To Throw Away Unopened Page 4
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I think it’s about your mother.’
Not Pretty
My daughter isn’t as resentful and rage-filled about the inequities of her life as my mother was from her thirties onwards, and as I was from thirteen onwards. Vida is growing up in a time and culture that gives (white) women more choices in both their work and identity than Mum and I ever had.
I grew up in a society that expected girls to smile and be acquiescent. The message I received was that loud, opinionated girls were ‘not pretty’. I learned to want to be pretty. When I was seven years old – before I wanted to be pretty – I won a prize at school. My teacher asked what gift she should buy me with the money (two shillings and sixpence). ‘A cowboy gun and holster, please,’ I said. I’d seen a shiny silver gun with a brown plastic handle embossed with a sheriff’s star tucked into a black leather holster in the toyshop window. The teacher said I couldn’t have a gun, not because a weapon was an unacceptable gift from a school – no one cared about that in the 1960s – but because I was a girl. My mother went up to the school and persuaded them to present me with the gun in assembly but wrapped in pink paper. The boys were given their guns unwrapped.
British society didn’t offer working-class women many choices in the 1950s and 60s. The way I saw it, I had three: become a secretary, a primary-school teacher or a policewoman. My mother used to be a secretary, I saw female teachers at school, and once a week I watched a police drama on TV called Z Cars that had policewomen in it (even now most of the decent parts for women are in police dramas). TV and school were the only two places, apart from the shops, where I saw women doing something other than being a mother and a housewife. I didn’t want to work in a shop, and after witnessing my mother’s life, to be a mother or a housewife seemed like a death sentence.
British culture was simple and binary back then. There were two choices in most spheres of my life:
The Beatles or the Stones
BBC or ITV
Cadbury or Rowntree’s
Wall’s or Lyons Maid
Peanut butter or Marmite
John Peel or Tony Blackburn
Labour or Conservative
Arsenal or Tottenham
Levi’s or Wrangler.
Everything was black or white, or black and white. I had two friends, two pairs of Levi’s, two T-shirts and two pairs of shoes (Clarks for school, Woolworth’s plimsolls for weekends).
I noticed that as Mum got older she stopped wearing dresses and skirts, and wore trousers instead. Her voice got lower and she didn’t talk to men in a cajoling sing-song tone any more. She also smiled less and a frown appeared between her eyebrows. She became more solitary, less ‘pretty’. I interpreted these signs as her becoming less happy.
In the whole of my childhood, my mother never once suggested that I should aim to be happy. No one discussed happiness at home or at school in those days. We were taught and brought up by people who’d lived through the Second World War, and they were brought up by parents who’d survived two world wars. You don’t go around asking each other ‘Are you happy?’ after a war. ‘Are you surviving?’ is more like it. Because I wasn’t burdened with trying to look and be happy (awful hearing parents ask their children ‘Happy, darling?’ and seeing the child’s attempt to nod convincingly and arrange its little face into a bright expression), there was plenty of space in my mind for me to respond to my mother’s encouragement to lead an interesting life instead.
My neighbour, Magnus, told me recently that his mother eventually became happy when she got dementia and forgot everything that had happened to her. When he asked her if she remembered his name, she said, ‘Sainsbury’s?’ Another friend’s mother found contentment when she started taking anti-depressants. She’d been quite bad-tempered up until then. He said it was a bit weird though, to see her floating around the house smiling all the time, especially after his father died. She just didn’t give a shit.
Euphoria
Although Mum insisted that she was never lonely after her divorce, I didn’t believe her. I was sure I detected an undertow of sadness.
‘Don’t you ever get lonely on your own, Mum?’ I’d ask whenever I visited.
‘No, I love it,’ she’d reply, hunkering down in her armchair with a satisfied smile, blinking in slow motion like an overfed cat. She never forgot what it was like to be in a marriage throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s: trapped, unable to get a mortgage if you were a woman, having to leave your job when you became a wife – most companies had a marriage bar after the war. Lots of women lied and removed their wedding rings so they could work. To be free of servicing a man, his washing and his cooking, not to be shushed whilst the news was on, leaving the washing up in the sink overnight if you were tired, these small privileges felt like luxuries to my mother, luxuries she never thought she’d be able to afford, and she cherished every one of them.
For eighteen months after the end of my own marriage I had the same sense of euphoria. My elation didn’t last fifty years like Mum’s did, but then she grew up in a more restricted time than me so appreciated her freedom more. Two years after my divorce I gave away our Burmese cat (he went to a good home). He was always complaining and demanding food and attention, even moaned when the heating wasn’t on. After my husband and the moany old cat were gone I felt exactly the same delirious relief mingled with the adrenalin rush of a narrow escape as my mother did when my father left home. But after eighteen months my excitement evaporated and real life, bills and loneliness crept in, although I still feel a surge of relief every time I inadvertently wander down the pet food and cat litter aisle in a supermarket. I’ve never regretted the loss of any man – or cat – I’ve known. I have regretted losing women though. Every woman, good or bad, who’s gone from my life has left a hole. I was on tenterhooks for years anticipating my mother leaving the biggest hole of all. I expected her to leave a crater. A crater can be beautiful, I kept telling myself. People go to Iceland and America especially to see craters.
10 I patted my back pockets and was annoyed with myself when I realised I’d left my phone in the basement. I should’ve kept it on me. I never went anywhere without it in case Mum needed me, but that night I was scared it would slip out when I used the loo because I was so busy and distracted – it had happened before. I ran downstairs and searched through my bag, telling myself to stay calm, not to panic until I’d called Pascale and heard the facts. I didn’t think it was anything serious. This was the one night I was certain I could relax. Mum knew what writing the book had cost me: three years of trying to find a bit more time, a bit more money, supporting my daughter, negotiating a divorce, moving home four times.
Why aren’t there more female artists?
Fuck off.
(And read Women Artists by Linda Nochlin.*)
Tender Buttons†
I met Eryk-the-builder when he came to price up the renovation work on the Hackney house. He was tall and thin, with a shaved head and eyes so pale they looked like acid drops that had been sucked into flat, transparent slivers. His voice was low, not so low as to be threatening but droney and mesmerising like bees buzzing around a lavender bush. I drifted into a daydream as he talked about partition walls, clerestories and intumescent paint, wondering if he’d arrived in my life because I’d been sensible for once and chosen to move to a plain, normal house and employ an ordinary, easy-going architect who knew nice builders instead of hiring someone fashionable and expensive. A week after the refurbishment started Eryk saw my full name on an email and realised I was ‘Viv from the Slits’. He told me that in 1978, when he and his then girlfriend were seventeen, they followed the Slits all around Europe. I was so flustered and flattered I tripped over a piece of copper piping as he spoke and stumbled into a hole in the concrete floor.
For a long time after moving to Hackney I was frightened to do anything adventurous or get involved with anyone in case I created bad associations. I wanted the house and the area – the only compas
s point of London I hadn’t yet lived in, and the only streets I could walk down without feeling nauseous and overloaded with memories – to remain pure and unsullied. Don’t ever try to do that. It’s impossible.
I got to know Eryk slowly. I didn’t want to rush into a relationship and make another mistake. He seemed gentle and intelligent, with occasional flashes of spite. We were both interested in music, art and architecture, a bit cynical, and repulsed by the theme tune to The Archers. I liked his physical presence. His movements were languid, unimposing. A man’s physical presence is very important to me. I’m sensitive about personal space and put off by too overbearing a manner.
I liked Eryk so much that I did that thing where you look at yourself through fresh eyes. What I saw made me want to shrivel up and dissolve into a smouldering pile of black clothes and pointy boots like the Wicked Witch of the East – which is exactly what I would dissolve into because that’s what I wear most of the time. I was ashamed of some of my character traits and failings, like my lack of tact and short temper. I knew I was loyal and good fun but I wasn’t sure if that made up for the bad stuff. Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better, I chanted to myself – a self-hypnosis mantra from the French psychologist Émile Coué that I first heard in the 1980s.
Eryk was a strange one. Of course he was, I’m only attracted to strange ones. I wouldn’t be able to see a nice normal man if I tripped over him in London Fields. Normal isn’t familiar to me. Eryk was very passionate on our first date, felt me up in the corner of a dark bar, grabbed my arse, slid his hand inside my jeans and snogged me for ages at the bus stop. We were like teenagers. But the first time we went to bed together he kept all his clothes on, including his socks. I’m used to inexperienced and sexually shy men so I asked him if I could undo the top button of his soft brown shirt. ‘Just one,’ he replied without smiling. I negotiated with him that every time we saw each other (about every ten days) he’d allow me to undo another button. I liked his reticence, it made me feel bold. I felt sexually experienced compared to him and more confident about taking my own clothes off. After six months, Eryk agreed that next time we met he’d take his socks off, but I had to promise not to look at his feet. I did have a quick peek. They were no different from or worse than anyone else’s feet, just soft and very white, like the fish that live at the bottom of the ocean and never see daylight. Whenever he was coming over to my place Eryk would text to ask what I’d like to do. If I said, ‘Bed,’ he knew that didn’t mean sex. It meant we’d lie down, kiss and touch and read a book out loud to each other. We were reading Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. I don’t know if Eryk knew I wasn’t bothered about us not having sex because we never talked about it. I thought if I probed him on the subject he’d close down. Something I’ve learned from the past and all the dates I’ve been on is to just let a person be who they are. If they do something that makes you uncomfortable or doesn’t work for you, tell them. If they don’t or can’t adjust and it doesn’t bother you too much, ignore it. If it does bother you, leave. That’s what I always do. Leave. I thought that’s what everyone did. When a relationship hits an obstacle you say mean things and then you leave. That’s the way my parents did it.
* Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, edited by Maura Reilly, 2015
† Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914
11 I turned away from the smokers huddled around outside the entrance, leaned against the wall, pulled the collar of my jacket up to shield the phone and called my sister. She managed to say, ‘Mum’s turning blue, the ambulance crew are here,’ before bursting into tears. I was relieved Mum wasn’t dead, even though I wasn’t expecting her to be. I told Pascale to put me on to a medic. ‘We’ve only got one more tank of oxygen,’ he explained. ‘Your mother has about twenty minutes left.’ I wandered back into the club. I wasn’t upset, I didn’t feel scared, I didn’t feel anything. Even though I’d just been told that Mum had only twenty minutes left I didn’t feel there was any need to rush. I’ll leave later, in a couple of hours, after my talk, I thought. My first duty is not to let all these people down. I pushed through the crowded room. I was talking to myself in my head: Mum’ll be all right, she’s not going anywhere. No way she’ll slide off the planet tonight. She’s strong and wilful, she’ll wait for me.
Deckchairs
Anger is about status injury.
Martha Nussbaum*
By the time she reached her sixties, Mum had developed into such a confrontational person that I felt compelled to have a word with her about it. I said it wasn’t necessary to be so aggressive all the time nowadays and she needed to keep up with the changing times. (Vida said a similar thing to me when I was fifty-six.)
It was back in the 1980s when Mum was sixty-something that we had the ‘unnecessary aggression’ conversation. British people seemed to suddenly sprout a whole new attitude to life. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and even creative people started conforming and becoming acquisitive. Men and women began physically grooming themselves from top to toe like Americans. It was all a bit of a shock to the system. I wasn’t aware of British men wearing deodorant before the eighties. The smell of body odour on the tube at rush hour made your eyes water. I miss normal body smells. Now that we’re all masking our sweat I feel we’ve had a signal removed that helped us deduce attractiveness and character.
Mum and I had booked a bed and breakfast by the sea for the weekend, but the landlady was so offhand and rude to us we decided to check out and find somewhere else to stay. I was polite as we left but I could feel Mum bristling behind me when I paid. She managed to wait until we were trotting down the path with our bags before bursting out with, ‘You should have told her why we were leaving and had a go at her!’ Whenever I was conciliatory Mum thought I was being traitorous. I explained that things didn’t work like that any more, that these days it was considered much cleverer – and nastier in my opinion – to smile to people’s faces whilst you stab them in the back. The pain lasts longer for them and you walk away feeling smug and looking refined because you haven’t lost your temper. I observed people conducting themselves this way whilst working as a freelance director at television companies in London, mixing with people who’d been privately educated and gone to Oxbridge. I was exposed to much more ruthless behaviour when I associated with these professionals than when I hung out with street kids in my punk days.
Mum and I kept on discussing the merits of suppressing anger as opposed to expressing it, huddled together in our deckchairs behind an orange-green-and-white-striped canvas windbreak. It was the same sort of place she used to take us for childhood holidays. We couldn’t afford to go on proper holidays so every year Mum took us to the seaside for just one day – Walton-on-the-Naze or Canvey Island in Essex. ‘You can have anything you want – fish and chips, rock, sweets, candy floss and balloons, souvenirs, go on all the rides. We’ll have our whole holiday in one day,’ she’d say, as she took all her savings out of the tea caddy. We’d fall asleep on the train home, bags full of sandy swimming costumes and towels, sweets, toys and postcards, with Mum telling us, ‘That day was as good as a two-week holiday!’ She said it so many times that I believed her. Still do.
I had to give Mum lots of context and references to convince her that it was necessary to contain her anger, but she got it eventually and was grateful to me for bringing her up to date. She realised she’d developed the habit of always defaulting to a defensive position. Reverting to anger when cornered was Mum’s automatic response to threat because she felt and had always been treated as if she were a nonentity, in all walks of life, from her home to her work to her society. It was when I was in my twenties that I tried to reject her way of thinking and not be furious all the time like her. No one wanted to be perceived as an underdog in the 1980s – or since the 1980s, come to that. Some of us embraced it in the 1970s and made a virtue of it. My mother had pumped me so full of her anger I couldn’t throw it off. She must have thought I needed some ki
nd of fuel to fill me with the courage to kick down doors and gain entry to an interesting life. So anger it was.
Fishwife
Bad girls aren’t villains; they’re transgressive forces within patriarchal cultures. Made to choose between wreaking destruction and accepting their own powerlessness, they pick destruction.
Judy Berman, ‘The cool girls, good girls and bad girls of modern books’, Guardian, 28 May 2016
Often, when I’ve acted in anger, I’ve been perceived as, been called and have felt mad. Not the quietly-weeping-in-my-room-can’t-get-out-of-bed madness of depression, although I have had that. Or the erase-myself-from-the-planet-can’t-bear-it-any-more-kill-myself-I-am-a-burden-to-those-I-love mental illness. I’ve been close to and feel compassion for that. But boiling-over-furious-red-faced-eyes-popping-burn-her-at-the-stake-clap-her-in-irons-tie-her-to-a-stool-duck-her-in-the-pond-teeth-grinding-howling-in-the-attic-lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key-raving-hollering-in-your-face-ugly mad.
One October evening in 2010 I set off with my guitar, pedals and a couple of changes of clothes to play a solo gig in York. It was a small, intimate venue and everyone there had paid to see me, except four men sitting at a front table. I later discovered they were a boss and his three male employees, who’d been given tickets as part of a work bonus. They shouted and caroused through my first four songs, which is fine in a big venue but not a tiny one. They were louder than me as I only had my guitar with its tinny, trebly sound for accompaniment. After the fourth song I asked them to keep it down because other people were finding it difficult to hear, but they ignored me. I felt like I was their mother asking if they had any washing they wanted doing. After they continued to shout through the next song I suggested they go to the bar if they wanted to make a noise, but they didn’t move or stop yelling. Instead of the audience witnessing Viv-Albertine-the-ex-punk come back to shake them up, they saw a middle-aged woman being disrespected and ignored. I had two choices: give up and let people see a woman try and fail to be respected, or fight. I decided to fight.