To Throw Away Unopened Read online

  It was her own fault. Mum’s attitude to child-rearing made me into the kind of girl who’d do something reckless like form a band with a boy called Sid Vicious when I couldn’t play guitar or sing and girls didn’t do that sort of thing. She raised me to be a punk. By the time I joined my next band, the Slits, she’d rallied to the idea and came to every show we played in London, often bringing a friend from work. Most mothers would have been embarrassed to be seen with me in those days, and certainly wouldn’t have shown me off proudly to their colleagues at Camden Council, where she was a housing estate manager. Mum was very good at being an estate manager. She was good at everything she did. I had complete faith in her, whatever she tried to do. Any job she went for, I took for granted she’d get. She was smart and determined, and I was ashamed that for a very long time I was unfocused and unmotivated, easily bored and only interested in music, art and romance. None of these pursuits were thought acceptable by schools or society in the early 1970s. At my North London comprehensive I was considered a dropout and a time-waster.

  Mum cried when I left full-time education to form a band. That was only the second time I’d ever seen her cry (the other time was during the first few months I turned vegetarian, when we sat down to yet another plate of lentils). She didn’t reprimand me though. All she said was, ‘Do you have to get a guitar? It’s the one thing Pascale has to herself.’ My sister was learning to play flamenco guitar, but as I didn’t want to play guitar, I wanted to be in a band – a totally different thing – I ignored Mum’s objection. Pascale was fine about it, as she was when I copied her Maria Schneider Last Tango in Paris perm. She was very generous about things like that.

  I set myself up for life with that reckless decision, that £200 and that electric guitar.

  Frieda the Fierce

  I’ve always been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

  Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in Olivia Laing, ‘The wild beauty of Georgia O’Keeffe’, Guardian, 1 July 2016

  Mum didn’t do it on her own, it took three generations to make me a punk. Before me there was Mum, and before Mum there was her mother, my grandmother, Frieda Basler. For six years, when I was between the ages of four and ten, we lived downstairs in Frieda’s house in North London, but I don’t remember much about her except seeing her false teeth in a glass by her bed, the smell of mothballs, and noticing that after she’d washed up her plate, fork and cup there was still food stuck on them (that happens to me now – eyesight).

  Mum talked a lot about Frieda over the years, which is how I formed an impression of her personality. She was born in Switzerland in 1891, when the Swiss industrial revolution was in full flow – until 1848 Switzerland was one of the poorest countries in Europe – and her parents were farmers. Before anyone was hired to work at their farm, Frieda’s mother cooked them lunch and watched how they ate. If they ate fast, they got the job. ‘A fast eater is a fast worker,’ she used to say. I’d like to propose that a quick shitter is also a quick worker, although neither a quick shitter nor a quick eater will complete a task as neatly and thoroughly as a slow and methodical shitter or eater.

  After my cancer treatment ended I kept going back to the hospital for tests because I had constant diarrhoea and thought I might have bowel cancer – you can become a hypochondriac after surviving cancer. During the investigations a nurse said she was going to teach me how to evacuate my bowels correctly. First she tricked me by asking me to show her how I would push out a poo. I felt embarrassed but reminded myself I’d been a punk, screwed my face up, bore down and pushed my arse into the blue plastic chair with as much effort as possible, hoping I wouldn’t fart. ‘Aha!’ said the nurse. ‘That’s how everyone thinks they should do it but it’s completely wrong and is very bad for your insides.’ She told me that to shit properly you have to take a deep breath and gently expand your ribcage and your waist, making sure your breath goes to the sides of your body, not to the front – using the same muscles opera and bel canto singers use when they sing – and then the poo slides out without straining your insides. This is difficult for me to do because I’m in and out of the bathroom as fast as possible, not patient with the process at all. I can’t understand why anyone would want to sit on the bog reading. I feel claustrophobic in small rooms, and anyway it’s not good for your sphincter muscles to hang them over a bowl all opened up for ages. I use the method the nurse taught me whenever I remember, and it works every time. Forcing something, whether it’s a shit, a song or a relationship, never gets the best results. Force is aggressive, whereas bravery and determination, traits my grandmother had in abundance, are much more positive attributes.

  When she was sixteen, Frieda and her best friend planned to leave Switzerland and travel to England to start a new life – Switzerland had a very advanced train network compared to the rest of Europe – but the night before they were due to leave her friend got scared and dropped out. Instead of abandoning the idea, Frieda went to England alone. This was around 1908, Edwardian times. She would have been wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved blouse, a floor-length skirt over petticoats, a wide-brimmed hat and boots with lots of fiddly little buttons up the side, and carrying a bag containing all her possessions (probably not many). She was unable to speak English and, according to Mum, had two francs in her pocket. Frieda was a risk-taker.

  Frieda made a good life for herself in England and married Charles van Baush, a Dutch South African who had fled his home country as a young man because he hated the politics. They saved up, bought a house and had five children – my mother, Kathleen, was the fourth. When her younger brother, Edward, was born, Kathleen stamped her foot and cried out, ‘You’ve all dropped me like a hot cake!’ Frieda sewed for extra money, knitting clothes for shops in the West End. She didn’t use all the allotted wool though. She kept some back to make clothes for her children, stretching out and ironing the garments she sold to her clients to hide that they were undersized. Frieda was a hustler.

  Charles voted Labour and Frieda voted Conservative – women were supposed to vote the same as their husbands in those days so she was going against the norm. Whenever a local or general election came round Frieda would say to Charles, ‘If we both vote, we’ll only cancel each other’s votes out, so let’s not bother.’ Charles agreed and didn’t vote, but Frieda nipped down to the polling station and voted when he was at work. She used to laugh about this trick with Mum. Frieda was a con merchant.

  Frieda wasn’t a bad person though. She lived through two world wars and joined the British Red Cross during the Second World War to drive ambulances. It couldn’t have been easy for her, living in England during the war with her Swiss German accent. Her eldest son, Charlie, was a flying officer on Lancaster bombers. He was killed six months before the end of the war on his twenty-sixth mission. Mum used to think to herself, At least he had a good life – he was thirty, it seemed old then. Mum told me that because Charlie was the highest-ranking airman on the plane, Frieda thought someone from his family should handwrite a letter of condolence to the family of each member of the crew who’d gone down with him. The job fell to Mum but she couldn’t think what to say – she was twenty-one at the time. She fretted all her life that she didn’t do it right. I’ve got the calico pouch that Uncle Charlie’s personal effects were sent home in. It’s the size of an A4 envelope, with Frieda’s name and address written haphazardly on the front in black ink using capital letters. It looks like a child wrote it. He was Frieda’s favourite, but Mum didn’t mind – she loved him too, he was playful and handsome. When she was six Mum asked Charlie if it would hurt if he drove over her finger with his go-cart. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, and told her to put her finger on the ground, which she did. He ran over it, bruised her finger badly and her nail turned black and fell off. Frieda bought Mum a pink sugar mouse as compensation, an unheard-of luxury back then. She made it last for a month by only allowing herself two licks a da
y.

  * Fictional character in Viz comic, a parody of a militant feminist

  8 It was the night of my book launch. We’d hired the venue, the Lexington in King’s Cross, months ahead. There was a lighting rig, a small stage and a bar, and people called all day for spare tickets or to get on the guest list. It was more of a gig than a launch as Anat Ben-David and Bryony Kimmings were performing. As soon as I got there I went over the lighting with the stage manager, then sat at a table and wrote out the guest list. Tessa, bass player from the Slits, was DJing. She’d already set up her records and was checking sound levels with her headphones on. I’d thought about what to wear non-stop for the past three weeks and decided on black jeans, my new Haider Ackermann Cuban-heeled black boots and a Dries van Noten shirt with different-coloured panels and a see-through back, a bit like Vivienne Westwood’s old anarchy shirts. I felt as if I was throwing a party, not nervous, but I hoped everyone would have a good time.

  We Are the Granddaughters of the Witches

  that You Could Not Burn*

  Mum had a bitter streak, but I thought all mothers were like that. Most of my friends’ mothers were disgruntled and used to say things like, ‘I could have been a ballet dancer if I hadn’t had children,’ or ‘I was going to be an artist before I met your father.’ They were full of tales of what they dreamed of doing as children, or were on a path towards before having a family stopped all that. After I’d been through a couple of art schools and bands I realised that most of us fail at what we try to do, especially in the arts, but our mothers didn’t know that. You don’t know how hard it is or how unexceptional you are until you’ve been at it for ten or so years. They assumed they would have succeeded. I’m glad I just about managed to be born into a time that allowed me the advantage of looking back at my failures (and successes) instead of fantasising about what I could have been.

  One of the reasons feminism took such a strong hold in my mind, and in the minds of many girls of my generation, is that we were brought up by repressed and dissatisfied women who had grown into adulthood during the war, learned new skills, tasted independence, and then had to dissolve back into the shadows of their dark-brown homes and watch from behind their ironing boards as the swinging sixties unfolded. In the words of Jacqueline Rose, they were ‘part of a generation whose identity was above all to become mothers and who found themselves, after a devastating war, under the harshest obligation to be happy and fulfilled in that role’.†

  To compensate for the freedom and the opportunities she missed out on, Mum did her best, with very little means, to make sure that my sister and I didn’t suffer the same fate of domestic drudgery and dependence on a man that befell her. Sometimes it’s easier to push someone else to do what you can’t or don’t have the nerve to do yourself. Mum was highly attuned to the subjugation of women and pointed it out to me at every opportunity, on TV, in the streets, in shops, politics and education. Her injustices lodged firmly in my brain and added to my own grievances, made me doubly angry with the world. I burned with both her anger and my anger whenever I confronted prejudice. Perhaps that’s how it is for every woman. The repression your female ancestors suffered accumulates over the generations, resentment building in daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter like hair clogging a washing-machine filter, until along comes a child who is so pumped full of fury that she kicks all obstructions out of the way.

  I became the receptacle for her pain, her fury, her bitterness … I dragged it behind me as an ox drags its plough.

  Violette Leduc, La bâtarde, 1964

  In the 1980s I quit making music and living in squats, tried to stop being an angry young woman and went to film school. I was fed up with feeling cold and hungry all the time. Eventually I became a television director but I couldn’t understand how, at thirty-five and armed with a profession, I still felt like a furious outsider. I tried to rationalise it:

  Must be because I’m thick.

  Or because I don’t have British blood, so I have the wrong temperament.

  Or because I’m burnt-out and battle-worn.

  Because I have a moustache.

  Because I’m the oldest intern … the first female director at the company … in my thirties, don’t have a child, the least educated the most outspoken unprofessional hysterical mad bossy scary manipulative ambitious …

  But even though I look normal nowadays, with conventional clothing and natural-coloured hair, and even though I own a home, have given birth to a child and clocked up a seventeen-year marriage, I still feel like an alien.

  The sensation of being under attack has intensified as I’ve grown older. Even walking down the street is difficult. It always was, but I was younger then, I had energy and enthusiasm and hope. It’s harder for me to put on my psychic armour and sally forth now. There are times when I can’t face walking through the city. The advertisements, all the pictures of thin bodies, painted faces, men looking, judging – not so much me any more, I’m becoming invisible, still attackable though, but my daughter, other young women. The dark. Footsteps. Not making eye contact. Clocking distances, assessing his fitness, his age, his clothes, what shoes am I wearing? Can I run? Means of escape, street lighting, any other pedestrians? Everything registered, recorded, exhausting. I see male dominance everywhere. Some nights I can’t bear one more male face on the TV. I don’t want them in the corner of my living room. Or one more of their books. One more clever painting, one more lazy song.

  For sixty years I’ve been shaped by men’s point of view on every aspect of my life, from history, politics, music and art to my mind and my body – and centuries more male-centric history before that. I’m saturated with their opinions. I can think and see like a straight white man. I can look at a woman and objectify her, see her how a man sees her. I can think like a male criminal. To stay safe, you have to anticipate their thoughts and actions. I can think like a rapist for fuck’s sake.

  You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

  Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, 1993‡

  Some women can block patriarchy out and get on with life, the same way our brains filter out most visual input to our eyes, because if we could see every molecule that’s out there, we’d go insane. I can’t block patriarchy out. I was trained by my mother to notice it, to seek it out and to fight it.

  I can see it, I can hear it, I can feel it, and I’m burning up because of it. Same as all the other ‘witches’. Same as the ones in the Middle Ages.

  Fatherless Girls

  Never trust anyone who says ‘Trust me’.

  Mum

  Of all the domineering, repressive men in the world, in my mother’s eyes my father was the worst. I agreed with her. He was controlling and violent, and for a long time I was angry with her for choosing such a dud, even though I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t. The upside to having no respect for my father, and no contact with him after the age of thirteen, was that I had the freedom to range way beyond the boundaries society set for young women at the time. If he’d been around, I wouldn’t have had the confidence or been allowed to pick up an electric guitar for a start.

  It wasn’t just me; none of the Slits had a father. Both Palmolive and Ari’s fathers lived abroad and weren’t part of their lives, and Tessa’s father died during the early days of the Slits.§ We dressed outrageously, behaved aggressively, and fought every obstacle that came our way with a zeal that would have been impossible at that time in history if we’d had fathers. Fathers we hated or fathers we loved. Especially fathers we loved, we would have wanted to please them. In those days fathers were admired and obeyed. They ruled the home. The man of the house was given the best of everything – food, mother’s attention, choice of TV programme and the comfortable chair (now it’s the children). The Slits were able to run around the streets of London like Dickensian orphans, shouting, stealing, cursing, demanding equality with men and control from the music industry and society because no one we loved or
respected was angry, looking embarrassed or telling us not to.

  Now I come to think of it, our mothers weren’t around much either. Ari and I had liberal, hands-off mothers, Tessa’s mother lived outside London and they weren’t close at the time, and Palmolive’s mother lived in Spain.

  My mother’s attitude towards men freed me. ‘Never rely on a man. Make sure you’re financially independent. Never let a man own you,’ she’d intone. And, ‘Don’t ever give the biggest slice of cake to a man, you take it for yourself!’ was the sermon she dished out every Sunday as she passed around the plate of pink, yellow and brown Mr Kipling French Fancies.

  * Ghada Amer, Sindy in Pink-RFGA, artwork, 2015

  † Jacqueline Rose, ‘Mothers’, London Review of Books, 2014

  ‡ I was led to this quote by the film producer Nadin Hadi

  § The Slits: Paloma Romero/McLardy, aka Palmolive; Ari Forster, aka Ari Up; Tessa Pollitt; and me

  9 I can’t recall everything I did before the doors opened, but I do remember running upstairs to the DJ booth and giving Tessa a signed book for her friend, then running back down to say hello to the people selling books and records. At some point I huddled in a corner with John Robb to work out what we were going to say on stage. The audience started arriving at about seven thirty. I was talking to my old schoolfriend Maura, when Dan, Faber’s publicist, came over and said, ‘Your sister’s trying to call you.’

  I was a bit irritated. ‘What does she want? Is she stuck outside?’

  He shifted his weight, looked me in the eye for a second and then looked away.