Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 14

Most of Issie’s contemporaries were given a special present of some value for their eighteenth birthday – a pen, a piece of jewellery or maybe even a car.

Evelyn gave Issie a Bible. It was inscribed, ‘Follow in thy father’s footsteps’, and accompanied by a birthday card telling her she was ‘Off the books’.

It was a joke, but a bad one at Issie’s expense. Evelyn did, of course, continue to pay for certain expenses for his daughter, but he was letting her know in typically brutal fashion that she was now financially responsible for herself. Isabella’s early life had been very privileged, with cooks and staff to look after her things at home, and for Issie this was financial abandonment by the man she loved. She always remembered that thoughtless birthday card – it fed her demon of financial insecurity.

But now that she was 18, her arguments with Rona cooled somewhat, especially when she managed to persuade her father to lend her the farm Ford Fiesta. Despite the fact that the farm car ‘had straw sticking out of it’, she loved being able to drive herself around the country as she pleased. As she had been driving the car on the farm roads for years, she was a good driver and never had any accidents.

Even as a teenager Issie was the life and soul of any party, and she loved parties, particularly if they were grand and glamorous ones. Because she was so funny and lively she swiftly became much in demand on the stately home circuit even though, or perhaps because, her behaviour was so outrageous. Hugh St Clair, whose father was a Gloucestershire MP, remembers Issie dancing ‘semi-topless, howling with laughter in front of my stuffy father at Gloucestershire teenage parties’.

Because of Issie’s precociousness, she was often invited to the same parties as Evelyn and Rona, and, wittingly or not, Issie often embarrassed them at these events. At the famous Sitwell home of Renishaw, at a party for Alex Sitwell, which they all attended, Issie was thrown naked into the swimming pool. Issie told me that Evelyn and Rona ignored the scene. I understood by the way she told me the story that she was actually trying hard to get their attention and love by her provocations.

One of Isabella’s party pieces involved performing ‘feats of extraordinary strength’. Issie was petite – just 5′2½″ – and her strength astonished unsuspecting onlookers. When she stayed with her Heathfield friend Lady Sophia Pelham at Brocklesby Park, she carried her father, the 18-stone Lord Yarborough, twice around the long dining-room table. She particularly enjoyed arm-wrestling much bigger people, as well as humiliating fitness fanatics who, unlike her, worked out. Much later in Paris, in the late 1990s, at an exhibition of ‘Sex and the British’ at Thadeus Ropac’s gallery, I watched with amusement as serried ranks of tough, tattooed YBAs lined up to arm wrestle Issie – and were easily beaten by her one after the other.

Although the debutante season was in the process of becoming an anachronism, it still existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But, to Issie’s great disappointment, there was no suggestion by Evelyn and Rona of Issie becoming a deb, still less of her officially ‘coming out’ in society with a big party. Needless to say, Rona made quite sure that her stepsisters, by contrast, were given lavish coming-of-age parties in the castle at Doddington.