I picked up my pile of books for shelving. The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. I looked up at the enormous stained-glass window and the beautiful oak staircase. I loved that building.
The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior – benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’
‘Then what happens?’ asked the junior, rather overawed.
‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course – as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.’
The junior was silent. I said, ‘Who is Jung?’
‘That is not for now,’ said the librarian. ‘And in any case not English Literature A–Z. You would have to go to Psychoanalysis – over there, by Psychology and Religion.’
I looked. The only people who ever went near Psychology and Religion were a man with a ponytail who wore a T-shirt, very dirty, that said EGO on one side and ID on the other, and a pair of women who pretended to be witches and were researching Wicca In Our Time. All three were over there, passing notes to one another as they weren't allowed to speak. Jung could wait.
‘Who was Gertrude Stein?’
‘A modernist. She wrote without regard to meaning.’
‘Is that why she is under Humour, like Spike Milligan?’
‘Within the Dewey decimal system there is a certain amount of discretion. That is another of its strengths. It saves us from confusion but it allows us freedom of thought. My predecessor will have felt that Gertrude Stein was too modern a modernist for English Literature A–Z, and in any case, although she wrote in English, or approximately so, she was an American and she lived in Paris. She is now dead.’
I took The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas back to the Mini and I drove the Mini round to Mrs Ratlow's. I didn't go in for a while. I could hear her shouting at the boys.
I looked through the kitchen window of the neat little house – not a terrace like Water Street, but almost a cottage and backing onto fields. The huge hulking boys were eating their supper and Mrs Ratlow was ironing and reading Shakespeare from a music stand set up by the ironing board. She had taken off her polyester jacket and was in a Bri-Nylon blouse with short sleeves. Her arms were fat and dimpled. Her chest was wrinkled and slack and fleshy and red. She was everything Nabokov loathed.
Her eyes were bright reading Shakespeare, and every time she finished ironing one of the huge hulking shirts, she stopped, turned the page, hung the shirt, and got another from the pile.
She was wearing fluffy slippers, pink on the black-and-white lino.
She was giving me a chance. Winter was coming and it was cold sleeping in the Mini, and the condensation from a night's breathing meant that I woke up with drops of water all over me, like a leaf in the morning.
I had no idea whether any of what I was doing was the right thing to do. I talked to myself all the time, out loud, debating with myself my situation. I was lucky in one way because our church had always emphasised how important it is to concentrate on good things – blessings – not just bad things. And that is what I did at night when I curled up to sleep in my sleeping bag. There were very good things; there was Janey and there were my books. Leaving home meant that I could keep both without fear.
I got out my key, then I rang the bell out of politeness. One of the huge hulks opened the door. Mrs Ratlow came out. ‘Help her with her things, you two, do I have to do it all?’
I had a tiny room that looked over the back fields. I put my books in piles and folded my clothes; three pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four jumpers, four shirts and a week's supply of socks and knickers. And a duffel coat.
‘Is that it?
‘There's a tin-opener and some crockery and a camping stove, and a towel and a sleeping bag but they can stay in the car.’
‘You'll need a hot-water bottle.’
‘I've got one, and a flashlight and shampoo.’
‘All right then. Get some jam and bread and go to bed.’
She watched me as I got out Gertrude Stein.
‘S,’ she said.
Gertrude and Alice are living in Paris. They are helping the Red Cross during the war. They are driving along in a two-seater Ford shipped from the States. Gertrude likes driving but she refuses to reverse. She will only go forward because she says that the whole point of the twentieth century is progress.
The other thing that Gertrude won't do is read the map. Alice Toklas reads the map and Gertrude sometimes takes notice and sometimes not.
It is going dark. There are bombs exploding. Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: ‘THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.’
Gertrude drives on. She says, ‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’
10
This Is The Road
I
DECIDED TO APPLY TO read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do. I knew no one who had been to university and although clever girls were encouraged to go to teacher training college, or to take their accountancy exams, Oxford and Cambridge were not on the list of things to do before you die.
The Equal Pay Act had become law in Britain in 1970, but no woman I knew got anything like equal pay – or believed that she should.
In the industrial north of England traditional kinds of blue-collar employment were strong – factory work, manufacture, mining, and men held the economic power.
The women held together the family and the community, but the invisibility of women's contribution, not measured or paid for, or socially rewarded, meant that my world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men. My mother did it to my father. She held him in contempt (and that wasn't fair), but she called him the head of the household (and that wasn't true). That marital/domestic pattern was repeated everywhere I looked.
Few women I knew had professional or managerial jobs and those who did were unmarried. Most of my female teachers at school were unmarried. Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said – and I will never forget it: ‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’
It is quite a quote, and should have made her a feminist, but she had no time for feminism as a movement. She adored men, even though the lack of one rendered her invisible in her own eyes – the saddest place in the township of invisible places a woman can occupy. Germaine Greer had published The Female Eunuch in 1970 but none of us had read it.
We were not sophisticated. We were northerners. We didn't live in a big city like Manchester, and feminism seemed not to have reached us.
‘Battleaxe’ has always been a word used both for and against the strong northern working-class woman. That cleaver image split our identity too. Northern women were tough, and reckoned that way in the home and in popular comedy – all the seaside postcards were drawings of weedy little men and dominating women – and in the drunken working men's clubs, stage acts like Les Dawson dressed up in headscarves and aprons, parodying, but also celebrating, the formidable women the men loved, feared, and were dependent upon. Yet those women who were supposed to stand at the door waiting to whack their men with a rolling pin had no economic clout. And when they had, they hid it.
The women I knew who ran their own small businesses, like the market stall I worked on, or the fish and chip shop that supplied me with many of my meal
s, pretended it was their husband's enterprise, and that they just worked there.
When we had our one and only sex education lesson at school it was not about sex at all, but sexual economics. We should pay our own way, because that was the modern thing to do, but we should give the boy the money beforehand, so that he could be seen to pay. We were only talking bus fares and cinema tickets, but later, when we managed the household budget, we should make sure he knew that everything was his. Male pride, I think the teacher called it. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard; a flat earth theory of social relations.
The only women who were contentedly living the life they wanted without pretending socially were the pair who ran the sweet shop, but they had to pretend sexually, and weren't able to be openly gay. People laughed at them, and one wore a balaclava.
I was a woman. I was a working-class woman. I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule. Those three things formed the basis of my politics, not the unions, or class war as understood by the male Left.
The Left has taken a long time to fully include women as independent and as equals – and no longer to enfold women's sexuality into a response to male desire. I felt uncomfortable and sidelined by what I knew of left-wing politics. And I wasn't looking to improve the conditions of my life. I wanted to change my life out of all recognition.
*
In the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher appeared, talking about a new culture of risk and reward – one where you could achieve, one where you could be anything you wanted to be, if you would only work hard enough and be prepared to abandon the safety nets of tradition.
I had already left home. I was already working evenings and weekends to get through school. I had no safety net.
Thatcher seemed to me to have better answers than the middle-class men who spoke for the Labour Party, and the working-class men who campaigned for a ‘family’ wage, and wanted their women at home.
I had no respect for family life. I had no home. I had rage and courage. I was smart. I was emotionally disconnected. I didn't understand gender politics. I was the ideal prototype for the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.
I sat my Oxford entrance exam, coached by Mrs Ratlow, got an interview and bought a coach ticket to Oxford.
I had applied to St Catherine's because it had a new modern feel, because it was a mixed college, and because it had been formed out of the St Catherine's Society – a kind of sad satellite of the established Oxford colleges, founded for students too poor to attend Oxford proper.
But now it was Oxford proper. And maybe I could go there.
I got off the bus in Oxford and asked my way to St Catherine's. I felt like Jude the Obscure in Thomas Hardy's novel, and I was determined not to hang myself.
I had no idea that there could be such a beautiful city, or places like the colleges, with quadrangles and lawns, and that sense of energetic quiet that I still find so seductive.
I had been given overnight accommodation, and meals were provided in college, but I was too intimidated by the confidence of the other candidates to go in and eat with them.
I was unable to speak clearly during my interviews because for the first time in my life I felt that I looked wrong and sounded wrong. Everybody else seemed relaxed, though I am sure that was not true. They certainly had better clothes and different accents. I knew I was not being myself, but I didn't know how to be myself there. I hid the self that I was and had no persona to put in its place. A few weeks later I heard that I had not been given a place.
I was in despair. Mrs Ratlow said we must look at other options; to me, there were no other options. I was not interested in options; I was interested in Oxford.
So I came up with a plan.
I had passed my driving test at last, sold the Mini I didn't really own, and bought a road-legal Hillman Imp that cost me £40. The doors didn't work, but it had a good engine. As long you were prepared to wriggle in through the glass flap at the back, you could go quite a long way.
Janey said she would come with me, so we took my tent and set off to Oxford, travelling at 50 mph, the Imp's maximum speed, with frequent stops to add petrol, oil, water and brake fluid. We had two eggs with us in case the radiator leaked. In those days you could easily repair a radiator by dropping a broken egg into it, just as a fan belt could be replaced with a nylon stocking, and a snapped clutch cable with two bolts and a can of Tizer (holes in either end of can, bolts tied either end of snapped cable, bolts plus cable dropped into each end of can – you will find that with a bit of clunking, you can now depress the clutch).
Janey's family had a camp-site book and we looked up cheap camping at a golf club outside Oxford.
It took us about nine hours to get there but we had our bacon and beans and we were happy.
The next day I had an appointment to see the senior tutor and one of the English fellows – the other, fortunately for me, was away.
I had the usual problem of not being able to speak at all and then babbling like . . . Under stress I am a cross between Billy Budd and the Donkey in Shrek.
I spread my hands in despair and saw that the palms were covered in oil. The Imp had a leak.
So there was nothing for it but to explain at Shrek-speed about the Hillman Imp, and the tent, and the market stall where I worked, and a little bit about the Apocalypse and Mrs Winterson, and English Literature in Prose A – Z . . .
They already had a letter from Mrs Ratlow open on the desk. I don't know what she said, but Mrs Oliphant was mentioned.
‘I want to be a better writer than her.’
‘That shouldn't be too hard – though she did write a very good ghost story called –’
‘The Open Door. I've read that. It's scary’
For some reason Mrs Oliphant was on my side.
The senior tutor explained that St Catherine's was a progressive college, only founded in 1962, committed to bringing in pupils from state schools, and one of the few mixed colleges.
‘Benazir Bhutto is here. Margaret Thatcher studied Chemistry at Somerville, you know.’
I didn't know and I didn't know who Benazir Bhutto was either.
‘Would you like there to be a woman prime minister?’
Yes . . . In Accrington women couldn't be anything except wives or teachers or hairdressers or secretaries or do shop work. ‘Well, they can be librarians, and I thought of doing that, but I want to write my own books.’
‘What kind of books?’
‘I don't know. I write all the time.’
‘Most young people do.’
‘Not in Accrington they don't.’
There was a pause. Then the English fellow asked me if I thought that women could be great writers. I was baffled by the question. It had never occurred to me.
‘It's true they mostly come at the beginning of the alphabet – Austen, Brontës, Eliot . . .’
‘We study those writers of course. Virginia Woolf is not on the syllabus though you will find her interesting – but compared to James Joyce . . .’
It was a reasonable introduction to the prejudices and pleasures of an Oxford degree course.
I left St Catherine's and walked down Holywell Street to Blackwell's bookshop. I had never seen a shop with five floors of books. I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to be able to write their share, and why were there still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?
I was so excited, so hopeful, and I was troubled too, by what had been said to me. As a woman would I be an onlooker and not a contributor? Could I study what I could never hope to achieve? Achieve it or not, I had to try.
And later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that
was not arrogance; that was politics.
Whatever happened that day worked out for me; I was given a place, deferred for a year.
And that took me straight to Margaret Thatcher and the 1979 election. Thatcher had the vigour and the arguments and she knew the price of a loaf of bread. She was a woman – and that made me feel that I too could succeed. If a grocer's daughter could be prime minister, then a girl like me could write a book that would be on the shelves of English Literature in Prose A–Z.
I voted for her.
It is commonplace now to say that Thatcher changed two political parties: her own, and the left-wing Labour opposition. It is less often remembered that Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK broke forever the post-war consensus – and that consensus had lasted for over thirty years.
Spin back to 1945, and whether you were on the Left or the Right in Britain or Western Europe, rebuilding societies after the war could not happen using the outdated and discredited neo-liberal economics of the free market – unregulated labour, unstable prices, no provision for the sick or the old or the unemployed. We were going to need housing, plenty of jobs, a welfare state, nationalisation of utilities and transport.
It was a real advance in human consciousness towards collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something not only to our flag or to our country, to our children or our families, but to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture.
That advance in consciousness did not come out of Victorian values or philanthropy, nor did it emerge from right-wing politics; it came out of the practical lessons of the war, and – and this matters – the superior arguments of socialism.
Britain's economic slow-down in the 1970s, our IMF bail-out, rocketing oil prices, Nixon's decision to float the dollar, unruly union disputes, and a kind of existential doubt on the Left, allowed the Reagan/ Thatcher 1980s Right to skittle away annoying arguments about a fair and equal society. We were going to follow Milton Friedman and his pals at the Chicago School of Economics back to the old free market laissez-faire, and dress it up as a new salvation.