My friend Celia’s house was on four floors. She and her partner Gerry had separate rooms on the top floor, and I was given a bedroom on the floor below. We met in the basement kitchen for meals. Celia’s grown up daughters had recently left home, and I was in loco infantis, a replacement child, even though I was in my late twenties, had a job, and a share in a house in Tunbridge Wells. I slotted in to this role quite easily, as I was completely lost. The marriage to Richard had not worked, but without him, and our shared life and home, I was at sea. My job as a research assistant at Brighton Poly was less structured than teaching, and much of the time I did not know what I was supposed to do. So there was little succour there.

Celia and I were in a women’s group, and I discovered that I was not alone in tiring of married sex. In that group I learnt to see the world in a new light, to understand that my shyness in middle-class male company was not just a personal weakness, but something to do with gender, class and power. We read Shulemith Firestone and Mary Daly and Dale Spender, and took evening classes in women’s history, women’s writing, and art for women. In the art class we met Andrea, who described herself as a radical lesbian separatist. Andrea seemed free of the guilt I felt about not doing my vague and nebulous research project properly. She saw her own boss as an agent of the patriarchy and colonialism, so she just took the money, and lived happily with her girlfriend in a tiny house in Kemptown. Andrea viewed us heteros as poor benighted creatures, and was amused by what she regarded as our pathetic attempts to make women more central in our lives. In one of the classes we were asked to bring positive images of women. Andrea commented wryly: ‘you’ve got the iconography, all you need is the practice’.

On Saturdays my main pastime was not one Andrea would have approved of. I walked into Brighton and went round the clothes shops. On one occasion I bought a complete new outfit in a shop in the Lanes  – a bright cerise pink skirt with a camisole top in black with cerise straps and embroidery. The outfit was as different as possible to the tweed skirts and woolly jumpers I was still wearing, and had worn throughout my school teaching, married years, replacing the tweed with Laura Ashley cotton in summer. I also made a purchase of a black second-hand coat at Sussex University’s Tuesday market, on my way to ‘Feminist Forum’, where I listened to Jacqueline Rose and Cora Kaplan, awestruck, incapable of speech. The coat was a 1950s number, and it had a huge collar fastened by a large black button.

When I tried the cerise skirt and black camisole on in the evening for Celia and Gerry, still in my role of replacement daughter, Gerry commented that ‘the men would be flocking’. I had developed a crush on Celia, perhaps in part because of all that iconography, and I was more interested in her response to my new plumes. Celia was gorgeous – shining dark eyes and hair – and always elegantly dressed. She was the daughter of a diplomat, and had attended a French lycée, so like me she spoke fluent French, but unlike me she was culturally French, and knew how to dress, combine colours, and even make her own clothes. She was also good at interior design, and I marvelled at her pink and pale green salon on the ground floor, and the terracotta and turquoise study next to my room. Under Celia’s instruction I made a pair of earrings to go with my cerise and black number, and an appointment at a place in the North Lanes to get my ears pierced.  The earrings lasted longer than the outfit, and  I wore them as emblems of my Brighton transformation well into the 1990s.

Celia and I were close, and Gerry would leave notes for us in the basement kitchen, saying he could not cope with all this feminism in the house. He would retire to his room to work on his poetry or listen to funk music with his headphones on, while Celia and I enjoyed harmonious evenings together. In the morning I would hear the thud of Gerry bashing the typewriter keys as he completed another stanza of what seemed to be a very long poem. I found a box of completed pages in the bottom of my wardrobe, but could not make head nor tail of it. At lunchtime he would eat a solitary sandwich and then go out for a walk along the Undercliff path, whatever the weather.

In fact Gerry did not need to be jealous of me, because Celia was having an affair with a beautiful blond creature called Steve. She borrowed a friend’s cottage so that they could go there for sex in the afternoons, after which Steve returned to work to do the evening shift. In the mornings she would spend ages getting ready, and then would disappear out of the door in a flash of petticoats and perfume. Gerry eventually found out about Steve, and there was a terrible crisis, and a lot of door slamming. I admired Celia’s sangfroid. In the midst of the mayhem she planted spring bulbs in pots, in anticipation of the next season’s flowering. Perhaps this approach paid off. She and Gerry made it up, and became closer than before.

I began to look further afield for attention. Fortuitously I had met one of the lecturers at Sussex on one of my lunch-time flits over the road and he asked me out. It was a cold night, so I stuck to one of my tweed skirt, white blouse and woolly jumper outfits, but I did wear the black coat. He took me to the ‘Latin in the Lane’, and we ate a delicious Italian meal and drank a bottle of wine. Over dinner we recounted the stories of our failed marriages, and exchanged a few other salient details about our lives. He was the son of a Docker, and like me, the first in his family to go to University.  Then we had more drinks at his local pub, and staggered back to his house for ‘coffee’. Fortunately his wife was with her lover that night. As he undressed me he said he was glad I had worn the coat as it made the rest of the outfit less conventional. In the middle of the night I took a taxi back to Celia’s place to get my diaphragm, which I inserted with trembling fingers.

The next morning he brought me tea in bed, and played Duran Duran – ‘Don’t say a prayer for me now, save it till the morning after’. In Kemptown Celia was also bringing me tea, and was very shocked to find my bed empty. When I eventually wafted home on a little pink cloud of new passion, Celia and Gerry were cross. I was not sure why. Gerry picked a quarrel about emptying the washing up machine. I went up to my room, oblivious. I was not enough of a teenager to sulk. That night I went to bed early, but was woken by the phone ringing. It was him. Celia tried to tell him I was in bed and could not answer, but I ran to the phone, and responded to his need to see me, right then, at that moment, dashing out of the house. The conundrum he presented me with was ‘should he finish with his girlfriend? Was I serious?’. Obviously he did not want to take the risk of losing both of us. It was the first I’d heard of a girlfriend. Despite Andrea, and Shulemith Firestone, and Dale Spender, and Feminist Forum I completely failed to see all the flaws in this proposition, all the danger signs. The iconography on his bedroom wall was another sign that I ignored. We  read Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and even then I did not take fright at his obvious identification with the ‘hero’. He and I moved into his wife’s boyfriend’s place for Christmas, while they took over the marital home. I wore my black coat, and my cerise skirt, got my ears pierced, and threw caution to the winds.

 Still wearing the cerise and black earrings, Brighton, c. 1990….

 

My wedding dress was blue, not a pure blue, but a vaguely floral, sub Laura Ashley print with tones of blue, violet and cream. It was a cotton polyester mix, unlike the pure cotton garments favoured by ‘Laura’ herself. My mother and I bought the material for next to nothing in a shop in Wolverhampton, and then found a pattern in Beatties (the town’s only posh department store). The skirt was full and tiered, with a belt at the waist. The scooped neckline would be decorated with cream lace and I would wear a headband with the same lace and artificial cream rosebuds. I would carry my mother’s cream prayer book – a volume she kept for purely decorative and sentimental purposes.

It was not surprising that I had chosen a Laura Ashley sort of style. That year I was living in Bath, doing teacher training at the University, and Bath was the home of one of the first Laura Ashley shops outside London. The other girls on the course and I made a beeline for that shop on Saturdays, especially at sales time. I already, of course, had the second-hand skirt that I had bought in Oxford, and in Bath I added two knee length skirts to my wardrobe, one red and one navy, both decorated with tiny flowers. The skirts were pretty, but sensible; I would be able to wear them for teaching. Some of the other girls had several Victorian style long dresses, all frills and sprigs, that they wore to parties, and even for country walks; a touch of mud or dew around the frilled hem, was all part of the look, along with flowing long hair, preferably straight. There seemed to be something seductive about the contrast between the dresses evoking Victorian virginity, and the realities of smoking dope at parties and sleeping around. I had had my hair cut into a 70s style bob, smoking anything made me cough, and I was engaged, so I was only on the edges of the Laura Ashley dream of student life.

But perhaps, at least, I could be a romantic bride. My aunts set to work making my dress, and my mother baked and iced the wedding cake. We sent out ‘faire-parts’ to Richard’s French relatives, explaining that we were to be married dans l’intimité. My future mother-in-law assured us that this would take the sting out of the fact they were not invited. This was a necessary strategy given that the French family had split along party lines when Richard’s grandparents had divorced, and could not be gathered in the same room without a fracas. And there was some truth in the notion of intimacy as we were to be married in the tiny chapel of Richard’s Oxford college.

The marriage in the eyes of the law took place the day before, at Oxford Registry office, since in those days college chapels were not licensed. We wore ordinary clothes – in my case the red Laura Ashley skirt. My Dad was in his shorts – 1976 was a very hot summer. When the registrar pronounced us married we burst out laughing, and he gave us a look indicating that this response probably did not augur well for the future.

The next day I dressed in my finery, adding a corsage of real roses (yellow, not the cream I had asked for) to the dress. We sang slightly obscure hymns of my choice – ‘My song is love unknown’, and ‘For the beauty of the earth’. Richard and I turned to process out too early, before the Chaplain had finished the blessing. After the ceremony there were photographs, in the blazing sun. Then the lunch – fresh salmon, a luxury food in those days, and salads, and of course, the cake. And lots of very good wine from the college cellars.

In the afternoon we sat outside chatting and drinking wine and tea, leaning against the tombstones of the cemetery of St Peter-in-the East, which no longer functioned as a church, but as the college library. We visited the twelfth century crypt, whose cold, damp air contrasted with the heat of the day. My grandmother was photographed drinking tea, even though later she swore she had never had a cup. Although clearly she had had a bit to drink, she behaved with perfect decorum. My anxiety about my relatives ‘showing me up’ in front of my Oxford friends turned out to be unfounded. A photograph was taken of the two Mrs and Misses B. – Richard’s sister, aunt, mother and me. I was admitted to the family, and laden with hopes for its continuation. Confetti and rice were thrown, but perhaps the backdrop of the ancient tombs was another inauspicious sign: fertility withered by the proximity of death.

Later, I changed into my ‘going away’ dress, real Laura Ashley, bought in the sale again: a long navy sun dress with a frilled skirt and white sprigs, which I wore bare-armed, because of the heat. We drove off in our newly purchased, though not new Renault 4, to a hotel in a converted water mill in Abingdon. Our honeymoon was just one night in this hotel, which to us seemed extraordinarily luxurious. Money and time would not permit more as Richard was studying for law exams. We spent the whole night talking, mulling over the day, and thinking how lucky we were to have such families and friends. We did not consummate the union, which in any case was already consummated.

The next day we travelled on to Bath, where we would make a temporary home in two adjoining bed-sitting rooms. On arrival, Richard took so long parking the R4 that the next time we came to use the car, we found a notice on the windscreen ‘Reginald Molehusband Parking Award, Grade 3’. There was no fridge in our rooms, so I shopped and cooked every day on the Baby Belling. Food became my métier, and took up most of my time. Occasionally I would glance at the French text books I was to teach with in September, but all of that seemed unreal compared to my wifely duties in the kitchen, or more accurately ‘kitchen corner’. Perhaps also, I felt I had to excel there, because the bedroom scenes were an unmitigated disaster; the legalisation of our relationship seemed to have extinguished my desire. I had realised that something was wrong a few weeks before the wedding, but the machinery of arrangements for the ceremony was irresistible. I did not have the courage to intervene, even though I knew deep down that I was waiting for a deus ex machina to rescue me.

I changed my name, we opened a joint bank account. I felt as if I no longer existed. His parents came to visit and I prepared an elaborate picnic, which was consumed on the lawns in front of the Royal Crescent. I wore the red Laura Ashley skirt again, made meringues, and served them with whipped cream. My belle-mère approved of my culinary skills, having no ambitions in that line herself.

In the autumn, we moved to our first real home: a rented cottage in a Somerset village. It was pink, very picturesque and very damp, and our landlords were called the Powers. Everyone in the village had a name that signified their character or role: the Smarts, at the farm, constantly outwitted Major Power. The Foxes, up the road, were equally wily. Perhaps because our name signified nothing, we remained outsiders, despite our attendance at the Silver Jubilee preparation meetings. Then the shock of full-time employment added to our misery. On Fridays I taught nine 30 minute classes, including two sessions with 3F, who by the afternoon were less than fascinated by French verbs. Then I would cycle round to Finefare, the town’s only supermarket, and try to find something we could both afford and enjoy eating. Sausages or spaghetti were the usual solutions, and I often blessed Claudia for teaching me how to make a good Bolognese sauce. Then I would cycle another two miles home, usually in pouring rain, for the heat-wave had ended, and had been followed by a deluge.

Every purchase was the subject of major discussion, and I remember feeling we could not afford a packet of multi-coloured felt pens that I wanted badly. We were saving £50 a month for the deposit on a first house and on top of the rent of £75 a month little was left of our modest income. We did, in the end splash out on a black and white television, as winter evenings in a pink cottage in soggy Somerset did not offer much entertainment. There was a Bergman season, and I stayed up late, watching the films, and reflecting on the relationship dramas they depicted, and our own. Oxford friends came to visit, and although the weekends were jolly, they reminded us of everything we had lost. At Christmas I got a card from the boyfriend before Richard. I was tempted to write him a long letter, but I knew it would be wrong, so I resisted.

Richard and I became ever better friends and more infrequent lovers. The navy sun dress would have made a good maternity smock, but I did not want to be tied to a child. I wanted to do something creative. When I told his family this, in a hopeless attempt to justify our lack of fecundity, my belle-mère insisted it was already too late; Mozart was a great composer by 21.

We moved to Devon, and then to Kent, where I hoped the proximity of London would make us happier. At least we would be closer to our old friends. But things did not get better; Richard became depressed, and I felt guilty most of the time. His English grandmother died. They found her in an armchair, some time after lunch. We had visited her a few weeks earlier, in a ‘sheltered’ flat in south London that she never settled in. Everyone in the family except her knew that burglars were ransacking her old home, while the police did nothing. Perhaps she sensed something was wrong, and did not want to live to find out. With the money she left us we travelled round India by rail, visiting the cities of Rajasthan, Darjeeling, Delhi and Agra. We lingered in Agra for a few days, as if spellbound by the beauty of the Taj Mahal. We went there morning and evening, to see the effect of changing qualities of light on the marble. It was the year Diana and Charles got married, and we could not have imagined Diana sitting sad and alone in front of the Taj eleven years later.

When we got home, a few more months elapsed. There was another holiday, in France. In the Autumn it was clear that we had to face the terrible wrench of separating. I was working in Brighton, and on one wet October Sunday, Richard drove me across the Ashdown Forest to Kemp Town, where I had arranged to stay with my friend Celia. The rest of the inheritance was spent on our very amicable divorce.

I had imagined I could wear the wedding dress for parties, since it was blue and not very bridal, but in fact I never did. By the time I left for Brighton, all I had left was a piece of the cream lace trim.

I found the skirt in a second-hand shop in Jericho. It was Laura Ashley, all the rage at the time – pale blue with a white sprig. I wore it with a short-sleeved white blouse I had bought to wear for my finals. ‘Sub-fusc’ – black skirt, white blouse and gown – was, and still is, de rigueur for exams at Oxford. Theoretically you had to wear a hat too, but mostly we just used those as pencil-cases, clutching them nervously as we stood in the entrance hall of the Examination Schools waiting for the bell to ring. Was it Oxford tradition or just plain sadism that started the exam before we were even at our desks? When the bell rang we had to dash up the stairs and run around desperately looking for the desk labelled with our name. Then it was heads down for three hours of furious scribbling for some, and staring into space wondering what to write for others….

When I put on my pale blue skirt I was trying hard to forget about these terrors and my daily struggle to scrape together enough knowledge of French and German literature to get through ten three hour papers. Then, as now, I found it hard to spend a sunny day indoors, poring over the books. So I would wander in the University Parks, enjoying the scent of the spring blossom, and the sensation of the skirt swishing as I walked through the grass. On the first day of Trinity term 1975, my finals term, I dumped my bags in my room, changed into my blue skirt and went on a bike ride in Wytham Woods with my ex-boyfriend, Tony from TOC-H days, and a friend of his, Richard. Tony and Richard had met at the Maison Française, round the corner from St Hugh’s, where they both had rooms for the year. Richard was half French, definitely a point in his favour as far as I was concerned, and a Grammar School boy, so a lot less intimidating than the Public School crowd. They regaled me with stories of the tricks they had played on the Directeur of the Maison, who imposed a strict regime of formal conversation at mealtimes, and ate all fruit, including bananas, with a knife and fork. Our picnic in Wytham Woods was a more relaxed affair. We sat on logs in a clearing and ate slices of the coffee and walnut cake my mother had made to help me face the rigours of my final term. The food at the Maison was rather disappointing, and certainly not worth the stress of the accompanying conversation, so the cake was a huge success.

On another occasion I called in on Tony, and ended up spending the afternoon talking to Richard while Tony mended his bike. Then a plan was hatched to steal a punt for the revelries of May 1^st. Punting on that day was strictly forbidden because of the potentially lethal combination of drunken students and the river, so it was necessary to hide the punt somewhere up-river over night. Tony and Richard managed this feat, and at 5.30 a.m. I ran across the Parks in my long skirt and met them as they punted down the river towards Magdalen. We managed to time it so that we were underneath the Tower at exactly the moment when the choristers broke into song, and we were, of course, the only boat on the river. I have no idea how we escaped being noticed and punished for this misdemeanour, but there were no consequences. We parked the punt and went off to the indoor market to eat a large fried breakfast. Tony had to go off to lectures, but Richard and I cycled to Wolvercote, and sat watching the river and discussing the meaning of life and French literature at ‘The Trout’. We even splashed out on a lemonade before cycling back to our respective colleges and revision. This was clearly the start of something.

I got through finals, thanks, perhaps in equal measure, to my blossoming romance with Richard, and the special ‘Schools’ lunches provided by the college. After the morning exam we would cycle back to St Hugh’s for a light salad lunch, followed by strawberries and cream and fresh coffee. I am not sure whether it was the food or the feeling of being made a fuss of, but we left for the afternoon session refreshed and revived by this ritual.

After finals my family came to visit me. I wore the skirt again, and dragged them round colleges for a whole morning. They soon wearied of the beauties of mediaeval architecture – ‘Once yow’ve seen one yow’ve seen ’em all’. We went to the Buttery back at St Hugh’s for a lunch of Welsh Rarebit and chips. The black country voices suddenly seemed very loud, and I felt conspicuous, as if everyone in the college could see that I really did not belong there, despite my floral skirt and almost perfect RP vowels. I did not understand then that the shame I felt was about social class. Nor did I realise that many years later, even when I had understood this, I would still feel the shame of having felt ashamed. And that I would regret the loss of those voices, and the stories of working life they told, that then seemed so much less important to me than Stendhal or Proust, and that now I would etch in gold.

 

I wanted to forge your voice

in my mouth, a blacksmith’s furnace;

shout it from the roofs,

send your words, like pigeons,

fluttering for home.

 

Liz Berry, ‘Homing’, in Black Country, 2014.

 

 

 

The whole tweed skirt thing started at Oxford. When I got back from France I realised that my skinny-rib jumpers and cords and even my evening skirt were no longer quite the thing. I began to notice that my friend Sarah had an altogether different approach to clothes. When you looked at Sarah the words ‘quality’ and ‘country’ sprang to mind. She wore cords too, but they had a better cut, and she wore them with a check shirt and v-necked Shetland wool jumper. Occasionally the cords would be replaced by an equally perfectly co-ordinated tweed skirt, dark tights and sensible shoes. Somebody commented that in her blue and grey check shirt and grey cords and jumper (or the equivalent outfit in brown or navy blue) Sarah looked very French. I was not sure what they meant, but when the time came for me to buy new clothes, without even thinking about it, I copied Sarah’s look. The pale pink and black outfits were replaced by more autumnal tones, green and brown and beige, even though they played havoc with my complexion. The man-made fibres were replaced by wool and cotton, and I bought two very soft Viyella blouses, one cream and one green, and a long green tweed skirt in a boutique in Summertown.

Sarah was from Tunbridge Wells and I was from Wolverhampton, and that explained the differences between our clothes. In a sartorial sense, I was gravitating south, and of course, upmarket. My new evening outfit – the green blouse and tweed skirt – spoke of country pubs, walks in the woods and hearty Sunday lunches with sherry and wine and conversation about books. It was a world I had caught glimpses of when I visited Sarah and other friends in the vacation, and which seemed to offer a new kind of safe place.

The clothes were more sensible than sexy, but perhaps the tweed and wool did have their erotic charms. In my final year at Oxford, when I really did not have the time, I went on a day trip to Bath with the University Architectural Society. These people were seriously posh, so I decided I would sit on my own on the coach. My solitude was soon interrupted by an American who quickly introduced himself and explained he was an architect, working on the restoration of the Oxford stone. This seemed pretty glamorous to me, but at the same time I found him a bit tedious, harping on about Oxford ‘ac-anaemics’ all the way to Bath. We got off the coach and had lunch in a pub, and I just could not shake him off. Suddenly he grabbed my hand, in a slightly proprietorial way, but I did not protest. On the coach home I was tired and dozed off, and awoke to find him fondling my wool-clad breasts. Again, I did not protest.

He begged me to let him cook dinner for me at his house off the Cowley Road. I didn’t like him much but there was something attractive about getting out of college, and knowing a man who was an architect and had a house. Sarah was quite jealous –‘nothing ever happens to me’. I ate the dinner – lamb stew – and afterwards he did his best to get me into bed, going into ecstasies as he removed the Viyella blouse. But I was having none of it and escaped to the freedom of my bike and the cold air.

Another time I was at his house and he had to go off and do something else. I stayed there, ostensibly to work. In fact I explored the bedroom he was so desperate to get me into. I opened a few drawers and found another woman’s underwear. I did not even feel particularly shocked; he had mentioned an ‘ex’ several times. I felt myself drifting into a kind of passive decadence and I did not run away immediately. Then some sort of tweedy survival instinct kicked in, and I got out of there before he came home.