Rachel Fury

the photograph in inside-out(indian version) on page 285 shows the other band members from ( i presume) dsothunder tour,whereas i dont see any photo of Fontaine?is that fontaine or rachel in pink dress?

As a former publicity director with a big English publishing house, Polly Samson would recognise herself as a marketing man's dream. She has an exotic family background, is mother to seven children (not all her own), and lives in rustic splendour with her famous pop star husband. She's also an accomplished writer who once featured on a list of Britain's 50 most beautiful women. Patricia Deevy heard Samson's story.

Precisely because Polly Samson is a publicist's dream, you'd be tempted not to write about her just to spite the machine. She looks great (of course that doesn't matter, but we're talking marketing here, not art). She has a wonderful warm personality. Her family background is full of jaw-dropping drama. She is a mother of three sons and a stepmother to another boy and three girls. She lives in rustic luxury, amongst a menagerie in west Sussex with her husband, Pink Floyd frontman David Gilmour. She is happy. But chiefly she's worth knowing about because she is an accomplished new writer.

Despite her contentment, Samson has a streak of hilariously melodramatic fatalism. Recently, in an Oxford Street bookshop to sign copies of her first novel, Out of the Picture, she watched a woman deciding whether or not to buy it. She picked it up, studied the front and back, put it down, walked away, walked back, picked it up again, left it down. And on it went. "And I said: `If she buys it, everything in my life is going to be OK. And if she doesn't buy it everything is going to be terrible, my whole life is going to go wrong.' In the end she went and bought it and I've never felt so relieved. If this woman knew I was stalking her around the shop: 'Buy it, buy it, buy it ...'"

That Samson is still in touch with girlhood and its "he loves me/he loves me not" model of rationality partly explains why Out of the Picture works as well it does. In it a young woman flees to London after falling out with her stepfather over something which is a mystery for most of the novel. It is 1980 and Lizzie finds a crummy bedsit, takes a job at a photo-agency, begins an affair with her seedy middle-aged boss, and sets about finding her father, a painter who walked out of her life when she was a child. At 18, and lonely in London, Lizzie's resentments and sorrows propel her in two directions: into the stupid affair, but also towards taking responsibility for giving her life a shape and a meaning.

Samson is Lizzie's exact contemporary and at 18 her life was in a similar need of direction. Now, she calls herself "the luckiest person alive, things very much landed in my lap". She will talk about the goodness of her life, but is irritated when the publicity concentrates on her marriage. For instance, in Germany her publisher mentioned Gilmour in the book's author blurb. She raged about it to her mother, who observed that Pink Floyd were "probably quite famous in Germany". Her mother, she realises, still hasn't quite got just how big the band is. When she began seeing Gilmour her mother told her uncle that she was going out with a chappy from a band called Lily The Pink.

Six years later, Esther was disillusioned with the revolution, in danger because of her interest in rock music and working as a translator and interpreter with Radio Peking. She was eight months pregnant when she married Alan Winnington, a journalist with the communist Daily Worker (the forerunner of The Morning Star). They moved to East Berlin. Wanting to reward him for his services, the paper gave Winnington his heart's desire of a British car and got a Daily Worker colleague, Lance Samson, to deliver it.

oooookaaaaay

__________________
Only the very safe,
Can talk about wrong and right.
Of those that are forced to choose,
There's some who will choose to fight.

"Somehow he left the car and brought my mother back. And during this time I was conceived. The first four years of my life she was very much between the two men. I remember Alan Winnington absolutely. I used to call him Dad and I used to call my dad Lance. Isn't that dreadful? But they [her brothers] called him Dad. I've never really called my dad Dad."

Lance Samson had arrived in England in 1938, a 10-year-old Jewish refugee. Sadly, but also luckily, his father had just died of a heart attack. Samson senior was so adamant about fighting for Jewish rights that, had he lived, the family would have remained in Hamburg and probably gone to a concentration camp. With her husband dead, Ilse Samson sent the children to England. They were separated and put into four different institutions.Lance and Esther married when their daughter was seven, mainly, she says, because she nagged them into it.

"I longed to be a bridesmaid. I think I've got long hair now because I always had the urchin look when I was small, in all my brother's hand-me-downs. Nobody would have this speccy shaven-haired child as their bridesmaid. So I used to beg them. I remember that they took me to this department store to choose my dress this was 1968 or '69 and I was so excited I was running around the shop telling all these sales assistants in this rather posh store: 'My mummy and daddy are getting married, my mummy and daddy are getting married."

After the brutal suppression of popular agitation in Prague in '68, the Samsons abandoned communism and moved from London to the West Country. When Samson was growing up, at first in Cornwall and later in Devon, her parents were respectable members of the community, a local newspaper editor and a village school headmistress. The only sign of previous activism was more political talk than in most homes and a house where neatness and matching curtains and cushions were not a priority.

Her rebellion against free-thinking parents was excessive compliance: she asked them to tell her what to think. She took herself off to Sunday School from about the age of seven her parents were atheists. In her teens, she made her statement by getting expelled from school after throwing a table at a teacher, by getting a dead-end job as a telex operator in a local factory, by going out with the local stud lovely but dumb and planning to marry him and settle down to domestic bliss. Six months of that and boredom got to her. "I ran screaming both from the boyfriend and the clay company."

She arrived at the door of her German grandmother, who was then working in the British Library. Ilse encouraged her to look for work in publishing. Though Polly couldn't type, she started as a typist in Macmillan. She stayed late to do the work she hadn't managed during the day and impressed the boss with her diligence. She was promoted and by her mid-20s was the publicity director at Jonathan Cape. It was a dream job where she worked with writers like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James, Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin and Doris Lessing. But in 1989 she lost her job when she and her new boss did not get on. Though shocked and upset, the "enormous pay-off" suited her very well for she was pregnant and moving to Cornwall with her partner, the writer Heathcote Williams.