Paula Fiona Boyd was born in Nakuru Hospital (Kenya) on 14th March 1951 to Diane and Jock Boyd, and was the youngest of four siblings (Pattie, Jenny and Colin).
By the time her mother Diane was 31 years old, she met her second husband, Bobbie Gaymer-Jones. Diane was very poor and Paula was the only one of her children her mother had with her: when she left Jock, she had deposited Colin and Jenny in some kind of boarding nursery school, along with Pattie, eldest sister.
Pattie, Colin & Jenny spent the next school holidays [1953] at their father’s house. In her autobiography "Wonderful Tonight" Pattie Boyd explains: "I can only imagine that she and Bobbie had baby Paula and didn’t want us hanging around. They were the perfect nuclear family – and could even, perhaps, pass off Paula as Bobbie’s.” In mid 1953 Diane left for good, but she left with Bobbie and Paula and left Pattie, Colin and Jenny behind.
Pattie explains: “As a little girl, she was utterly adored and always had the biggest present at Christmas; but she clearly remembers even at that young age thinking that when she opened the present, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be enough. She was born with an addictive personality […] – and as a teenager she was well on the way to having a problem.”

She had always wanted to be an actress and had been sent to a children’s drama school. George Harrison and Pattie went to see her on stage a couple of times, and she had parts in a couple of children’s television series, including “Swallows and Amazons”. Potentially she had a good career ahead of her. And then it started to go wrong. She and her mother started to fight over clothes: she wanted to wear really short skirts and other things that her mum thought she was too young for. Eventually Paula was sent to a boarding school but that was a disaster and only made the things worse. As soon as she left school, she went to live with an actor boyfriend.

By December 1969 Delaney and Bonnie and Friends were playing in Liverpool and Pattie took Paula with her to see them; once again, there was a fantastic party afterwards. Pattie explains: "Paula was seventeen and a bit of a wild child; my mother was finding it difficult to cope with her. She was so pretty – the prettiest of us all – creative, lively and outgoing, not cripplingly shy like Jenny and me". That night Eric Clapton fell for her. After the show all of them went to a restaurant and everyone was quite drunk and raucous. When they went back to the hotel, they left Eric and Paula dancing.
The next night Eric was playing in Croydon and again Paula and Pattie went to watch, and again there was a wild after-show party, this time at Eric`s Italianate manor house, Hurtwood Edge in Ewhurst, Surrey. Soon after, Paula moved in with Eric.
“By this time [summer 1970] Paula had gone. She had been with Eric in Miami when he was recording Layla and knew instantly it was about me [Pattie]. She had always had a suspicion he was with her only because she was the next best thing to me [Pattie] and I [Pattie] was unobtainable. Hearing Layla confirmed it. She packed her bags and took her broken heart home. She had been seriously in love with Eric, but he destroyed her pride, her self-esteem and her confidence, which were already fragile.”

She went off to stay, first, with Bobby Whitlock, who played with Delaney and Bonnie and the Dominos, “then bounced from one relationship to the next, one marriage to the next” explains her