Jo Wood - It's Only Rock 'n' Roll - Thirty Years with a Rolling Stone

Three years after that snogging session at the Surbiton Odeon, I came along, the first child of the newly wed Mr and Mrs Michael Karslake. (Scandalously newly wed, in fact: the ink had barely dried on my parents’ marriage certificate when I was born just four months later, the surprise result of a romantic jaunt to Devon, with Dad on his Lambretta scooter and Mum in the sidecar, her pin-curled blonde hair wrapped in a silk scarf. I was a love child! I’ve been a bit of a romantic ever since …)

Our first home was 44 Vange Hill Drive, a redbrick council house in Vange on the outskirts of Basildon, with chickens in the garden and acres of climbable trees in the woodland just beyond the fence. Mum’s African heritage didn’t even register with me when I was a kid. Growing up she spoke English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, but I don’t remember her having a strong accent (although she must have done, as I can hear the South African twang in her voice to this day) and, apart from being head-turningly beautiful, she didn’t look very different from any of the other mums in our white, middle-class neighbourhood. In my mind, the only unusual thing about our family was the deerskin shield with crossed spears on the living-room wall, and the avocado tree that Mum was struggling to grow among the pansies in the herbaceous border.

It wasn’t until her mother came to stay for the first time, when I was nine, that Mum’s heritage really hit home. Granny Ellen was much darker-skinned than Mum and her manner was very African. I remember Mum putting on her favourite Miriam Makeba records and Granny would stomp around the kitchen, throwing her arms up and singing: ‘Woo! Da-ba-da-ba-da-ba!’ It was hysterical. And there was the sudden, amazed realization: ‘Oh, my God, Mum’s from Africa !’

I didn’t get to visit my mother’s homeland until years later, after Dad died in 1990. I was desperate to get away, and Ronnie suggested we go to Kenya. As soon as I stepped out of the plane, I was aware that I had some sort of connection to Africa, a bond I’d never felt with any other place. I fell in love, really. Many years later, I used Xhosa words, including tula , meaning ‘quiet’, and langa , for ‘sunshine’, as the names of the scents in my Jo Wood Everyday Organics range.

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As a little girl, I was perfectly happy in my dream world, and didn’t have that many friends; I still don’t really. I’m actually very shy. I’m fine once I get to know you, but it takes me a bit of time to trust people; maybe that came from living with Ronnie for all those years. Even as an adult, if I was in a hotel and room service brought the wrong order, I’d always say, ‘Oh, please don’t worry, that’ll be fine!’ rather than make a fuss. It used to drive Ronnie mad.

Apart from my siblings – Paul came along when I was two, Vinnie when I was six, and then, when I was 10, my baby sister Lize – my main playmate when we lived in Basildon was a girl called Linda Wood. She was the daughter of Mum’s best friend, Auntie Lily, and lived a few doors down. Linda was six months younger than me and quite spoilt. We used to play together with our dolls, but Linda had a real Sindy and a Barbie, whereas I just had Sindy’s cheaper cousin, Tina. I wasn’t a nasty child, but I suppose there was a bit of resentment there. On one particularly jealous day I made up a poem and chanted it to her in the garden: Linda Wood, is no good, chop her up for firewood . Linda had the last laugh, though. Years later, when I married Ronnie, she came to my wedding and was one of the first to congratulate me. ‘So, Jo, now you’re a Wood, too …’ Talk about karma.

For the first years of my life, I was Mum’s little shadow. I thought she was unbelievably glamorous, with her pencil skirts, stilettos and red lipstick. She loved clothes, and the house was always filled with pattern magazines from which she’d make the latest fashions on her sewing-machine. For a time she was an Avon lady and I would spend many happy hours playing with her makeup box, smelling the perfumes, patting the face powder so it puffed up in fragrant pink clouds and testing the lipsticks until I had tiger-stripes of Scarlet Lady and Passionate Plum up my arms. This girlie side of me frequently clashed with my inner tomboy. I loved climbing trees, so would go out looking immaculate and within minutes would have mud all over my skirt. There’s a photo of me aged five dressed as the Christmas-tree fairy for a school play, an angelic little girl with white-blonde hair, a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile, a sticky-out dress – and a pair of filthy plimsolls poking out of the bottom. To this day, that’s me all over.

As I barely left her side, Mum roped me into helping with the chores so I learnt really young to clean and cook. One of my earliest memories is of perching on a stool at the kitchen table while Mum made chocolate fudge, testing whether it was cooked by dropping a little bit into a glass of water to see if it formed a ball. To me, it was like magic! When I was eight, Mum went to South Africa to visit relatives, and for the next six weeks I helped Dad run the house: ironing his shirts, cleaning the kitchen, caring for Paul and Vinnie. At that age, six weeks seems an eternity, but I remember Dad being so proud – and I loved playing the little housewife.

We were a very tight unit: just Mum, Dad and us kids. We didn’t see much of our extended family, apart from summers spent at Auntie Mary’s beachside house in Devon and occasional trips to see my paternal grandmother, Grandma Karslake, in Surbiton. She must have been only 37 when I was born (she had my dad ridiculously young, at something like 16) and with her pinky-mauve set hair and moles that sprouted wiry hairs, she always seemed such a jolly woman. One day I was sitting on her lap, playing with her necklace. ‘Each bead is a different flavour,’ she whispered, with a wink, blowing my five-year-old mind. I sneaked a lick when she wasn’t looking.

But that’s not to say the Karslakes lived a quiet, solitary life – quite the contrary. Every weekend our house was full of people, united by one all-consuming passion: Lambretta scooters. The soundtrack to my childhood is revving engines and the clatter of crash helmets, while the smell is petrol. If we didn’t have a houseful of Lambretta fans at the weekend, we’d be heading off to a rally somewhere. Every summer we’d go to the Isle of Man for the famous TT motorbike races and watch Dad tear round and round the course for hours, thrilled by the noise, speed and smells.

A few years ago I fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by getting my car racing licence and zipping around the track at Silverstone in a Morgan turbo classic. In 2012, I went on a fantastic charity road trip with 55 remarkable women in a fleet of Maseratis, Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys; my sister Lize and I were in my Mercedes AMG. The route took us from London to Monte Carlo, via Paris, Geneva and Milan, but my own adventure very nearly ended at Dover.

‘Passport, please,’ said the officer at the border.

Oh, God. I’d forgotten my passport. ‘I’ve got my driving licence,’ I said hopefully.

‘You can’t get into France without a passport,’ he said.

Lize and I begged and pleaded with him and he must have taken pity on us because in the end he waved us through. ‘I haven’t seen you,’ he said, with the ghost of a smile.

By the time Dad died he had built up a museum of at least a hundred scooters, every model Lambretta had ever made lovingly restored. He was such a craftsman. When I was eight he took me to the scrapyard where we found an old bike frame and parts. He took them back to his workshop, put them all together, renovated it to mint condition and – ta-dah! – I had a beautiful new bicycle with a basket on the front. I loved hanging out with him in his workshop, watching him make incredible models of new towns, marvelling at his steady hand as he painted tiny windows or the lines down the middle of the street. Sometimes he’d let me help, teaching me how to make bits of foam into trees and spray-paint them green.