One of the essays in Emilie Pine’s collection, Notes to Self, details her rackety, out-of-control adolescence, full of drugs and drink and underage sex and bunking off school. As I was reading this, it struck me that her story is the dominant literary fable of growing up. There’s something supposedly shameful about being a rebellious teenager that makes lots of people want to describe their experiences in great detail and place them in the public domain. Reading her essay, I thought of my own adolescence, right up the other end of the scale, and it struck me that its like is rarely seen in print. So! Break out the Ovaltine and buckle up your slippers, I’m going to take you on the least wild ride of your reading life.
I was a child of the 70s and a teenager of the 80s. When I went up to secondary school it was all pixie boots and ra-ra skirts, drainpipe jeans and people with short hair having one teeny tiny long plait at the nape of their neck. It was the Falklands war. It was Princess Diana’s wedding (Charles being the merest prop), Torville and Dean winning gold at the Winter Olympics. When you switched the radio on (and we did switch the radio on), it was to hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller playing. On Top of the Pops it was Adam Ant and Boy George, causing fathers across the land to lower their evening papers and say, ‘What the hell is that?’ The 80s was the decade when social change began to speed up, when people became increasingly hungry for money, progress, status and glittering prizes. But my early teenage years were inevitably a hangover from the 70s, and there were plenty of pockets of England where the principles of the 50s and 60s still ruled – nothing swinging or counterculture, thank you very much, no, class was the great delineator and respectability the most significant social capital. It was in just such a pocket that I grew up.
There is a photo in which I’m twelve I think, possibly thirteen, alongside my mother, on a hot beach in Devon. My mother wears pale blue trousers, a white short sleeved top in a fabric like pointelle or crochet, and a wide-brimmed hat. I’m wearing jeans rolled to my knees and a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled to my elbows. We may not have been the best dressed people on the beach but we were certainly the most dressed. I would bet good money that my mother still has her tights on under her slacks – she always says she feels too strange without them. My Dad’s concession to the sand and the heat is to remove his tie and socks. None of us owns swimwear, not least since my brother, who’s seven years older and has now left home, is the only one of us who can swim. (Theoretically I’ve been taught, but my lack of aptitude combined with horror at the junior school’s outdoor pool, in which little floating rafts of matted dead bugs and leaves occasionally drifted by.) We all like the beach and understand that it is a vital part of a summer holiday, but we certainly don’t go there to undress. We are a restrained family, modest and cautious, reserved, easily embarrassed and crippled by politeness.
The most important thing to know about me is that I am in the middle – well, let’s call it two thirds of the way through – my Agatha Christie obsession. I believe I was reading The ABC Murders at the time of this photo (I have a lot of memories that are anchored in place by a book). I had a fairly solid diet of Agatha between 12 and 14, punctuated here and there by Sherlock Holmes, the memoirs of Monica Dickens, Sweet Valley High books, Daphne du Maurier novels and – an outlier lent to me by an enterprising English teacher – Rosamund Lehman’s Invitation to the Waltz, which I loved. I am a swot. I actually like homework and do it the moment I get in from school. Mr Litlove, who did his homework in the car on the way to school on the day it was due, says that if we had met at this age, we would not have been friends and I believe him. It’s ironic really because Mr Litlove went to a good, fee-paying school while I went to a comprehensive, having failed my eleven-plus exam. Or not absolutely failed it, but only done well enough to be put in the single grammar class of my year’s intake. The school is brand new, and as we gradually rise up through the years, the classes below us become mixed ability, which is much more the ethos that the teachers want to embrace. Sport here is everything. At the end of each year we have an assembly that takes most of a morning in which prizes are doled out for sporting achievement. I have zero hand-eye coordination and couldn’t hit or kick with intent if you put a gun to my head. There is no recognition for academic work, no prizes or rewards. Liking work is something I keep very quiet about – I’m not daft, though I am desperately awkward. I keep a diary and write it at 6pm every evening, just before we have dinner because, frankly, nothing is going to happen of note after that. I spend my evenings reading and watching television at the same time; a skill of which I am unjustifiably proud.
When it rains on the beach we gather up our belongings and retire to the car park. Then we sit in the car and wait the rain out with our puzzle books. My dad favours crosswords and logic puzzles, but Mum and I like word search. There are some days when it is raining but we come to the beach regardless and sit in the car doing puzzles. That holiday I make friends with a girl about my age from Chingford. I remember the name because it strikes me as intriguingly exotic. She has a couple of younger brothers and a black labrador dog. We are sitting in the car when her family drives up. Despite the rain they all tumble out, whooping and calling to each other, yomping over the top of the sand dunes and out of sight. As I sit in the back of the car watching them, does my heart give me a pang? Do I wish I could be part of that family, who don’t mind getting wet, who are not afraid of fun? Well, yes, of course I do. But then I also wish I could be three inches shorter, with long blond hair and freckles. Some things are not your destiny.
You should know this about me. When I go with my parents to the library in town, we pass a pub that squats on the corner of two streets, garish in mustard coloured render. As we walk by, the sour malty exhalation from the ventilation shafts is actively frightening to me. When my German pen pal comes to stay on an organised exchange visit, I am forced into more active sociability than usual. On her last evening we go to the roller disco, a den of 80s overstimulation. I am utterly hopeless on roller skates. Two boys take a kind of pity on me and offer to propel me around the dance floor. We do a circuit, one hanging on to each of my arms. Even this is beyond me and I get hopelessly tangled up, my feet having all the directional ability of a rogue shopping trolley. ‘Cor, look at that!’ one of the boys shouts. ‘She wants to go backwards now!’ They drop me off in the seating area, laughing good-naturedly, before zooming off to fly around the floor, effortlessly.
Adolescence is the dawn of self-awareness and I was learning many inconvenient truths about myself. Adolescence is also the first great schooling in inauthenticity, figuring out how far we can betray ourselves to please the world. I could see it was going to take a lot of energy I didn’t have to transform myself into a fun, carefree person. An anxiety began to take root that I still feel even now: my issue was not that I longed to be released from the car and the puzzle book, but that I was never going to be allowed to stay there.
******
There is always a point growing up, as we try to enter the autonomy of self-government, when we stumble across something uncontrollable in ourselves, and something inconsolable. In me, such things usually manifested physically, in one form of anxiety or another.
I am fifteen years old and I wake in the night with a stomach ache. Never worry your parents, never disappoint your parents are my mantras, and so I get up and creep silently downstairs, staying close to the walls to avoid the sweep of my mother’s nighttime radar. We’ve not long moved house and now have a downstairs cloakroom, usefully located at the furthest point from their bedroom. Before, we lived on one of the wide arterial roads into town, in a three-bed semi; I fell asleep at night to the sounds of lorries rumbling by. I didn’t really like that house, and am thrilled with the new one. We are on one of the first roads to be built on what will become a huge estate. At present I walk to school over ploughed fields, but that will change. This house not only has a bathroom upstairs but an en suite in the main bedroom and this downstairs loo – it’s 1984 and a level of luxury that we never thought to possess.
So I am bitterly disappointed to find myself spoiling the moment with stomach aches. I used to have them quite often as a child, and my mother would set to with the heel of her hand, grinding it in circles while watching me with an anxious frown. It is cold downstairs but very quiet. I lock myself in and stand staring at the sink, the clean scoop of enamel a comfort. An hour or so passes, and I get so cold that eventually I return to bed. But the experience leaves something unresolved, and it starts to happen more regularly. More and more often I wake and steal downstairs. Then the stomach ache is no longer confined to the depths of the night but spreads out into the day. One evening, I am sitting up in bed reading Austen’s Northanger Abbey and despite being so taken by the storyline with Catherine Morland and her false friend, Isabella, I can’t concentrate on it. I wonder if my reading is somehow involved in this internal disquiet; it is, after all, just another kind of consumption and digestion. I have recently read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I loved but which spooked and unsettled me. I also tried to read Ruth Rendell but stalled at a scene of a woman being tormented inside her house by a man who pokes his bloodied fingers through her letterbox. There was something so queasy about it that I quickly pushed the book back into the shelf and don’t even like to look now at the spine.
I start to cut back on food. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with my weight or my figure. I am simply desperate to stop feeling sick and the only thing I can think of is that something I’m eating doesn’t agree with me. I monitor my response to every meal and because I feel sick so often, I decide there are many things I can’t eat. But here my memory fails me, because writing this down I think: how on earth did this play out? Did I refuse to eat the food my mother gave me? Impossible. Did I try to hide how little I was eating? More plausible, but there were just the three of us and we had all our meals together. How come neither of them noticed? All I know is that I got very thin and the problem with food lasted a long time, from the early autumn of one year into the late spring of the next. It got so bad that eventually I had to confess. I was taken to the doctor where I was given a lecture – there was always a lecture – this one misguidedly about anorexia, and a bottle of pink medicine. Jollop, my dad would call it. Anyway, the medicine helps; I start to feel better. My stomach calms, and I begin to eat again. Then one night about a fortnight later, I get up in the middle of the night, go to the main bathroom and am violently sick. In the morning my mother asks me wearily if I want to stay home. She’s been hoping we’d reached the end of this saga and is afraid of a further, worse chapter ahead. But in truth, I feel fine. Fundamentally better. And this is indeed the end. Afterwards, I eat my meals and I sleep at night. There are wobbles now and then, and for many years eating out in a restaurant will cause me quite intense anxiety, but the stomach aches go away.
I look back now and think that I must have been holding so much tension inside me, must have been so clenched, not just with fear and worry, but with fear of, and worry about, the fear and worry. The knottiness of that sentence reflects the knots in my gut. And now that I look back, I realize that the extremely obvious reason for so much anxiety must have been my impending O level exams. How did I not see this at the time? I was an expert in dissimulation, so I can understand to some extent why no one else saw it. But how could I have been so blind?
Something uncontrollable, something inconsolable. Over the years I have puzzled a great deal about the origins of my anxiety, and I’m inclined to trace them back to these teenage years when I was dimly becoming aware that there were differences between who I was, who I wanted to be and who I needed to be. How elastic was I, internally? I wanted to be without limits, to do all the things to please all the people. At some level I knew this was impossible, but I couldn’t accept the impossibility. That conflict had its own emotional runoff, and it was toxic. I had some confidence in my ability to pass exams; my cleverness was the only defining characteristic I actually liked. But what if I failed those exams like I failed the eleven plus? Who would I be then? And beneath all of this, down in the toxic waste, I was angry that I should be pushed into a corner, turned into an exam sitting machine and valuing myself only for this. It would take me years to unearth all these different layers of emotional response.
******
I am 17 and life is good; I have a boyfriend and a suntan.
Every day that there has been the least patch of clear blue sky, I have dragged the sunlounger out onto the patio, a rectangle of orangey floral fabric attached to a metal frame by a series of curly spiral springs. The more I use it, the more springs fly off, and my bottom now hangs dangerously close to the paving stones. The doors are open into the house and I listen to the Radio 1 roadshow while devouring books. I read my mother’s books (The Shell Seekers, Judith Krantz’s Scruples), I read my father’s books (the Lovejoy series, Inspector Morse), I read Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, The Chymical Wedding by Lyndsay Clarke, Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. I read Susan Howatch’s chunksters and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. I am a good girl and use sunscreen religiously, wafting around the toasty smell of Ambre Solaire factor 2, which probably has the same effect as basting myself in margarine.
As for the boyfriend, this happened a couple of months ago; the thrilling culmination of weeks of wondering and yearning and hoping. When I came in from school I forced myself to tell my mother, who was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. She wasn’t happy about it, but she was wise enough to realize there wasn’t much she could do. The potatoes bore the brunt and they were sensibly meek and submissive in her hands. We stood in her loud silence and watched the vegetable peeler skimming with fierce intent over their surfaces, unspooling skin.
This is my first boyfriend, although there have been a lot of unsuitable crushes and some distinctly unsuitable suitors. My first crush was the male half of the UK’s Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1982. By chance I came across a photo of Bardot quite recently and showed it to Mr Litlove, who sighed and shook his head. ‘Oh Litlove, how could you?’ This strikes me as a bit rich, given my taste has always been for slightly pretty men who give off an air of vulnerability, something Mr Litlove has ruthlessly exploited for 30 years. The unsuitable suitors came in a cluster. One of my teachers asked me to help out with wardrobe for the National Youth Theatre, and this broadened my circle of acquaintances significantly. A much older stagehand rang me up to propose, while a sweet 12-year-old told me he’d been thinking about me while looking at his watch and a small heart of condensation had formed on its face. He had two friends with him, eager puppies who backed him up enthusiastically. We saw it! It really happened! A heart! They went to an all-boys’ school and so I didn’t take this personally.
My boyfriend is someone who has been in my class at school all these years. He first impressed me in a needlework lesson, when we were introduced to a sewing machine. Given lined paper to follow and a machine with no thread, most of us produced drunken swirls of perforations, our needles veering wildly off course. Only T beside me produced orderly rows of empty stitches, neatly aligned. When I asked him how he’d managed it, he shrugged and said he’d sewn so many sails on his mother’s machine he’d had a lot of practice. Ah yes, sailing. His father had been in the Navy and T was headed there too, had it all mapped out even back then and never deviated from the plan. I liked that about him. He seemed self-contained, directed, clean-cut. I liked the brilliance of his dark eyes and the way he seemed to know what to do with his hands, didn’t leave them dangling by his sides like the other boys. But as we grew up he moved in different social circles to me, hanging out with the cool kids a parallel universe away. At 16, one of my friends extracted the information that yes, maybe I liked him better than the other boys in our class. Oh, fool that I was to trust her. I watched helplessly as she wove her way through the ranks of seating to the far side of the room where T sat, and told him. They both turned and looked at me. His eyes were very bright and he made the tiniest inclination of his head, a small nod of acquiescence like the polite greeting from a leader of a distant principality. Naturally a year passed before I ever dared catch his eye again.
T’s parents are rather lovely to me, very kind, even when I prove quite hopeless at steering a boat by its tiller. They also go out to the pub most nights, leaving us the house (and T’s younger brother, who knows his place and hides in his room. T drags him out the first time I go over, literally drags him with his hands under his armpits, says his name and then throws him back in his room again). I have changed my mind about pubs, now I realize how useful they can be. My own parents never leave the house in the evenings and are horrified, and inclined to be offended, when I suggest they might. Still, one evening returning from T’s, my mother tells me about a television program they’ve been watching. It follows the life of a Cambridge college, and the program they’ve just seen was all about interview season. My mother exclaims that one girl had six A’s at O level and they thought she was marvellous! Cambridge is madness. No one in my family has even been to university; the women before me were dressmakers and piano teachers, housewives and mothers. Cambridge seems as far beyond me as T was…. Which gives me pause for thought. I’m in an unusually expansive time, a uniquely expansive time, it will turn out, one that later in life I will spend decades trying and failing to repeat.
I look up the Cambridge courses. If I take modern languages, I could read a lot of books.
And what books! The Existentialists thrill me to the very core. I am dazzled by Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. These books are like drinking rarified air; they are based on ideas, on philosophies. I seem to be making a habit of falling in love, and this time it is with literature. I am sent a date for an interview and my mother is determined that whatever happens, I will not be open to the least criticism as far as my appearance goes. For her, clothes are armour, and this much she can give me. I am in my years of monochrome dressing; black, white and pale gray are acceptable, and I tend to favour straight, mannish lines. We buy me a suit with a white blouse underneath that has a small gold tie at the neck. My mother drives me to the interview, bursting with pride, and once I emerge, a little shell shocked, she drives me to T’s house, the first and last time she will ever do so, to show them, I think, what they are really dealing with. She doesn’t know that things are not so good between T and I. Every time I annoy him, he requires a few days’ cooling off period, and these coolings off are beginning to merge together into a long ice age. Trying to conduct a relationship in the white heat of sixth form gossip is proving more than our flawed communication skills can manage.
Anyway, I get a conditional offer and the work really begins. Cambridge requires me to sit its own special three-hour long exam paper in both French and German. I’m sent a copy for practice and take it to my German teacher, who boggles at it and tells me that it would be impossible to attempt such questions without having spent several years living in the country. This is not great news but frankly right now, I am punching so far above my intellectual weight that what does it really matter? I am flying, flying, with the great design of my life unfurling far below me. I am riding this unexpected thermal of confidence because I don’t know yet all the myriad ways that life can disappoint you and let you down. I haven’t learned yet that being good does not keep you safe or that virtue is not its own reward. I am drunk on my belief in discipline and hard work to get me out of here, here being a perfectly pleasant middle class enclave, and into the dazzling unknown.
At this point I commit the most serious transgression of my school career. A large bunch of us bunk off school for a day to go to a Bon Jovi concert in Hammersmith. Why we can’t catch the train after school I have no idea now, but we figured that if there were enough of us, the teachers couldn’t punish us quite so severely. So we spend the day shopping in London before taking the tube south of the river. I am wearing black trousers with pleats at the waistband, a white shirt and a black V-necked jumper. The first person I see when we arrive at the venue is a woman in a plunging lace top and leopard print leggings – and she turns out to be quite conservatively dressed. The feeling of being out of place spoils the evening for me, and T and I have a serious falling out. We end up sad and stony-faced, trying to avoid each other while being crushed together on the tube back to the station. The teachers impose a half-hearted punishment but I don’t care about that. I am not a rebel, that much is confirmed, because the experience simply wasn’t worth it. I’d have had a better time if I’d stayed at home reading.
T and I sit our exams in a state of estrangement. It’s not a surprise when, at a party some time afterwards, we end up in my (parent’s) car, breaking up. Years later, when my son breaks up with his first love, he is beyond devastated and I watch him with no idea how to help. I was sad about it, yes, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I am far more upset when my results come out and although the A level grades are fine, I’ve not met my requirements in the Cambridge papers. That day is awful. My mother, determined to celebrate the A levels, sends me a beautiful bunch of apricot roses. The delivery guy makes me pose for a photo with them, some company initiative probably intended to make happy people buy photographic portraits of their special moment. His face, when he looks at the screen at the back of his camera, is a picture of dismay.
But the following day a hefty A4 envelope arrives for me, full of information about my college. I have been lucky. One of my soon-to-be tutors set the paper and marked it, and miraculously, he has seen enough in my work to allow me to take up my place. This is the moment when I step forward onto the edge of the springboard. I stand there as it quivers beneath my feet and steady myself for the plunge. Looking back, I realize that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. At 18, ignorance is necessary insulation or you’d never do anything. You’d always stay in the backseat of the car with a puzzle book. But in years to come, when I would read many stories of womens’ lives, it would disconcert me every time that a happy ending for a woman was a romantic one. Was this a lack of imagination or a kind of mass cultural censor? What if the woman didn’t really want the man? What if what she really wanted was the work?
Adolescence taught me that I wanted different things from other people, and that was okay. It felt like a strong position. I believed I’d never feel shamed or coerced into doing things that felt wrong to me. In this calculation I entirely disregarded the indivisible remainder carried over from my childhood: the need to people-please. I thought it had been swallowed up into my new autonomy, never realising it had simply moved up a grade into greater abstraction. The university was about to become my tiger mother, and the need for success would quietly become both the best and worst aspect of my life.