Time and place: Jessica Hynes
The actress, 37, recalls her unorthodox Brighton childhood, with brown rice, foreign students and shabby chic
By Hilary Whitney, The Times online
My family moved to Brighton in 1974, when I was 2 and my sister, Zoe, was 4. We had been living in a bedsit in London, where my dad was studying textiles, but my mum felt isolated, stuck at home knee deep in nappies, so she was only too happy when dad gave up his course to become a builder and we could move to the south coast.
They bought a Victorian townhouse on Canning Street for about £8,000 with some money they’d inherited. After a couple of years, my parents separated; the house was rented out and my sister and I went with our mother to live in America. It didn’t work out, though, and within a couple of years, we moved back to Britain, and back to our house on Canning Street.
At that time, Brighton attracted quite a lot of people who were looking for a slightly alternative lifestyle, and there was a real sense of community. My mum started a local branch of the Natural Childbirth Trust — she used to keep a model of a pair of hips and a little sandbag baby in one of the kitchen cupboards.
We loved that house. It didn’t look that tall from the outside, but it had two floors below ground level, which made it feel very skinny. On the first floor were two bedrooms. Mum had the one at the front and I had the one at the back. It was a long way down to the bathroom, and when I was little, the house constantly reverberated to the sound of my thundering footsteps as I dashed to the loo.
For a while, I shared a bedroom with my sister, which I loved. When we were in bed, we would wait until it was dark, then put on these funny voices and pretend to be a genie or a magician and have these long conversations in character, which we never, ever spoke about afterwards. It was our own secret world.
There was also a room on the ground floor that we let out to foreign students. Mum was strict about the food we ate. She made wholemeal bread and gave us brown rice and vegetables and lots of garlic, which was quite unusual then, and sometimes the students would cook us meals from whichever country they were from. It was all quite chaotic and we didn’t have regular meal times.
I loved having the students around. Mohammed and Farage were Afghan chemistry students, and I used to watch Top of the Pops with them. They were really keen on Michael Jackson and got me to write all the lyrics down to One Day in Your Life. Whenever one of them was in the loo, they’d sing it at the top of their voice.
I was precocious, and used to interrogate them quite unashamedly, but I was genuinely interested in them — and besides, I loved an audience.
It was a happy, easy life. Brighton is beautiful and small enough to get around easily. My sister and I were given a lot of freedom to come and go as we pleased, and I went to a Saturday-morning drama class in Hove, which I loved. I dreamt about becoming an actress all the time, and went straight into acting after A-levels. I think my first job was playing a secretary in corporate video.
We moved to London when I was 15, but we all have great memories of Canning Street. The furniture was a mixture of styles. Quite a lot was from skips, some of which was beautiful. I still can’t walk past a skip without having a rummage — luckily, my husband is the same.
My childhood friend, the illustrator Emily Gravett, lived opposite, and my mum still has a little framed picture that Emily drew from her window of our house. It will always be a magical place to me.
Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) will shortly start filming on Burke and Hare, alongside Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis and Isla Fisher.
Taken From: Timesonline.co.uk