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Lady Annabel Goldsmith: 'Life would have been very different if my mother had lived'
I could never have imagined the path my life was to take. I was a gawky, painfully shy little girl and it made me noisy and attention-seeking, particularly at school, which I loathed.
My parents were wonderful; more hands-on than many of their generation, and I was close to both of them. With no television, I read voraciously at Wynyard Park, our family home in Co Durham, and I always knew I would write.
But the idea of not one marriage but two – and six children [Rupert, Robin and India Jane with first husband Mark Birley; Jemima, Zac and Ben with second husband James Goldsmith] – would never have entered my mind.
I believe life would have been very different if my mother had lived. She was very beautiful but sadly developed mouth cancer in her early 40s. She died aged 47, when I was 17.
Despite being fun, my mother was conventional and would never have allowed me to marry Mark, who was considered rather wild. I met him when my father, sick of seeing me loafing around, told me to get a job. I went for an interview with Frank Owen, editor of the Daily Mail. To my amazement he offered me a position.
But fate was to turn me in another direction, when into my life walked Mark. I had thought he was way out of my range. He was older, very sophisticated and was always seen with the prettiest girls. My father, who was drinking pretty heavily (he had adored my mother, and would drink himself to death within a few years of her dying), went mad and forbade me to see him. Had he not been so antagonistic towards Mark, we might well never have married.
Mark was penniless. I was 19 and had no hope of any money until I was 21, so we lived at the top of my mother-in-law’s house in a small flat. Life improved when I became pregnant, at 21, and we moved into our own house. It was also small – but having grown up in a large house, small was all I wanted.
This remained the case until I married Jimmy Goldsmith [in 1978; she and Birley having divorced in 1975], who wanted the exact opposite.
I didn’t start writing the first of my three books until I was 69, and my younger self would wish I had made more of a career of it. I’m sure she’d see my life as more of a work of fiction than reality: after my conventional upbringing I’d have been astonished at the lack of it in my adult life.