DJ Taylor: Celebrity daughter Zoe-Sky had an odd kind of upbringing

(Mark Long)

There came a moment once, playing the Truth Game with some twentysomething friends, when somebody posed the two-part question: "When did you smoke your first spliff? And who gave it to you?"

Zoe-Sky listened thoughtfully to the answers that preceded her own and then replied: "Aged 10. Dad." Even here, in a determinedly hipster gathering full of strung-out young people with seat reservations on the Oblivion Express, this announcement was greeted with a respectful silence. As her husband once put it to an enquiring relative, there were bohemian childhoods, and there were bohemian childhoods, and then there was Zoe-Sky's.

It was an odd kind of upbringing, this, in the mansion outside Weybridge, where the Rolling Stones once came to Sunday lunch and the five-year-old Zoe-Sky was several times woken from an afternoon nap by a Drugs Squad officer searching her playpen for contraband; so detached from other types of existences was she that it took Zoe-Sky at least a decade to appreciate its thorough-going singularity. The discovery that most people's fathers did not play bass in prog-rock bands and spend six months of the year on tour; that most children were not left in the charge of negligent au pairs while their mothers went skiing; and, indeed, that other children were not called Tennyson, Quintessence and Avalon (Zoe-Sky's siblings) was a profound shock to her: she had simply assumed, on the evidence of the world around her, that this was how people lived.

To do Eric, her bass-playing, womanising, fast-white-powder-ingesting father justice, he did, in her early teens, make some slight effort in regard to her welfare and education. There was an expensive girls' boarding school in Cheshire and trips to Venice to look at the galleries. None of this, alas, was of any interest to Zoe-Sky, whose great joy in adolescence was to stay the night at the decidedly unglamorous, bourgeois house of her friend Melanie, where Melanie's mum brought them hot chocolate in bed and insisted on lights out at 11.

In her early thirties now, a stunningly beautiful girl who has always declined to make commercial use of that beauty, Zoe-Sky has been married for the past eight years to an accountant. She has a pious horror of drug use, late nights and sexual irregularity of any kind. Her father, still living in the big house at Weybridge with his fourth wife, can't imagine why she grew up so staid.