Will Self

I've never... At three?

Yeah.

I've never seriously doubted my vocation, and certainly by the time I was 11 or 12, it was insupportable.

I went to what we would call in those days a dame's school, run by Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis.

And just to give you a portrait of how brilliant my mother was, these two old dames, who were perfectly all right old ladies who ran a school for about 80 kids in Golders Green, and we all had little uniforms, Golders Hill School.

At the end, when you left age seven...

You were meant to go up to them both.

They were standing on the steps.

The house is still there.

And you would shake their hands and say, thank you very much, Miss Davis, and thank you very much, Miss Fitzgerald.

I said to Mum, seven, I said, I hate Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis.

They are authority figures I have no confidence in.

So Mum said, fine.

I'll have the car waiting at the bottom of the steps, gunning the engine.

I'll have my foot on the accelerator.

When it becomes your turn, say whatever you want.

Piss off, Miss Davis and Miss Fitzgerald.

And then you can run down the stairs and leap in the car and I'll drive away.

oh wonderful well she was a great woman yeah she was a great anarchist she had a real sense of how to flip something in an unexpected way so you would suddenly see that it was totally artificial she would say you'd be with her when in childhood and a beautiful young woman would walk past trailing clouds of sort of

O'Daniel and kind of you know just absolutely a picture and mum would snarl out of the corner of her mouth she thinks she shits chocolate ice cream right I get you get the picture I get the picture what I'm wanting to know now is why you have struggled with this relationship until quite recently as as she grew older I'm a great believer in a book by Ernest Becker called the denial of death