Davina McCall - Lessons I’ve Learned

Lessons
Ive Learned

DAVINA McCALL

This book is for Holly, Tilly and Chester

Contents

Dont judge anyone for the birth they want
(in fact, just dont judge anyone EVER)

Tell your kids they can ask you anything
(I know, scary!)

Lessons from childhood

Change your hair!

Dont let your past define you

Be as determined as a mosquito!

Dogs really are mans best friend

How to have fireworks when you kiss

Look after the people you love and keep them close

Friendship

Style it out

Give more than is expected

Start scaring yourself

My dad, my hero

H elloo...

Im me...

A work in progress.

And I really believe this to be true: I am learning every day. I learn from every situation. Every person I meet. Every place I go.

Sometimes I am unwilling at the time to see it... Maybe the lesson hurt or embarrassed me, and its only with hindsight I can feel how much it taught me. At other times I am desperate to learn. I may be stuck in some emotional rut or a parenting quandary or a self-esteem collapse and turn to friends, psychologists, hypnotists, 12-step fellowships, councillors ANYONE to please teach me something ANYTHING to take me away from how I am feeling!

Most often I learn that I have to sit with those feelings and the lesson comes after.

Anyhoo... you get the gist. I make the mistakes so you dont have to!

Writing this book was easy, like an outpouring. I didnt write it as a way of making myself feel good, but as a way to help other people feel good. Lots of people have helped me learn along the way, and I think good news or great tips should be shared!

This book is for everyone, including my own children and future grandchildren, so that they know where the lessons I talk about come from. I wish my granny had written a book like this for me, because shes taught me so many lessons in life that she learned from some wonderful people, but I will never know who they were or what the story was behind them. With my granny being so elderly now, I think about all the things she hasnt told me, and how sad I feel about that.

So in this book I get to tell you some of the life lessons Ive learned and also tell you a little bit about me...

BIIIIIIIIG HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS

oxoxoxoxoxo Me

My childhoods quite complicated, so just bear with.

My mum met my dad when they were both really young, in their early twenties, on a boat going from France to England. My dad had been on a business trip and they sat in the corridor all night talking and that was it. It was mad, passionate young love.

My mum, Flo, (her name was Florence but no one called her that) moved to London to be with Andrew, my dad, and got a job in Knightsbridge, at Yves Saint Laurent. She was from Paris and extraordinarily glamorous, with great style, and stick thin. She confessed to me later that she had been anorexic. That was the late sixties/early seventies, and everybody was unhealthily thin. Her and my dad made a pretty amazing couple. My dad was super-duper handsome, and still is in my book, but, sadly for their marriage, my mum was incapable of monogamy until much later in life when she met her fourth and final husband, Henry, in her fifties.

Mum was a total wild child. Shed already had a little girl when she was a teenager herself: that was Caroline, my big sister. Mum was sixteen when she gave birth but fifteen when she got pregnant, so when she met my dad shed lived a wild and crazy life already.

There was something really intoxicating about my mother. Everybody felt it, even my granny Pippy, Dads mum, who always had a soft spot for my mum despite the fact she treated Dad really badly and absolutely destroyed him emotionally. My mum was eclectic, naughty, impish, funny, irreverent and captivating. For example, a very early memory I have of her, I guess I was about five, is of her driving across a cricket pitch in a Rolls-Royce. I am in the back playing with the windows. Mums at the wheel. And shes drunk. The game is in full swing and the cricketers are up in arms until they realise that theres this very, very beautiful, smoking-hot French chick in the Rolls-Royce. They go from shouting to asking, Who is that...? Ive got no idea why we were driving across a cricket pitch, but its a vivid memory.

My earliest memory is also of my mum. When I was three, nearly four, my mum and a man I didnt know took me to my granny Pippys house.

Im going skiing, Nanou, she said, in English but with a strong French accent. My mum always called me Nanou, short for Anoushka, because that is what she had wanted to call me. We were in the boot room of Pippys house, the light was quite dim, and there was another man there who wasnt my dad. I remember the musty smell of the little room and the fact that it didnt seem weird that she was going.

Ill be back in two weeks, she said. I remember being dropped off in that little room, no loitering, no long goodbye, the kind of thing you do when you dont want your toddler to cry on the first day at school. You dont let them cling on to your leg for ever, you do a cut and run. I dont remember kissing. I dont remember tears. I just remember her going. The next thing I know my granny was shepherding me into the kitchen, there was the smell of cooking, and that was that. She was gone.

The next thing I remember is wondering when my mum was coming back. I was sure somebody had said she was coming back, but she still hadnt. I had no concept of time and even now I dont know how long it took for me to start worrying that I had overstayed my welcome. I didnt want to upset Pippy by asking when Mum was coming back, but I felt bad about still being there.

She didnt come back in two weeks. I never lived with her again.

At the time, no one explained anything to me. I had no idea I would be living permanently with my granny, it just happened. It was much later that I learned my mum had left my dad for another man, and that there was a court case to decide where I would live after my parents divorced. My dad won, which in those days was pretty unheard of. He was living in London, though, and couldnt have me because his job didnt pay him enough to get a nanny, but he felt very strongly that I should stay in England and not go to live with my mums parents in Paris. Mum had a pretty bad track record to be honest. She had a problem with drink and drugs and had already left her first daughter with her parents in Paris. So that, and the fact Id been brought up in the UK and didnt speak French, made the court feel it was right for me to stay with my paternal grandparents, Pippy and Mickey. In retrospect, my sister had a tough time growing up around our mum in Paris, so the court made the right decision. Being here in the UK was far and away the safest and most stable place for me to be. I wish I had been told at the time that my mum was not coming back, but that Pippy and my dad had fought to keep me in the UK and that they desperately wanted me.

My mum was so young when she left me at Pippys house that day, not even twenty-six. It must have been very painful to leave, at least thats how I perceive it now. In my teenage years, when everything was difficult, on the days I thought that the world was conspiring against me, I felt like my mum dumped me. I was angry.

Since Ive had children myself, Ive understood that sometimes you do things that you think are right at the time, but twenty years down the line your kids tell you it really messed them up! So Im a lot softer on my mum now than I was when I was younger. I dont think she found it easy leaving me. She didnt just say, Well, you have her. She fought for me in court and, after she lost the case, she probably thought she was doing the best thing for me, leaving with no fuss. I was very young, perhaps she hoped I wouldnt remember it, but of course youre going to remember that your own mother hasnt come back, and for a long time that was all I wanted. I wanted her to come back.