When she was eight years old, Susan Greenfield was chosen to be a duchess in her school play. “I woke up that morning and there, hanging on the door, was this most amazing dress,” she remembers. “It was lilac. This was a fairytale dress.”
Baroness Greenfield’s mother, Dorice, recalls making it: “I stuck loads of cottonwool on, then dotted blobs of ink to make it look like ermine,” she says. “On stage, it looked really good.”
They glance at each other, and Susan says: “That is the sort of thing a loving mother will do for a daughter. Not telling you, either, so you wake up and there’s this real surprise.”
More than half a century has passed since then. The little girl has become a famous scientist, author and broadcaster. She is also a life peer, and when she stood up to make her maiden speech in the House of Lords, dressed in robes, her mother was watching from the gallery. “Mum said that day: ‘Do you remember the first time you wore ermine?’ ”
The story makes both of them glow, as they sit together on a big leather sofa at Baroness Greenfield’s flat in Oxford, where she is a professor of pharmacology. Later this month, she will speak to the Oxford Science Festival about what digital technology is doing to our brains. Best known for books on science, she will soon publish her first novel, set in a dystopian future.
Dorice, 85, remembers the fierce pride with which she watched her daughter make that first speech to the Lords. “Oh, the tears. I couldn’t see her for tears. The whole family was there, including her brother and her dad, Reggie. The speech she gave? Wow. She got loud applause.”
Susan Greenfield breaks in. “No I didn’t, Mum; there is no applause in the Lords.” Her mother isn’t having it. “I would swear to this day I heard applause.”
She knows what it sounds like, having been a professional dancer in her youth. Dorice ran away from school at 14 and joined a chorus line. “We did the Moss Empires tour with the Crazy Gang,” she says. As they crossed the country, a particular commercial traveller kept popping up in the front row, time and again. His name was Reg, and he wouldn’t leave her be. “I didn’t like him at first, but perseverance won. He was a really nice man. We were married for 63 years.”
Dorice Greenfield pictured in her days as a dancer
After two years of marriage, in 1950, she gave birth to Susan. “I was so thrilled. I couldn’t get over her lovely little baby fingers.” Susan started speaking before she learnt to sit up. “She was a little baby lying there going, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, Dad.’ ”
They lived in a middle flat on the Chiswick High Road, west London, sharing a toilet and bathroom with the people upstairs. “We were broke,” says Dorice with a chuckle, before her daughter interrupts again, typically.
“People say, ‘You’ve done so well, given your background.’ Actually, I had the biggest break of all, being born to Mum and Dad and not rich. I had time to think, time to get bored. I wasn’t shoved on self-improvement courses after school, or taken on fancy holidays. I had time just to dream.”
Dorice is calm and elegant, in a long skirt, white blouse and black waistcoat, with a ballerina brooch. Susan is intense and restless, in platform boots, skinny jeans and stripy top.
As a child, she spent hours drawing or with a toy theatre. “When I was growing up, a sketch book didn’t ask you to draw in it. You drove the story. Nowadays, I fear people follow passively the narrative given to them on a screen. It’s a second-hand imagination.”
She did play chess with her parents, from the age of eight or nine. “Even though we were a working-class family, there was this element of stimulation.”
Susan spent so much time reading that Dorice went to the doctor to ask what was wrong. “It worried me. All her friends were out and about and there was Susan sitting in her room. The doctor said to me, ‘You’re very lucky.’ ”
There was, says the mother, “plenty of love around. I used to kiss and cuddle her a lot, make sure I was always there. She never came home to an empty flat.”
Susan says of her parents: “They gave you confidence and real support, but at the same time, freedom.”
Her father was an electrician, with a fascination for taking things apart to see how they worked. “In another time, he would have been a philosopher or a scientist.” She inherited his enthusiasm, and once bought a rabbit from a butcher in order to cut its head open and see what was inside, while her three-year-old brother watched.
Graham was born when she was 13, and she was sometimes merciless towards him. “The best torture was to take his plastic water pistol and put it in the oven, which had a glass door. He could see it melt before his very eyes.” As she cackles theatrically, Dorice insists: “This was all done when I wasn’t in.”
Having run away from the Godolphin and Latymer School as a girl, Dorice now arranged for her daughter to try for a scholarship. “Lots of kids were getting promised rewards for passing the
11-plus,” says Susan. “Mum said, ‘No bribes. You’ll pass it if you want to pass it.’ ”
She did, and loved the school. “In terms of being stretched intellectually, it was amazing. In particular I had a teacher called Veronica Lemon, who did Ancient Greek. I thought she was the most exciting, stimulating person.”
Some parents of brilliant children are intimidated. Dorice says she wasn’t. But could she help with Ancient Greek? “I didn’t help her with her homework. She went in her room, shut the door and that was the end of Susan for a couple of hours.” Susan is grateful. “The middle-class children I know have parents breathing down their necks. I was left to get on with it. Sink or swim.”
What about boys? “Susan didn’t go out much as a teenager,” says her mother. “There wasn’t much to say about boys, really, until she went to Oxford. By then, they had the Pill.”
First, Susan worked on a kibbutz in Israel for nine months in 1969, a troubled time. “She sold her blood to get money to buy a Bedouin dress. She smuggled back a bullet for Reg. That period was very worrying for me.”
Then it was time for Susan to leave permanently. “I was heartbroken. That is the most difficult thing about being a mum: when they leave home. You’ve really got to reorganise yourself, and your feelings,” says Dorice. “You miss them so much. Susan being a girl, we were very close. More like a sister than a daughter. We’d sit together and make her frocks, you know? When she went I felt very lonely.”
Her daughter was the first in the family to go to university. “We brought her here in our old banger. The locks on her suitcase were broken, so we had to tie it up. She took me into the dining room and there were all these dons, sitting up on a high level. I remember saying, ‘I wonder if you’ll ever be a don and sit up there.’ ”
Her daughter achieved a lot more than that. Susan Greenfield is an honorary fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was given the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society. The French government awarded her the Légion d’honneur.
She was made a life peer in 2001. “I said, ‘Mum, something really nice has happened to me, but I can’t say what it is yet.’ Mum said, ‘I can guess what it is. You’re pregnant.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ So Mum said, ‘I know what it is. You’ve won that Nobel Prize.’ ” They both roar with laughter. “Notice,” says Susan, “that pregnancy came ahead of the Nobel Prize.” Dorice grins. “I always wanted a grandchild.”
It never happened. “That’s perfectly all right. I’ve had other things which are as good, maybe better.”
They are obviously close, and talk for half an hour every Saturday morning. “I get that phone call every week, wherever she is in the world,” says Dorice. Reg died two years ago, but she remains active, line dancing three nights a week. She has also written a memoir.
Her proudest moment was when Baroness Greenfield was director of the Royal Institution in Mayfair, and introduced her to the Queen there. “She had lovely eyes. Susan said, ‘This is my Mum.’ The Queen went, ‘Ooh!’ I thought, ‘What’s the ooh for?’ She didn’t say anything, but the Duke of Edinburgh came over and said, ‘Do you come here often?’ I said, ‘Well, seeing as Susan’s running it, yes.’ ”
She is clearly very proud of her daughter, but what does this charming, sparky woman think it takes to be a good mother? “Patience. Plenty of love. No smacking. Let them have their head, but be behind them when they go for it.”
Baroness Greenfield watches, nodding. What does she owe to her mother? “I owe her everything.”
The story makes both of them glow, as they sit together on a big leather sofa at Baroness Greenfield’s flat in Oxford, where she is a professor of pharmacology. Later this month, she will speak to the Oxford Science Festival about what digital technology is doing to our brains. Best known for books on science, she will soon publish her first novel, set in a dystopian future.
Dorice, 85, remembers the fierce pride with which she watched her daughter make that first speech to the Lords. “Oh, the tears. I couldn’t see her for tears. The whole family was there, including her brother and her dad, Reggie. The speech she gave? Wow. She got loud applause.”
Susan Greenfield breaks in. “No I didn’t, Mum; there is no applause in the Lords.” Her mother isn’t having it. “I would swear to this day I heard applause.”
She knows what it sounds like, having been a professional dancer in her youth. Dorice ran away from school at 14 and joined a chorus line. “We did the Moss Empires tour with the Crazy Gang,” she says. As they crossed the country, a particular commercial traveller kept popping up in the front row, time and again. His name was Reg, and he wouldn’t leave her be. “I didn’t like him at first, but perseverance won. He was a really nice man. We were married for 63 years.”
Dorice Greenfield pictured in her days as a dancer
After two years of marriage, in 1950, she gave birth to Susan. “I was so thrilled. I couldn’t get over her lovely little baby fingers.” Susan started speaking before she learnt to sit up. “She was a little baby lying there going, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, Dad.’ ”
They lived in a middle flat on the Chiswick High Road, west London, sharing a toilet and bathroom with the people upstairs. “We were broke,” says Dorice with a chuckle, before her daughter interrupts again, typically.
“People say, ‘You’ve done so well, given your background.’ Actually, I had the biggest break of all, being born to Mum and Dad and not rich. I had time to think, time to get bored. I wasn’t shoved on self-improvement courses after school, or taken on fancy holidays. I had time just to dream.”
Dorice is calm and elegant, in a long skirt, white blouse and black waistcoat, with a ballerina brooch. Susan is intense and restless, in platform boots, skinny jeans and stripy top.
As a child, she spent hours drawing or with a toy theatre. “When I was growing up, a sketch book didn’t ask you to draw in it. You drove the story. Nowadays, I fear people follow passively the narrative given to them on a screen. It’s a second-hand imagination.”
She did play chess with her parents, from the age of eight or nine. “Even though we were a working-class family, there was this element of stimulation.”
Susan spent so much time reading that Dorice went to the doctor to ask what was wrong. “It worried me. All her friends were out and about and there was Susan sitting in her room. The doctor said to me, ‘You’re very lucky.’ ”
There was, says the mother, “plenty of love around. I used to kiss and cuddle her a lot, make sure I was always there. She never came home to an empty flat.”
Susan says of her parents: “They gave you confidence and real support, but at the same time, freedom.”
Her father was an electrician, with a fascination for taking things apart to see how they worked. “In another time, he would have been a philosopher or a scientist.” She inherited his enthusiasm, and once bought a rabbit from a butcher in order to cut its head open and see what was inside, while her three-year-old brother watched.
Graham was born when she was 13, and she was sometimes merciless towards him. “The best torture was to take his plastic water pistol and put it in the oven, which had a glass door. He could see it melt before his very eyes.” As she cackles theatrically, Dorice insists: “This was all done when I wasn’t in.”
Having run away from the Godolphin and Latymer School as a girl, Dorice now arranged for her daughter to try for a scholarship. “Lots of kids were getting promised rewards for passing the
11-plus,” says Susan. “Mum said, ‘No bribes. You’ll pass it if you want to pass it.’ ”
She did, and loved the school. “In terms of being stretched intellectually, it was amazing. In particular I had a teacher called Veronica Lemon, who did Ancient Greek. I thought she was the most exciting, stimulating person.”
Some parents of brilliant children are intimidated. Dorice says she wasn’t. But could she help with Ancient Greek? “I didn’t help her with her homework. She went in her room, shut the door and that was the end of Susan for a couple of hours.” Susan is grateful. “The middle-class children I know have parents breathing down their necks. I was left to get on with it. Sink or swim.”
What about boys? “Susan didn’t go out much as a teenager,” says her mother. “There wasn’t much to say about boys, really, until she went to Oxford. By then, they had the Pill.”
First, Susan worked on a kibbutz in Israel for nine months in 1969, a troubled time. “She sold her blood to get money to buy a Bedouin dress. She smuggled back a bullet for Reg. That period was very worrying for me.”
Then it was time for Susan to leave permanently. “I was heartbroken. That is the most difficult thing about being a mum: when they leave home. You’ve really got to reorganise yourself, and your feelings,” says Dorice. “You miss them so much. Susan being a girl, we were very close. More like a sister than a daughter. We’d sit together and make her frocks, you know? When she went I felt very lonely.”
Her daughter was the first in the family to go to university. “We brought her here in our old banger. The locks on her suitcase were broken, so we had to tie it up. She took me into the dining room and there were all these dons, sitting up on a high level. I remember saying, ‘I wonder if you’ll ever be a don and sit up there.’ ”
Her daughter achieved a lot more than that. Susan Greenfield is an honorary fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was given the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society. The French government awarded her the Légion d’honneur.
She was made a life peer in 2001. “I said, ‘Mum, something really nice has happened to me, but I can’t say what it is yet.’ Mum said, ‘I can guess what it is. You’re pregnant.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ So Mum said, ‘I know what it is. You’ve won that Nobel Prize.’ ” They both roar with laughter. “Notice,” says Susan, “that pregnancy came ahead of the Nobel Prize.” Dorice grins. “I always wanted a grandchild.”
It never happened. “That’s perfectly all right. I’ve had other things which are as good, maybe better.”
They are obviously close, and talk for half an hour every Saturday morning. “I get that phone call every week, wherever she is in the world,” says Dorice. Reg died two years ago, but she remains active, line dancing three nights a week. She has also written a memoir.
Her proudest moment was when Baroness Greenfield was director of the Royal Institution in Mayfair, and introduced her to the Queen there. “She had lovely eyes. Susan said, ‘This is my Mum.’ The Queen went, ‘Ooh!’ I thought, ‘What’s the ooh for?’ She didn’t say anything, but the Duke of Edinburgh came over and said, ‘Do you come here often?’ I said, ‘Well, seeing as Susan’s running it, yes.’ ”
She is clearly very proud of her daughter, but what does this charming, sparky woman think it takes to be a good mother? “Patience. Plenty of love. No smacking. Let them have their head, but be behind them when they go for it.”
Baroness Greenfield watches, nodding. What does she owe to her mother? “I owe her everything.”
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