking plasters to eggs, jam, and flypaper. Miss Jones was still so remarkably tiny that she stood on a teetering series of boxes behind the counter to serve us.

  Everything would, I hoped, be as tranquil and cozy as it once was. But it did occur to me that, although we were quite affluent before—my sister kept a pony, my mother had lots of beautiful jewelry, and my father drove an amazingly luxurious French saloon car called a Delage (banished to the garage throughout the war because of petrol rationing)—we now seemed fairly poor. For instance, we previously owned a small home movie camera, I would imagine not a cheap item in those days, and I remember my sister’s childhood being recorded on grainy film. Mine wasn’t. I can only think it was sold to help pay for a few of the more urgent renovations or debts.

  Following my mother’s difficult second pregnancy—both Rosie and I were delivered by cesarean section—the doctor told her that she mustn’t have any more children. There was no real contraception at that time, so my father removed himself from their bedroom. They were already sleeping in separate beds by then, anyway. My sister and I shared a bedroom because I was terrified of being alone in the dark (and still am). However, Rosie was grown up enough at this point to merit her own room, so my father moved in with me instead.

  Abstinence quietly drove my parents further apart, but I didn’t notice that at the time. I was just happy to have my father to myself every evening. At night he would tickle my arm and tell me stories until I fell asleep. It’s strange how little I remember of him, except that I really adored him. As the years passed he became an increasingly melancholy figure. In wintertime he would sit for hours in front of the small electric fire in our room. He developed a terrible, wracking cough brought on by the packets of unfiltered Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes he smoked continuously. By now he had taken to visiting the betting shops, where he lost considerable sums on the horses. He would then pawn all the jewelry he had given my mother, hoping to recover it the following week if ever he enjoyed a big win.

  One early-autumn afternoon when I was eleven years old, I went into the bathroom and found my father collapsed on the floor, not quite unconscious but certainly delirious. I rushed off to fetch my mother and watched as he was immediately taken away to hospital. They did test after test but just four months later—on New Year’s Day, 1953—he died of lung cancer.

  When he first came out of hospital, my father told me they had no idea what was wrong. At this stage I think they were keeping the truth from him. That my mother knew, I was sure. She and I switched rooms so that she could better care for him. Over the months, he grew weaker and weaker, thinner and thinner, and was unable to make himself understood. My mother fed him little measures of whiskey to help him gather his strength. During the last few weeks of his life, she finally told me that his condition was not going to improve.

  My auntie May, who had been living with us for some time, was the one who came to tell my sister, Rosie, and me that our father had died. Rosie rushed into his bedroom, while I remained in the corridor outside. My mother was standing at the bedside in tears. The instant she realized he was gone, my sister tried to shake my father back into life. She was devastated and hysterical. I witnessed all this, my mother trying to calm her screams, my aunt struggling to get my sister out the door.

  I never entered the room again. It remained empty after that. Only rarely would I approach it in future years, nervously willing myself to push a toe across the unlit threshold. But I always ran off again, my heart pounding in fear of the unknown.

  I did not attend the funeral. That was my mother’s decision; she said I was too young. On the day of the burial, I wandered around the empty fields behind our hotel, grieving, not understanding what death was all about, feeling inconsolable loss yet wanting to be part of what was going on. I remained on my own until all the friends and relations returned for their postfuneral tea and cake.

  My father was the first to be buried in the family plot of the churchyard next door to the convent I attended all through my teens. There was enough room for him, my mother, my sister, and me. But then my aunt died and took the place that had been reserved for me. In retrospect, that’s fine. I plan to be cremated anyway.

  From the time I began to read, children’s comics transported me to cheerier places. My mother kept books, but I rarely looked at them, much preferring the traditional British weeklies such as Beano and Dandy, and a glossy new one called Girl, which was, naturally enough, much more girly than the rest and remained a firm favorite of mine until I graduated to fashion magazines like Vogue.

  When I was very young, my sister used to read me all the children’s classics like Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. Years later, I would use Lewis Carroll’s great narrative to inspire one of my favorite fashion shoots. But the stories I really loved were about Orlando the Marmalade Cat. These were a series of beautiful picture books by Kathleen Hale about Orlando and his wife, Grace, who had three kittens, Pansy, Blanche, and Tinkle. Seeing a story visually rather than in words was what I was responding to.

  Most of the people who stayed at our hotel were families that returned year after year. And then there was Mr. Wedge. I nicknamed him the Shrimp Man because he liked to take me shrimping. He was a regular hotel guest, very proper, smoked a pipe, and could have been a banker. I recall his suit trousers being rolled up to his calves and his wearing
a waistcoat as we paddled about the shallows with our nets. He was considerably older than I, possibly in his late thirties or forties. I was barely thirteen at the time and no doubt thought of him being as unbelievably ancient as Santa Claus. One day he came to the house, confessed to my mother that he was madly in love with me, and said he would like to wait until I grew up and then marry me. My mother was horrified. She completely flipped and then threw him out.

  We still didn’t have a television, but once a year, when we went to stay with my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Cheshire, we rode their pony and were given permission to watch their TV. But it was the movies that fascinated me the most. Once a week from my early teens, I was allowed to visit the local cinema for the matinee performance. So every Saturday, after making the beds, washing the dishes, and finishing the remainder of my chores, I was off, walking the mile along the seafront to the bus stop by myself, darting to avoid the stinging sea spray. Then I would take the country bus to Holyhead, passing through a no-man’s-land of derelict parking lots to get there.

  The cinema was a crumbling old fleapit, a small-town cliché of a picture palace complete with worn plush velvet seats and a young girl selling ice cream in the interval. Think of The Last Picture Show, only even more shabby. I would settle into one of the larger, more comfortable double seats in the back row—a place where the boys usually sat and smooched with their girlfriends during the evening show—and there in the darkness I would completely give myself up to the dream world of celluloid.