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Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me - Softcover

Boyd, Pattie; Junor, Penny

 
9780307407832: Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307407837 ISBN 13: 9780307407832
Verlag: Crown, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For the first time, rock music’s most famous muse tells her incredible story

“A charming, lively and seductive book . . . The appeal of Wonderful Tonight is as self-evident as the seemingly simple but brash opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’”—The New York Times Book Review

Pattie Boyd, former wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, finally breaks a forty-year silence and tells the story of how she found herself bound to two of the most addictive, promiscuous musical geniuses of the twentieth century and became the most legendary muse in the history of rock and roll. The woman who inspired Harrison’s song “Something” and Clapton’s anthem “Layla,” Pattie Boyd has written a book that is rich and raw, funny and heartbreaking—and totally honest.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PATTIE BOYD is an acclaimed photographer whose exhibition Through the Eyes of a Muse recently toured two continents. She lives in West Sussex, England.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1


One
Childhood in Kenya


My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach—strange for someone who turned into such a passionate foodie. In my late teens I became determined to improve the experience, even enjoy it, and today spinach is one of my favorite vegetables—but it has to be right: steamed, chopped, and mixed with double cream, white pepper, and nutmeg. Delicious. Raw in a salad, it’s even better. But at the age of two I couldn’t get the repellent dark green mess out of my mouth fast enough.


I was living in Scotland, at a house in West Lothian my grandparents had bought when I was a year old in 1945. We lived with them at that time, and my mother remembers the move from Somerset: taking me on a train—in an ordinary carriage, as she puts it—with all our belongings, and the embarrassment of having to feed me during the journey amid a group of soldiers. I was her first child, of six, and she was a young, nervous mother. Shortly after we arrived in Scotland my brother Colin was born. He is almost exactly two years younger than I am and I remember examining him when he was a baby and noticing that there was a small difference between us. He was a huge baby, and as soon as he could walk he followed me everywhere.


Another early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed. I am told I also tried to feed him with a petrol capsule—the sort used to fill lighters. It looked like a miniature baby’s bottle, so I pushed it into his mouth and the poor little thing had burns all over his lips. I don’t remember that episode but I do remember trying to kill him by burying him in the sandpit in the garden. Luckily my mother noticed in the nick of time and rescued him.


My parents were living at Howleigh House, near Taunton in Somerset, when I was born. My mother and her twin brother, John, had spent most of their childhood there. They had been born in India but sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, and in the holidays they stayed with an aunt at Howleigh House. Their father, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander E. Drysdale, DSO, MC, was in the Indian army, and Vivian, his wife, a rather exotic figure with a penchant for pink gin, visited England and the twins about twice a year. So sad, but Vivian had also been born in India and shipped home to be educated in England, so history was repeating itself.


I never knew my great-grandfather but he sounds splendid. His name was Alexander Stuart-Martin and he was also born near Lucknow, in India—in 1870. He fought in the Indian Mutiny and the British government rewarded him for his bravery with indigo and sugar plantations, which made him wealthy. He, too, was educated in England, as most colonials were, then became an engineer and built many of the bridges and railways in India. It was on a trip to England that he met and married the beautiful Elizabeth Sabin, who, unusually for those times, was a divorcée, having managed to escape from a terrifyingly brutal husband. They returned to India together, where she had two daughters, Vivian, my grandmother, and Frances, but there were complications with the second delivery and Elizabeth died soon after she had given birth. Alexander lived on—in some style. He drove around in a magnificent Bentley that he had had shipped out from England. For years it behaved beautifully in the heat and dust, but finally gave up the ghost. Undaunted, my great-grandfather hitched it up to a couple of oxen and continued to travel in the style to which he was accustomed.


The two daughters, Vivian and Frances, were sent to school in England, where they were looked after by relatives, returning to India once a year to visit their father. You could only travel by sea in those days and the journey took two weeks. On one of the voyages the young Vivian met Alexander Drysdale, my grandfather, on his way to join his regiment. Many years later they met again, at a tennis party in Lucknow, fell in love, married, and Vivian gave birth to twins: Diana Frances, my mother, and John, my uncle, who never married and has spent most of his life abroad.


The twins were well looked after at Howleigh, and there was no shortage of money. A cook, a scullery maid, and a pantry maid ran the domestic side of life, but the aunt was Scottish born and bred, so life was simple. She didn’t entertain much or lay on anything for the children, so Diana and John seldom saw other children during their stays. I can’t imagine how bereft they must have felt with their parents thousands of miles away, or how a mother could bear to see her children no more than two or three times a year, but I suppose in those days she would have had no choice. And, having suffered the same fate as a child, she probably thought there was nothing unusual about it.


I was born, weighing seven pounds, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1944; hence my name. My mother had been convinced she was having a boy and had thought of me as Michael for nine months, so as she had put no thought into girls’ names, I was called Patricia Anne. I don’t know whether it was the shock of discovering that I was not a Michael, or the inordinate length of time I took to be born, but she had a sort of breakdown afterward—I suppose you would call it postpartum depression today—and to begin with I was looked after by the now aged aunt, May, who had cared for Mummy, and by my grandmother, who was back from India. My grandfather had retired from the army, leaving India for good, and they planned to settle in Britain. They stayed initially in Somerset with Aunt May, but when she sold Howleigh House, they bought a house in Scotland and the whole family moved there.


Brigg House was beautiful, with extensive grounds and a walled vegetable garden, but the cold, damp West Lothian winters proved detrimental to my grandfather’s health, so in 1947 he sold it and moved to Kenya with my grandmother, leaving my parents, Colin, and me to fend for ourselves. We moved south and rented a house near Guildford, in Surrey, where my sister Jenny was born in November 1947, when I was three and a half. She wasn’t actually christened Jenny: my mother named her Helen Mary, to please a couple of aunts, but I had a favorite teddy at the time called Jenny and I insisted my new sister be called by the same name.


My parents married when they were young and inexperienced, and, like hundreds of other couples who married during the war, they knew next to nothing about each other when they walked up the aisle. My mother was seventeen when she met Jock Boyd at a dance in Somerset. He was twenty-three and, of course, dashing in his RAF uniform, with smart brass buttons and gold wings on the left shoulder. Also, he danced like a dream. He was tall and handsome with blond curly hair and cornflower-blue eyes; she was petite and beautiful, with luxuriant chestnut hair. They danced all night, and after just two more brief meetings Jock wrote to Diana and asked her to marry him. Her mother, my grandmother, who was a controlling sort of woman, encouraged her to say yes. I think she wanted to get my mother off her hands, and Jock, she had established, came from a good family. He had money, too, or so she had been told by his mother. All in all, he was the perfect catch. But once they were married it turned out that he had no money, and my mother, having been used to quite a grand lifestyle, found it difficult to manage.


Jock’s real name was Colin Ian Langdon Boyd. His parents had a farm in the Fowey Valley in Cornwall. His mother was a strange woman. By the time I knew her she and Jock’s...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307407837
ISBN 13 
9780307407832
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Three Rivers Press
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