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Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.
“You’re the Bridget Jones of the West Village, darling,” my friend declared. She giggled as I wept my way through another tale of romantic woe over a cosmopolitan at four in the morning in an animal-print booth at Bungalow 8. It was the late 1990s, I had been in New York for a couple of years working for Vogue, and the cosmos were so strong they made me wobble like blancmange, the men so alien they had virtually the same effect. I wasn’t pleased about the Bridget Jones reference because my friend’s pronouncement was true: My love life was like a romantic comedy minus the happy ending. My stories of boyfriends had all my friends screaming with laughter, but I was left in tears. Lucky Bridget, I would think to myself: She’d only had to deal with one Daniel Cleaver before she met her Mr. Darcy. I seemed to exclusively date Daniel Cleavers, plural, with no sign of a Darcy type anywhere on the horizon.
Why, I wondered when romantic disappointment hit (which in my 20s was often), had I been caught out again and always in the same manner? Why did I end up with boyfriends who, I tended to discover long after the event, were lying to me? The usual scenario was that we seemed to break up over nothing (things that counted as nothing were, for example, work pressures or nonalignment of vacation plans) for me only to find out weeks or months later that the boyfriend had been involved with someone else long before the relationship ended. Every time I was shocked.
My New York girlfriends (amateur therapists all) tended to explain my romantic disasters to me by concluding that I simply picked the same kind of unfaithful boyfriend each time. But why would I? I didn’t want an unfaithful boyfriend—in fact I was allergic to the idea of men who cheated. We would spend hours analyzing and dissecting men, somehow thinking that the more we talked about men, the more likely we were to fathom them. We read silly self-help books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which led us to absurd simplistic deduction. Inevitably more Daniel Cleavers followed, and each time I was left in a sort of stunned puzzlement at the way men behaved toward me. There were still no answers, and I started to think that not only did I not understand men, I did not understand myself.
Turns out I was right about that last part, but it wasn’t until years later that it made sense. I was talking to a very smart friend, still wondering out loud about those peculiar boyfriends I’d had in my 20s and why I never spotted a liar.
“Plum, it’s so obvious,” the smart friend said with a look. “It’s because you weren’t really brought up by your parents. You were brought up by your grandmother.”
It was a light-bulb moment for me. Let me rewind and explain. When I was about eight years old (late 1970s), my maternal grandfather, Thin Grandpa, died. I was devastated: He loved horses, as I did; had been a daring steeplechaser, among other things; and I worshipped him. I didn’t stop crying for weeks, it seemed. He was about 15 years older than my maternal grandmother, Madeleine Goad, which left her a widow in her mid-50s, still living in the large farmhouse in the bucolic Kent countryside where she had raised her four children in the 1940s and ’50s. She had done this with the aid of one Winifred Philpot, who had arrived in the early ’40s, aged 14, initially to work as a lady’s maid. Winnie’s fiancé was killed in the war, and she had remained with the family ever since, becoming the nanny to the four children, one of whom was my mother, Valerie. It seemed obvious after Thin Grandpa died that my parents and their six children (yes, six) should move in.
Moving from London to Granny’s house was a dream, and I took to country life. My three brothers and two sisters and I roamed the meadows and hills and attended the village school, which we could walk to in summer. It was Granny who taught us to ride and took us with her on her rounds to feed the chickens and milk the Jersey cow. (As a ration-weary war wife, Granny had become self-sufficient, and even after the war ended, she was never without a cow.) Winnie cooked us huge teas and baked endless cakes that we wolfed down every day after school.
While my parents were wild and fashionable (my mother was a designer, my father an art dealer), Granny and Winnie were cozy and always around and, frankly, took over the child-rearing to a large degree. Life revolved around games of Monopoly or Scrabble, summer holidays in Devonshire (with Granny and Winnie, of course), sewing, gardening, and a menu of exclusively English literature: Books like The Railway Children, The Secret Garden, and Ballet Shoes got me interested in reading, and I was soon plundering Granny’s bookshelf and borrowing her copies of Rebecca, The Pursuit of Love, Pride and Prejudice, and Brideshead Revisited. I grew up thinking that the old-school British value system—honestly, loyalty, hard work—was universal. If a man were a rake, he’d be found out and hung out to dry—after all, that was what happened in all of Jane Austen’s novels. I had never even heard of the books my peers in America were digesting—Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City—which were analyzing the cutthroat world of the 1980s in a new way. The only movie I remember seeing as a teenager was Grease, and since we weren’t allowed a VCR and lived miles from a cinema, most modern film and television didn’t reach us either. When my parents decided, in the mid-’80s, to install a dishwasher, Granny insisted a machine could never wash up as well as a person. She refused until the end of her days to have one in her own kitchen at the other end of the house.
Looking back on it all now, I can see that I entered the world of grown-ups barely fit for purpose, emotionally speaking. I was less an adult, more a wannabe Nancy Mitford heroine, a wide-eyed innocent who saw the world as an extension of Granny’s farm, a delightful universe in which to skip around and pick daisies, dream and eventually be rescued by a Mr. Darcy.
The Daniel Cleavers, no doubt, could see me coming. I had no idea that men with a dark side might single me out as easy pickings and went into relationships completely oblivious to reality. I had a 1940s attitude to life and love. The problem was it was the 1990s. Do I wish things had been different? Do I wish I had been more modern, more educated about love? Would I have been better off had I had a more cynical, even suspicious, attitude toward the opposite sex? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it would have been nice to avoid the heartbreaks. On the other, I wouldn’t have swapped my childhood on that farm for anything. It was a blissful, innocent time, the sort of upbringing every parent dreams about for their kids. If it led to heartache, that was the price I paid, but it gave me so much: As an English girl in New York, with no negative preconceptions about people, an open heart, and that naive belief that everyone was good, I was fearless and open to everything. I was that joyful, bubbly girl who bounced into every room full of happiness, and it was intoxicating for others. I met everyone I could, fell in love with some cads, but enjoyed every second of my 20s.
And now years later, despite many ups and downs of the heart, I remain an optimist. I’m still convinced that there is good in everyone, and I like that I think that. The difference is that now I know where to look, and if there is a hint, and I mean even a tiny hint, of someone not being nice, I ruthlessly cull them from my inner circle. That’s new, and in my 20s I would never have dreamed I would have to think like that. But as Bridget Jones might have put it: Note to self—when a grown-up, be a grown-up.
Plum Sykes is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming Wives Like Us.
