‘I Knew I Was Right’ by Julie Burchill
It’s a very entertaining read. I’ve occasionally found Burchill's contrarian style wearing but I do admire her way with words. She refers to school as ‘a spiritual slaughterhouse … there only to lead us little lost lambs to the altar, there to sacrifice us to husband and two veg’. She relates her despondency at what she felt were the limited options open to her as a working-class girl – leave school at 16, get a bloke, get up the duff – and her desperation to break away. Burchill ran away to London aged 15, such was her fear of what she felt she’d become otherwise. She hooked up with some other girls via the YWCA hostel and found herself a cash-in-hand job at a chemist’s on King’s Cross station, and seems to have survived quite well for eight weeks before she was picked up by the police and duly collected by her father and taken home. At 17, Burchill responded to an ad in the NME asking for ‘hip young gunslingers’ by sending in a review of Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ and, after a few interviews, got the job – out of a pool of apparently 15,000 applicants.
Burchill confesses to what she claims is a degree of psychopathy, but it’s often hard to tell whether she’s being tongue in cheek. She’s certainly admirably upfront, which has its refreshing aspect. Her class warriordom has always irritated me (as does Suzanne Moore’s) – Burchill is SURE she had a worse adolescence than any middle-class girl could possibly have done, despite having had what sounds on the whole like a fairly decent relationship with her parents and having been reasonably popular at school. She states elsewhere in the book that she couldn’t possibly respect a middle-class person – though again, it’s hard to tell whether she’s being entirely serious. Her frustrations at what she sees as the limited expectations of the milieu she grew up in are entirely understandable – accusations of being ‘too clever by half’ and an apparent expectation that she would take a job in the cardboard box factory where her mother worked – but directing anger towards the middle classes in consequence seems to be avoiding the proper target. That aside, though, one of many funny stories related in the book is of the occasion when Burchill is being told off by the editor of the NME for slipping speed into an interviewee’s tea (!):
‘Did I realise what I was doing? This was my big chance. My only chance. Did I want to go back to the biscuit factory in Bristol?
‘”Box factory,” I said sullenly. “My mother makes cardboard boxes.”’
I really enjoyed this, and love Burchill’s turn of phrase – she relates returning to London after having been ‘married alive’ in Essex for three years, and she wittily lampoons Feng Shui with advice including not pouring sump oil on the hallway floor, not hanging weights over your bed and never sexually mounting a cactus. I was tickled by her account of spending hours as a teenager in her bedroom banging away on her cherished manual typewriter, with her tolerant if bemused parents sticking their heads round the door every so often and saying ‘Doing nice typing?’. I also identified with her morbid fascination with Harpers & Queen and the ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ section, as I went through a phase of similar fascination with this in my teens – though I’d forgotten about it until reminded.
Burchill worked at the NME for three years and the book conveys the importance of it in her life. She subsequently wrote for The Face, The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Punch, The Guardian and currently seems to write for The Telegraph. That’s quite the range of publications.
‘Nancy at St Bride’s’ by Dorita Fairlie Bruce
According to the preface to the GGB edition, ‘Nancy at St Bride’s’ was first published by the Oxford University Press in 1933. St Bride’s is based on the fictional island of Inchmore, which is evidently meant to be off the west coast of Scotland, as the story opens with the girls queuing at Greenock for the boat to take them to school. Nancy Caird, a thirteen-year-old new Fourth Former, is dropped off by her young aunt, an Old Girl of the school, and put into the charge of Christine Maclean, a prefect that Nancy’s aunt selects as being a suitable sort of person to take charge of her niece. Once at the school, Nancy turns out to be a lively character who accepts all sorts of dares from her admiring classmates and eggs them on to break the rules. In disgrace after organizing a midnight dance on the beach, Nancy is denied the opportunity to watch the St Bride’s team compete in a local boat race, so takes a canoe out by herself into the bay to try to get a glimpse, falls in and gets into even more trouble. An attempt to run away results in her falling asleep in the bottom of a boat she had hoped to catch a lift in, and drifting out to sea.
Nancy is one of those stupidly headstrong, insouciant characters beloved of school story authors but whom I find thoroughly irritating. However, I thought the relationships between the sixth-form girls were well drawn, and I’d read another of Bruce’s books purely on that account. The ups and downs between Christine and her best friend Sybil Grierson, a complex and interesting character, and their interactions with their peers, I thought were realistic and insightful. She explores the teenage girls’ friendships in more detail than Elinor Brent-Dyer ever does in the Chalet School series; EBD’s exaggerated determination to avoid sentiment often makes the interactions between her teenage characters somewhat implausible.
One interesting thing about the book is that it features a disabled character, Winifred, who uses a wheelchair. An Old Girl who has returned to the school to help out following the death of her father, she is shown as well-liked and accepted by the school and to be valued by the girls as a source of advice. A further interesting thing is the sensible way in which the headmistress Miss Caldwell deals with Nancy. A typical school story arc in this scenario would have the wilful girl ‘redeem’ herself by some act of heroism, whereby her transgressions are completely forgotten and she is allowed to remain at the school. Sensibly to my mind, Miss Caldwell decides that she cannot pass over Nancy’s complete disruption of the school routine that term, and makes the decision not to allow her to return the following term – the plan is that her parents will be asked to send her to a day school for a few years until she gains some maturity, after which she’ll be welcome back at St Bride’s if she wishes.
‘Nancy is really too young for boarding-school life – not in years, but in character. She is too irresponsible – and besides, she’s a positive danger to everyone in her neighbourhood until she learns more sense.’
One final snippet that interested me: the expression “That’s right” was evidently considered a bit lowbrow at the time the book was published, judging by prefect Christine’s (to my mind, odd) reaction to Nancy’s using it:
‘That’s right;’ said Nancy, answering for herself, and thereby putting the final touch to Christine’s irritation.
‘Don’t use that hatefully common expression!’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you say, “Yes it is,” or – or anything but “That’s right”? It absolutely sets my teeth on edge!’
Gosh.
‘The World I Fell Out Of’ by Melanie Reid
Reid was thrown from her horse when the horse refused a jump and she landed on the ground head-first. She remained conscious throughout and immediately knew that she was catastrophically injured. (“My horse refused a piddly jump, on a piddly little British Horse Society instruction day for piddly middle-aged wannabes playing with their piddly ponies.”) The first part of the book relates her year’s stay in hospital in Glasgow, initially on a high-dependency ward and then on the spinal rehabilitation ward, whence patients, once stabilized, are moved in order to be prepared for their new life outside the hospital. The latter part focuses on her adjustment to life back home. The reader almost has the sense that the main challenges began once she left the spinal unit and the company of people with similar injuries to hers, and was faced with being back in familiar surroundings in an entirely new body, and have to find new ways of trying to do as many of the things as possible that she once took for granted.
Reid writes movingly about her forced transition to living in an alternative, parallel world ‘just below the surface’, one that ‘normal’ people don’t see until it’s forced on their attention. She writes about adjusting – or trying to adjust – to stillness, and her incredulous envy of others’ easy movements. She describes feeling a disjoint between the top part of her body – the only part of her with feeling and movement – and the part below the chest, which turned into an object she had to care for. She writes about the frustrating lack of spontaneity that is a consequence of severe disability and dependence on others. (That's not to say there aren't also some funny bits: referring to the dark humour to be found on the spinal ward, she relates having to sit around in a semicircle with other similarly-injured patients watching a PowerPoint presentation on Bowel Management, and another patient pondering aloud that their lives had come to this.)
She devotes a chapter to detailing her fascination with horses and riding as a child, even though her parents could not (or would not) afford riding lessons for her. She relates giddily splashing out on a palomino mare shortly after starting her first job as a graduate trainee on a newspaper, and then coming down to earth quickly when she realized after a couple of months that she could not afford the animal’s keep and had to sell her. After her accident, Reid did attempt to take up riding again via Riding for the Disabled, but unfortunately had a fall and landed herself in hospital again; she elected not to try again after that. (She describes being lowered onto the horse in a hoist but not actually being able to feel the saddle – how did she ever feel safe on the horse? Entirely through the arms I suppose. And her desire to ride was clearly very strong.)
Spinal shock led to Reid’s injury initially being misdiagnosed as a ‘complete’ spinal injury, but over time it emerged that it was ‘incomplete’ – good in the sense of some potential for recovery of feeling and movement, not so good in others. An outsider would assume, as I did, that paralysis means limbs being completely limp and floppy, but Reid explains that incomplete spinal injuries such as hers often result in lower limbs going into rigid spasm – correctly termed ‘spasticity’ apparently; there’s a page about it here. On the plus side, she notes encouragingly that eight years after her accident she was still seeing some minor signs of improvement – neurological recovery can it seems continue for years, though Reid makes clear enough the need to moderate your initial expectations regarding what will be possible for you.
Since her accident, Reid has written a weekly piece in the Saturday Times magazine titled ‘Spinal Column’. This book was published in 2019. There’s a foreword by Andrew Marr.
‘Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café’ by Fannie Flagg
The central story is Evelyn’s midlife awakening and the evolving friendship between Evelyn and the older woman. The ‘flashback’ years are set against the backdrop of the Depression and the racial segregation in Southern states. The racial stuff is certainly interesting, as is the (accepting) way that Idgie’s clear proclivities are treated by her family and those around her – I have no idea how common this would have been, but it seems plausible enough that there would have been some acceptance that some women wanted another woman as a permanent ‘companion’.
The earlier time period dots about from around the mid-1920s right up to the 1960s, and not always in that order, with the result that you always have to check back to see whether the bit of flashback that you’re about to read is set before or after the last bit you read. To make things worse, I made the mistake of not reading any of the book for a week, as I had a less than productive week of just slumping in front of the TV, and then got more disoriented when I went back to it. A couple of things really lost me: 1) on page 316, Grady Kilgore is described as a railroad official, when it’s been stated early in the book that he’s the local sheriff; 2) in the chapter beginning page 262, dated 28 October 1947, Ruth is described as out at a meeting over at the school. In the chapter beginning on page 287, dated 7 February 1947, Ruth dies of cancer. Surely this can’t be the author’s mistake – is it meant to represent vagaries in Ninny’s memory? It’s not very clear.
FGTatWSC was published in 1987. It was made into a film in 1991 starring Kathy Bates as Evelyn and Jessica Tandy as Ninny. I saw the film close to the time it first came out, and thought it was quite good, but have never had any interest in seeing it again. From memory, the film makes some significant changes to the story, including dragging out Idgie’s appearance in court (under suspicion of the murder of Ruth’s abusive ex-husband) into a whole Courtroom Drama, when it’s a relatively minor part of the book, related as just one of Ninny’s rather disordered memories. The book is definitely better – but then film isn’t my medium.
‘Gateway to Heaven: Fifty Years of Lesbian and Gay Oral History’ by Clare Summerskill
The collection is divided into several topics: recollections of growing up; London nightlife (pretty much all the reflections are of going out in London – presumably, heaven help you if you were gay in the provinces); marriage and coming out late, and custody problems; a short chapter on AIDS towards the end (I was glad the book doesn’t devote too much time to this, as I was more interested in the memories from earlier decades). There are reflections on various campaigning organisations active in the 1960s and 1970s: there are memories from the chaps of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (quite middle-class and civilized, apparently) and the later Gay Liberation Front (a bit more out there, probably as per anything with ‘Liberation Front’ as part of its name). From the women: discussions of Sappho magazine and the feminist magazine Spare Rib, and the interactions with the 1970s women’s liberation movement. Really interesting about the role of the former Greater London Council in enabling gay groups: the GLC apparently established and funded the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in the mid-1980s, and funded the setup of the Older Lesbian Network.
I was really interested in the reflections of the older lesbians, on how in the 1950s and 1960s you had to be ‘butch’ or ‘femme’; there was nothing in between – and how this caused practical problems for butches: one woman recalls how in the 60s dressed as a man she couldn’t find work and had trouble finding accommodation, resulting in her turning to petty crime and experiencing some homelessness.
The collection contains some sobering reflections on how being gay made the contributors’ lives difficult. One of the most chilling things is the fact that for gay men prior to 1967, having relations privately at home with your partner could lead to the police legitimately knocking on your door and asking about your sleeping arrangements. One of the contributors, Rex, recalls how in the 1950s he and his partner had to undergo separate interviews with the police – his stroke of luck in throwing them off the scent was the fact that he smoked a pipe, evidently not something usually associated with gay men – but the whole thing sounds unbelievably stressful. Rex, who was 23 at the time, recalls “my partner had a good job … but he would have lost it and no-one would have employed him again … It was terrifying, not only for us, but it could have destroyed our families.” Although the Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalised consensual sex between men in private, arrests for cruising and for ‘cottaging’ (cruising in public toilets) continued into the 1970s, often involving police entrapment – from some of the men’s stories, you do come away rather with the impression that some of the Met enjoyed picking on the gays as a fun evening out. The women were obviously less directly affected by the law, unless you were in the Services: one poor woman recalls losing her naval career after being outed (the ban on homosexuals serving in the military was only lifted in the late 1990s) – after ten years in the navy she was left with nothing and even lost rights to her military pension.
The title of the book is a reference to the Gateways club, the former lesbian nightclub in Chelsea that closed in the 1980s, and the later gay men's nightclub Heaven. Clare Summerskill is the twin sister of Ben, the former Chief Executive of Stonewall.
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