I remember


Sarah, Duchess of York on her wedding day, her weight and pretending to Prince Andrew that she could cook


I remember… that when I was small, I had pale skin and a mass of


tight red curls. If you pulled one it would bounce straight back. My mother, a stunning dark-haired beauty, used to take me down to the village in my pram and joke with people that my father was really the postman. For much of my life I honestly believed that to be true.


…my mother calling me “fish face” because I walked around with my mouth open. When I look in the mirror as a 50-year-old woman her words still ring in my mind.


…the sound of the birds at dusk singing outside my window on the countless occasions I was sent to bed early for some misdemeanour. I was very naughty. My sister still has a pencil lead in her hand from the time I stabbed her, and I once set off fireworks in the school loo.


courtesy of sarah ferguson


…our housekeeper would let me have sugar and milk in my tea when I visited her at the end of our drive. That was a great treat as my mother wouldn’t let us have either. But Puffy our poodle was allowed to—he’d lap it out of a saucer. My childhood was often rather challenging.


…on Thursday afternoons the fish-and-chip van would arrive at the bottom of our drive. I’d get on my bike with its basket in the front and buy fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper, and take them home. It was my first taste of independence and I felt very grown-up.


…sitting in front of the mirror and Mum saying, “Stop looking at your- self, you’re so vain!” Many years later when my daughter Beatrice was three, she was sitting in front of a mirror in a hotel in New York and I heard myself say the same words to


jonathan banks


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