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fascinate her. Those trusted few who heard her early songs often found them unnervingly morbid. Between her second and third years at school, she claimed to be writing a children’s book. To be a bright teenage girl is to claim to be writing a children’s book.
    Though terribly shy elsewhere, she blossomed at the parties she hosted at East Wickham Farm, where her guests would hurl themselves into the swimming pool at evening’s end to try to make themselves sober. Commonly, one presumes, they succeeded only in making themselves damp. She admired Elton John’s piano playing, but reserved her biggest crush for a local boy who looked like Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and regularly implored a school friend to traipse with her past their local, Fanny On The Hill, in hopes of glimpsing him. She packed in the idea of his noticing her after meeting her first boyfriend, Al Buckle, at nearby St. Laurence’s Youth Club, at 16. Playing him tapes of her music, her shyness was such that she had to leave the room.
    Treated with kindness at home, Cathy treated others with kindnessout in the world. When a classmate was hospitalised, it was she who circulated a card of condolence for everyone to sign. But most children are sadistic little monsters, and sometimes her friends sent her to Coventry purely for the pleasure of seeing the sadness and confusion in her pretty hazel eyes. She found being ignored more painful than being walloped. Still, there is no evidence of anyone having described her as unbuckled when she and Al packed it in.
    Her pipe-smoking
pater
, whose accent betrayed the occasional trace of the Essex countryside, was aloof, but generous, to the tune of Cathy being free to help herself to the change he left around the house. She stashed cash in the mouth of the lion-skin rug in the front room, removing some to buy herself Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bridge Over Troubled Water
LP, and a ticket to a Who gig, the first gig she ever saw. She was there at the Hammersmith Odeon the evening David Bowie, who’d grown up a short bus ride from East Wickham Farm, announced that the Spiders From Mars would be no more after that night. She wept along with much of the audience.
    During her fifth year at St. Joseph’s, she spent a week with a friend at Newcastle Polytechnic and thought she might become a psychiatrist. To be a bright, empathetic teenager is to consider becoming a psychiatrist. It also crossed her mind to do social work.
    What she really wanted to do, though, was music. At 12, she’d begun recording her songs, some of which amazed her dad by seeming to emerge as whole verses at a time, on the family tape recorder. Within a year, she’d composed the clumsy but gorgeous ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. A family friend who worked in the music business encouraged her to send tapes to music publishers and record companies. No one paid the slightest attention, and not entirely because most vetters of unsolicited tapes in the music business have no business in the music business. Her voice was unusually assured, but not quite extraordinary. Her songs occasionally betrayed traces of melodic ingenuity, but squandered them by rarely condescending to provide a recurring “hook” (think of the “Ooh, he’s here again” section of ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’) a listener could look forward to hearing at regular intervals. The mostly unrhymed lyrics, unmistakably the work of a precocious schoolgirl who did a lot of reading, were no help at all (as they would remain!). But the family friend’s belief in her precocity was undiminished, and he was able to persuade his acquaintance Dave Gilmour, he of Pink Floyd who resembled her first crush, to come hear her.
    What a perfect choice – not only a rich, famous guitar god, but alsothe living embodiment of male gorgeousness! Though rigid with terror, Kate impressed him a treat, and he invited her to his studio near Harlow in Essex to record better demos than she could