Three Things

Posted by litlove

This comes with thanks to Paula at Book Jotter for her Three Things meme!

The Book: Earlier this week I had a sudden yen for a Persephone title and picked up High Wages by Dorothy Whipple. I’m so happy that I did. I’ve enjoyed all my reading lately but this is the first novel in a long while that’s held me properly hostage, that I put down with the greatest of reluctance and pick up again at the first available opportunity. It’s the story of Jane Carter who, at 17, is obliged to make a living for herself, having trespassed on her stepmother’s goodwill for too long after the untimely death of her father. She finds work as a shop girl in Chadwick’s, a draper’s shop as it was called, where women came to buy material and trimmings that would then be made up into clothes by their off-site seamstresses. It’s 1912 and the great shopping revolution is underway. Selfridges having opened its doors onto an extravagant cornucopia of goods in 1909, and Jane, with her ‘good eye’ and determined ambition will be at its forefront. She will push Chadwick’s as far as she can towards the new, modern ways, and eventually set up a shop herself selling the fresh trend of ‘ready-mades’.

There’s a fascinating preface to the book that delves into the social history of shopping at this time, and the phenomenon that was the shop girl. Very few avenues of work were available still to women, and retail looked a great deal less arduous than either service in a house or factory work. In fact, it was as exploitative as most other forms of employment. Shop girls worked a solid 12-hour day with only 20 minutes for lunch and most lived in on the premises for a cut of their wages. Dorothy Whipple writes a brilliant villain, one of whom is the redoubtable Mrs Chadwick, who holds the domestic purse-strings in her tight fist:

Mrs Chadwick was rather mean. Not excessively so; but just mean enough to add interest to her days. She enjoyed exerting her ingenuity in the provision, for the girls, of suppers that did not cost more than threepence a head.’ And when the First World War comes, it ‘called Mrs Chadwick’s full powers into play; she lived vividly. She could now scheme and stint to her heart’s content…. She spent exciting moments stealing down to her own scullery, when the girls were out of the way, to take parings from their margarine allowances with a razor blade. She would pop the stolen pieces into the pot where her husband’s supper was cooking… with a greater satisfaction than she had known when she could put ounces of the best butter in and never miss them.’

Jane is permanently hungry while she’s at Chadwick’s, but the disadvantages of life there keep her motivated to move on. Shop girl literature – and there was such a thing – fell into two categories. On the one hand, commercial romances in which the pretty girl behind the counter is plucked from obscurity by a well-off prince and may return to buy goods on her own account; and the rags to riches and possibly back to rags tale, where dangerous social aspirations were met with scandal or worse. Whipple’s book takes a different, kinder, more optimistic path, although Jane’s route to better fortune is punctuation by misunderstandings, hardship and betrayals. And finally – finally – I have a book in my hands in which the main female protagonist chooses work over romance; I’m cheering her on.

The true story: Perhaps one of the best stories of a shop girl made good concerns the author of 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith. Dodie’s first desire was to be an actress, and from 1914 she was a very bad actress indeed, one who, in her own words, was always ‘talking herself into a job and then acting herself out of it.’ She lurched from one bad role to another, until finally she seduced the director of the Windmill Theatre, Norman McDermott, in the hope that it would guarantee her steady employment. In fact he sent her abroad on tour and then, in her absence, sacked her. And so, Dodie decided that part of her life had come to an end and she needed a new direction. In 1923, she heard of a position in the London furniture emporium, Heal’s, and went and talked herself into that. ‘After years of selling myself as an actress to theatrical managers who didn’t want me,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘it was child’s play selling goods to customers who were pleased to have them.’

When she turned out to be a success, she went directly to the manager, Ambrose Heal, and (just like Jane Carter in Whipple’s novel) negotiated herself a pay rise. This was considered outrageous presumption, but Ambrose Heal was inclined to be charmed by it, and Dodie needed no more encouragement. She longed to be in love again, and had acquired a taste for sleeping with the boss. She’d unwittingly set herself a challenge, though, as Ambrose Heal had not only a wife, but a mistress too. When he pointed out how little time and affection he had to spare, she told him ‘half-a-loaf was better than no bread’. To his continued protests, she said ‘Then just crumbs from the rich woman’s table.’ So Ambrose Heal accepted defeat, and for the next six years they maintained a stable if clandestine affair.

During this time, Dodie was busy channelling her energies and ambitions into her writing. Ever since she was a child she had written stories and plays but acting had always been her passion. When Ambrose Heal gave her the rather splendid gift of a typewriter for Christmas 1929, she longed for something to type up. As it happened, she had an idea for a play. Playwriting braided together Dodie’s finest skills – a powerful sense of emotional melodrama inherited from her mother and grandmother, balanced by a rather delightful sense of humour. She had a fine ear for dialogue in a family that loved a punchline. Her aunt looking with dislike at her hat in the mirror had declared ‘Well, it’s a beast and that’s all there is to be said about it’. Dodie had been relishing dialogue for years, and she had her own wealth of stage experience into which she could pour her vivid imagination. She wrote her play quickly, loving the experience, and her triumph was complete when it was bought by a director who had once sacked her.

The first night was catastrophic – a rumpus in the audience ended with the gallery booing the play and the stalls booing the gallery. ‘I never heard a noisier, more disastrous, reception’ Dodie remembered, and she went to bed distraught, fearing the play had failed and thinking ‘But it can’t, because if it does I can’t bear it.’ Then in the morning, a miracle happened; the newspaper critics were uniform in their praise. Journalists rushed to Heal’s to get a glimpse of the latest sensation, a 33-year-old woman who ran her own department. By the evening news the billboards proclaimed: ‘Shopgirl Writes Play’.

For the next year, Dodie struggled to repeat her success, starting over and over with different ideas, none of which took fire. A journalist rang her up, asking whether she had anything new ready, and a theatre critic wrote a story claiming that no woman had ever written more than one successful play. ‘Perhaps,’ Dodie wrote acidly, ‘they felt “Shopgirl Writes Play” had been a pleasant fluke, but “Shopgirl Writes Two Plays” would be a bit like Cinderella getting two princes.’ It seemed to goad her on, though, and she had the inspiration of writing about a grand department store suffering in a time of slump. At the end of the first curtain call for Service, she was enticed on stage to take a bow before the audience. It was a heady moment, hearing their whoops and cheers, finally finding her place on stage in the limelight.

Dodie Smith would go on to have three more stage hits, making five in a row which was a record for a woman playwright. She had the success and the money that she’d longed for, and she realised that her interest in Ambrose Heal had faded away. ‘I partly longed for affairs as status symbols,’ she wrote in her journal many years later. ‘Women have for so long been conditioned to equate sex appeal with success.’ Her plays fed her ego far more than any mere man could, and in comparison the romance of an affair felt paltry. And so I keep banging the drum: women want work; stop giving them storylines that are all about the men.

The photos: A few weekends ago I was with my family, searching through the thousands of family photos we’d taken over the years for good ones of my Mum, when my brother remembered the slides up in the loft. He returned with four old boxes, each about the size of a large dictionary, each divided up into about a hundred tiny compartments, each of which housed a slide. We held them up to the light in awe of their antiquity, squinting to see the tiny figures. Well, my brother took them away and scanned them onto his computer, producing a very 21st century One Drive file with almost 500 photos on it. This, for me, was my family prehistory. The life they had together before I arrived in it – well, there’s a sequence towards the end of the slides of me as a baby, and a handful in which I’m a toddler. It is so very strange to see my parents and brother before I knew them. My brother at 5, 6, 7, wearing shorts and a little shirt with a tie (a tie!), taken on holidays and trips, playing with his model railway. Mr Litlove looked at the photos and sighed ‘He’s living the dream,’ he said. I did feel a tad guilty; my arrival must have been a bit of a shock.

But the pictures that fascinated me the most were the location shots. This was only the 1960s, less than a decade before I was born. But the small towns depicted look like they come from another world altogether, a world that is probably less distant from that of High Wages and Dodie Smith’s time at Heal’s than it is from the High Street as we know it today.

This was the world in which my parents were young and it makes me feel very old. I don’t know where these photos were taken, but think it might be from the area around Hay-on-Wye. If you recognise it, do let me know!

How Things Have Been

Posted by litlove

Hard to believe, but it’s been very nearly three weeks since my mother died. I think we’re all bearing up pretty well. There were certain conventions around a family loss like this that I was dreading, but they’ve passed off better than I feared. The day afterwards, for instance, we travelled to my brother’s house, just so we could all be together. I was afraid it would be more emotion than I could deal with, but in fact it was a very gentle, calm day. My mother was the emotional wellspring of our family, and the lodestar around which we oriented ourselves. Without her, we were three people all used to holding our emotions in check in order to be responsive to others. My mother could be very dazzling, and I didn’t really realise how much she soaked up my attention. Now I find I’m seeing my father and brother in an amped up technicolour, in exceptional detail. When I was around my mother, I shifted into a higher energetic gear, and I can feel how that would be too much energy for the remaining men. It would be overwhelming, unnecessary. I wonder what the consequences of all this will be, how I will change, who we will be for one another.

On our last visit, we needed to find some photos of Mum to put in the Order of Service. I braced myself emotionally for this task too, and once again it turned out entirely different to my expectations. This time we were all at Dad’s, where the cupboard under the stairs is a kind of Aladdin’s cave of family history. My brother dragged just one of the many boxes of photographs out and hours passed as we sifted through them. My Dad was a keen photographer back in the day and the photos were good. We watched our children grow up again through family holidays, parties, outings, visits, every few minutes someone would cry ‘Oh I’ve found a good one!’ or ‘Do you remember?’ and we would laugh or sigh or say ‘Awwww’. There were photos I’d never seen before, black and white ones of grandparents I’d never met, my Dad as a young boy, my parents before they were my parents, a beautiful one of my mother, holding my brother as a baby in her arms for his christening. I really loved that one of her. When she was full of joy, she was radiant.

I read online in one of the endless stream of Instagram memes the thought that grief is love with nowhere to go. I feel that I gave my mother every bit of the love I felt for her, and I think that she gave all the love she had to me. There is nothing left undone between us. I’m sad she’s not with us but I don’t – at present anyway – actively miss her. I’m all topped up. What I feel I’ve lost is not the person my mother was – who I know better than I know myself – but the structural pillar that is a mother. The attention economy of my life has altered: in the first few days it occurred to me that there was no one now on earth to whom the things I did would matter as much. That was an odd thought because it caused both sorrow and relief. But the real change is clearly going to happen at a much deeper level. This past week I’ve felt more free-floating anxiety than I have in a long time, a signal that some kind of emotional Kraken is stirring in the depths. My inguinal muscles have been tight, which makes sense. They cradle the womb, the mother core, the place of creativity. I imagine some unimaginable ancestral foundation crumbling away. Will what I have built on it stand firm?

After all the years of CFS, I’ve grown used to my body telling me things more clearly than my emotions do. I will admit that these three weeks I’ve felt very tired. This I recognise as a reaction to the past year of drama and the last six weeks of melodrama. There’s also a lot to do and a part of me is saying, What? MORE effort? I find all I really want is to read and daydream and sleep. But other parts of me want to see what happens next, to go through this ritual of a funeral, of a family mourning, and see what comes out of it. My curiosity is both my downfall and my saving grace. And although I feel sluggish and disinclined to move, exercise has in fact been very helpful. At the end of last week, I was full of unidentifiable emotion and my yoga session just wiped it clean away, processed it effortlessly for me. Writing helps a lot, too, because it’s only when I write things down that I really get a purchase on them.

I don’t want to lose the little oddities that keep cropping up. My mother will be having her hair and makeup done for her last great party, and I find my thoughts often crystallising around the person – I’ve no idea who it will be – who will do this for her. I feel a great tenderness for this person and their task, which is so futile and yet so dignified, so loving. The other evening I realised I couldn’t face watching Who Do You Think You Are? on the television, and asked a long-suffering Mr Litlove if we couldn’t have another episode of Make It At Market, a daytime programme in which people are mentored by professionals in their craft and helped to create a business. I realised I couldn’t stomach the great sweep of family history; I just wanted to watch good parenting.

The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan came up with the term extimacy to describe the way that the most intimate inner core of our self can often only be seen outside of us, reflected back in unexpected moments that feel uncanny. My experience at the moment is deeply marked by extimacy. I don’t know what I’m feeling; the emotions are too deep, too close, until I see them reflected back to me in something random outside of myself. We have a long wait until the funeral at the end of April, and I’m actually glad of the time. Several friends have encouraged me to just be as far as I’m able, and I can see its potential. I had empty, spacious time after surgery for breast cancer in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. No one could visit and so I didn’t need to compromise my healing process in order to reassure people that I was just fine; and I became more myself, more in possession of myself. I think I need some emptiness to allow the generational tectonic plates to shift and settle.

The Unwild Child

Posted by litlove

One of the essays in Emilie Pine’s collection, Notes to Self, details her rackety, out-of-control adolescence, full of drugs and drink and underage sex and bunking off school. As I was reading this, it struck me that her story is the dominant literary fable of growing up. There’s something supposedly shameful about being a rebellious teenager that makes lots of people want to describe their experiences in great detail and place them in the public domain. Reading her essay, I thought of my own adolescence, right up the other end of the scale, and it struck me that its like is rarely seen in print. So! Break out the Ovaltine and buckle up your slippers, I’m going to take you on the least wild ride of your reading life.

I was a child of the 70s and a teenager of the 80s. When I went up to secondary school it was all pixie boots and ra-ra skirts, drainpipe jeans and people with short hair having one teeny tiny long plait at the nape of their neck. It was the Falklands war. It was Princess Diana’s wedding (Charles being the merest prop), Torville and Dean winning gold at the Winter Olympics. When you switched the radio on (and we did switch the radio on), it was to hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller playing. On Top of the Pops it was Adam Ant and Boy George, causing fathers across the land to lower their evening papers and say, ‘What the hell is that?’ The 80s was the decade when social change began to speed up, when people became increasingly hungry for money, progress, status and glittering prizes. But my early teenage years were inevitably a hangover from the 70s, and there were plenty of pockets of England where the principles of the 50s and 60s still ruled – nothing swinging or counterculture, thank you very much, no, class was the great delineator and respectability the most significant social capital. It was in just such a pocket that I grew up.

There is a photo in which I’m twelve I think, possibly thirteen, alongside my mother, on a hot beach in Devon. My mother wears pale blue trousers, a white short sleeved top in a fabric like pointelle or crochet, and a wide-brimmed hat. I’m wearing jeans rolled to my knees and a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled to my elbows. We may not be the best dressed people on the beach but we are certainly the most dressed. I would bet good money that my mother still has her tights on under her slacks – she always says she feels too strange without them. My Dad’s concession to the sand and the heat is to remove his tie and socks. None of us owns swimwear, not least since my brother, who’s seven years older and has now left home, is the only one of us who can swim. (Theoretically I’ve been taught, but my lack of aptitude combined with horror at the junior school’s outdoor pool, in which little floating rafts of matted dead bugs and leaves occasionally drifted by.) We all like the beach and understand that it is a vital part of a summer holiday, but we certainly don’t go there to undress. We are a restrained family, modest and cautious, reserved, easily embarrassed and crippled by politeness.

The most important thing to know about me is that I am in the middle – well, let’s call it two thirds of the way through – my Agatha Christie obsession. I believe I was reading The ABC Murders at the time of this photo (I have a lot of memories that are anchored in place by a book). I had a fairly solid diet of Agatha between 12 and 14, punctuated here and there by Sherlock Holmes, the memoirs of Monica Dickens, Sweet Valley High books, Daphne du Maurier novels and – an outlier lent to me by an enterprising English teacher – Rosamund Lehman’s Invitation to the Waltz, which I loved. I am a swot. I actually like homework and do it the moment I get in from school. Mr Litlove, who did his homework in the car on the way to school on the day it was due, says that if we had met at this age, we would not have been friends and I believe him. It’s ironic really because Mr Litlove went to a good, fee-paying school while I went to a comprehensive, having failed my eleven-plus exam. Or not absolutely failed it, but only done well enough to be put in the single grammar class of my year’s intake. The school is brand new, and as we gradually rise up through the years, the classes below us become mixed ability, which is much more the ethos that the teachers want to embrace. Sport here is everything. At the end of each year we have an assembly that takes most of a morning in which prizes are doled out for sporting achievement. I have zero hand-eye coordination and couldn’t hit or kick with intent if you put a gun to my head. There is no recognition for academic work, no prizes or rewards. Liking work is something I keep very quiet about – I’m not daft, though I am desperately awkward. I keep a diary and write it at 6pm every evening, just before we have dinner because, frankly, nothing is going to happen of note after that. I spend my evenings reading and watching television at the same time; a skill of which I am unjustifiably proud.

When it rains on the beach we gather up our belongings and retire to the car park. Then we sit in the car and wait the rain out with our puzzle books. My dad favours crosswords and logic puzzles, but Mum and I like word search. There are some days when it is raining but we come to the beach regardless and sit in the car doing puzzles. That holiday I make friends with a girl about my age from Chingford. I remember the name because it strikes me as intriguingly exotic. She has a couple of younger brothers and a black labrador dog. We are sitting in the car when her family drives up. Despite the rain they all tumble out, whooping and calling to each other, yomping over the top of the sand dunes and out of sight. As I sit in the back of the car watching them, does my heart give me a pang? Do I wish I could be part of that family, who don’t mind getting wet, who are not afraid of fun? Well, yes, of course I do. But then I also wish I could be three inches shorter, with long blond hair and freckles. Some things are not your destiny.

You should know this about me. When I go with my parents to the library in town, we pass a pub that squats on the corner of two streets, garish in mustard coloured render. As we walk by, the sour malty exhalation from the ventilation shafts is actively frightening to me. When my German pen pal comes to stay on an organised exchange visit, I am forced into more active sociability than usual. On her last evening we go to the roller disco, a den of 80s overstimulation. I am utterly hopeless on roller skates. Two boys take a kind of pity on me and offer to propel me around the dance floor. We do a circuit, one hanging on to each of my arms. Even this is beyond me and I get hopelessly tangled up, my feet having all the directional ability of a rogue shopping trolley. ‘Cor, look at that!’ one of the boys shouts. ‘She wants to go backwards now!’ They drop me off in the seating area, laughing good-naturedly, before zooming off to fly around the floor, effortlessly.

Adolescence is the dawn of self-awareness and I was learning many inconvenient truths about myself. Adolescence is also the first great schooling in inauthenticity, figuring out how far we can betray ourselves to please the world. I could see it was going to take a lot of energy I didn’t have to transform myself into a fun, carefree person. An anxiety began to take root that I still feel even now: my issue was not that I longed to be released from the car and the puzzle book, but that I was never going to be allowed to stay there.

******

There is always a point growing up, as we try to enter the autonomy of self-government, when we stumble across something uncontrollable in ourselves, and something inconsolable. In me, such things usually manifested physically, in one form of anxiety or another.

I am fifteen years old and I wake in the night with a stomach ache. Never worry your parents, never disappoint your parents are my mantras, and so I get up and creep silently downstairs, staying close to the walls to avoid the sweep of my mother’s nighttime radar. We’ve not long moved house and now have a downstairs cloakroom, usefully located at the furthest point from their bedroom. Before, we lived on one of the wide arterial roads into town, in a three-bed semi; I fell asleep at night to the sounds of lorries rumbling by. I didn’t really like that house, and am thrilled with the new one. We are on one of the first roads to be built on what will become a huge estate. At present I walk to school over ploughed fields, but that will change. This house not only has a bathroom upstairs but an en suite in the main bedroom and this downstairs loo – it’s 1984 and a level of luxury that we never thought to possess.

So I am bitterly disappointed to find myself spoiling the moment with stomach aches. I used to have them quite often as a child, and my mother would set to with the heel of her hand, grinding it in circles while watching me with an anxious frown. It is cold downstairs but very quiet. I lock myself in and stand staring at the sink, the clean scoop of enamel a comfort. An hour or so passes, and I get so cold that eventually I return to bed. But the experience leaves something unresolved, and it starts to happen more regularly. More and more often I wake and steal downstairs. Then the stomach ache is no longer confined to the depths of the night but spreads out into the day. One evening, I am sitting up in bed reading Austen’s Northanger Abbey and despite being so taken by the storyline with Catherine Morland and her false friend, Isabella, I can’t concentrate on it. I wonder if my reading is somehow involved in this internal disquiet; it is, after all, just another kind of consumption and digestion. I have recently read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I loved but which spooked and unsettled me. I also tried to read Ruth Rendell but stalled at a scene of a woman being tormented inside her house by a man who pokes his bloodied fingers through her letterbox. There was something so queasy about it that I quickly pushed the book back into the shelf and don’t even like to look now at the spine.

I start to cut back on food. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with my weight or my figure. I am simply desperate to stop feeling sick and the only thing I can think of is that something I’m eating doesn’t agree with me. I monitor my response to every meal and because I feel sick so often, I decide there are many things I can’t eat. But here my memory fails me, because writing this down I think: how on earth did this play out? Did I refuse to eat the food my mother gave me? Impossible. Did I try to hide how little I was eating? More plausible, but there were just the three of us and we had all our meals together. How come neither of them noticed? All I know is that I got very thin and the problem with food lasted a long time, from the early autumn of one year into the late spring of the next. It got so bad that eventually I had to confess. I was taken to the doctor where I was given a lecture – there was always a lecture – this one misguidedly about anorexia, and a bottle of pink medicine. Jollop, my dad would call it. Anyway, the medicine helps; I start to feel better. My stomach calms, and I begin to eat again. Then one night about a fortnight later, I get up in the middle of the night, go to the main bathroom and am violently sick. In the morning my mother asks me wearily if I want to stay home. She’s been hoping we’d reached the end of this saga and is afraid of a further, worse chapter ahead. But in truth, I feel fine. Fundamentally better. And this is indeed the end. Afterwards, I eat my meals and I sleep at night. There are wobbles now and then, and for many years eating out in a restaurant will cause me quite intense anxiety, but the stomach aches go away.

I look back now and think that I must have been holding so much tension inside me, must have been so clenched, not just with fear and worry, but with fear of, and worry about, the fear and worry. The knottiness of that sentence reflects the knots in my gut. And now that I look back, I realise that the extremely obvious reason for so much anxiety must have been my impending O level exams. How did I not see this at the time? I was an expert in dissimulation, so I can understand to some extent why no one else saw it. But how could I have been so blind?

Something uncontrollable, something inconsolable. Over the years I have puzzled a great deal about the origins of my anxiety, and I’m inclined to trace them back to these teenage years when I was dimly becoming aware that there were differences between who I was, who I wanted to be and who I needed to be. How elastic was I, internally? I wanted to be without limits, to do all the things to please all the people. At some level I knew this was impossible, but I couldn’t accept the impossibility. That conflict had its own emotional runoff, and it was toxic. I had some confidence in my ability to pass exams; my cleverness was the only defining characteristic I actually liked. But what if I failed those exams like I failed the eleven plus? Who would I be then? And beneath all of this, down in the toxic waste, I was angry that I should be pushed into a corner, turned into an exam sitting machine and valuing myself only for this. It would take me years to unearth all these different layers of emotional response.

******

I am 17 and life is good; I have a boyfriend and a suntan.

Every day that there has been the least patch of clear blue sky, I have dragged the sunlounger out onto the patio, a rectangle of orangey floral fabric attached to a metal frame by a series of curly spiral springs. The more I use it, the more springs fly off, and my bottom now hangs dangerously close to the paving stones. The doors are open into the house and I listen to the Radio 1 roadshow while devouring books. I read my mother’s books (The Shell Seekers, Judith Krantz’s Scruples), I read my father’s books (the Lovejoy series, Inspector Morse), I read Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, The Chymical Wedding by Lyndsay Clarke, Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. I read Susan Howatch’s chunksters and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. I am a good girl and use sunscreen religiously, wafting around the toasty smell of Ambre Solaire factor 2, which probably has the same effect as basting myself in margarine.

As for the boyfriend, this happened a couple of months ago; the thrilling culmination of weeks of wondering and yearning and hoping. When I came in from school I forced myself to tell my mother, who was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. She wasn’t happy about it, but she was wise enough to realise there wasn’t much she could do. The potatoes bore the brunt and they were sensibly meek and submissive in her hands. We stood in her loud silence and watched the vegetable peeler skimming with fierce intent over their surfaces, unspooling skin.

This is my first boyfriend, although there have been a lot of unsuitable crushes and some distinctly unsuitable suitors. My first crush was the male half of the UK’s Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1982. By chance I came across a photo of Bardot quite recently and showed it to Mr Litlove, who sighed and shook his head. ‘Oh Litlove, how could you?’ This strikes me as a bit rich, given my taste has always been for slightly pretty men who give off an air of vulnerability, something Mr Litlove has ruthlessly exploited for 30 years. The unsuitable suitors came in a cluster. One of my teachers asked me to help out with wardrobe for the National Youth Theatre, and this broadened my circle of acquaintances significantly. A much older stagehand rang me up to propose, while a sweet 12-year-old told me he’d been thinking about me while looking at his watch and a small heart of condensation had formed on its face. He had two friends with him, eager puppies who backed him up enthusiastically. We saw it! It really happened! A heart! They went to an all-boys’ school and so I didn’t take this personally.

My boyfriend is someone who has been in my class at school all these years. He first impressed me in a needlework lesson, when we were introduced to a sewing machine. Given lined paper to follow and a machine with no thread, most of us produced drunken swirls of perforations, our needles veering wildly off course. Only T beside me produced orderly rows of empty stitches, neatly aligned. When I asked him how he’d managed it, he shrugged and said he’d sewn so many sails on his mother’s machine he’d had a lot of practice. Ah yes, sailing. His father had been in the Navy and T was headed there too, had it all mapped out even back then and never deviated from the plan. I liked that about him. He seemed self-contained, directed, clean-cut. I liked the brilliance of his dark eyes and the way he seemed to know what to do with his hands, didn’t leave them dangling by his sides like the other boys. But as we grew up he moved in different social circles to me, hanging out with the cool kids a parallel universe away. At 16, one of my friends extracted the information that yes, maybe I liked him better than the other boys in our class. Oh, fool that I was to trust her. I watched helplessly as she wove her way through the ranks of seating to the far side of the room where T sat, and told him. They both turned and looked at me. His eyes were very bright and he made the tiniest inclination of his head, a small nod of acquiescence like the polite greeting from a leader of a distant principality. Naturally a year passed before I ever dared catch his eye again.

T’s parents are rather lovely to me, very kind, even when I prove quite hopeless at steering a boat by its tiller. They also go out to the pub most nights, leaving us the house (and T’s younger brother, who knows his place and hides in his room. T drags him out the first time I go over, literally drags him with his hands under his armpits, says his name and then throws him back in his room again). I have changed my mind about pubs, now I realise how useful they can be. My own parents never leave the house in the evenings and are horrified, and inclined to be offended, when I suggest they might. Still, one evening returning from T’s, my mother tells me about a television program they’ve been watching. It follows the life of a Cambridge college, and the program they’ve just seen was all about interview season. My mother exclaims that one girl had six A’s at O level and they thought she was marvellous! Cambridge is madness. No one in my family has even been to university; the women before me were dressmakers and piano teachers, housewives and mothers. Cambridge seems as far beyond me as T was…. Which gives me pause for thought. I’m in an unusually expansive time, a uniquely expansive time, it will turn out, one that later in life I will spend decades trying and failing to repeat.

I look up the Cambridge courses. If I take modern languages, I could read a lot of books.

And what books! The Existentialists thrill me to the very core. I am dazzled by Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. These books are like drinking rarified air; they are based on ideas, on philosophies. I seem to be making a habit of falling in love, and this time it is with literature. I am sent a date for an interview and my mother is determined that whatever happens, I will not be open to the least criticism as far as my appearance goes. For her, clothes are armour, and this much she can give me. I am in my years of monochrome dressing; black, white and pale grey are acceptable, and I tend to favour straight, mannish lines. We buy me a suit with a white blouse underneath that has a small gold tie at the neck. My mother drives me to the interview, bursting with pride, and once I emerge, a little shell shocked, she drives me to T’s house, the first and last time she will ever do so, to show them, I think, what they are really dealing with. She doesn’t know that things are not so good between T and I. Every time I annoy him, he requires a few days’ cooling off period, and these coolings off are beginning to merge together into a long ice age. Trying to conduct a relationship in the white heat of sixth form gossip is proving more than our flawed communication skills can manage.

Anyway, I get a conditional offer and the work really begins. Cambridge requires me to sit its own special three-hour long exam paper in both French and German. I’m sent a copy for practice and take it to my German teacher, who boggles at it and tells me that it would be impossible to attempt such questions without having spent several years living in the country. This is not great news but frankly right now, I am punching so far above my intellectual weight that what does it really matter? I am flying, flying, with the great design of my life unfurling far below me. I am riding this unexpected thermal of confidence because I don’t know yet all the myriad ways that life can disappoint you and let you down. I haven’t learned yet that being good does not keep you safe or that virtue is not its own reward. I am drunk on my belief in discipline and hard work to get me out of here, here being a perfectly pleasant middle class enclave, and into the dazzling unknown.

At this point I commit the most serious transgression of my school career. A large bunch of us bunk off school for a day to go to a Bon Jovi concert in Hammersmith. Why we can’t catch the train after school I have no idea now, but we figured that if there were enough of us, the teachers couldn’t punish us quite so severely. So we spend the day shopping in London before taking the tube south of the river. I am wearing black trousers with pleats at the waistband, a white shirt and a black V-necked jumper. The first person I see when we arrive at the venue is a woman in a plunging lace top and leopard print leggings – and she turns out to be quite conservatively dressed. The feeling of being out of place spoils the evening for me, and T and I have a serious falling out. We end up sad and stony-faced, trying to avoid each other while being crushed together on the tube back to the station. The teachers impose a half-hearted punishment but I don’t care about that. I am not a rebel, that much is confirmed, because the experience simply wasn’t worth it. I’d have had a better time if I’d stayed at home reading.

T and I sit our exams in a state of estrangement. It’s not a surprise when, at a party some time afterwards, we end up in my (parent’s) car, breaking up. Years later, when my son breaks up with his first love, he is beyond devastated and I watch him with no idea how to help. I was sad about it, yes, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I am far more upset when my results come out and although the A level grades are fine, I’ve not met my requirements in the Cambridge papers. That day is awful. My mother, determined to celebrate the A levels, sends me a beautiful bunch of apricot roses. The delivery guy makes me pose for a photo with them, some company initiative probably intended to make happy people buy photographic portraits of their special moment. His face, when he looks at the screen at the back of his camera, is a picture of dismay.

But the following day a hefty A4 envelope arrives for me, full of information about my college. I have been lucky. One of my soon-to-be tutors set the paper and marked it, and miraculously, he has seen enough in my work to allow me to take up my place. This is the moment when I step forward onto the edge of the springboard. I stand there as it quivers beneath my feet and steady myself for the plunge. Looking back, I realise that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. At 18, ignorance is necessary insulation or you’d never do anything. You’d always stay in the backseat of the car with a puzzle book. But in years to come, when I would read many stories of womens’ lives, it would disconcert me every time that a happy ending for a woman was a romantic one. Was this a lack of imagination or a kind of mass cultural censor? What if the woman didn’t really want the man? What if what she really wanted was the work?

Adolescence taught me that I wanted different things from other people, and that was okay. It felt like a strong position. I believed I’d never feel shamed or coerced into doing things that felt wrong to me. In this calculation I entirely disregarded the indivisible remainder carried over from my childhood: the need to people-please. I thought it had been swallowed up into my new autonomy, never realising it had simply moved up a grade into greater abstraction. The university was about to become my tiger mother, and the need for success would quietly become both the best and worst aspect of my life.

O My America! by Sara Wheeler

Posted by litlove

Finally! A book that goes directly onto my best of the year list. I bought this when it was published back in 2013 because I’d become interested in a Victorian traveller called Isabella Bird. She was a Scottish spinster who suffered debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome when at home, but underwent miraculous recoveries when she was in life-threatening off-the-map situations. She’d written a book about travelling through the Rockies on horseback – riding ten hours a day often up to her shoulders in snow – having taken for companion and travel guide a grizzled, disreputable, one-eyed raconteur of tall tales called Rocky Mountain Jim (the eye was lost in a bear fight). They fell for each other in a sweet, too-late-in-life, probably respectful way, with Isabella declaring that any woman might fall in love with him, but you’d have to be nuts to marry him. In any case, it was adventure that had stolen her heart. I just loved Isabella and when I found out this book had a chapter about her, I snapped it up, little knowing that her life offered a representative taste of what was in store for me, and that I would emerge from it six extraordinary women the richer.

Well, seven, if we include the author, Sara Wheeler, and I think we should. Wheeler was a successful travel writer approaching 50 and in search of a good topic for a new book, when, much as I had come across Isabella Bird, she came across Fanny Trollope who ‘captured my imagination – and not just because the author’s name was an event in itself’. Fanny (Anthony Trollope’s mother) had written a smash hit book Domestic Manners of the Americans, off the back of a trip she had taken to Ohio, that gave a clear-eyed portrait ‘of the Republic halfway through its journey from Independence to Civil War.’ ‘I warmed to the personality that leaped off the page, and to the author’s blend of topographical description, social commentary and waspish humour,’ Wheeler writes. ‘Fanny was living proof that there is life after fertility’. Entranced, Wheeler began collecting astonishing women who spanned the inner 19th century and who had travelled from one end of America to the other in search of what she calls a ‘second act’. America was seen by the jaded eyes of Old Europeans as the great promised land of reinvention:

‘Coleridge and Southey planned paradise on the banks of the Susquehanna River and Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover discussed founding a farm in some western territory of the US, released from the bounds of class, religion and frowsty institutions such as monarchy, marriage and money. This post-revolutionary generation dreamed of turning ideals into a new way of life, and where better than in the shining new republic itself?’

And yet, the reality of America was beyond anything they could have imagined, mostly because these idyllic fantasies lived in the heads of people whose spirit of courage far outreached their common sense. ‘Their prototype Edens,’ Wheeler writes, ‘were founded on noble, politically sound principles almost always hijacked by dubious theorising and crackpottery.’ Louisa May Alcott’s father, for instance, founded a utopian farm in Massachussetts, that ‘extended the remit of vegetarianism by allowing the consumption of “aspiring” vegetables such as tomatoes and banishing “downwards” specimens like carrots. Alcott believed it was wrong to “oppress” oxen by making them plough, a policy which made farming tricky.’ And if the philosophy wasn’t always easy to subscribe to, the sheer physical hardships on the frontier demanded an outstanding constitution. When Fanny Trollope finally reached Nashoba (near Memphis), the experiment in communal living that had sounded like a dream destination to her impoverished mind in cold, ugly England, the actual place was the stuff of nightmares:

‘Buildings were in stages of disintegration, sanitation was non-existent and everyone was ill. In addition, the site was malarial and there was hardly any food. The slaves wanted to go back to proper slavery.’

One of my favourite chapters in the book concerns the God-fearing Yorkshire housewife, Rebecca Burlend, who ‘left England with a husband, five children and one hundred pounds in cash, for a lonely bit of sod in western Illinois.’ After an arduous journey, the family found themselves quite literally in the middle of an outstandingly beautiful nowhere. ‘The first settlers to west-central Illinois found heavily forested land with prairie running like fingers between the creeks, its surface lush with waist-high grasses. In 1831, only tiny patches had been cleared.’ Conditions were so basic that barter was the main form of trade, and for the first two years the family lived on corn paste and what wildlife they could kill (once mistaking a buzzard for a turkey), managing to farm their fields with nothing other than their bare hands. When John fell ill with an infected leg wound, Rebecca had to bring in the harvest all by herself, with an unweaned baby at home. The hardship they endured was epic, but they did make it in the end, accumulating more than 360 acres in fifteen years and dying in their eighties. Such stoicism! Such longevity! The resilience of our ancestors is mindblowing. But Wheeler points out that the previous settlers on this same land were not so lucky:

‘During the Burlends’ first twelve months, following the Black Hawk War, government militia drove the Sauk and Foxes from Illinois and the Winnebago ceded all their territory south-east of the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. In 1833, at a grand council of chiefs in Chicago, the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa also relinquished their holdings […] That secular saint Lincoln hanged thirty-nine Sioux who had led a violent revolt against federal regulations that starved their nation.’

What I think is so very good about this book is the way Wheeler manages to show the founding of America as a magnificent tribute to man’s strength, courage and survival skills, as well as a tragedy of rapacious, inconsiderate greed. One chapter follows the extraordinary fortunes of Fanny Kemble, a former star of the London stage, who came to tour America with her theatrical family and married into a plantation family in southern Georgia. Fanny was a talented, strong, if temperamental, woman, and her husband, Pierce Butler, was a patriarchal bully, unaccustomed to having his whims and privileges challenged. Fanny hated slavery, and was beyond horrified by the way the slaves were treated. This wouldn’t have been hard to do – the much vaunted ‘hospital’ for slaves on the plantation was an unmonitored room ‘without sheets, medicines, beds or food’ where sick folk were left to die. Her husband’s grandfather was one of the Founding Fathers ‘who devised the language of the Constitution. “For census purposes,” read a section Butler drafted, “a slave is one fifth of a person.”‘ Fanny eventually divorced her husband and returned to England to fight slavery there – it was necessary, given that for three years, Britain supplied ships and ordinance to the Confederacy. We’ve none of us got anything to be proud about during this era in history.

Another chapter concerns Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubbock, whose lawyer husband suffered a ‘catastrophic mental collapse’ leaving her with three sons to raise on the profits of her writing. Publishers only accepted three-volume novels at that time, in order to appease the circulating libraries (which must have been the supermarkets of their day) and so Catherine wrote ten of them in the next thirteen years, ‘an output that makes Anthony Trollope look like a part-timer’, Wheeler notes. When the sons grew up and went to America, Catherine followed them all the way to California. Here, the gold rush had passed through, creating four plutocrats who had all initially been Sacramento storekeepers, supplying the forty-niners – Stanford, Collis Huntingdon, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Much of future America was quite literally put in their hands:

‘Huntingdon … went on to control the Southern Pacific and almost the entire transport industry of the West. The desire to open up the country was so intense that Washington lawmakers handed swathes of public land the size of small European countries to railway barons. Contracts were rigged, funds siphoned, specifications fiddled, stock manipulated’.

The land was being urbanised and modernised and colonised so fast and so intensely, that a desire to preserve some of the breathtaking landscape was folded into the ‘narrative’ of America as a ‘source of strength and healing.’

‘Post-railroad Americans integrated grand wonders and the monumentalism of natural spaces into their national vision, and in 1872 the federal government formalised the notion when President Grant signed Yellowstone on to the statute books as the first national park. […] Nobody was interested in the fact that Shoshone sheep eaters had been living off Yellowstone for centuries, or that other Indians had been using the ecosystems of the West for generations in all kinds of different ways. The indigenous peoples’ relationship with the landscape was spiritual as well as practical. They did not tame or harness it: they were part of it.’

This is only a taste of the riches in this book. It’s a clever, immersive, eye-opening account of how the West was won through the perspectives of six brave women (seven including Wheeler). The writing is so good, so atmospheric and evocative, that I felt I’d travelled with them, encountering a new land of such vastness, such ludicrous oodles of resources, that it must have seemed intoxicating; an invitation to excess. All these women went to America because they could not stay at home – mostly for financial reasons, occasionally for the need to conquer their own weaknesses. They were highly motivated to succeed, and yet the crazy conditions that met them – the opulence of the landscape, the hardship of the life, the unimaginable risks and rewards – put them into a state of hardscrabble survival. It’s possible to understand the manic greed of the settlers. Who, under such circumstances, would be capable of seeing the people they were displacing? In such a wild, sink or swim life, who could pay compassionate heed to the ones being pushed under? Well, not Wheeler’s midlife travellers, who had no power, only their own personal strength and agency. These are not stories of reckless or selfish women – Wheeler’s leading ladies are immensely sympathetic, and often ahead of their time in siding with the angels. There are, however, also plenty of wealthy white male ‘philanthropists’ and lawmakers populating these pages who made ruthless and cold-blooded calculations. America sings a complicated song in its cradle – one of hope and ingenuity and hard, hard work, but also one of wilful blindness, of crackpottery, to borrow Wheeler’s term, and of idealism that transforms in its furthest reaches into oppression. It’s a fascinating account. So good, in fact, that I immediately ordered Wheeler’s next book about travelling across Russia, following the paths of famous writers, Mud and Stars.