Grace Coddington memoir exclusive extract: the early years

There were sand dunes in the distance and rugged monochrome cliffs strung out along the coast. And Druid circles. And hardly any trees. And bleakness. Although it was bleak, I saw beauty in its bleakness. There was a nice beach, and I had a little sailboat called Argo that I used to drift about in for hours in grand seclusion when it was not tethered to a small rock in a horseshoe-shaped cove called Trearddur Bay. I was 15 then, my head filled with romantic fantasies, some fuelled by the mystic spirit of Anglesey, the thinly populated island off the fogbound northern coast of Wales where I was born and raised; some by the dilapidated cinema I visited each Saturday afternoon in the underwhelming coastal town of Holyhead, a threepenny bus ride away, where the boats took off across the Irish Sea for Dublin and the Irish passengers seemed never short of a drink. Or two. Or three or four.

For my first 18 years, the Trearddur Bay Hotel, run by my family, was my only home, a plain building with whitewashed walls and a sturdy grey slate roof, long and low, with the understated air of an elongated bungalow. This 42-room getaway spot of quiet charm was appreciated mostly by holidaymakers who liked to sail, go fishing or take long, bracing clifftop walks rather than roast themselves on a sunny beach. It was not over-endowed with entertainment facilities, either. No television. No room service. And in most cases, not even the luxury of an en suite bathroom with toilet, although generously sized white china chamber pots were provided beneath each guest bed, and some rooms - the deluxe versions - contained a washbasin. Three to four standard bathrooms provided everyone else's washing facilities. For the entire hotel there was a single chambermaid, Mrs Griffiths, a sweet little old lady in a black dress and white apron equipped with a duster and a carpet sweeper. I remember my mother being taken aback by a guest who took a bath and rang the bell for the maid to set about cleaning the tub. Why wouldn't the visitors scrub it out themselves after use, she wondered.

IN PICTURES: Grace Coddington's early years, by Willie Christie

We were open from May to October, but the hotel was guaranteed to be 100 per cent full only during the relatively sunny month of August. Throughout the endless weeks of winter, the hotel was so deserted it wasn't worth the bother of switching on the lights. My sister and I would play ghosts. Wrapped in white sheets, we hid along the dark, empty corridors, each containing many shadowy doorways from which you could jump out and say, 'Boo!' We would wait and wait, the silence broken only by the tick-tock, tick-tock, of our big grandfather clock. But in the end, I couldn't stand the gloom, the suspense of waiting, the sinister ticking. It was too scary, so I usually fled to the warmth and comfort of the fireside.

Grace Coddington's father, William, sister, Rosemary, and mother, Janie, holding Coddington in their garden at Trearddur Bay Hotel in Anglesey, 1941

I was a solitary and sickly child, suffering from frequent bouts of bronchitis and croup. I was stricken so often that my doctor thought I might have tuberculosis. Because of this, I missed at least half of each term in every school year. My parents even tried building me up in those pre-vitamin days by feeding me glasses of Guinness and a dark, treacly substance called malt extract that was totally delicious. I was pale, freckly, and allergic to any significant amount of sunshine. Luckily, whatever sun we had during my youth in Wales was filtered through heavy grey clouds. Later, when I was in my 20s, if I had too much exposure, my face would swell up. But I did love the outdoors. And right through to my teens I was always more outside than in, sailing, climbing and clambering over the rugged slopes of the nearby mountains of Snowdonia, or wandering along our island's country lanes, their hedgerows dotted with wildflowers.

Our family lived in what was known as 'the annexe'- the self-contained part of the building just beyond the hotel kitchen. We had our own private front door, a pretty clematis-covered porch, and a garden filled with roses and hydrangeas that was my mother's pride and joy. In the back we grew vegetables and kept geese, ducks and chickens.

The annexe was our own enclosed world within a world. It was furnished in a similar style and in the same taste as the rest of the hotel, but everything was on a much smaller, more personal scale. The paintings and tapestries on the walls, for instance, were all my mother's work. It was also extremely cluttered, because she could rarely bring herself to throw out so much as an empty jam jar. And so the clutter grew, to the point that, despite its being piled into cupboards or hidden out of sight behind curtains, I was too embarrassed to invite any schoolfriends back home.

From the time I began to read, children's comics transported me to cheerier places. My mother kept books, but I rarely looked at them, much preferring the traditional British weeklies such as The Beano and The Dandy, and a glossy new one called Girl, which remained a firm favourite of mine until I graduated to fashion magazines such as Vogue. We didn't have a television, but once a year, when we went to stay with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Cheshire, we rode their pony and were given permission to watch their television. But it was films that fascinated me the most. Once a week from my early teens, I was allowed to visit the local cinema for the matinee performance. So every Saturday, after making the beds, washing the dishes and finishing the remainder of my chores, I was off, walking the mile along the seafront to the bus stop by myself, darting to avoid the stinging sea spray. Then I would take the country bus to Holyhead, passing through a no-man's-land of derelict parking lots to get there.

Coddington with her sister Rosemary at Trearddur in 1945 - both wearing examples of their mother's knitting

The cinema was a crumbling old fleapit, a small-town cliche of a picture palace, complete with worn velvet seats and a young girl selling ice cream in the interval. Think of The Last Picture Show, only even more shabby. I would settle into one of the larger, more comfortable double seats in the back row - a place where the boys usually sat and smooched with their girlfriends during the evening show - and there in the darkness I would completely give myself up to the dream world of celluloid.

I remember being crazy about Montgomery Clift and James Dean. I loved all the boys with soft, sad eyes and lost souls. I loved horses, too: National Velvet, with Elizabeth Taylor, and Black Beauty, which was dreadfully sad, although not as sad as Bambi. When I saw that, I cried all the way through to the end. Duel in the Sun was another favourite - such a tragic love story. I adored Gregory Peck; his voice was so warm and reassuring. I was enchanted by The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann. Audrey Hepburn, too, was so chic and adorable in her skinny pants and little pumps. I loved Audrey, not only through her films but because of some reportage photos I saw in the magazine Picture Post that struck a chord. She was shown happily riding around on her bike and cooking in her tiny apartment. Everything was so clean and shiny. I aspired to live in exactly that same perfect way.

Back home I often attempted to make outfits similar to the sophisticated looks worn by the actresses on the big screen. Throughout my teens I made most of my own wardrobe - even suits and coats - on our Singer sewing machine, which you worked with foot pedals. All it took was patience, and lots of it. I would use Vogue patterns and fabrics from Polykoff's, a big old department store in Holyhead. I never made anything outrageous. My mother allowed me to dress only in relatively conservative clothes. Everything else she knitted for me. As many old photographs will attest, my mother seldom stopped knitting. She took her knitting everywhere, night and day, making things that were the bane of my life because they would become saggy, especially the knitted bathing suits: saggy and soggy.

Even when I was a child, Vogue was already on its way to being my magazine of choice. I used to see my sister's copy lying around the house after she had finished looking through it - so in a way, it was Rosemary who introduced me to fashion. When I was older, I would make a special trip to Holyhead to buy it for myself. It always arrived rather late in the month, and there were usually only one or two in stock. Presumably Harper's Bazaar was around then, too, but for me it was always Vogue. I bought it for the fantasy of looking at beautiful clothes, and I liked getting lost in its pages.

Leafing through the magazine, I was fascinated by the new styles, those ladylike 1950s outfits implying a softer, more approachable type of glamour than that which dazzled me at my local cinema. But what I particularly loved were the photographs themselves, especially those taken outdoors. They transported me to all sorts of exotic places - places where you could wear that kind of thing. Après-ski wear under snow-topped fir trees! Beachy cover-ups on sun-kissed coral islands!

Trearddur Bay Hotel in 1964

The images that stood out for me the most were by Norman Parkinson. He was one of the few fashion photographers back then who was a celebrity in the modern sense. Tall and skinny in an elegant suit with a small, bristling, old-fashioned military moustache, he was always putting himself in his pictures. I began to recognise his work for its light-hearted humour and irrepressible personality. Parkinson would come to play an important role in my life.

During the years after I turned 13, I spent even more time studying Vogue, since my sister left home to get married, and I inherited the sophisticated privacy of her room. It was very much hers when she lived with us; I wasn't even allowed through the door without an invitation. So the first thing I did was redecorate.

The funny thing was, after Rosie moved out, we became much closer. I even saw her more often. Our relationship changed dramatically: when I was younger, she had been able to push me around, and I bore the brunt of her terrible temper tantrums. But by the time she left home, I had grown a lot bigger and taller, and found I had a new way of dealing with things. The more someone gets angry with me, the calmer I become, a policy I have stuck to all my life.

By the time I turned 18, I knew I must leave my tiny Welsh island. Although I had nothing like a good alternative plan, there was no choice if you stayed in Anglesey. You could end up working in either a clock factory or a snack bar. Through my teens, people had remarked upon my height, saying I was tall enough to be a model (probably because most Welsh girls are pretty short). My old school friend Angela always encouraged me, saying, 'Let's go to London. You can go to modelling school, and I can get a job as a secretary, and we will see where it leads.' Before I left home, I cut out and posted a coupon from the pages of Vogue. It was a tiny paragraph in the back of the magazine promising, for 25 guineas, a life-transforming two-week course at the Cherry Marshall Modelling School in Mayfair.

Modelling seemed like an escape into a world of wealth and excitement, a chance to travel to new places and meet interesting people. At the very least, I reasoned, it could lead to a greater social life, a respectable home, and marriage, all of which would make my mother deliriously happy. Besides, I loved seeing beautiful clothes in beautiful photographs and dreamt of being part of it.

'Grace: A Memoir' by Grace Coddington (Chatto & Windus) is available for £23 plus £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk )

Via: Grace Coddington memoir exclusive extract: the early years