When you are the youngest of a large family, you have a battle on your hands if you want to make your presence felt. By the time I was born my mother already had four children, allegiances were formed, strong characters had been established and all the major personality types were taken. How could a tiny person carve out a role for herself in that sort of environment and be more than a little half-remembered PS at the end of a long list of names?
Besides, my family had recently returned from its greatest adventure and I had played no part in it. When her mother died and left her a bit of money, my mother bought a ship called Inge, took my brothers and sisters out of school and set sail around the world. At one stage the crew mutinied and my mother had to stand over them with a gun, or so the story went. At another point, my brother, a babe in arms, fell overboard and two sailors nearly clanked heads with my mother as they all dived in to save him. I heard these stories like fairy-tales from a book and in my mind the sailors were pirates with gold hoop earrings and fearsome grins. The captain was a huge, red-faced, surly fellow and I imagined he was made of meat.
'Tell me about the ship,' I used to say. I knew the bare bones of the story, that Inge was a cargo ship and she had sailed to Trinidad, via Norway, where my family had eaten sugary salamis and learned the word for mashed potato which was kartoffle mousse. And I knew that in Trinidad when the ship was declared unseaworthy and no longer viable as a means of support for my family, they were deported back to England, so as not to be a burden on the West Indian state. But it was the specifics that enchanted me. I liked to hear of the shipmates' duties which were swabbing the deck, looking over the rigging, painting the deck house which was meant to be a little school room but was always getting blown away. My mother referred to mysterious tasks such as 'checking the charts' and 'pumping out the bilges'. My sister, Rose Boyt, wrote beautifully and movingly about this episode in my family's history in her novel, Rose.
I think my narrow escape from this drama, which I know I would have loathed, prompted me to position myself firmly outside the exciting world my siblings seemed to inhabit. My hopes and dreams were of a different, narrower realm. The things I craved as a child were socks rolled into balls and Findus frozen crispy pancakes. I pined for the things other children seemed to have - rides on their father's shoulders, glossy-haired cousins, bedtime, uncles who exhibited bonhomie, spry aunts with an eye for luxury goods and drawers full of French blue and white stripey underwear, ironed and neatly folded. As a small girl, my longing to be neat was insatiable. The envy I felt for a school mate whose shiny brown bob was elegantly swept off her face by a kirby grip... I used to follow her around and beg for an invitation to her exceptionally tidy home in a block of north London police flats. How I marvelled at her immaculately pressed, pale pink cords, her little, spanking new, snow-white tops from Marks & Spencer, her father's spotless uniform.
Occasionally, even now, when I am out shopping I am drawn to clothes that make me look like the most efficient secretary in the world, with several languages under my belt and a championship shorthand speed. But unfortunately, clothes seem to unravel when I put them on, buttons fall off, hems come down.
As I grew older, my secret passion for neatness and order sometimes made me feel like a cuckoo in the nest. While my brothers and sisters indulged in after-school activities that made me gasp, wide-eyed, I was building up my leotard collection. I once worked out that between the ages of eight and 13 I attended 900 dance classes. These were tap, ballet and a kind of chorus-girl dance called 'modern' which involved a lot of saucy grinning with head inclined and many high kicks. Sometimes we sang as we danced in jaunty American accents. In these songs we reminisced about our childhoods from the perspective of old age, or belted out a hymn of praise to the most generous candy vendor of all time: 'And if one baby hasn't got a dime, Sweetmeat Joe says, "Pay next time."'
At Rose's 21st birthday party she kindly allowed me to perform a song and dance routine in a little, red gingham skating skirt and silver tap shoes. What her dazzling friends made of this display that was so quaint it was verging on the sinister, I do not know. I still occasionally run into people who recall that extravaganza of camp. I know because they wink at me conspiratorially, and whistle 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah' in my ear. I pretend I've no idea what they are referring to.
My elder sisters were always glamorous to me, born leaders and pioneers, with a charm that was hypnotic, but they also seemed fierce. They boasted such strong characters that I feared I would only ever be a pale imitation. They seemed so modern with their cropped hair and fast talk, embracing the latest trends, even initiating and popularising them. There was always a small queue of stylish, nervous admirers round at our house. Sometimes they plied me with sweets in the mistaken belief that getting in with me would further their own suits. As if! I was an old-fashioned girl with olden-days habits and olden-days values. The codes I held dear championed outmoded social virtues such as smiling through tears.
In my early teens, while I was putting so much effort into my school work, Rose built up a reputation as a London club DJ. To finance her blossoming writing career, she organised parties in a disused warehouse around the back of King's Cross and when the Café de Paris was in its heyday, it was her job to choose who was allowed to come in. At the time this was probably the most important job in London. Meanwhile my 16-year-old brother had just opened north London's premier skateboarding venue and my sister Isobel was exploring the wonders of India. During this period two half-sisters also came into the picture: Bella, who was studying fashion and living with an Italian prince in Rome, and Esther, who was appearing in a smash-hit review she and a friend had written called I Didn't Know Celery Could Kill You , which was the best thing I have ever seen about sex and the single girl. In one fortnight I saw it 11 times.
When my sisters and brothers had left home, my mother and I lived in a smaller house together for several years. This house was physically steeped in the past, partly through my mother's work which was selling second-hand clothes, lace and Victorian nighties in order to support us. A huge cauldron of white washing was always bubbling away on the stove - and this was the 1980s. The house was hung with drying wedding veils and old lacy bloomers and beaded cardigans and flower-patterned summer dresses, the air thick with the smell of starch and scorch. It was not unusual for me to come down in the morning and find that my mother was still up sewing on a last button, steaming a bolt of millinery velvet or feeding ribbon through the eyelets of a Victorian camisole. I helped her unpick hems and embroider lazy daisies on cardigans and sometimes, when she was very tired, she paid me a penny a minute to brush her hair.
I spent quite a few of my teenage years worrying that my personality was a bit thin, that, possibly, I lacked one altogether. My role in the family as the good, quiet girl grated on me slightly, but I did not know how to shake it off. Even my more outlandish moments, I realised, were mild by most people's standards. Once when I was about 12 and we were having dinner in a Soho restaurant, my father asked me what I wanted to drink and I replied: 'Would it be possible to have a pineapple pina colada, but without the rum?'
While my mother had to coax my eldest brother out of a night club and shoehorn him into an exam room, I put so much effort into my school work that it actually got the teachers down a little bit. The school I attended was traditional - all tidiness, cups and deportment badges, which I loved and took very seriously. Quite an anarchic system of rewards operated in our household at this time. My eldest brother was promised a bike if he failed his exams, which may have been comforting but possibly was not the best incentive scheme. I remember telling my father I had got seven As in my O-levels and him inquiring grandly: 'Is that good or bad?'
It was no accident that the authors I studied at university (and the four novels I have written myself) are largely concerned with how to be good in life without withdrawing from it completely or being ground down by it or taken for a ride; how to live fully in the world, without assuming any of the negative character that the word 'worldly' implies. Every single essay I wrote at university was on this theme. It did not matter who I was writing about - Dickens, Henry James, Shakespeare, TS Eliot - it seemed to me that this concern was at the heart of every writer worth his or her salt.
Of course I'm not quite so square these days. I like oddness and intensity in a person. I can appreciate quirks and kinks, a six-inch strappy sandal and a dangerous hem. The adult world was just too frightening when I was a teenager. I used to stare at people on buses just going about their lives, sure and easy with their tickets and bags, and what I thought was, how do they know how to do it? Who told them? These days I know how to do it too.
· Only Human by Susie Boyt is published by Headline Review on 5 July, £16.99.
