Love, family & Arabian nights

After Esther Freud was whisked away on a Moroccan “adventure” by her hippie mum, it would later inspire the movie Hideous Kinky. But that journey played out in the wake of a dark family secret which Esther reveals is at the heart of her moving new novel.

- JULIET RIEDEN

Esther Freud confesses she has no idea what prompted her mother to leave England with her two young daughters in tow to swap their suburban existence for 1960s Morocco. “My mother was always full of adventure, loved to travel and loved other worlds,” she recalls. “We’d moved out of London by that time and my parents were separated. Her best friend had gone off to India with her little girl, who is still my best friend. She was the only other unmarried teenager my mother met when they were these two pregnant girls, and I feel that must have influenced her.

“But it’s so frustrating. Even though I spoke to my mother all the time about everything, I didn’t ever ask her specifically that question: ‘What was it that made you go?’. It just seemed inevitable and a good idea to leave where we were living, which was Tunbridge Wells [a genteel town in the south], to go to Marrakesh. Why not?” she muses with a wry smile.

Esther was four, her sister Bella (now a fashion designer) was six, and the 18 months they spent on the North African hippie trail were life-changing, though not equally welcome for the siblings. “It had a huge effect. I’d say it’s really a big part of me,” notes Esther. “For my sister, I don’t know. She had already had a bit of a life in England. She’d already started school, she had friends, so she was taken away from something. I was at an age where everything was my life. Bella used to say, ‘When are we going to go home?’ … For me it was very positive. It opened my imagination and made me feel that I had a story inside me.