Being Davina - Nigel Goodall

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when they divorced in 1970.

      Davina Lucy Pascale McCall was born on 16 October 1967 in Wimbledon, Southwest London, and was the only child of a French-born mother, Florence, and an English father, Andrew. Florence – who already had a daughter, Caroline, from her first marriage – was also very glamorous. By all accounts, according to Davina (‘Div’ for short), she was ‘a wild sixties person who didn’t have it in her to look after me. She was very young when she had me and I don’t think she could cope with the responsibility of a child.’ So she fled from the Yves St Laurent boutique she managed in Knightsbridge and ended up living in an apartment located in the exclusive 8th arrondissement in Paris, near the Champs Elysées.

      What is curious, however, is how, if she couldn’t cope with looking after Davina, she coped with bringing up Caroline, who had arrived in the world five years before. Florence would have been just 18 years old then, and surely having a child so young would have been far more daunting than having one at 23. But then again it was the decade of rebellion: a decade in which free thinking, free love and free drugs were the buzzwords of a generation. The burgeoning counterculture scene of two years earlier was now in full bloom and the entire world, it seemed, felt the need to go to San Francisco and put flowers in their hair. Just six months before Davina was born, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the US Army to serve his national service as a protest against the war that continued to grind on in Vietnam, and, in the process, was stripped of his World Heavyweight Boxing Championship belt.

      More peacefully perhaps, Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in a secret ceremony in Las Vegas. But even that could not be regarded as completely without hysteria when you consider that at that time the marriage of a pop star – and in this instance the biggest pop star of all – would have brought certain death to a colourful career. Despite a run of less than mediocre movies, Elvis was still clearly a heartthrob. Of course, there was more at stake than just a career. What would the world have thought to discover that Priscilla was barely 14 when plucked from a US Air Force base in Germany to become Elvis’s child bride?

      Whatever it was that caused Davina’s mother to flee back to her native France, it would now be up to her father Andrew (who still calls her ‘Divvy Poohs Pops’ – and who Davina, who already had her mother’s Gallic good looks, describes as ‘the love of her life’) to decide what would be best for her. Realising he would probably not cope that well with the emotional demands of bringing up a daughter on his own while trying to hold down his job as a sales rep for fashion house Jaeger, he thought a good option would be for Davina to live with his parents in Bramley, Surrey. At least then she would have some kind of stability in her life and, if nothing else, he could see her at weekends. But Sundays, Davina recalls, ‘were full of dread because he had to leave’.

      For Davina, it was perfect. She was, after all, very gung-ho, a bit of a tomboy, always building houses out of tree stumps, riding a lot and, overall, was very outdoorsy. In fact, it was because she was so outdoorsy that she would imagine she was the sixth member of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, the classic series of 21 children’s adventures, published over 20 years from 1943. Even now, it is one of the most popular series of children’s books in England and America, still selling over 2 million copies a year. She remembers, ‘I’d go out with a quiver and arrows I’d made out of kitchen rolls and sticks, sit on the gate and wait for them to come and take me on an adventure.’

      Interestingly enough, to this day the stories remain the favourite among the most enjoyed books that adults read as children. And from that point of view it is not difficult to understand why they would have been one of Davina’s favourites as well. Like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Blyton’s Famous Five was about family loyalties, bonding and friendship, something Davina may have thought was perhaps missing from her own early upbringing. And what is the point of reading children’s fiction if not to make the unbelievable believable?

      Although not in a book and still a few years away, Davina would soon have other favourites, such as television’s popular sci-fi series Star Trek, the movie versions of which she still watches every Christmas. She also shared an obsession with all British and American girlhood: Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser. In fact, so obsessed was she with Glaser that she would never miss a single episode. But perhaps the strangest crush she confesses she had was on comedian Freddie Starr. ‘It started when I was young, but I did fancy Freddie. I used to tell everyone I was going to marry either my dad or Freddie. I thought he was the funniest person ever. He used to do this thing where he walked into the microphone and hit his head. I thought it was absolutely hilarious.’

      For the time being, though, and before falling for those who frequented our small screens, despite her parents going their separate ways when Davina was still an infant, ‘it was like all my Christmases had come at once,’ she raves. ‘I was spoiled rotten. I had lovely granny food made for me all the time; she’d bake cakes and delicious treats. I still saw Mum in the holidays. Even though I missed her at first, I just got on with it, really.

      ‘When you’re that age and your life changes you don’t really understand what’s going on. All I know is that I had a lot of love. I had my grandparents spoiling me during the week, I saw my dad at weekends, and then jetted off to stay with Mum during the holidays.’ At first, she says, ‘my mum was a very exciting woman to be around, an electric personality. There was always a drama happening but she was always funny. She’d do the really embarrassing thing that you would never dare to do. I used to watch Absolutely Fabulous and I sometimes used to think, “Gosh, that’s like me – I’m Saffy and my mum’s Edina.” Not the same kind of fashion preciousness, but that kind of relationship where she made me more square because I was constantly trying to look after my mum and keep her under control.’

      But, if you asked her today how embarrassing her mother was, she would probably tell you, ‘Well, I’m thinking of an electric-blue floor-length fake fur that made her look like Cruella De Vil, which she’d waft around in. And she’d go to a café and have a double Ricard before she went to work, and she’d be flirting with somebody, you know, inappropriate, and you’d be thinking, “Oh my God!” and she’d do citizen’s arrests when someone pinched her bottom. Just mad stuff, but funny and fantastic… if you’re not the daughter. My friends would say, “Oh my God, she’s so cool.” But I didn’t tell people a lot of the stuff that happened in France and I especially didn’t tell my English family because I didn’t want to upset them, or for them to stop me going over there because I loved my mother.

      ‘It was like having three families. For a while, I was the envy of all my friends. The main thing was I was loved. However, I’m sure I was also a bit confused by the unsettling aspects of living with three different sets of people. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I could put it into perspective. I actually realised what it was about, that I was very lucky to have had so much love. It’s a lot worse for other children whose parents split up – I was treated like a goddess. Before then, though, I’d gone a bit wild, not surprisingly.’

      In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that ‘my granny and I were talking about memories from childhood and I was remembering how I used to sit at the feet of my great-granny – who also lived with us – and how I would pinch the skin at the top of her hand and watch how long it would take to go back down again; and how she had these little things in her purse – like a pixie in a black cap – which she’d let me play with. And a couple of days later, my granny had gone through the house and found the little pixie and sent it to me in the post, and now I have it in my purse.

      ‘That was very emotional for me… a memory from 35 years ago and she still had it, and now I’ve got it. And she’s just done the most fantastic book for me, called The Grandparents Book, with all our family’s stories and the treats she was allowed when she was a little girl. And our family tree from way, way before me, and it’s these things that are really important to me, and will be even more so when she goes.’

      With so much love, isn’t it surprising that, by the time she was 15, Davina was to struggle with the onslaught of anorexia nervosa? In 1994, it was one of the eating disorders afflicting 8 million sufferers in the United States, and in Britain at least 60,000 people were known

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