Passing on the mother wound. Peaches Geldof and the misery of inherited fame

Peaches Geldof is dead and it’s a tragedy, one that has been broiling up for a decade. Oh, yes, she had got very thin. So much, so fashion, it’s not like anyone could have seen it coming, especially from my distance, viewed in magazine and gossip columns that I flicked through in doctor’s waiting rooms while my own offspring bawled.

And yet, becoming a mother twice in quick succession, so young, she was looking for something alright. She was trying to find herself, but when you haven’t got a mum, that’s hard to do. No, I’m not going to say it was inevitable, but clearly,  the mother wound runs deep. And poor Peaches has handed it on to her two boys who are now cut adrift in a family touched by tragedy and stardom. Blame Paula Yates and her heroin addiction, blame what you like, but these things never happen in isolation, and I don’t know enough about them to comment any further.

All know is I saw Tom and the boys floundering around Victoria Park in the autumn, one strapped to his chest, the other in a pushchair. He looked lonely and a little henpecked all rockstar hair and tattoos, Baby Bjorn and bugaboo. Most of all he looked painfully young.

Several years before I saw Peaches at a club in Hoxton. It was the same night my fur coat went missing, a vintage I’d bought from Portobello Market the year I moved to London. I always joked Peaches had taken it, but of course I have no proof. At the time tales of her wild child behaviour were escalating in the press and I had some reason to feel bitter. As a budding journo myself, Peaches had bagsied herself a column in some fashion rag or other, while I was taking out the post at another and the biting unfairness of it made me realise that it’s not what you know it’s who. True though that may be, would I want her life, for all its bright burning fame and tantalising closeness to stardom. No. Its superficiality seem to radiate from her. At the time I thought her a silly girl, spoiled; airy fairy. I know now she was in pain; too much too young, her beloved mother gone and with her, Peaches was unrooted for all her father ‘s fame, her contacts, her youth and her promise, the leg ups I never had.

I understood why she may have gripped onto motherhood like it would root her down. I felt the same pull when I became pregnant at 24, my own mother had left when I was a baby, as I mentioned last week. But with it, you lose the shining lights of youth and dare I say whatever fame she possessed, the superficial friends, the drugs and all the other props one might use to stay afloat in a world I have only glimpsed from the cheap seats. People were waiting for her to fail. Viewed like this, it looks all too miserably inevitable.

Normality has saved me from myself, I think. Having to knuckle down and get on with it. It gives you something to do, no get out clause, no rider, no runners.

I don’t pretend to know what Peaches felt. But it’s such a shame. Such a terrible, terrible shame.