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03.07.21

M AGA ZINE OF THE Y EA R

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S T S I T N E I C T HE S N I A T I R B D WHO SAVE

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03.07.21 18

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5 Caitlin Moran I’m not the same person I was nine months ago.

7 What I’ve learnt Olympic swimmer Adam Peaty on Tokyo – and his childhood fear of water. 9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid Please don’t give me presents. 10 Anita Rani The TV presenter on racism and defying expectations. 18 Me and my dyslexia Labour MP Peter Kyle has the reading ability of an eight-year-old. Now he’s the shadow schools minister. 24 Cover story The Oxford vaccine heroes Scientists Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green led the team that developed the Covid vaccine in scarcely 18 months.

They tell Tom Whipple how they did it. 29 Eat! Summer baking with our experts, Nadiya Hussain and Rahul Mandal. 36 Cult survivor Bexy Cameron on life in the secretive Children of God community. 40 Does my paunch look big in this? Talking about body hang-ups is one of the last masculine taboos.

47 Men’s Shop! Stylish swim shorts to take you from beach to bar. 49 Home! The best hot tubs and parasols for your garden.

51 Shop! Summer totes and basket bags. 52 Giles Coren reviews Thomas by Tom Simmons, Cardiff. 58 Beta male: Robert Crampton I had forgotten just how tricky socialising can be.

ON THE COVER: CATHERINE GREEN (LEFT) AND SARAH GILBERT PHOTOGRAPHED BY TOM JACKSON

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IKOHS, £35 A retro-style desk fan in pistachio. Comes in ten cool shades (ikohs.com)

DYSON, £299.99 The high-tech Cool Me fan is also an air purifier (dyson.co.uk)

JOHN LEWIS, £45 A modern oscillating fan with three speed settings (johnlewis.com)

CHOSEN BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

MARK HARRISON, ROMAS FOORD, DAN KENNEDY

FIVE COOL DESKTOP FANS

EDITOR NICOLA JEAL DEPUTY EDITOR LOUISE FRANCE ART DIRECTOR CHRIS HITCHCOCK ASSOCIATE EDITOR JANE MULKERRINS ASSISTANT EDITOR TONY TURNBULL FEATURES EDITOR MONIQUE RIVALLAND CHIEF SUB-EDITOR AMANDA LINFOOT DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR JO PLENT DEPUTY CHIEF SUB-EDITOR CHRIS RILEY PICTURE EDITOR ANNA BASSETT DEPUTY PICTURE EDITOR LUCY DALEY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRIDGET HARRISON EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GEORGINA ROBERTS

The Times Magazine 3

CAITLIN MORAN I’ve changed my mind about Botox… … and a few other things since my book was first published

T

ROBERT WILSON

he paperback of More Than a Woman is out on July 8.

Following between six months and a year after the publication of the initial hardback, the paperback allows the author to plunge into a mental state she is never far from, to be honest – flicking through the shiny new paperback for 30 seconds, face melting with horror, before lying on the floor, wailing, “Oh my God, why did I write that? How could I even think it? How is it possible that the person I was, a mere nine months ago, is so radically different to the person I am now? How am I now going to embark on a live tour (info below, please come, we’ve anti-bac’d everything and the bars are open) to discuss all my Firmly Held Beliefs, when I have now cheerfully watched many of them slip from my open hands. What am I playing at? What is my long game here?”

Don’t get me wrong – I still stand by a good, say, 220 pages of More Than a Woman.

All the stuff about feminism in middle age; caring for ageing parents; helping children with mental illness; the necessity of a dog; the need for a Women’s Union; and the terrible hammer blow that wine starts delivering you, past the age of 40. I’m still firm on all that.

These, however, are the things I’ve Changed My Mind About between hardback and paperback, so help me God: 1. Upmarket ladieswear company Toast. In Chapter 13, I talk about how, in middle age, there is a day you open your cupboard and discover that all your clothes have suddenly “gone shit” and are now actively betraying you.

And so you have to start over again and build a new, middle-aged wardrobe from scratch.

“This is when the Toast catalogue will call to you, with a deceptive siren cry,” I wrote.

Unfortunately, I continued, the truth is that the only people who look good in Toast are wiry, 5ft 11in bohemian intellectuals with strong cheekbones and a perfect bob. Everyone else – me – will look like a dumpy dung-farming peasant wearing her grandma’s clothes.

Well, I’ve not grown either another five inches or strong cheekbones, but, since last autumn, I seem to have become somehow…

Toast-worthy. The denim dungarees, the navy cashmere jumper, the short-sleeved shirt in both white and blue – some days, I am a pile of

‘I now deplore my anti-Toast stance in the same way I regret voting for Corbyn for Labour leader’

Toast. My wardrobe has become a Toast rack.

I now deplore my previous hardline anti-Toast stance in the same way I regret having voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Oh God, why is my past so full of shame and wrongness?

2. Botox. The chapter about me getting Botox was one of the more controversial, with several commentators “being sad” a feminist could admit to having had it. I wanted to be honest about having Botox, because I am wired to loudly and cheerfully confess things other people feel they should keep secret – and, as someone whose job involves meeting lots of “fresh-faced” celebrities, I know they’re all keeping it secret. They're terrified of, well, getting the reception I did when I admitted it.

They are scared of being Botox-shamed.

However, since I wrote about how enjoyably efficacious Botox is, I’ve started to feel increasingly… not arsed about it any more. Watching the Friends reunion tipped me over the edge: the women who had had no injectable interventions – Lisa Kudrow and, particularly, writer Marta Kauffman – just looked, to my personal aesthetic standards, which is all this comes down to, better. I liked every sag and wrinkle. There’s something quite odd about seeing what are unmistakably “an older woman’s eyes” in a younger woman’s face: it gives the appearance of an immortal child-god who’s seen civilisations rise and then crumble, condemned to witness everything and yet never feel the sweet release of death.

And while that’s a strong look, it’s not necessarily the look I’m going for.

3. Cold-water swimming. I know it’s “the thing” now – as the viral tweet had it, “Find someone you love as much as The Guardian loves cold-water swimming” – and I still adore it. But this February I had an “incident” where I stayed in too long, went a bit “weird” and spent the rest of the day in three jumpers, shivering. When you think about it, heated, indoor swimming pools are… quite nice? I feel like it needs to become socially acceptable again to swim somewhere with a roof.

So these are my reversals. Everything else still stands. Especially the stuff about men sneezing louder than women. Why? It should be a small involuntary spasm – not the detonation of a Death Star. Wind it in, guys. n Caitlin Moran tours Bradford, Basingstoke, London, Nottingham, Newcastle and Edinburgh from tomorrow (caitlinmoran.co.uk)

The Times Magazine 5

What I’ve learnt Adam Peaty

GETTY IMAGES FOR THE BRITISH OLYMPIC ASSOCIATION

Swimmer Adam Peaty, 26, became Olympic 100m breaststroke champion at the 2016 Rio Games, a title he's defending in Tokyo later this month, and is the current holder of the 50m and 100m world records, He lives in Loughborough with his partner, Eirianedd Munro, and their nine-month-old son, George.

I was scared of the water as a child. I even hated having baths; I’d scream every time. My older brothers had told me sharks could swim through the plughole. My first memory of swimming was just trying not to drown.

These days, I’m not a fan of spiders.

Growing up, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I’ve always loved military history and I was obsessed with Second World War air battles. But at 6ft 3in, I’m too tall to be a pilot. Swimming has some similarities though – speed, discipline – and just like in the military, I get to push my limits every day. My motto is, “Better never stops.”

I was at a crossroads in my life when I decided to take swimming more seriously. I’d just done my GCSEs and was about to get drunk in a field with my mates when I heard [breaststroker] Craig Benson, an old friend from my junior years, had just made it to the semis at London 2012. I knew then that I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t give swimming my best try.

Athletes are essentially entertainers. But I don’t think competing at the Olympics without a crowd will make a difference to me, even though I thrive on the noise normally. There will be millions of people back home, tuning in and wanting me to bring back gold.

I can eat between 6,000 and 8,000 calories a day if I’m training for a major event – two to three times the recommended amount for the average male. I have a massive sweet tooth. Chocolate is my biggest weakness.

I don’t feel any pressure to be a role model. I’ve never thought about it like that. When you’re preparing for a big event like the Olympics, you watch what you do and say, but it’s about being professional. I just feel gratitude to be in this role – I’ve worked hard and people looking up to me is a good thing.

I don’t believe a lot of what I read and see any more.

There’s a lot of jealousy. I think if someone has an opinion of you but they don’t know you, then it’s invalid.

My tattoos mean a lot. I have a lion because I’m proud to represent my country, Poseidon as he was king of the water and a gladiator because I’ve always loved the military.

I don’t like talking about swimming at home. When you spend your whole life chasing hundredths of a second, you need your safe haven.

I’m a fun dad – probably too fun. But I’ve got a better understanding of the world and my priorities since becoming a dad. Georgie is a huge motivation.

My secret talent is gaming. My favourite is Call of Duty.

And I’ve got a flight simulator at home – I get to live out my military ambitions through that.

I want to keep going until the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

I’ll only stop when I stop having fun. n

‘I thrive on noise but I will be competing in Tokyo without a crowd’

Adam Peaty represents the sportswear collection Castore (castore.com)

INTERVIEW Sarah Ewing PORTRAIT Karl Bridgeman

The Times Magazine 7

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

Don’t think I’m not grateful… but here are the 30 gifts I never want to receive again

E

veryone wants presents.

Of course we do. We’re hard-wired to feel loved and honoured and flattered.

Someone has thought about us! Someone cares! Someone thinks we’re special.

But presents don’t like me.

Worst of all, some of them involve so much hard work on my part that frankly I’d rather you shot me than gave me them. Here’s what I won’t thank you for:

9. Anything sticky. Cosmetic or edible.

Because it goes on my hands. And then on my wheelchair push rims. Which means a wearisome 30 minutes cantilevered sideways trying to wash them.

1. Le Creuset. I can’t even lift the lids any more.

12. Tickets to anywhere. Because I’d have to go somewhere.

2. Socks. Unless they’re knee-length medicalgrade compression stockings, extra long.

11. A dog lead. Because the dog strangles himself on my scooter when I try what horsey folk call “ride and lead”.

13. Beauty appointment. It’s too late.

3. Any plant that needs planting out, repotting, watering or feeding in any way at any stage in its entire life.

14. Spa massage. What massage? You mean you’ve been working on me while I was lying there?

4. Any hardback book that weighs over 150g.

15. Restaurant bookings. See 12.

5. A gone-to-the-beach dress.

16. Delicate neck chains. Because I can’t feel them, break them and feel bad.

6. A nightie. You think I bother changing?

7. Gloves. Unless they’ve got sandpaper on the palms for pushing my chair.

MURDO MACLEOD

10. Thongs. Bikinis. Only if you’re dark.

Very, very dark.

8. Homegrown vegetables. Or fruit. Listen, they’re delicious, organic and straight out of your garden. And you’re lovely to think of me.

But they just mean washing, peeling, cutting up and the crushing sense of remorse when I don’t.

The only good food gift requires zero prep.

17. Rings. My knuckles are as big as knee joints.

18. Horsey anything. I’ve tried but it upsets me too much.

19. A pasta-maker. An anything maker.

20. Candles. You want to burn my hands?

Set fire to my lap? Kill me in a house fire?

21. Bath salts/bombs/oil/essence. Last time I was in a bath was ten years ago, with a sleazy salesman in winkle-pickers, a battery hoist and two helpers. Fully clothed with no water.

22. Expensive shampoo and shower-wash containers too sleek to grip when wet.

23. Bracelets. They interfere with pushing. And sleeves. And peeing. And life. I’m like a special forces agent; I carry emergency equipment only.

24. Hand cream. See 9 and 13.

25. Booze. Doesn’t work.

26. Chocolate and cakes. Because I gorge like a beast on them, get fat, joints become inflamed and shoulders are crippled trying to push extra weight around.

27. Anything lacking a huge handle.

28. Any oven dish/plate/drinking glass weighing over 150g. Picnic plates are the bizzo.

29. A holiday/weekend break/cruise. See 12.

30. Scarves. Please don’t be offended if you’re among the 603 people who have given me one. They’re beautiful. I love them and wear them. But they need their own dressing room. n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010

The Times Magazine 9

‘TV companies used to think, “We don’t know what to do with a brown face” ’

Anita Rani, 43, wears bustier and trousers, Alessandra Rich (selfridges. com); earrings, shaunleane.com.

Opposite: dress and earrings, lanvin. com; shoes, malonesouliers.com

‘Unless you’re brave and put yourself out there, nothing will change’

Anita Rani is one of the most familiar faces on television. But growing up as British Asian she felt stranded between two cultures, battling racial prejudice on one side and the expectations of her family to marry and have children on the other. Now she’s decided to speak out. Interview by Louise Carpenter PORTRAITS Dan Kennedy STYLING Hannah Rogers

COURTESY OF ANITA RANI, ALPHA PRESS, BBC

A

nita Rani, the presenter of Countryfile and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, remembers the moment she began to question her identity.

She had been at a work drink “not that long ago” with “educated, liberal TV types” and a man in the group dropped what she calls “the p-bomb”.

“Right to my face,” she says. “I’d not heard anyone say this word out loud for years, not since I was a kid, or maybe since watching a rerun of Only Fools and Horses, the episode where they casually talk about going to the ‘P*** shop’.”

Racist abuse was not new to Rani, but she thought she had left it behind in her childhood in Bradford. She was born to firstgeneration working-class Punjabi immigrants and grew up in the Eighties witnessing abuse, especially that word. Kids shouted “P*** slags” at her aunts. The word was so ubiquitous that it felt like a constant hard punch in the arm.

“I hate it,” she says of the term. “I hate the way it makes me feel, the memories it conjures up.”

The slur had no less impact on her when she had to endure it once again at her work do. In childhood she had run away from it – from the shame it made her feel – by trying to be less “brown”, which meant she was accused of being a “coconut” by her extended family: too white in the way she spoke, her taste and the mates she chose. The hatred behind the word and the shame and confusion it generated had been inescapable for years.

In choosing a career in television presenting, Anita Rani had thought she could bid farewell to all this confusion. There had been microracism – “People often didn’t know what to do with me,” she says of TV commissioners in the early days. “There just wasn’t anyone like me around.” But she had been successful both on independent channels and the BBC and she moved in circles that were educated and professional.

She will not say by whom and at what function the word was used again. “What I will say is that it wasn’t even the fact that the word was slung at me, or that no one else responded. It was my own reaction that really spun me out.”

Rani, to her horror, laughed it off. But when she got home, she was appalled. Why had she shrunk like a mouse? Why had she not “kicked him in the balls? Thrown a drink in his face?” Or, as she puts it, “simply told him that there is no context, none whatsoever, where it’s OK to say that to me”?

“It’s not about that person. It is about my reaction to it,” she explains. “My reaction made me think: ‘Who the hell am I? How weak am I? How battered down have I become? Am I still that needy and desperate for acceptance?’ ”

12 The Times Magazine

With her parents at a house in Telford

With her husband, Bhupi Rehal

She was racially abused at a work drink but laughed it off. ‘Am I still that desperate for acceptance?’

It was as if she had become her confused 11-year-old self all over again, returning from the Sikh temple dressed in her Indian suit, torn between joining the ice-cream van queue for a much wanted Screwball yet knowing that if she did her clothes would reveal her Indianness; and staying inside, keeping the secret but missing out on an ice cream. It is a desperately poignant recollection.

As it was, she overcame her nerves and, £1 coin in hand, joined the queue. A white girl looked her up and down and said, “We didn’t know you were one of them.”

“Shame has been this big thing looming over me my whole life,” she says when we meet.

Today, at 43, Anita Rani seems to exude the self-assurance that helped build her stellar CV, which also includes Watchdog, The One Show, the recent Saved by a Stranger and stints on Radio 2. Her frame is small and she has the athletic physique of a woman half her age (she looked dynamite on Strictly Come Dancing in 2015, when she made it to the semi-final).

She has the warmth and easy manner of a TV presenter, adept at making people feel at ease and filling silence. She calls herself “gobshite Rani”, a self-deprecating joke, but it is difficult to imagine her remaining quiet and still. “I am learning to relax,” she says.

The professional power she has been building slowly over the past two decades has come from fighting for a space, jostling to be noticed, overcoming prejudice – mostly unconscious – and just striving to work harder

than her white colleagues. “When people ask me, ‘Do you think you have had to work harder to get where you are?’ the answer is, ‘Yes.’ But then I think, ‘How is that going to go down?’ ” In the early years, TV companies looking for a presenter often asked, “Why you?”

Looking back, she says what this really meant was, “We don’t know what to do with a brown face.”

We meet today because of the consequences of that most recent racial slur. She explains that until that point her adult life had been “a cocoon”. Yes, it had been harder to get presenting jobs, but she’d managed it, was respected for it and had kept her head down. She lives in a trendy part of east London. She buys overpriced sourdough bread at artisan food markets and she’s on primetime TV every week. But her silence in the face of the casual use of the p-word, she says, shone a spotlight on a huge disconnect between who she believed she was and how she behaved.

The past two years of her life – helped by the enforced solitary nature of lockdown – have been a period of self-reflection, which has also incorporated the confusion and sadness of a miscarriage in December 2018.

As a result Rani is about to publish her memoir, The Right Sort of Girl. She wrote it in lockdown and at times it dug up trauma that had been buried for decades. The book explores four decades of shame, experienced explicitly but also in sublimated form. She

With Gleb Savchenko on Strictly Come Dancing, 2015

Presenting Countryfile

has had a bit of therapy, she says, “but I hope it’s not therapised”.

The title is a trick because – spoiler alert – if Anita Rani has learnt one thing she wants to pass on, especially to young south Asian women born in the UK and struggling to live in two cultures, it is that there is no “right sort of girl”. Trying to be one, she has learnt, is a burden that requires emotional sacrifice and the capacity for a whole lot of lying.

“As a young woman I had the responsibility of being both the pride and the shame of my family. If I did something wrong, I brought shame. But when I succeeded, great pride.

“Your children are a reflection of you. I am the reason my mother will get judged, and so I was constantly trying to mould myself into what Mum thought… But it was also, ‘Boom – my parents had me and I’m not prepared to toe the party line.’ I’m questioning everything, asking things like, ‘Why is it me who has to learn how to make chapatis when my brother can sit around all day?’

“And I could just see [the inequality] all around me, at every family gathering, and I thought. ‘This sucks. This is shit.’ ”

Rani and her younger brother were the first generation of their family to be born in the UK. Their parents had a successful textiles factory, which went bust in the Nineties. The children were sent to public school – an effort that almost broke the family – in order to assimilate them.

At school Rani felt different for having brown skin, and at home she felt shame for being too westernised. “It’s like you’ve got to be everything and it’s exhausting. I’ve written this memoir because I’m really tired of being good all the time.

“I am so proud, but even now a part of me is nervous that I’ve said it. But what is that internal dialogue that is telling me to keep quiet?”

The attempt at moulding was literal too.

While Rani was asleep, her mother would try to mould her nose to make it prettier. It looks like a pakora, she told her, the inference being that a prettier nose brings a husband.

“They began that indoctrination mantra from birth. Even with all my independence, when I’d moved to London and was working on the telly, there were these conversations I’ve had with my mum and the mantra was, ‘When are you getting married? When are you getting married?’

“My mum is so proud of me. She made me, right? She’s always been, ‘Dream big. Go for it!’

But at the same time it’s also, ‘Make sure you marry a good Indian guy.’ ” Part of Rani’s memoir explores her difficult childhood, not just in terms of not knowing where she belonged, but also practically. Her uncle took his own life and alcoholism was rife. Money was in short supply. Her parents worked themselves to the bone. Family relations were strained, to put it mildly.

“It was a very difficult childhood,” she says.

At 13, Rani began self-harming in her bedroom. “I can’t remember how it stopped.”

She had not intended to revisit this, but somehow it just fell onto the page. “I had completely put it out of my mind. But as I went back to those teenage years in my bedroom, I started writing about it and I began crying. I went downstairs and read it to my husband and I cried again while I was reading it. He said, ‘You know, it has to be there if this book is about helping the next generation.’ ” Her mother saw the scabs and scratches – the scars of fleeting emotional relief but much more lasting shame – “but probably didn’t know what the hell to do about it”.

It was a household in which not even menstruation could be discussed. “Now I’ve put it in the book it feels like one of the most important things in it. I’ve just lived my whole life where everything is a ‘shame’. Shameful.

Everything I’ve done, I can’t talk about it; no one talks about anything. And that [aspect]

doesn’t have any power over me any more.”

Her hope is that by shining a light on how she felt, others will feel less alone. “I am part of a generation who have come of age and it is important to tell our stories. I grew up in a very patriarchal world and, as well as giving me immense joy, I felt constrained by the community around me. I have always been amazed by people who are able to talk about their shame and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me!’

“Being Indian is amazing. There is some great stuff but, at the same time… I hope things have changed.”

Already, older friends are planning to give the book to their daughters. It is important to give credit to Anita Rani’s mother, which might sound odd given that at times she subjected Rani to overwhelming cultural pressures, but she is the hero in this story too.

Just before lockdown, when Rani was beginning to think about what she might write, she consulted her mother, saying, “I want to say what I really feel about the way I have been brought up.

“My mum told me, ‘Say it! Say it all! I told you to behave in a certain way your whole life and you should just let it out and get it off your chest. Because somebody has to say it, otherwise there will never be a change.’ ” It is a case of her mother being liberated too, of a young woman arriving in the UK for an arranged marriage and being subjected to all her own cultural pressures about how to raise a “good” daughter, and now being of an open enough mind to be educated by that daughter’s independence. Mothers of daughters are judged too.

“They are amazing,” Rani says of her parents, “and hopefully they come out as amazing. But at the same time, it’s a different generation. My grandparents are from a totally different world to me, in so many ways. Their attitudes, their lifestyle, are the same as they were 100 years ago, so within one generation we have this huge shift. This cultural shift.”

Two developments in her career also made her feel closer to her heritage: taking part in Who Do You Think You Are? in 2015, followed by My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 in 2017, in which she explored the death of her maternal grandfather’s entire first family as a result of partition, as well as the persecution of women.

“I had this conversation with my mum the other day and she said, ‘You are saying it for me.’ I feel like I am saying it for them and for my generation. What were we all so scared of? Going through puberty and not talking about periods. What is that control?”

Anita Rani left the family home at 18 to study broadcasting at the University of Leeds.

She wasn’t allowed to cut her hair until after her A-levels, at which point she took the

The Times Magazine 13

GETTY IMAGES. MAKE-UP: SARAH JANE WAI O’FLYNN USING CHARLOTTE TILBURY. HAIR: NARAD KUTOWAROO AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING UNIT

Climbing Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief, 2019

kitchen scissors and seared the blades through her long plait, a neat metaphor. “It was weighing me down,” she says.

Even then an aunt told her, “You’ve lost your beauty.” Rani writes, “Long-haired girls are seen as dutiful as well as beautiful. Shorthaired girls are seen as spirited, independent, rebellious. Yes to all three of those.”

Leeds was only ten miles from the family home but her independence, like many other things, came with a fight. “My mum’s family were very much, ‘You are sending your daughter to stay out? Are you sure?’ ” Rani spares us the details of her sexual liberation in the book and admits the irony.

“I’ve written about self-harm, I’ve written about trauma, I’ve written about domestic abuse and alcoholism and male suicide, but the thing I’m most nervous about talking about is my ex-boyfriends.”

She puts on a thick Punjabi accent: “Now the world will know she had boyfriends.

White boyfriends!” And your virginity?

“I’m not answering that question.” She laughs again.

“I feel like, for a lot of south Asian kids, it’s kind of like those post-Second World War parents whose children went off in the Sixties – there was this massive cultural shift.

I think that’s us. We are the first generation.

Run for the hills! Let’s do this! Well, actually, we didn’t do that. We just had secret relationships, raves in the daytime and were superskilled and superdevious.”

Anita Rani dedicated her twenties to her television career, an industry not celebrated then for its inclusivity. “We know people thought, ‘Put someone white on the cover of a magazine and it’s going to sell.’ ” She still questions, for example, whether the fact that she is Indian might have held her back from being voted into the Strictly final.

She is more hopeful now. “The industry is changing and the world is changing. We want change. I don’t just mean for people of colour but everybody.” She cites Edward Enninful, the editor of Vogue, as having instigated change overnight, as having taken over an institution and looked at the world through his own lens. “That’s how you do it,” Rani says. “It doesn’t take much. Overnight that magazine has gone from being amazing to being something so culturally important.”

There is also Samira Ahmed, who took the BBC to court for pay discrimination, claiming she was paid 85 per cent less than Jeremy Vine and was consequently owed £700,000 in back pay. She later won an employment tribunal, after which the BBC reached a financial agreement with her.

“Those images of her walking into court arm in arm with Naga Munchetty? It makes me emotional just thinking about that photograph. It makes my shoulders go back

14 The Times Magazine

There was pressure on her to have children. ‘An uncle said, “You have your career, but now is the right time” ’ a bit. Unless you are brave and put yourself out there, nothing will change.”

Talk of marriage and babies was an annoyance during her twenties, Rani says. She had seen far too many crushed wills.

“I just thought, ‘I am going to move to London, live my life, do something different,’ and that was it. And work was my liberation.

Working in TV was my liberation.”

But still, underneath all the kick-ass attitude and professional success, at some level she still felt she needed to be “the right sort of girl”. She met her husband, Bhupi Rehal, who has a tech company, at a rave in east London. Their relationship was sped up for the fact that they needed to tick the marriage box for their parents. She allowed herself to be pushed into a big Indian wedding in a Bradford hotel in 2009, something she had never wanted. In the lead-up, she experienced a real case of cold feet.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Who is all this for?’ I was already 32 and I wasn’t getting any younger,” she writes. “Of course, they were all thinking about children too – everyone apart from me, that is.”

She admits in the memoir she felt she had been led into a trap. “Oh God,” she says, “my poor husband. That’s a big thing for me to say.

But my husband is a dude. ‘Write it from the heart and then no one can say to you, “This isn’t true,” ’ he said to me.”

They are, in fact, very happy. “He’s great and we have a great life. It’s like any marriage: you have to work at it.”

Rani continued to dedicate her life to her career and to freedom. There was a different sort of pressure now from extended family: producing a grandchild.

“I had a chat with an uncle once at a family party. After having a few whiskies he said [she puts on an Indian voice], ‘The thing is, Anita, “now” is the right time for you.’

I was like, ‘OK.’ And he said, ‘You have your career, yes, very good, very good, but now is the right time.’

“You know, it went in one ear and out the other,” she says. It was, of course, coming from the same patriarchy that had defined her childhood. Her cousins had told her, postGCSEs, “If you fail them, we’ll marry you off.”

“I mean, what even is that?” she says.

In December 2018, Rani suffered a miscarriage. She wrote about it for a magazine – “I wasn’t intending to” – her first taste of the catharsis of writing. Shortly after that experience she had a full-on panic attack halfway up Kilimanjaro, which she was climbing for Comic Relief. It was a consequence of trying to bury her pain, of never giving into vulnerability. “I was sad.

Deeply, truly and crippingly sad.”

Young women, many southern Asian, connected with her. “It’s still such a huge taboo, both generally and within my community.”

Rani doesn’t discuss motherhood in her memoir, nor does she want to with me.

“I try not to talk about it,” she says. There is a tangible sense of self-protection emanating from her, which is to be respected.

“What I will say about it is the idea that all women feel the same is just mad, and that all men feel the same is also mad. People’s trajectories take them on unexpected paths.”

There is no pressure from family now. “It’s fine. My life will be my life. And whatever will happen will happen. Also, if I’m OK with that and my parents are OK with that, it’s no one else’s…” She trails off.

After seeing how her parents had been experiencing loneliness, she moved them down from Bradford to east London. “I found them a house, put in an offer and told them to sell their home. And that was it. They did it.”

She has just begun presenting the Friday and Saturday editions of Woman’s Hour, a job she was convinced she wouldn’t get. On her application she wrote, “I am often in Ubers and ask them to change stations to Radio 4.

Whenever it’s Woman’s Hour and I am in the back of the car, they are always talking about vaginas. Uber drivers are usually Asian men and I feel, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry I’m making you listen to something about vaginas.’

Well, now maybe I can be the woman talking about vaginas for someone else listening in the back of an Uber.”

She has also acquired a lockdown dog, a Bedlington terrier/whippet cross called Rafi.

“My parents spent all that money trying to get me to fit into middle-class Britain, speak the lingo, walk the walk, talk the talk, and all I really needed to do was get a dog.” n The Right Sort of Girl by Anita Rani is published by Blink on July 8 (£16.99)

Peter Kyle, 50, at his home in Hove

THE MAN WITH THE READING AGE OF AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD WHO BECAME THE SHADOW MINISTER FOR SCHOOLS Peter Kyle struggled so badly at school he was put into a remedial class and left without qualifications. But at 25 he took his A-levels, went to university – and his severe dyslexia was finally diagnosed.

Now the Labour MP is being hailed as a future star at Westminster INTERVIEW Rachel Sylvester PORTRAIT Mark Harrison

Kyle with his mother in 1977 and, right, as a cub in 1975

PREVIOUS SPREAD: HAIR, SVEN BAYERBACH AT CAROL HAYES USING BURT’S BEES. THIS SPREAD: COURTESY OF PETER KYLE

P

eter Kyle’s earliest memory is of school. He is standing at the front of the classroom beside a chart with a picture of a swan surrounded by letters. “I must have been five and we were doing the alphabet,” he says. “There was a lovely teacher called Mrs West. She was asking students to put letters in the right order to make two or three-letter words. I just stood there blank. She was very gently encouraging me and I had an absolute meltdown, a proper, full-on meltdown. I can still remember the humiliation and the sheer panic of that moment. As I say it now, I can actually feel the emotion coming up inside me.

It was one of the most powerful experiences of my childhood.”

Kyle is the shadow schools minister who, at the age of 50, has a reading age of only 8. He is so severely dyslexic that he still struggles with briefing papers, often working late into the night and using “highlighter pens and loads of notes” to digest and prioritise information. He finds scripted speeches in the Commons “really challenging” and has to weed out any difficult words that might trip him up. Some phrases are like “potholes in a road, hard to spot until you’re on them and everything shudders”, he says.

Recently, when we met for lunch, he misread the name of the restaurant on the menu and thought he was in the wrong place.

He frequently gets criticised on Twitter for getting letters the wrong way round, but he refuses to be silenced, instead railing against the “spelling police” who sneer at him. “People will say that you’re thick because you can’t spell something,” he tells me. “I understand people loving words and the meaning of words. I don’t understand judging others.”

20 The Times Magazine

In Romania with Anita Roddick in 1994

‘I was in a hut with the naughty kids. The teachers would leave. It was just chaotic’ Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove, is one to watch at Westminster. Elected to Parliament in 2015, at the same time as Sir Keir Starmer, he was recently promoted to the opposition front bench as a junior member of the education team. A protégé of Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder, he was an aid worker before going into politics and has an emotional intelligence lacking in many MPs. He is gay, liberal, optimistic and moderate: he was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s fiercest critics and now remains loyal to Starmer, whom he counts as a friend. One former cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown says, “He should be in the shadow cabinet, on the front line and never off TV. He speaks and thinks like a human being and a future star, if the Labour Party ever approaches being a competitive electoral party again.”

We meet for coffee at a café in St James’s Park, near the House of Commons. It is a gloriously sunny day and Kyle is already there when I arrive, sitting in the shade at a table by the lake. He has a bottle of sparkling water and a latte waiting for me. Most politicians dress in navy suits or dodgy “off-duty” sweaters, but Kyle is wearing a pink All Saints T-shirt, white shorts and grey Camper trainers. There is a rainbow strap on his Apple Watch. A few years ago he “had his colours done”, he tells me, and whips out a wallet of swatches advising him which shades to wear to suit his skin tone.

“I’m a winter jewel,” he confides with a laugh.

Unusually for a politician he seems to be lacking in all cynicism, but he also has a

resilience and determination that comes from having overcome extraordinary obstacles in his life. “It’s odd for me being in Labour,” he says. “A lot of people fetishise accents in both directions. It’s an inverse snobbery. People will assume that because I’ve got a southern accent and a doctorate that life has always been easy. But actually what I look for in people who aspire to run things is that they’ve struggled to be where they are, because I think they’re the people who make the best decisions and make decisions on behalf of others as well as themselves.”

Kyle grew up in Bognor Regis, one of a “set of white working-class communities” on the south coast of England – staunch Brexitsupporting territory, although the MP is a strong pro-European and now lives in Remain-voting Brighton.

His father, Les, had grown up in “abject poverty” in Liverpool and left school at 14 to be an apprentice stonemason, then joined the navy before going to night school and becoming a door-to-door salesman.

“It was a story of aspiration,” Kyle says.

“He loved cars. I remember him having a Ford Cortina – there’s a photograph of me in welly boots cleaning it as a little toddler.

Then he got a TR7, with those lights that go up and down. I ran down the battery playing with them. Then he came home with this entry-level Porsche 944, which I thought was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.” He now drives a Range Rover Evoque and still lives in the family home.

With his father in 2019

His father was “always moving on, always moving up”, working all hours to provide for his family. “I think I’ve inherited Dad’s work ethic but I’ve also got a middle-class sensibility to go with it: I enjoy great food; I like travel.

For me a city break with friends and great restaurants booked two months in advance would be heaven on earth. But I’m not embarrassed about that because I know the effort and sacrifice Dad made to give his family a better life. He wasn’t there a lot. He was working huge hours and grabbing life with both hands. He learnt to ski and then he taught the family skiing. He played squash two or three times a week. It was exhilarating for us because we never moved geographically more than five miles but, my God, socially did we move.”

Kyle was “incredibly attached” to his mother, Jo, a dental nurse who worked parttime. When he was 18 she ran away with his father’s best friend, completely out of the blue, and the family were devastated. “She left a note on the kitchen table. Dad came home from work, picked the note up and stood there shaking. I tried to speak to my mum a lot and she wouldn’t have the conversation.

When they eloped, I never heard from them for several years. It was just before my 21st birthday that I got a phone call and she was reintroduced into my life.”

School was “always difficult”, Kyle says.

When he first started at primary school, “The head teacher used to have to come and grab me off Mum and drag me away.” The whole process of education was baffling as much as

traumatic for him. “I got on with people, I was never angry, but I just couldn’t really learn. I remember loving playtime. Then in the classroom I knew I wasn’t doing what other people around me were doing. I was never naughty and teachers liked me, but they couldn’t figure it out.”

He went on to the local comprehensive, which was “a total Grange Hill experience”, all the boys with their ties slightly undone, the teachers complaining about a lack of resources and only one girl who was planning to go to university. “They shoved me into remedial,” Kyle says. “Two or three times a week I would spend an hour after school in a hut, just by the playing field, with this eclectic ragtag bunch.

It was mostly the naughty kids.” His task was to draw loops over and over again on the blackboard; while he did that, he would have to duck to avoid the chairs flying overhead.

“The teachers would leave because they didn’t want to be in the room. It was just chaotic.”

Nobody considered the possibility that Kyle might be dyslexic. At one point, he was sent to a doctor in London who diagnosed a “wobbly” eye and gave him a strange wooden contraption he had to put on his head every day. “It was like a helmet with a stick that extended. I had to pull it out ten times in the morning and ten times in the evening. He said if you strengthen his eyes, the rest will happen.”

Most of the teachers were well intentioned, if slightly confused by Kyle. “They would say, ‘I can’t understand you. It doesn’t make sense.’ ” There were some “grim” moments in his teenage years. “When I was about 15, we were in an English class, doing Shakespeare.

The teacher just stopped midway through reading this extract and said, ‘Peter, you carry on.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Why would you do that?’ ” But the teacher wasn’t giving up. “He said, ‘Stand up. Come along, we’re waiting. We’ve not got all day.’ So I start reading and it was one word at a time. This was Shakespeare, for crying out loud. It was painful, so humiliating, and the teacher was laughing. I remember looking around and the vast majority of the kids in the class – my friends – had their heads down. One or two were howling away, thinking it was the funniest thing they had ever seen, along with the teacher, but most of the kids were just as embarrassed about the whole thing as I was.

By the end I was dripping in sweat and nerves and embarrassment and humiliation.” It was a

‘In the Commons it can be shocking. I look down and can see the text, but it doesn’t mean anything’

deeply damaging moment and after that, the MP says, “I just switched off. I went through 13 years of school and I never learnt to learn.”

There was another layer to his emotional turmoil. As Kyle puts it, “I’m gay. This is the Eighties in a comprehensive school in Bognor Regis. Section 28 [a clause in the Local Government Act that banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools] had been introduced. It added to the sense that the system wasn’t really on my side.” During one English lesson there was a discussion of a same-sex relationship in a book. The teacher said that he was obliged to point out that this was not “normal” and Kyle remembers feeling himself blush. But he did not come out until much later, or even acknowledge his sexuality to himself. “In those days it was a one-way street. If you said the words out loud, ‘I think I might be gay,’ there was no going back from that. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m a repressed gay person.’ I wasn’t exploring that bit of my life secretly. I just turned the volume down on it and focused on other things.”

Kyle left school at 18 with no usable qualifications, although he had scraped through on maths – “I retook the O-level so many times that by the time I passed it, it had turned into a GCSE.” With that, he got a job in the accounts department at the headquarters of the Body Shop, the cosmetics and skincare company that was then pioneering ethical consumerism. “It was the lowest paid job in the company and I was absolutely crap at it,” he admits. “But I didn’t want anyone to know that I was useless, so I used to go in on Sunday morning, very early, and plough through it all.” The only other person who worked at weekends was the charismatic founder, Anita Roddick. She was so impressed by the hard-working teenager that she asked him to stand in for her at a few speaking events in schools and old people’s homes.

It was the beginning of a long-running partnership. After the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Roddick sent Kyle to help set up a charity working with the orphans who had been discovered living in appalling conditions in Romania. “When we walked into the orphanage, people on the trip threw up because of the smell,” he recalls.

“There were 500 children there. These kids were tied to cots. They were rocking. They had bedsores and sores on their wrists, shorn heads.” The charity expanded to Albania and Kosovo and soon Kyle was travelling the world with Roddick, visiting war zones and refugee camps.

Eventually she suggested that he should apply to university so, at 25, he went back to his old school to retake his A-levels. Kyle vividly remembers walking into the class of 16-year-olds. “They thought I was the supply teacher,” he says. “I thought, ‘This

The Times Magazine 21

is a humiliating situation, but I’m not going to be humiliated,’ and I plonked myself right bang in the middle of the classroom.” It was, he admits, “a bit like living in a sitcom”, sitting on chairs that were slightly too small for a grown man but, he says, “I wasn’t embarrassed. I was just driven.” He studied as hard as he could, cramming two years’ worth of lessons into a single year. “I just threw myself into it. I thought, I’m not going to act like I’m separate. I totally joined in. I went on field trips with them. I think they enjoyed it because it was unusual.” At the end of the year he was invited to the prizegiving ceremony.

“They gave me an award for persistence.”

He also got a place at the University of Sussex. As soon as he submitted his first assignment, his tutor told him to get a dyslexia test. He remembers receiving the results and seeing his brain charted in fascinating detail.

Suddenly, everything started to make sense.

He read the report three times back to back because “it was such a revelation”. Finally he had an explanation for all his difficulties.

The test found that his dyslexia is “quite extreme”, Kyle says. “I have the writing ability and the reading ability of someone who’s eight years and three months, but in word associations, attributes that associate with empathy and being able to communicate very precisely, I’m in the top 1 per cent.” In six years he completed his undergraduate degree, then went on to be the first severely dyslexic student to do a doctorate. “I made myself ill working 14-hour days, but that was the only way I could do it.”

It was also at university that Kyle “opened the door” to his sexuality. “I did it very consciously. It was the first time in my life I actually wanted to be with someone. I wanted companionship. Yes, I wanted sex.

I wanted a partnership and intimacy. It was so easy. I walked around a bit and I thought, ‘OK, who’s it going to be? It’s going to be a bloke.’ I was very clinical about it. It wasn’t… an emotional outpouring.”

His tutor advised him to tell his parents face to face, but he couldn’t wait. “I rang my dad first, my mum second, my brother third, and told them all that evening. I just thought, I’ve decided this, I’m not going to change my mind. They need to know.”

His dad was “fine”, but, Kyle says, “It wasn’t as easy for Mum. She had been much more exposed to stereotypes and I think she was worried that I was going to morph into a different character.” It was only when he went to visit her with his partner five years later that she understood. “The second she saw how happy I was and how comfortable we were with each other, she just changed instantly, never mentioned it again, and was suddenly inviting her friends round to meet us both.”

Has he suffered more from homophobia or

‘I learnt at the very beginning that I’m going to have to work harder than other people. It was liberating’ prejudice about his dyslexia? “I wouldn’t use the word ‘suffer’ because I’ve always had this anti-authoritarian streak in me.” But he has experienced both. “I was lying on the beach in Brighton once in someone’s arms, very early one morning, and suddenly the stones started coming across. I’ve had names shouted; I understand prejudice.”

In 2012 he lost his mother and the man he calls “the love of my life” in close succession.

“I think after you go through something so profound, you have an opportunity to move forward in different directions. Your brain reconfigures.” A few months later, Kyle was selected as the Labour candidate for Hove, a seat that was then held by the Conservatives.

The party offered him a safe seat in the north of England, but he insisted on standing in the area where he had grown up. “I’m one of the few people who has aspired to stand in a Tory seat. Nobody thought we would win Hove.”

But Kyle did. “I’ve never taken anything for granted,” he says.

Kyle thinks it is no coincidence that so many dyslexics, from Richard Branson and James Dyson to Michael Heseltine, end up being successful. “I never coast,” he says.

“For me, it’s on or off. I don’t have a dimmer switch. I learnt at the very beginning that I’m going to have to work harder than other people to do the same. It was quite liberating, because as long as you know what you’ve got to do, you can just crack on and do it.”

Although he has worked out coping strategies, there have been some terrifying moments in the Commons. “Sometimes it can be shocking. You get a real burst of adrenaline.

People are looking at you, expecting you to say something and you look down and it’s just not there. I can see [the text] but it doesn’t mean anything. The eyes work and something up here works [he taps his head] but the bit in the middle has gone. It’s like the gearbox in a car has just fallen out the bottom.”

He finds it impossible to absorb 15-page Labour briefings or remember the party’s official “lines to take”, which may be why he sounds so natural on radio and TV. “I can’t recall a script. The only way I can do it is if I understand the argument.” The way his brain works gives him a different perspective on the world. “I’ve always been good at reading other people’s emotions.”

It is Labour that is struggling now as the Conservatives reap the rewards of the vaccine rollout and questions grow about Keir Starmer’s leadership. Kyle says Starmer has “the hardest job of any opposition leader in the postwar period”, but he also thinks Labour

is still being punished for Corbyn. “We shocked people in that period and the truth is that we’ve got to shock them again, in a good way,” he says. “We can’t saunter our way to No 10. We need to send fireworks off into the sky, spelling out what we stand for today.”

Many in the party are fixated on winning back the red wall of former Labour seats but having campaigned in both Hartlepool and Hove, Kyle insists that there are far more similarities than differences between north and south, and between Remain and Leavesupporting areas. “Half the white vans I saw had a Mercedes next to them. These are people who just want to get on in life. They’re not poor but they’re not rich. Traditionally, at least in our recent history, we want to take the money from the rich and we want to do things for the poor, but if you’re not one of those two things, we’re not captivating enough.”

The Commons education select committee recently blamed talk of “white privilege” for low educational outcomes among white working-class boys, but Kyle thinks this is a “distraction” that will make no difference to these kids’ lives. “It is injecting a cultural politics into what is a really straightforward educational challenge,” he says. “White working-class kids need the same education as anybody else, but there’s no margin for error.

If other students don’t get great lessons from great teachers they will go home and get the rest from their family life.” That means not “reinforcing stereotypes and limiting aspirations” by assuming working-class children should only aim for vocational qualifications. “They need to be familiar with a university campus and they need to know what it’s like to work in an office environment, not so we are pushing them towards academia, but so they’re not dissuaded because it’s a leap into the unknown.”

Kyle says his whole life has been about overcoming challenges. “The things that were holding me back have ultimately been the things that have given me the greatest success in life. I’ve been tested by systems, by people and by my own brain so much that now I know precisely who I am. I’ve been in situations where the pressure has been so great that I know where my limits are and I know where my breaking points are.”

Does he think Britain is ready for a gay prime minister? “I think that Britain thinks about individual attributes second to, ‘Are they on our side?’ I think that goes for race and sexuality and gender. For all our obsession with class and background, ultimately we’re a country that wants to get on.” n The Times Magazine 23

THE WOMEN WHO SAVED BRITAIN

‘We decided, if we’re going to need it, we’re going to need it fast. Let’s prove we can do it and how fast we can do it’ Professor Catherine Green, 46, right

Eighteen months. Half a billion doses in 178 countries. Thousands of lives saved. The scientists behind the Oxford vaccine, Professors Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, tell Tom Whipple how they pulled it off PORTRAITS Tom Jackson

‘I’ve had people say to me they’ve had their vaccine and they’re so grateful.

And I don’t think they expect it, but they get very emotional’ Professor Sarah Gilbert, 59, left

February 2020 There is a new virus in China and Sarah Gilbert, an Oxford scientist, is trying out a novel vaccine technique. The epidemic in China may come to nothing, she tells me, but this is a good exercise in proving that vaccines can be made faster.

Number of doses of the Oxford vaccine administered: 0.

November 23, 2020 Sarah Gilbert looks tired.

We have spoken a couple of times since, but this is our first Zoom call. The efficacy results of the vaccine are out, and it looks likely to be approved and in general use before Christmas.

I ask her if she and her team are planning to have a Zoom party. “We are all having an early night,” she says.

Number of doses of the Oxford vaccine administered: fewer than 100,000, in trials in 4 countries.

June 2021 Gilbert still looks tired, but this time she is wearing a mask – we are meeting in person. I ask again if she has had a celebratory party yet. She hasn’t.

This time she has a colleague with her, geneticist Catherine Green. “We’ve been exactly the same as everyone else. We’ve missed the events that would ordinarily be marked by champagne and cake,” says Green.

Number of doses of the Oxford vaccine administered: just shy of half a billion, in 178 countries. Lives saved in the UK due to vaccination: 12,000, estimated.

STEVE PARSONS/PA WIRE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES, STEVE PARSONS/ POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

It has been a long 18 months.

T

hey called it a “Disease X” situation. At some point, a completely new pathogen would emerge for which a completely new vaccine was required. And at Oxford’s Jenner Institute at the start of 2020, they were ready.

The small problem, says Professor Sarah Gilbert, is that when Disease X arrived, no one had anticipated a very specific scenario.

What if they themselves – the people working on that vaccine – ended up being in the same country as the disease? “The idea of having to live through a pandemic while we developed a vaccine to get us out of a pandemic?” says Gilbert. “We hadn’t planned for that.”

They had always imagined they would swoop in, the vaccine cavalry, to defeat an

Brian Pinker, 82, becomes the first person to get the Oxford vaccine, from nurse Sam Foster, on January 4 this year

outbreak in some distant country. In the sort of distant country that has pandemics.

Instead, it turned out that it’s not only distant countries that have pandemics. They can also strike cities such as Oxford and affect Oxford academics, who also have children who need schooling, toilet rolls that need replenishing, coughs that need isolating.

By the spring of 2020, with empty shelves, pasta panics and a closed canteen, that flaw in planning was most keenly felt in the office vending machine. “We ate nothing but Mini Cheddars and Bounty bars for two weeks solid,” says Professor Catherine Green.

There are many procurement triumphs in the vaccine’s story, but the earliest – and most unsung – was when Green bought a jar of £2 coins from an elderly lady after everyone ran out of change for the machine.

This was a period when the Oxford vaccine team, the hope of a nation – the hope of the world – was fuelled by chocolate and cheesy biscuits. “All of us,” says Green, “were getting spotty.” Then the inevitable happened: the last packet of Mini Cheddars tumbled down to the bottom of the vending machine and even those meagre rations were gone.

The Duke of Cambridge at the Oxford labs, June 24, 2020

It’s funny, but food matters. Morale was low; they were doing 18-hour days. If it had gone on much longer, says Gilbert, “I think a lot of people would just have given up.”

She had, coincidentally, been approached by two couples, Jonathan and Tracy Turner, and Denise Foderaro and Frank Quattrone.

They are philanthropists and they wanted to know how they could help. Her answer?

They needed meals. The couples agreed on the condition the meals were healthy. After spending an elderly lady’s lifetime savings on Bountys, no one demurred.

This was, in a minor way, a turning point.

“It was transformative for the team,” says Green. “It felt that someone had noticed them.

It felt like an endeavour. It was one of the first times I think we started to feel there’s a community willing us to succeed.”

Ebola was not a Disease X. When it re-emerged in 2014 it was well known and understood, and the outbreak was depressingly predictable.

Green and Gilbert are speaking to me because, with the help of a ghost writer, they have written a book about their fight against Covid. And it is in West Africa, with a disease that arrives not beneath the cloak of a cough and a sniffle, but with the terrifying sight of people bleeding from the eyes, that they begin their story.

“To understand what we now all know intimately as Covid-19 and to explain how my colleagues and I designed a vaccine to protect against it,” they write, “we first need to travel 12,500 kilometres west from Wuhan in China to Guinea in West Africa.”

When reports emerged of the ebola outbreak, there were vaccines already in development. One was known, snappily, as ChAd3-EBOZ. It was different from the vaccines you would have learnt about at GCSE or O-level.

Edward Jenner, after whom the Oxford institute where Gilbert works is named, began the world’s vaccine journey when, so the (apocryphal) story goes, he noticed that milkmaids had lovely smooth complexions, unlike the pockmarked skin of their less cow-orientated compatriots.

They were not, it seems, catching smallpox, a disease that killed a fifth of those infected and left the rest with scars. The reason? They contracted cowpox instead. Their bodies were trained on a similar but milder virus and could then fight off the scary one. This has long been the principle of a vaccine: find a weaker or deactivated version to simulate an infection, and train the immune system on that.

ChAd3 worked nothing like this. It was what is known as an adenoviral-vectored vaccine. It was not a deactivated version of Continues on page 34

The Times Magazine 27

T OU P LL EE PU D K AN

Eat!

Nadiya and Rahul’s summer bakes Our star bakers whip up their favourite fruity treats

Nadiya’s clementine cake, page 30

Berry compote cake

Nadiya

into the batter along with the orange blossom water, polenta and baking powder and then pour over the clementine slices in the base of the tin.

5. Level off the top and give the tin a few sharp taps on the work surface to encourage the batter to sit in between the gaps of the sliced clementines. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes.

6. After 30 minutes, lower the oven to 160C (180C non-fan) and bake for another 30 minutes.

If it is browning too quickly, cover the top of the cake with a sheet of kitchen foil. Meanwhile, dissolve the sugar and orange juice in a small pan over a gentle heat.

7. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, leave it in the tin and use a skewer to poke holes all the way to the base of the cake.

Gently pour the syrup all over and leave the cake for 20 minutes before turning out.

BERRY COMPOTE CAKE Easy Serves 8-10 For the cake • 250g mixed berries, fresh or frozen • 1 orange • 225g unsalted butter, softened • 225g caster sugar • 4 medium eggs, whisked • 1 tsp vanilla extract • 225g self-raising flour

DAN KENNEDY, JAY BROOKS

For the filling • 2 tbsp seedless raspberry jam • 300ml double cream or whipping cream • 1 tsp almond extract • 3 tbsp icing sugar, plus extra for dusting • Extra berries, to garnish (optional) 1. Preheat the oven to 160C (180C non-fan). Line and grease the base and sides of two 18cm round cake tins.

2. Spread the fruit (defrosted if necessary) evenly in the base of the tins. Grate orange zest over both fruit layers, then halve the orange and save for later.

3. Beat together the butter and sugar in a stand mixer until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, making sure to incorporate between each addition. Add the vanilla extract.

4. Sieve in the flour and fold through to create a smooth, even, glossy batter. Divide it between the two cake tins, trying not to disturb the fruit. Even off the top and give each tin a few sharp taps on the work surface; this is to encourage the batter to enrobe the fruit before baking and fill in any gaps in the base of the tin.

30 The Times Magazine

Rahul 5. Put the tins in the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes or until the cakes are golden brown and just coming away from the sides of the tins. Leave to cool in the tins for at least 15 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack, fruitside up. Once cooled, squeeze the orange halves over each cake.

6. To make the filling, heat the jam in a pan to loosen slightly, then leave to cool. Whip the cream with the almond extract and icing sugar to form stiff peaks. Drizzle in the jam and ripple it through the cream with a chopstick.

7. Place one cake half on a serving plate, fruit-side up, spread the filling over it and then top with the other half, fruit-side down.

Garnish with extra fruit, if you like, and a dusting of icing sugar.

CLEMENTINE CAKE Easy Serves 8 (page 29) For the cake • 9 unpeeled clementines, 3 roughly chopped

• 180ml sunflower or vegetable oil • 220g caster sugar • 300g ground almonds • 3 medium eggs • 2 tbsp orange blossom water • 150g polenta • 1 tsp baking powder For the syrup • 3 tbsp caster sugar • 150ml orange juice 1. Line and grease the base and sides of a 20cm round cake tin. Preheat the oven to 180C (200C non-fan).

2. Cut off the top and base of the six whole clementines and cut in half horizontally so the beautiful star pattern is exposed.

Lay the 12 halves in the tin with the largest surface area to the base. Don’t worry about gaps because the batter will fill them.

3. Make the cake batter by placing the oil and sugar in a large bowl. Add the almonds and eggs and mix through really well.

4. Blend the 3 whole chopped clementines in a food processor to make a smooth paste. Stir

STRAWBERRY ETON MESS CAKE For good bakers Serves 8-10 Preparation time: 20-30 minutes Cooking/baking time: 2-2½ hours For the cake • 250g fresh strawberries • 100g strawberry jam • 4 free-range eggs • 150g caster sugar • 200g unsalted butter • 200g self-raising flour • ½ tsp baking powder For the meringue • 3 egg whites • Few drops of lemon juice

PHOTOGRAPHS Romas Foord FOOD STYLIST Henrietta Clancy

Eat! SUMMER BAKING

Strawberry Eton mess layer cake

Eat! SUMMER BAKING

• 1 tsp vanilla extract • 150g caster sugar For the filling • 300g double cream • 1 tsp vanilla extract • Zest of 1 lemon • 2 tbsp chopped fresh mint

Summer layered pavlova

To decorate • Segments from 2-3 oranges • Mint leaves

To decorate • 200g strawberries, quartered • Mint leaves 1. Hull the strawberries and place in a saucepan. Cover and cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes. Take off the lid and mash the strawberries with a potato masher. Let them reduce to almost one third.

2. Add the strawberry jam and reduce it by another half. You will need about 100g in total of this strawberry reduction. Let it cool to room temperature.

3. Preheat the oven to 160C (180C non-fan). Grease and line two 20cm baking tins with baking paper.

4. In a large mixing bowl whisk together all the cake ingredients, including the strawberry reduction, using an electric whisk for about 1 minute. Scrape the sides of the bowl and whisk for another 30 seconds. Divide the batter equally into the lined tins and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

5. Take the cakes out of the oven and let them cool in the tins for 10 minutes. Remove them from the tins and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

6. Turn the oven down to 100C (120C non-fan). Draw two 20cm circles on a piece of baking paper.

Line a baking sheet with the baking paper, pencil-side down.

7. In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites with the lemon juice and vanilla until it forms soft peaks.

Add the sugar 1 tbsp at a time, whisking between each addition until all the sugar is incorporated.

8. Once all the sugar is whisked in you will have a stiff, glossy meringue. Add the mixture to a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle. Fill the inside of each circle with meringue and smooth the middle using a pallet knife.

Pipe some decorative designs

32 The Times Magazine

• 1 tbsp caster sugar • Few sprigs of fresh thyme, chopped

around the edge of the circles.

9. Bake the meringues in a preheated oven for 1½-2 hours.

Then switch off the heat and let them cool in the oven for another couple of hours.

10. To assemble the cake, whip the cream with the vanilla, lemon zest and chopped mint until it forms soft peaks. Spread 1 tbsp on top of the first sponge and add one of the meringue discs. Spread the meringue with 1 tbsp cream and scatter over some of the chopped strawberries. Place the second sponge on top and then repeat the process.

11. Decorate the top of the second meringue with the rest of the strawberries and sprinkle over some mint leaves. Keep it chilled.

Take it out of the fridge about 2 hours before serving.

SUMMER LAYERED PAVLOVA For good bakers Serves 8-10 Preparation time: 30 minutes Cooking/baking time: 3 hours For the meringue • 5 egg whites • 2 tsp lemon juice • 250g caster sugar • 1 tsp vanilla extract • 1 tsp cornflour For the filling • 300g double cream • 50g caster sugar • 200g Greek yoghurt • Zest of 2-3 oranges For the grilled fruit • 3-4 firm peaches and nectarines • 1 tbsp melted butter

1. Preheat the oven to 100C (120C non-fan). Take two pieces of parchment paper. Draw two 30cm x 5cm rectangles on one piece and one rectangle the same size on the second. Put them on two baking sheets, pencil-side down.

2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk the egg whites with 1 tsp lemon juice to form soft peaks. Still whisking, add the sugar 1 tbsp at a time, allowing 30 seconds between each addition. Once all the sugar is incorporated and the mix is glossy, add the vanilla, remaining 1 tsp lemon juice and the cornflour and mix well.

3. Put the meringue in a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle. Fill inside the drawn rectangles. Then pipe some patterns around the edges of each rectangle. If some meringue is left, pipe some kisses on the second baking sheet to use for decorations.

4. Bake for 2-2½ hours or until the meringues are crispy. Open the oven door slightly and leave the meringues in there for about 1 hour before taking them out.

5. Whip the cream with the sugar and orange zest until it forms soft peaks. Fold in the Greek yoghurt and set aside.

6. Heat a griddle pan on a high heat. Coat the fruit in melted butter and sugar and, once the pan is hot, griddle on each side for a minute. Sprinkle with chopped thyme and set aside.

7. To assemble, set one meringue on a cake plate. Spoon one third of the cream into the middle.

Decorate with one third of the orange segments and griddled fruit. Sprinkle some mint and thyme leaves on top.

8. Carefully place the second layer on top. Repeat step 7 for the second and third meringue layers as well. Keep chilled until ready to serve. n Find Nadiya and Rahul’s recipes for The Times at thetimes.co.uk

JOANCOLINSDBE/INSTAGRAM, STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: JO LORRIMER AT DAVID ARTISTS USING RMS BEAUTY AND DAVINES

The women who saved Britain Continued from page 27

ebola. It was nothing like ebola. It was, in fact, a completely different family of virus.

But inside the adenovirus that formed ChAd3’s key innovation was a little snippet of genetic code taken from ebola. When it infected the cells of vaccinated people those cells became vaccine factories, churning out harmless fragments of ebola proteins so that the body was prepared to recognise and fight off the real thing. This was a near-miraculous technology. It was not so much a vaccine as a “platform”, ready to be adapted to new diseases as and when they arrived.

And in 2014-15 the process was still too slow. Bottlenecks in manufacturing and testing meant that by the time it was ready to be used, ebola was under control.

When Gilbert and Green heard reports of a new kind of pneumonia appearing in China, they were determined not to repeat the same mistakes. “The dilemma of being a vaccinologist is you don’t really ever want a situation where your vaccines need to be used at this kind of scale,” says Green. “We decided, if we’re going to need it, we’re going to need it fast. Let’s prove we can do it and how fast we can do it, because then we can learn from that for next time.”

Ebola had taught them that designing the vaccine was only the start. They needed trials, pipelines, pharmaceutical companies. They needed to do things concurrently that had previously been done consecutively. At the start of 2020, this was what they resolved to do.

“We had to get everything moving,” says Gilbert. “Start the manufacturing, make the starting materials, get the clinical trials off the ground – phase one, phase two, then phase three trials in different countries. There was the immunology, the bloods coming from the clinic back to our labs, getting all the data together, recruitment, volunteers.”

“It’s massive,” Green continues. “You have to buy new freezers. You have to buy inventory control systems. There were hundreds of people working on this campus.

The thing that Sarah was doing sounds like logistics, but it’s massive logistics.”

Gilbert makes a comparison between this time and the months after she had triplets. As then, “There have been times when it’s just so totally full-on that all we can do is focus on the next half-hour, and then the half-hour after that. It’s been quite traumatic, frankly.”

Of everything that could go wrong, the most likely was the early stages of manufacturing.

Making the first vaccine, constructed from adenovirus and DNA, was a miracle of biotechnology, but it was also well understood.

They had done it for ebola and for other diseases since.

Growing more vaccine from that, using cells and bioreactors to churn out the doses of adenovirus needed, was more temperamental.

34 The Times Magazine

This was Green’s job. She talks about making the raw ingredients of a vaccine as if it is a little like animal husbandry. She speaks of coaxing cells, finding those that thrive, giving them the environment they need. One batch failed entirely. One was more successful than she could have hoped. Eventually in her lab she had a Coke can’s worth of raw material – 600 billion particles of virus – from which every one of the planned 3 billion doses of their vaccine would be descended.

As science editor of The Times, I remember chatting around this time to members of the Oxford team. Gilbert was saying that, in contravention of all known precedent, they could be through trials and into general use in a year. It seemed simultaneously fantastically optimistic and also far too slow. Surely a pandemic would be long over by then?

Others clearly shared my view, not yet

Dame Joan Collins receiving the Oxford vaccine in January

‘ALL THE CHALLENGES – NO PASTA IN TESCO, NO TOILET ROLL – WE WERE EXPERIENCING THEM TOO’ convinced of the practical merits of this technology. While Green was whispering sweet nothings to her bioreactors, Gilbert was performing the role that our scientific system appears to have decided is the best use of senior scientists’ time: scrabbling around for laboratory space, begging equipment, applying for funding.

Eventually they would get the full backing of the British state, but even then that was not always enough. She remembers a call with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, in March 2020. “He said, ‘What can I do to help? What do you need?’ ” She needed to get the vaccine clinics up and running and replied, “PPE.” “You could see he was thinking, ‘Not you as well,’ ” she says.

As the first wave came to an end, Britain needed heroes. We had put NHS rainbows in our windows and clapped for carers. But carers were to the pandemic what the small boats of Dunkirk were to the Second World War. It was time for the big guns. The nation wanted not pluck in defeat but hope for victory: they wanted Spitfires and Bletchley code breakers.

Gilbert and her colleagues provided that.

So it was that something entirely unexpected happened, at least to Gilbert and Green. People started getting in touch, interested not in adenoviruses but in the scientists behind them. Sixth-formers would email them asking who their role models were.

TV channels would call. Journalists like me would bother them with interview requests.

Schools asked them to speak – Gilbert will visit one after our interview.

“I have mixed feelings about it,” says Gilbert. “It’s all about personalities. We don’t want to be science personalities.”

But this is what they’d become. There were appearances on The Andrew Marr Show, there was a profile on Radio 4. “There was,” Green reminds Gilbert, “that kid who dressed up as you.” A nursery had a superheroes day and one child went as Gilbert. Her parents sent over the pictures. “She’s wearing a white shirt that looks like a lab coat, with big glasses and a string of pearls,” says Gilbert. (“I’ve never seen Sarah in pearls,” adds Green.)

Is it flattering? Gilbert doesn’t like the “role models stuff”. “People ask me, ‘Who were your role models growing up?’ ” she says. She finds the question mystifying. “Science isn’t about people,” she says. “I didn’t have time for heroes.”

You don’t get passionate about viral vectored vaccines by being a people person.

“I was interested in doing the science, finding out how things work and how to use what we know to make something happen, or create something that’s more interesting.

“I had an email from a parent of an eight-year-old girl who said she’d seen me on television and didn’t realise that women could be scientists, and now she wants to think about being a scientist.”

So far, so inspiring? Not quite. Gilbert thought, “Well, what on earth have you been teaching her? For heaven’s sake.”

Three days after our meeting on the site of Oxford’s Churchill Hospital, where much of the development was done, the Queen’s birthday honours will be announced.

Green will get an OBE, Gilbert a damehood.

Stephen Fry getting his jab in March at Westminster Abbey

Scientists often say they are not interested in being personalities or in press approval.

Despite writing a book, which she justifies on the basis that Edward Jenner also worked to publicise his vaccine, I’ve never doubted the sincerity of these sentiments with Gilbert.

Speaking to journalists she has always been scrupulously polite, but has never invited follow-ups. For much of the past year, if you sent her an email you received an out-of-office that roughly translated as, “I’m very busy.

Leave me alone and go to the press office.”

In the book she talks about that press office scheduling back-to-back interviews with people like me on key days. The encounters in the book are described with the vague air of a duty ticked off: a task that’s slightly unpleasant, mildly regrettable, but probably

family-run pizzeria, doing everything ourselves,” writes Gilbert. “They were Pizza Express.”)

And now she had a meeting with a prince.

She and Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and the man running the trials, were due to sit down with Prince William and be filmed having a conversation.

“It was a bit odd – the three of us in a row.”

She realised, though, that the backdrop was a mess. “Andy had to go to meet the entourage and I was left there, so I had to fix the blinds.”

The Oxford vaccine, as it was now called, had become a patriotic emblem to be lauded at Downing Street press conferences and, perhaps, used as a shield by the government when confronted with other failings.

When something is this big – enough that its success or failure could move percentage points in the global economy – it is not just scientific or patriotic, it is also geopolitical.

This has been hard, say Green and Gilbert.

Throughout the book they talk about press and political attention, much of which they perceive as unfair. Misinformation began almost from the start, when there were internet rumours that the first recipient had died.

There were the accusations, which stung, that the trial had made an “error” in giving a subgroup a half-dose of the vaccine: the wrinkle that led to two efficacy statistics being reported on the day their results were at last released. It wasn’t planned, but to call it a mistake was also to elide a lot of nuance. And it deflated their achievement.

The nadir, though, probably coincided with that of the nation: the midst of the winter wave, when hospitals were full and, on the continent, politicians were briefing against the Oxford vaccine. The Germans were

‘THIS CONCEPT THAT THE VACCINE MANUFACTURERS ARE “THEM’’? WE’RE NOT THEM. WE ARE US’ worth it on balance, much like filling in a grant application.

It feels oddly in character that Gilbert had triplets, as if she had planned the most efficient and rational way to create a family.

All, naturally, are now studying biochemistry.

By the time Gilbert was frantically adjusting the blinds in the Jenner Institute for a visit from the Duke of Cambridge last June, she had accepted she was the figurehead of something that was no longer merely scientific.

The first wave had come and gone. The preliminary trials had been successful. Larger trials had begun – too late, alas, to gather enough infections before the summer lull.

AstraZeneca had been brought in to take the vaccine to scale. (“We were essentially a

questioning whether to give it to the elderly.

Emmanuel Macron was openly suggesting it was worthless.

“The whole country,” says Green, “gave a Gallic shrug at that point.”

Then came the fear about blood clots. One of the odd things about vaccine development is that at some point the results are out of your hands. The reason politicians had relative confidence that we could get a vaccine was not because they had faith in any particular team – it was because there were so many teams.

And many have, indeed, failed. That they have done so is not somehow a reflection of their lesser skill, but simply of the sheer complexity of a human body and what happens when you tweak its immune system. One vaccine stopped trials because it caused people

wrongly to test positive for HIV. The vaccine interfered with the tests – astonishing bad luck.

So too were the clots. It was a side effect so rare that there was no way of knowing about it except by vaccinating at scale. We still don’t understand the mechanism. “Of course we don’t want a vaccine that we’ve been involved in to have these rare serious adverse events,” says Gilbert. “There was no way anybody could have known that was going to happen.”

Green said her motivation for writing the book was, in part, because of the conspiracy theories: the belief there was some malevolent force behind the vaccine team when, in fact, it was people like her just trying to work out how to home school her daughter in a pandemic.

“We are normal people doing our job to the absolute best of our ability. All the challenges – no pasta in Tesco, no toilet roll, not being able to see your mum and dad – we were experiencing them too.” She was also trying to get key worker status so that her daughter could stay at primary school. “So this concept that the vaccine manufacturers are ‘them’?

We’re not them. We are us.” It’s been hard.

“What has been especially tough is the inability to mark what we’ve done as a team.”

They know, though, that they’re appreciated.

When Green went for her vaccine she couldn’t resist telling the nurse. “I said, ‘I made that.’

She took a selfie and put it on Twitter.”

Gilbert gets recognised these days.

“I’ve had people say to me they’ve had their vaccine, their parents have had the vaccine, and they’re so grateful. And I don’t think they expect it, but they get very emotional. They kind of break down into tears. I find that quite difficult.” I can imagine. Gilbert does not strike me as a natural with public displays of affection. In the book she talks about how she hopes that a lasting legacy of the pandemic will be the end of the handshake.

But I am being unfair. She finds it difficult, she says, because, “Then I start empathising with them too.” It is hard to tell – in our bland meeting room in her offices where we are all wearing masks – but it looks like there is just the hint of emotion there, that she has, like the unexpectedly teary people approaching her in the street, become briefly overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.

But the interview is over. Green is off to pick up her daughter from school. Gilbert is off to her next engagement. We head out together into the bright Oxford sun. “Right,” says Gilbert, with all the forced briskness of someone jollying themselves to go for a Boxing Day swim. “I’m off to inspire a school.” n Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green is published on July 8 (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)

The Times Magazine 35

‘My sisters and I were the lucky ones. I didn’t have to marry my dad.

Some girls I grew up with did’

Children of God founder David Berg Prayer meeting in 1971

Bexy Cameron was born into the Children of God, the cult that became notorious for exploitation and sexual abuse. Now she’s written a memoir about what it was like to grow up in a movement founded by a predator – and to go back as an adult to try to understand what made her parents stay. By Hilary Rose PORTRAIT Tom Jackson

Bexy Cameron, 38

PREVIOUS SPREAD: HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING CHANTECAILLE AND T3 HAIR TOOLS. WENN, SHUTTERSTOCK. THIS SPREAD: SHUTTERSTOCK

G

rowing up, Bexy Cameron didn’t exactly know there was something odd about her childhood. She knew that moments of happiness tended to be brief. She remembers sitting on the back of her sister’s bike one day, as they cycled along a dusty road in India. She felt happy then, she remembers. Free.

“It’s a pure memory,” she says today, choosing her words very carefully, “a moment of being without the understanding that I was in a cult.” She calls it “an unpolluted memory”.

She is more used to memories such as the day in Johannesburg when, aged four, she found piles of cash on the bedside table of a woman she knew as Auntie Beverly and first made the connection between money and sex.

This is where the Lord’s work happens, she was taught. Cash for Jesus. Or the time in Cape Town, the year after, digging around in the dirt for something that might kill her father. Or the day when she was eight or nine and living in a commune in Hendon, north London, and a man she knew as Uncle Jonathan put her in bed with his son and told her to undress while he watched. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she knew it was wrong. She ran.

Cameron was born into the Children of God, the notorious cult that, at its peak, had more than 10,000 members in 130 countries.

By the time she escaped at 15 there had been “experiences”, she says, alluding darkly to the sexual abuse of children for which the cult became infamous. It was founded in California in 1968 by a self-styled prophet called David Berg, who was referred to as Moses and sent weekly letters dictating exactly how his followers should live their lives. Cameron would like to think the cult was born from pure motives and love, a Sixties desire to change the world. She accepts that some followers might have joined and then lost their way.

“But I also think that a group that is led by a sexually deviant predator paedophile, which is how I look at David Berg – not a prophet – is going to attract people who want to harm kids. What I find so hard to believe is how he tricked that many people into thinking it was OK to raise their kids in this environment: being shown sexual imagery and child pornography I wish I’d never seen.”

Cameron, 38, has written a memoir and made a documentary about modern-day cults, optioned for TV by Dakota Johnson and Riley Keough. She drove across America visiting ten cults, trying to understand the perspective of the children who, like her, were born into them.

The book is defiantly not a misery memoir; there is nothing of the “poor me” about Bexy Cameron. She doesn’t want pity. It’s a testament to her determination to survive.

38 The Times Magazine

Members of the cult protesting in 1993, with Bexy Cameron on the right, circled. Below: her father in 1993

At ten, she was forbidden from speaking for a year, except to an assigned ‘leader’ When we meet at her flat in east London, her first concern is whether Nacho the woodle and Raffa the Frenchie can join us (they can).

She lives here in Mile End with her fiancé, Paz, a producer, and her friend Maria who, like her, escaped the cult. With her successful career as a film and creative director Cameron is clearly resilient, surviving a childhood that would have sunk many. But she’s also fun and quick to laugh. Her home feels happy.

Her childhood was anything but. Families like hers would roam between communes across the world, constantly on the run, existing on handouts begged from shops and cafés. She was nine when she was subjected to her first exorcism, in Birmingham. She vividly remembers the feel of the carpet pressing into her face as the adults held her down.

When she was ten she was placed on “silence restriction” and forbidden from speaking for a year to anyone except her assigned “leader”.

The aim, they said, was to improve her communication with God. Another time she was told to fight her best friend until one of them couldn’t get up any more. Television and pop culture were banned. Punishment beatings were common. Her mother comes across in the book as passive, but her father was prone to violent rages. Cameron believes that unlike some in the cult, she was lucky.

“I didn’t have to marry my dad. Some girls that we grew up with did. Me and my sisters weren’t being flippant when we said, ‘We’re the lucky ones, ’cos Dad isn’t a paedophile.’ ” Her parents, Martin and Linda, dated briefly when they were medical students at the University of Leicester. When Linda subsequently heard rumours that Martin had become mixed up in a cult in London, she

decided to rescue him. She found him in a room full of hippies, singing and hugging. The Children of God was her purpose in life, they told her. It was where she belonged. Five hours later, she believed them. She had been “turned”. Martin and Linda married and went on to have 12 children.

The sixth of those children was Rebecca – Bexy – born in Chesterfield in 1982. She has no idea how many countries she’s lived in.

Mauritius, South Africa, India, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland – “All over the shop.

It’s very easy to slip under the radar.”

In the UK they bounced around, as she puts it, from a terraced house in north London to a campsite in Wales, a commune outside Rugby, another in Tewkesbury and two houses in rural Leicestershire. Sometimes they lived in houses with three or four families, which felt “normal-ish”. At others they were in remote communes with hundreds of people.

The children never went to school – she jokes that she’s the last person you’d want on your pub quiz team – but there were daily religious teachings.

Her parents, she alleges, ceded control of their children to the group, which was in thrall to the mysterious Berg. As early as the Seventies he had been on the run, wanted for questioning by the FBI and Interpol about allegations within the cult of rape, incarceration, kidnapping and incest. The hunt only ended in 1994 with his death in Portugal.

“This man, our dictator, could change our lives on a daily basis,” she recalls, “from having a toe in the water of the outside world to being completely isolated, hidden away, on the run.”

Funding for the cult was through a web of sources, mostly benefactors and the cash and

possessions of those who joined. For six months, and against the rules, Cameron’s father had a paying job as a fireman in Chesterfield to raise money for a move to India. She thinks that most of the money came from making and selling music videos and tapes of the group singing about the end of the world. Remarkably, people bought them.

“Bizarre, isn’t it? They had a record label called Music with Meaning, and in the early days we’d sell them door to door.”

Children were the workforce, cooking, cleaning, washing up. Social services visited once or twice, but the children were coached to say they were being “home schooled by loving parents”. She can’t recall being asked about sexual abuse. Books were banned. One of her brothers, Chad, was beaten when he was caught with a dictionary. “What will you need all those long words for when you are fighting the Antichrist?” the adults shouted.

The only subject on the curriculum was the Day of Judgment, which was expected imminently. It was exciting and horrifying and Cameron believed every word. Why wouldn’t she? Her parents said so, as did all the adults she met. It was normal. They were normal.

“It’s hard,” she says now, “to pinpoint an actual moment of realising that we were not.”

Her childhood environment was one of promiscuity and sexual desensitisation. The late actor River Phoenix, who was brought up in the cult, said that his first sexual encounter was at the age of four. While still a child, Cameron was taught that it would be her duty to have sex with men, ostensibly in order to turn them into followers. Women were sent out to perform what was known as “flirty fishing” in bars and nightclubs. Sometimes they would take the men back to the commune and if the man was, as Cameron puts it, “of a certain inclination, what happens then?”

Is she saying that children were offered up sexually, for money, to men?

“Not necessarily offered up. But if you involve people that are attracted to a group that is entirely loose with its children and how their children view sex, then it leaves everything open for abuse. Sex incorporated itself into our lives. Sex was expected. We were raised to believe that this was normal.”

Her life changed when she was ten and living at a commune in Leicestershire. Every so often one of the children would be offered up for a press interview, coached in what to say to prove that there was nothing illegal going on. The journalist asked a simple question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And her world shifted. It had never occurred to her that growing up and living a different kind of life was an option. That day, she realised that she might have a choice.

It was another five years before she escaped.

She was 15. The Children of God was now

‘I wanted to push my parents. Scream. But they still had a power over me’

The Children of God in Brighton in 1971

widely referred to, in newspapers and court cases, as a sex cult. She was befriended by Raffa, an 18-year-old mechanic’s apprentice, who helped her to come up with a plan. She would bide her time while she earned enough money to pay rent, and then she would run away. She got a bar job in a nightclub, slipping out of the commune after lights out at 9.30pm.

But she lasted barely a month before her parents found out.

They were incandescent. The commune debated her fate, and the unanimous verdict was banishment. She was turned out onto the street. She headed for the train station with her few possessions in a bag and, within the hour, she was picked up by a man she describes only as a predator.

“Imagine you’re 15,” she says now. “You’ve got no idea of the world. Next thing you’re at a train station – what happens next?

Predators can smell vulnerability from a mile off. I was raised not to be in that world and all of a sudden I was, and extremely bad things happened.”

But she was determined and desperate. She did “whatever was necessary” to survive and eventually rented an apartment in Leicester with two other exiled cult teenagers, one of them her 19-year-old brother. Cameron worked two or three jobs at a time and at one point, penniless, they lived off milk for a month.

“Then,” she says, grinning, “there was the other side of it. If you’re teenagers and you don’t have parents telling you what to do, what are you going to do? Drink, drugs, the lot. We didn’t have any guidance and we’re not going to die in the fires of Armageddon. Brilliant!”

She did a secretarial course, which led to office jobs. Meanwhile, her parents moved to South Africa with their younger children. For years she was careful not to confront them in case they cut off access to her younger siblings.

Only recently did she feel able to do that. She

filmed the first meeting with them, five years ago in London, for her documentary. But her mother reminisced about how wonderful it was to give her life to the cult. It was as if, Cameron writes in her book, she was talking about yoga or vegetarianism. Cameron sat in stunned silence.

“I wanted to push them. Shout. Scream. But somehow they still had a power over me that reduced me to being a little girl. And what did that little girl do to survive? She was quiet.”

Three years later, she met them again. This time she told them how deeply damaging her childhood had been, and how she had barely survived in the years after they turned her out.

“I just needed them to listen,” she says.

“I didn’t want them to give me an explanation or say they were sorry. I didn’t want to get into arguments about what did or didn’t happen, because I lived it. I was there. They said they were sorry and I imagine they are, if for nothing else than the fact that they’re missing out. That must be devastating in their older years, to have these incredible children they don’t see or speak to.”

The Children of God has been renamed over the years, but Cameron dismisses it as “just a logo change”. Her parents are still a part of “whatever it’s called now”, but they live a “much more regular” existence. She wonders wistfully why they couldn’t always have done that. She and her siblings are entirely estranged from them. Uncle Jonathan and the other abusers and paedophiles of her childhood have so far escaped justice, because they used pseudonyms. There have been a few successful prosecutions in Scotland, France and America, but a generation of children like her has been lost, she says, and there’s never been a reckoning.

Yet her life doesn’t seem defined by hatred.

The constant theme running through it, then and now, is love for her brothers and sisters.

All of them have adjusted, painfully, to life in the real world. She has 13 nephews and nieces and wonders aloud how on earth her siblings turned out to be such loving, caring parents after the parenting they had. She answers her own question. Unconditional love. Do the opposite of what was done to them.

“My brothers and sisters are a huge part of my healing. I can’t even talk about them without smiling. To have these incredible people, who have gone through the same thing as you, whom you can cry about it with, joke about it with…” She tails off. “Not to be trite, but some of the ways you deal with stuff like this is humour. That’s how we dealt with it when we were kids. We still do now.” n Cult Following: My Escape and Return to the Children of God by Bexy Cameron is published by Manilla Press on July 8 (£14.99).

Read an exclusive extract at thetimes.co.uk

The Times Magazine 39

THE

BIG FAT LIE ABOUT

MEN AND THEIR

BODIES AND WHY I’M (PARTLY) TO BLAME

Always on diets, worried about your waistline and obsessed with your hair? Admit it, you’re a midlife bloke. Phil Hilton, 57, right, the editor who helped launch the six-pack bible, Men’s Health magazine, talks to celebrities about their secret body hang-ups (and we’re not just talking beer bellies) PORTRAIT Jude Edginton

Bruce Springsteen, 71

BACKGRID, WILLSMITH/INSTAGRAM, KGC PHOTO AGENCY, MATRIX PICTURES, MEGA AGENCY

T

here are generally two kinds of remark a man will make to another man about his body – loosely undermining and specifically cruel. The man rules dictate bodies are for building or ignoring. We will display our PBs on Strava, but will never share a view on our legs; will ask about bench-press weights but never talk about our chest hair or weird nipples. We are too busy doing manly things to worry about our physical appearance.

It’s all a massive lie. Men stand in front of the mirror and have feelings – powerful feelings of pride and disappointment, insecurity and dread. We carry with us the remarks made in the changing rooms at school, the panic of an early sexual encounter, the hours of secret comparisons, the private diets and the hunt for the first pubic hairs.

But we never, ever talk about it. So many other aspects of old-school masculinity have been eroded but the words, “Does my bum look big in these?” do not bring to mind a rugby prop forward bursting onto the pitch in a new pair of shorts.

Men have always had feelings about their bodies, but the pressure on us to look a certain way has cranked up since the Nineties and now, thanks to social media and the ever burgeoning wellness industry, it’s fevered and omnipresent.

Sales of weight benches during the gymdenying months of lockdown increased by

42 The Times Magazine

Barack Obama, 59

more than 4,000 per cent (yes, 4,000). There are currently 51 million posts on the #abs Instagram feed. No one used to know what abs were – now they’re a shorthand everyone understands and I’m partly to blame.

Sometime in the Nineties I found myself on a beach in Miami with the most physically impressive men I’d ever met in my life.

The memory remains vivid. I was part of a small team taking pictures of leading US fitness models, shooting a cover for an early edition of the UK incarnation of Men’s Health magazine. They were tall, evenly tanned, action-hero handsome with thick hair.

But beyond all that, beyond everything else really, were the extraordinary physiques.

Huge, well-defined shoulders, powerful, thick thighs, deep muscular chests. But the most compelling element, the part that had me and my colleagues flying thousands of miles, were their stomach muscles. They had the elusive six-pack visible abs.

We’d already tried shooting English models on windy parts of the south coast near arcades, but they didn’t quite muster the magnificence of the true American muscle god. The aesthetic my US colleagues pioneered was a long way from the extremes of bodybuilding and suggested an awesomeness that was a side effect of some sporting excellence – boxing, sprinting. There was a spirit of, “What me, lean and muscular?” I’ll admit, I stood, pale, British, thirtysomething, already bald, in the shadow of these American uberbeings and I was smitten.

Chris Hemsworth, 37

It felt like these genetically gifted, highly disciplined specimens of masculinity were there to act as human signposts on our cover, rather than literal goals to aim for. They’d eaten a tight, unforgiving diet, they’d been captured in the right light by a highly skilled photographer, snapped in the precise moment their bodies looked most ripped, and then they’d been retouched (obviously). I mean, everyone knew that? Didn’t they? You don’t actually get to look like these guys.

Since then, the culture has exploded and men really do strain, diet, run and lift to achieve impossible ideals. Social media creates the impression this is what male bodies look like – who else posts a picture of themselves shirtless? Every torso in every movie is “in shape” – even the doofus who can’t get the girl in the rom-com looks like he could rip trees out of the ground. What about the rest of us?

My long-time friend, writer and broadcaster Danny Wallace, and I were kicking around ideas for a podcast when he suggested we ask famous men to open up about their bodies.

Hair, genitals, bellies, skin, self-image, selfdoubt. The very idea of talking about this stuff made me feel uneasy. I’d hardly discuss it with myself. It sounded awful.

I knew we were on to something.

The sense in every conversation was of boundaries being explored, sometimes touched and crossed, and sometimes a turning back.

What was interesting as they spoke about their physical appearance were their theories, their past wounds, the detail with which they

Pierce Brosnan, 68

Hugh Jackman, 52

Will Smith, 52, who posted photos of his ‘new’ lockdown body, right

‘MOST OF MY LIFE, WHEN I’VE LOOKED IN THE MIRROR, I’M DISAPPOINTED ON A VISCERAL LEVEL’ TIM MINCHIN could recall decades-old humiliations and the realisation that everyone, absolutely everyone, has their issues, even Rick Edwards.

TV presenter Edwards, 42, is 6ft 4in, has a slim but muscular frame, cheekbones you could shelter under in bad weather, a rich dark beard and matching hair that appears unfamiliar with the term “thinning”. He was scouted as a model before his screen career, but it’s not always been easy being Rick.

“I didn’t like modelling. It’s horrible. People are mean to you. My agency said, ‘You’re drinking too much beer. You’ve got a fat face.’ I was too large to be a model. There’s an ideal size where you fit all the clothes.

They lied on my model card and that was just embarrassing. I ripped two consecutive Prada ski suits. That was unpleasant.”

Feeling external pressure to look a certain way was a constant theme, and this with men who live with public attention, whether it be fans wanting selfies or the judgment of their audience. In a way, they were experiencing a magnified version of everyone’s life in a world where we are all material for a phone shot.

Hard to imagine the male celebrities of even a decade ago having or sharing these thoughts.

Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin, 45, fills stadiums. He created a stage

look around heavy, dark eye make-up and his long, rock-star hair and, often performing in bare feet, he presents a fairly elfin appearance.

He surprises people who meet him by being, in reality, an athletic 5ft 11in. Minchin is a lifelong runner but more recently pursued strength training as his acting career grew alongside his music. He is very self-aware about muscle, vanity and self-esteem.

“Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I was big and round and puffy and gross and, if I’m honest, most of my life, if I’ve looked in the mirror, I’ve felt disappointed on a really visceral level… with another layer over the top saying, ‘Don’t be silly.’ Happily, I’ve reached a point in my forties where, for the first time in my life, I’m like, yep, I got where I wanted to get. Took a shitload of work.

The standards I set myself are unfair and unnecessary.” He is at pains to point out that he applies these standards to no one else and would never want to be part of the growing pressure on men to look a certain way.

I think my most common response to these men and their unravelling thoughts about themselves was, “So, you think this stuff too.” The feeling as a man is that other men are living more easily in the world than you do – my female friends are always

dealing with their bodies, their faces, their hair, frequently conflicted about the emphasis on their appearance but at least in touch with the issues. The body positivity movement has meant fashion brands overhauling decades of devotion to a single, tall, skinny body shape, and we’ve seen plus-size embraced.

But men remain dogged by stereotypes and are way behind this new way of looking at size and bodies.

Comedian Jason Manford recently turned 40. He’s a 6ft Mancunian who exudes warmth and honesty. Calling himself “a comic”, he is a true mainstream face and as an actor, stand-up and singer has lived with media attention much of his life. He has always wrestled with his shape and is open about that. When a company sent him a pair of shorts, after much internal debate, he decided to post an Instagram wearing them, as intended, without a top. He was fully aware this would draw comment and coverage.

“You can keep breathing in on photos and put the lens higher and higher up when you’re doing a selfie, but at some point you’ve got to just be happy in your skin.”

Manford was consciously battling with the prevailing impression that male bodies have all been sculpted in the gym. He points out there are very few images of men who look like him published anywhere.

“In the street, more people look like me than don’t – maybe not on Instagram.

I had a moment of clarity: I thought, ‘Sod it.’ There hasn’t been a time in my life

The Times Magazine 43

STYLING: HANNAH SKELLEY. GROOMING: KRISTOPHER SMITH AT DAVID ARTISTS USING SAM MCKNIGHT AND THE ORDINARY. PHIL HILTON WEARS TOP AND SHOES, UA.COM; SHORTS, NEWBALANCE.CO.UK. WITH THANKS TO ELITE-EVOLUTION.COM

where I haven’t thought about my weight or appearance at least once a day. So many blokes got in touch to say, ‘Thanks, mate.’ We’re not so blasé; we care. I can only imagine what it’s been like for women.”

Manford precisely captures the oddness of never seeing anything other than a very narrow and seriously hard to achieve body type. Through a lifetime of trying to manage my own physique through exercise, and living with the gap between reality and goal, conversations about weight were both fascinating and liberating.

I’ve grown up listening to women relate food to fat, sharing diet tips, never feeling at home with their shape, while men affected indifference. Bigger men have always been deemed funny. Bond and Bourne are not played by actors carrying bellies – those body types are allocated comic or corrupt characters at the periphery of the action.

Many larger men in entertainment have used their own shape as material or had funny thrust upon them.

Comedian Omid Djalili radiates positive energy – at 55, he has successfully developed a Hollywood movie career in parallel with his life as a stand-up. But he was warned many years ago that his life on the road, eating carelessly, would have medical consequences.

He is small and describes himself as “a sphere”. He used humour to fend off his concerns and the judging gaze of those around him – a technique many of us know well.

“I have an Iranian background where people are very honest and they will come up to you and grab your stomach and say, ‘What’s this?’ You always deal with it with a joke – as long as people are laughing, it’s OK.” Our conversations frequently led us back to weight. The most dramatic story belonged to comedian Marcus Brigstocke. At the age of 48 and 6ft 2in, he is a dashing man with a mind that examines the world around him with a vigour you can almost see as he speaks.

However, he suffered an eating addiction as a teenager and experienced extreme weight gain as a result. Although eating disorders among men have received more recognition, to hear Brigstocke speak with such candour about a time in his life when his relationship with his body was so dysfunctional was very moving.

“I created very unhelpful links between food and approval, and food and love. Your physicality is all of what you are, so if your body is a source of discomfort, both physical and emotional, there’s nowhere to go with that. You’re overweight, so you comfort eat.

When food is your source of comfort, that’s where you go. By the time I was 12, I couldn’t fit into school uniform. I was diagnosed as morbidly obese at 17.”

Hearing men, imperfect men, talk about themselves and offering a glimpse behind the

‘AT 12, I COULDN’T FIT INTO SCHOOL UNIFORM. BY 17, I WAS MORBIDLY OBESE’ MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE scenes of a public persona made me even more aware of how little we discuss this stuff. The conversation reveals, above all else, an unmanly self-awareness. We are earners, fighters, drinkers – if we were attractive or grotesque, that was of no interest. To own up to thinking about your belly or your chin is to admit to the weakness of vanity and insecurity.

For someone in their fifties – I’m age twins with Boris Johnson and Brad Pitt – it’s a complicated time. Every day brings developments, news from the front line of decay. I’m cool with it/horrified, depending on when you get me.

Let’s talk grey chest hair: shirt off, I’m a gorilla forced out of the richest food sources by the young, dominant males. I could shave it, pluck it, wax it, but that would involve pain, upkeep and untold humiliations and technical mishaps. I’m a cowardly, outcast gorilla.

Let’s discuss the sag. I work out every day – running, lifting, pull-ups and burpees.

Lockdown for me was an almost endless PE class with a sadistic teacher of my own creation. But the way your body looks as you age is beyond exercise – nothing I do can make me young. I’m an older man who can do loads of press-ups – but the way flesh

loosens or gathers is out my control. I’m aware of this and I’m OK with it/hate it.

My baldness follows the classic pattern designed by nature to give me a look only Einstein managed to pull off. If I turn my back for a day and allow the clippers to rest, the sides of my hair power-grow, dense and unstoppable, while the top offers fey, almost transparent, strands with acres of old man scalp between each of them.

It’s not sexy, any of it, and that’s the other thing…

One of the areas most taboo for men is dealing with our own status as sexual beings.

Men are profoundly coy about being sexy – this really is territory still deemed to be counter to every masculine ideal. Where women are battling with the dominant male gaze, men can’t acknowledge any gaze at all.

It was liberating to hear the investigative writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson (54, 5ft 7in, devoted to chic, loose, casual clothes) look back at a period when he found himself suddenly hot.

“I got very fat, something went wrong at Cardiff High, something was off-kilter. I lost it all when I came to London. I was very happy and popular with the girls. I didn’t know until I looked back at an old picture. I felt a twinge of regret – had I known how good-looking I was, I would have utilised it more. All the residual insecurity from my Cardiff days followed me around.”

So, we care. We’ve cared all along. We also know what it is to hate parts of ourselves, to feel like objects in the eyes of others, to feel unwanted and trapped by behaviours we can’t control. We’re also hoping our clothes will disguise the parts we dislike and accentuate those we’re proud of. It’s all been going on in our heads all along, but we’ve never let on.

Years spent in gyms left me suspecting men were walking around with an unacknowledged backstory of self-awareness, vanity and insecurity – all that lifting, pulling and pushing in pursuit of an ideal shape was the one broadly acceptable outlet for complex feelings about how we looked.

The generation of young men coming up behind me is now in the crosshairs of an industry selling protein, fruit shakes, fat loss products, and now it has the amplification of Instagram, where everyone can take 100 shots to find the perfect image on their biggest, leanest day. On the one hand, it feels like it’s human to want to look good, and better than living for the office and burning out.

But on the other hand, it can be dark material when it takes hold. Women have started a conversation about the reality of our bodies.

I hope we men have the courage to follow. n The first Manatomy podcast, hosted by Phil Hilton and Danny Wallace, is available on July 14

The Times Magazine 45

Men’s Shop!

Take the plunge with some multitasking swim shorts, says Jeremy Langmead

From £79, mrmarvis.com

W

hat with constantly changing red, green and amber lists, fluctuating temperatures and a fully booked Britain, many of us still have no idea where we might be spending our summer holiday, so some strategic packing is called for.

On the off-chance there’s a little more pebble than pedalo, more Aperol than aftersun, think about buying a pair of swim shorts that look as smart worn at the bar as they will on the beach. There’s a host of men’s brands that offer tailored, waterproof shorts that work as well teamed with a linen shirt as they do a damp T-shirt. British brand Orlebar Brown started the trend for multitasking swimwear in 2007, but now there are warmer-clime labels such as Arrels Barcelona and Frescobol Carioca to choose from, as well as a tempting array on the high street from Next to Marks & Spencer. Dip your toe in carefully. n

15 SWIMMING SHORTS

£225, orlebarbrown.com

£145, sunspel.com

£145, Frescobol Carioca (mrporter.com)

£48, waxlondon.com

£225, orlebarbrown.com

£45, arket.com

£17.50, marksandspencer.com

£18, next.co.uk

£85, Atalaye (mrporter.com)

£55, paulsmith.com

£19.90, uniqlo.com

£55, reiss.com

£65, mrporter.com

£55, Reiss ( johnlewis.com)

£180, connollyengland.com The Times Magazine 47

Home!

PARASOLS AND HOT TUBS

By Georgina Roberts

1. £432, Camberra (maisonsdumonde.com).

3

1

3. £599, eastlondon parasols.com.

2. £471.20, Skagerak (skandium.com).

2

4. £395, frenchconnection.com.

5

6

7

8

5. £429, Fatboy (madeindesign.co.uk).

6. £129, Klaoos (amara.com).

9

7. £87, maisonsdumonde.com.

8. £266, HKLiving (en.smallable.com).

10

11

9. £295, coffeeandcloth.co.uk.

10. £55.99, wayfair.co.uk.

11. £266, HKLiving (en.smallable.com).

15 14

18

18. £142, maisonsdumonde.com.

19. £169, Business & Pleasure Co (amara.com).

12 16

20. £1,990, Sywawa (gomodern.co.uk).

13

HOT TUBS 12. £329.99, wavespas.com.

13. £449.99, CleverSpa (campingworld.co.uk).

14. £820, Lay-Z-Spa (argos.co.uk).

15. £774, CleverSpa (diy.com).

16. From £5,495, urbancedarhottubs.co.uk.

17. £1,499, royaltubs.co.uk.

21

17

19

20

21. £985, eastlondon parasols.com.

Shop!

1

2

SUMMER TOTES AND BASKETS

By Monique Rivalland

1. & 2. £195 each, luluguinness.com.

5. £120, sezane.com.

3

4

3. £216, Aranaz (revolve.com). 4. £285, thisisstelar.com.

6

7

6. £29, topshop.com.

7. £210, Heimat Atlantica (matchesfashion.com).

B E ST BU Y

8

9

10

11

8. £22.99, hm.com. 9. £19, arket.com. 10. £125, uterque.com. 11. £375, Dolce & Gabbana (mytheresa.com).

12

13

14

15

16

17

12. £57, lolaandmawu.com. 13. £29.99, mango.com. 14. £233, Sensi Studio (revolve.com). 15. £70, boden.co.uk. 16. £131, L*Space (revolve.com). 17. £220, aaksonline.com.

EDITOR’S PICK

18

19

20

21

18. £258, Heimat Atlantica (matchesfashion.com). 19. £90, marni.com. 20. £125, rouje.com. 21. £29.99, zara.com.

22. £114, Mercedes Salazar (revolve.com). 23. £52, artesano.net.

22

23

Eating out Giles Coren ‘The kids can’t manage long, so it’s eat up and run before another regular gets hit with a flicked pea. Sure it was just like this for Egon Ronay’ Thomas by Tom Simmons, Cardiff

TOM JACKSON

H

52 The Times Magazine

ey, look, last week I didn’t mean to damn Wales with faint praise, food-wise. I’ve had some of you suggesting that pizza and fish and chips aren’t proper food and having gone all that way, why didn’t I go to any “real” restaurants? And, frankly, you make me want to cry. After 25 years at the coalface of restauration in all its pomp and nonsense, I can honestly tell you that ALL I want on holiday, or ever, is really great pizza and fish and chips, such as I found at Pizzatipi in Cardigan and the Shed at Porthgain. Any half-trained fool can lob a sous-vided torchon of flesh onto a posh plate, squirt something oil-based and brightly coloured onto it out of a squeezy bottle and charge you 40 quid. Anyone! And they do. And that is most of what you get in the best eating cities in the world. And going out hunting for more of it in the boondocks, with my kids in tow, is seriously not going to happen.

And, anyway, how do you know that I didn’t go to actually quite a few of the smarter places in west Wales in the hope of finding something wonderful? Went through all the hassle of settling the kids in front of the television in our rental cottage with a hired stranger to mind them, schlepping for an hour in each direction and sitting in a silent room

while perfectly nice, slightly nervous staff brought us plate after plate of not-quite-up-toit cooking, which I decided not to write about?

Is that okay? Or would you have preferred me to make fun? Do you want me to drag out all my stupid cosmopolitan prejudices and piss all over some place that is trying hard to do what it has seen on MasterChef and thinks is the height of sophistication and, who knows, may well be what some people really do want?

You do? Well, then, you’re a bastard, and I have no use for you. I chose to focus on Tipi and the Shed because they are great, full stop. No qualifications. Far too good for you, in fact.

As it happens, on the way back east after a wonderful week in Pembrokeshire, we did happen upon an absolutely brilliant “proper” restaurant in Cardiff. It was vaguely en route because after all the electric car-charging traumas of the outward journey (recounted here ad nauseam last week), we had decided to return to London via Gloucestershire (which is only 190 miles from the Welsh coast and can be done in a single charge), spend the 48 hours there that it would take to fill the car up from the mains, and be back in London within three days. Like in the Middle Ages or something.

This meant that we didn’t need an electric charge in Cardiff, only a spot of lunch. And Thomas by Tom Simmons was a place I had been pointed towards by many people, when touting for Welsh restaurant recommendations on Twitter. It’s on a leafy street in Cardiff’s super-boujee Pontcanna suburb and we parked

Thomas by Tom Simmons 3-5 Pontcanna Street, Cardiff (029 2116 7800; thomas-pontcanna. co.uk) Cooking 8 Service 8 Room 8 Score 8

just a few doors away, right by… an electric charge point. If only I’d known. Could have saved myself a world of pain.

There was a very smart grocer and butcher on the street, dinky little cafés and bistros all around and very much the sense of a big local food thing going on. The outside was beautiful, classic, big-vitrined, quite Parisian or Lyonnais, just the sort of place you want to walk into with your wife and a couple of mates on a Thursday evening after work.

Although there is always that nervousness with children, at lunchtime, in the middle of a long journey. We normally take them to pubs because pubs are dark and rugged and they can run around. Proper, serious, brightly lit restaurants can be a worry.

But all seemed very relaxed inside the big, airy, cream-walled and dark green restaurant, with its parquet floors, neoGeorgian styling and deeply stuffed chairs.

It was an older clientele, no question, but Andrew, the restaurant manager, was very welcoming and the kids more or less behaved themselves. Depending on how you view playing Spit on the floor next to their parents’ table. Spit is a card game, I should at least point out. Not a spitting game. That came later, in the bar.

Beautiful menu. Tom Simmons has had his flagship restaurant, Tom Simmons, at Tower Bridge in London since 2017 and this place, opened last year, was his coming home. Or, rather, coming halfway home.

For Tom, like the Corens that day, started

out in Pembrokeshire, and the restaurant’s website tells us that his childhood there, “roaming the farmers’ markets” and “foraging in the countryside” is the “foundation of his cooking” and the “inspiration behind” this new venture. Just as well he didn’t spend his childhood playing Spit, I suppose.

A single piece of A4 card with its classy font offered six little things “for the table” such as crispy pig skin with hummus or Gordal olives; six “starters” including divercaught scallops with pork belly and celeriac velouté with truffle cream and chive; three “mains”; five items from the “grill” with named farms and breeds; and six “sides”. It was the sort of stuff of which you want to order loads, in three or four waves, plus a different bottle for each one. But, as ever, the kids can do about 45 minutes before it all goes pearshaped and I was driving, so “No, thanks,” to the booze, water all round, we’ll have six or seven dishes from across the menu and can you do them all at the same time, please, just squeeze them all on the table at the same time as the bill, and we’ll eat and scram… And still my wife will say, “I told you we should have packed sandwiches.”

First out of the kitchen was a basket of “Ground Bakery” breads and various house butters (I recall a delicious, densely mushroomy one). These disappeared in seconds and would probably have done most of the family for lunch. I was thus the only taker for four excellent little spherical mushroom croquettes with wild garlic mayo

and parmesan (£5) and the whipped cod roe with basil and paprika and a scattering of cod’s eggs (£5) – although the children piled into the spectacular giant squid ink crackers that were meant for my dipping. (“Monster prawn crackers.” Chomp chomp chomp. “But why are they black?”)

Then came the tea-brined fried chicken (£6) with lime mayo, coriander and sesame that I’d thought might work for the kids but – disaster! – the sexy dressings were all pre-striped across the lush, crispy, lightly battered and incredibly juicy chicken, and no matter how carefully I wiped them off, Sam was having none of it. So I ate all of those too while our lovely, long-suffering waitress fired out an order for fried chicken covered with nothing at all, which came in no time and quietened my stupid boy. It was historic fried chicken. Historic.

For my own main, I had a thick, wobbly tranche of turbot with a smoked mussel velouté in a big, sexy black bowl with charred baby leeks and dots of cod’s roe (£34). Would have been so good with a nice glass of icecold, flinty montrachet. A pint glass.

Alas, just as I was about to tuck in, Kitty’s full-sized, rare Welsh ribeye steak (£26) arrived. So there was the chopping-up of that to be done for her while my turbot cooled (she is ten, you’d think she might by now…) and the sculling of two or three deliciously grainy, ferrous offcuts, with some of her skinny fries into the bargain.

Then more chips, Tom’s special ones (£6) this time, which are of a type that I first encountered at Cora Pearl in Covent Garden, where potatoes are sliced wafer-thin into a tray and par-cooked, then chilled, turned out and sliced into rectangles, then deep-fried.

And these were as good as those get. Which is very good.

For Esther, the house-smoked salmon (£11.50): three greaseless rectangles, lightly smoked and still salmon pink, not orange, with the piquant addition of Gentleman’s Relish, cucumber and lemon.

And that’s your lot. Eat up and run for the car before the kids hit another regular with a flicked pea. Just a coffee for Dad, to keep him awake at the wheel, no time for puddings. But we did go away with a bag of their wonderful bread and pastries for the weekend. Except they all got eaten just a few hours later, on the hard shoulder, when we ran out of juice six miles from home and had to call the AA. I’m told restaurant reviewing was very much like this for Egon Ronay too. n The Times Magazine 53

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

Beta male Robert Crampton

TOM JACKSON

‘My first night out, and I’d forgotten what a faff it all is.

I’m far from social match fitness’

My first proper night out in ages, and I’d forgotten what a faff it all is, the socialising business. And when I say “proper” night out, it wasn’t even a big night, but a rather medium-sized, albeit important one: a (long-delayed) post-work, early evening, usually-over-by-9pm colleague leaving do.

Still, travelling into central London from home as required, it needed some effort, planning and decision-making.

Quite a lot of decision-making. How to travel? Bus? Uber? Feet? Overground train, then feet? Or Overground, then bus?

Or maybe not bother at all – Simon will understand. No, no, definitely got to go.

Let’s stick with the tried and tested 388 bus, the one I used to get to work all those months ago. The venue is only around the corner from the office.

When to leave? To arrive bang on time?

To arrive fashionably late? How long does the bus take? Will the reduced traffic be much of a factor? If I have a wee at 5.45pm, last thing before leaving home, will I go bladder-critical if the bus gets stuck and I don’t get to another lavatory until, say, 6.45? (I drink a lot of Diet Coke.)

What to wear? Stick with gym shorts and baggy T-shirt, as currently modelled? Too scruffy. Not to mention, possibly not entirely clean. Proper shirt and trousers? Too hot.

(It’s a humid, sticky evening, precisely the sort of weather in which you don’t want to be on a bus at rush hour.) Smarter shorts and tight T-shirt to show off new, improved physique? No, because new, improved physique is neither new nor improved sufficiently yet. Smarter shorts and loose short-sleeved shirt it is, then.

I still got: “Oooh, here’s someone who looks like he hasn’t been into the office in a LONG time!”

To eat now or to eat later? That’s an easy one: both now and later. And indeed, during: a bowl of bolognese at 5pm, a bowl of chips in the pub at 8pm, another bowl of bolognese back home at 9.30pm. Bag or no bag? Bag, definitely – I want to read my Stalin biography on the bus and it’s a big hardback bugger.

Is my Oyster card in funds? Will my phone battery last? I don’t want to take my back-up charger, but equally I don’t want to risk losing out on logging any steps on the exercise app.

Oh, come on, stick it on low power mode, hope for the best and be off with you!

And two minutes later come back again

because you’ve forgotten your mask. In those two minutes, I almost got run over while crossing the road. Partly, I realised, because I was nervous, jittery, anxious about the forthcoming social engagement, even one with people I’ve known, in some cases, for decades. And partly because I’ve gone, for some reason, about 70 per cent deaf.

Impacted ear wax, the doctor says. But I’m doing heavy-duty ear drops and it ain’t working. A car sneaked up on me. Round here, more and more are electric anyway.

You can’t hear them even when your ears are functioning properly. Hackney, eh?

I’d also forgotten, and gratefully, that peculiarly humiliating feeling you get when you arrive at a do in a crowded public place and can’t find your friends. So, you end up going into the back area, the two side areas, scrutinising rows of tables, returning to review the front area, all packed with post-work punters, none of whom you recognise. But they recognise you: you’re the dork in the baggy shirt with a bulky shoulder bag and quite possibly a pressing need to urinate who’s been stood up.

A man with a clipboard told me Simon’s do was upstairs on the roof terrace. Two hours of amiable catching-up duly ensued. At least I think it was amiable; I couldn’t hear much of what anybody said. They might have been telling me they’d hoped never to see my sweaty face ever again for all I know. I only rapped my shins on the underneath crosspiece of the table twice. And I made the mistake of talking to a stranger in the loo and got a threatening look in return.

I forgot, you’re not supposed to do that in the gents’, although I believe such conversations are permitted in the ladies’ without violence ensuing. Truly, it’s been a long, long lay-off and I am very, very far from anything approaching social match fitness.

I forgot to wear my mask to the loo and got a dressing-down from the man with the clipboard. And the electronic ordering system took an hour to deliver a round of drinks.

But these are surely transitory problems, no doubt swiftly to be solved by other people.

As for getting back up to speed with the challenge of appearing in public, however, that’s down to me. With some help, I suspect, from an ear, nose and throat specialist.

Still, I’ve made a start. n robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk

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