I was brought up by my grandparents to think that there was no alternative to going to church and being a practicing Christian. My grandfather, who I loved very much as a small child, sang in the church choir and had wanted to become an opera singer in his youth. It was only at the age of 12 that I realised that I didn't need to go with my grandparents to church. I had always felt intimidated in churches and the Christian faith was always meaningless to me. The first time I refused to go, I took my clothes off, danced naked and drew myself while looking in a mirror, all of this very symbolic of my future life. My grandfather soon decided that I was "heathen" and there was a great rift between us especially after I discovered socialist writers in my teens.

My only friend in those early years in Stockholm was another girl who was also an outcast, her mother a part-time prostitute and her step-father an alcoholic who turned into a monster when drunk. I couldn't believe the transformation and came early to understand the violence so many women and children are made to suffer in our society at the hands of men.

My situation got infinitely worse when my mother remarried in 1949. My stepfather was a Russian, Michael de Tourchaninoff, of the old Tzarist nobility. He was stateless, an emigre, who hated the Russian Communist regime and imagined they had spies everywhere ready to murder him. My stepfather resented my presence and there was class warfare in the family as I was the daughter of a peasant and he the son of aristocrats. He was also deadly jealous but my mother loved him in spite of it all. Since we lived in a one room and kitchen flat there was nowhere for me to escape or hide, no room of my own. I slept and lived in the kitchen and was like a prisoner there during the 5 years Michael stayed with us he wouldn't allow me to have friends or go out. I missed out on being a teenager and even on the popular music of the time since my stepfather always listened to Radio Moscow. I was far more familiar with Russian choirs than with Elvis Presley. I became familiar with Russian culture as Michael read aloud to us all the great classical Russian writers in the evenings, such as Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenjev. This is one good thing Michael did for me, he got me reading real literature instead of the girls-only slush. His family came from the Caucasus, he had Tartar-blood in his veins. He was a dark Russian and was treated in a racist way by mother's family and that I couldn't go along with although he was incredibly rightwing and was trying to drive me out of my mind. He would swear at me in five different languages and torture me psychically.

An influence on my life when I was 15 years old was reading Engel's book "The Origins of the family, private property and the state" and being taken by a young British Marxist, who was trying to educate and rescue me, to see Eisenstein's marvellous films, such as Potemkin and Alexander Nevskij. Of course my stepfather went spare. My brother Stephan was born when my mother was 42. I ran away from home and left school when I was 16 years old and was almost catatonic from depression and rejection. I was poor and homeless but took refuge with a group of surrealists/avantgardists/existencialists who met in a cellar cafe in the Old Town in Stockholm. I worked as a nude artists' model, which was humiliating for me but the only job I was able to hold down as nothing was expected of me. I was running the gauntlet between predatory male artists, out to seduce me and the 'beat-niks' who were reading Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, as well as Henry Miller and de Sade, and had the most appalling attitudes to women who they treated as members of a lesser species. Seeing this damaged me further and it also put me off all male centred religions for all time.

I was told in no uncertain terms that I'd have to pick a man to live with, for my own protection. It was my good luck that I chose a decent human being, a working class Dane, 10 years older than me, who was beautiful but disfigured from childhood polio. His mother was a cleaner in Copenhagen where we spent 4 months. The rest of the year I lived with Torben we spent in Gothenburg where I worked as a fulltime model in the prestigious Valand art school. I had wanted to go to art school myself when I left school but no chance of that because I was poor. I tended to say that this was my art school training, being the object in others' art. I felt treated as if I was a cross between an apple or chair and a part-time prostitute. At the time this was often the assumption and John Berger, the Marxist art historian, wrote in "Ways of Seeing" of how women are/were seen as sexual objects in men's art and he compares to portrayal of women in European male art with pornography and advertising. The woman always pleasing, to be bought and consumed by the male bourgeois buyer and viewer.

I was 17 when I left Sweden in 1955 with ca. £20 in my pocket that I had saved from working in the summer on a graveyard, hitch hiking with a girl a year younger than me. We were heading for Paris and then the vineyards in south of France. We were delighted and amazed at the multi-racial cosmopolitan cultures first of Amsterdam and then Paris. Sweden at the time was very provincial and white and conformist and very few immigrants had arrived then. We worked as artists' models in the Paris art schools for a while and then headed south to Beziers in the Languedoc, the land that the Cathars once inhabited. I knew nothing of the terrible history of persecution and mass murder of the Gathers but I could somehow sense a sadness in the people and the land itself. We visited medieval Carcasonne and worked a month picking grapes in the vineyards. Hard work but it earned us enough to travel during a month in Franco's Spain. We visited Barcelona , and saw Gaudi's park there,( we stumbled upon it ) Valencia and traveled to Granada where we stayed a week and spent most of our time high up in the gypsy caves of SacreMonte. We had befriended some gypsy-boys who took us to their families. We saw a large elderly man 'King of the Gypsies' dance to rhythmic handclaps in a dark cave and we swapped Swedish folk songs for Flamenco singing. We loved the Alhambra, magnificent palace of the moors. We also saw the fear in the Spanish people and the poverty in Andalusia, we saw that the catholic church worked hand in glove with the fascist dictator, Franco, and that the only wealthy and well fed looking people were priests, monks, police and the military. While we were in Granada the Suez crisis broke out and the world could have been plunged into another war. We traveled as fast as we could back to France but on the way we managed to stop off in Madrid where I saw Goya's "Black paintings" at the Prado museum. We had nothing, not even a tent, sleeping bags or any such things, and in this situation we found amazing kindness and hospitality from people who were also poor. It revived my belief in the basic goodness of human nature, at least in the common people.

After many further adventures we ended up in Stockholm where we married in the registrar office because we were planning to go and live in Bristol in England, in the home of Stevan's parents. His mother, a Celt from the Shetland Islands, became my life long friend.

Stevan was escaping military service and therefore we didn't officially exist in England, something that got difficult when I got pregnant. We lived a winter in St. Ives where we were able to hire a large studio/home above the Penwith gallery. I was starting to paint then and we were drawn there because of the artist colony centred around Barbara Hepworth and others. I discovered though that there was a tyranny of abstraction and figurative art was unacceptable.

As I got more pregnant we returned to Sweden where our son, Sean, was born in 1959 in a hospital. It was a bad experience as I was put to sleep for no reason at all and felt alienated from my child as a result. We were given emergency housing on the outskirts of Stockholm far away from my mother and brother. Stevan trained as a silversmith and I was left alone all day suffering from post natal depression and unable to cope with my son. During this unhappy period I did some visionary pastels while listening as in a trance to Hebrew sacred music. Many of Stevan's fellow workers were Jewish silversmiths who had lost their families in the concentration camps. My situation was not helped by the fact that we lived in just one room with a non-functional small kitchen, no hot water, no bath and the toilet three flights down.

We returned to Bristol when military service was ended for good and my second son, Toivo, was born there in 1961. This was a natural homebirth, it changed my entire life, initiated me to the Great Mother and it was love at first sight. So, so different from the hospital birth. (See the text to my painting "God giving birth"). I was painting, learning my craft, doing part-time courses, in sculpture, in etching etc. and making jewellery with my husband. It was interesting thinking in terms of form and seeing how different metals behave.

I came across first "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir, and then Robert Graves "The White Goddess" in the early 60s, and those two books changed my life, especially coming after that homebirth which had already set me questioning what this patriarchal culture is all about as it diminishes, disempowers and desacrilises women. I realised why I was angry!

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