Her mother died of throat cancer in 1943 when Cynthia and her sister Melanie were still young; the two girls were brought up by a series of housekeepers hired by their father. Expelled from school for being “a bad influence” (a cousin recalled she never stopped talking about sex), Cynthia was enrolled by her father on a hairdressing course at a technical college in London, but she was asked to leave because of her lack of interest. An apprenticeship with some hairdressing friends of her father in Aldershot proved equally fruitless; they insisted she saw a psychiatrist to cure her compulsive swearing, and after claiming falsely that she was pregnant and threatening to swallow weedkiller, Cynthia was disowned by her father.