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I was scared that it would but, for once, I just didn’t care. I had to start looking after myself. Enough was enough. So I just refused, and let the violence of Barbara and Kevin rain down upon me, just as it always did. And, of course, things were only going to get worse before they got better.
18
Collision Course
I was on a collision course with school, a collision course with home and a collision course with life. At school I hung out with the thick girls in the lower classes, at least when I got to school and stayed for the first half an hour. There would be Pakistani men hanging around the gates of our school who came from the Cowley Road, and one friend, Sandy, would chat to one or two and then disappear. I would look at the men, drooling all over my friend, and watch her as she turned and waved briefly at me, and then went off with them. There were many girls doing this, lured by free drinks, drugs and unlimited male attention. I didn’t like the look of it. I kept clear and worried what might happen to Sandy.
They tried to chat me up, and Sandy said, ‘C’mon, Louise,’ but I got away as fast as I could – my hairs standing up on my skin, sensing danger. Sandy would tell me later what she got up to. She was having unprotected sex with several of the men – who were really old and married – but she said she was enjoying herself. At least at first. I didn’t really believe it, as I didn’t like the feelings I got when I saw them. They were bad news. For me, freedom was what I was after. I was wary of anything that would tie me down or pin me to any obligation.
Home was getting harder and harder and I was desperate to get out. As I got taller, Kevin was taking over the regular discipline, as well as Barbara. If I was late back, he would violently grab my hair, push me against the wall, shouting, then punch me, pulling me down to the floor to give me a good kicking. She gave him total permission to damage me as much as he liked. She would be standing, smirking, enjoying my pain. Barbara behaved more and more like a helpless lady that Kevin had to protect from me, the marauding punk girl.
One day when our paths crossed in the Rec, he grabbed me, shoved me into a nettle bed and held me down. He was still sleazing at my body, trying to touch me all the time. One time he pushed me up against the back of the shed and shoved his tongue in my mouth. I managed to escape. Just. It was utterly disgusting. I hated him. With all my might I pushed him off and sent him flying. But it was a daily battle zone.
Meanwhile, Ian was floating around ignoring everything. I’m sure he could hear the screams, the shouts, the fights, but he ducked into his garage and put Radio 3 on loudly to block it all out. He was a total coward.
I was still wandering around the city as much as I could, despite being given detention after detention. I became a regular on the benches in the various locations and in the University Parks, and was on nodding terms with many academics and mature students. I now took clothes to school to change into, so I didn’t look like a schoolgirl any more. I was turning fourteen but felt ancient. I got hold of some money somehow and, with one of my friends, bought some dye and began to experiment with my hair. I made it very black to start with, like my music heroes. I was listening to as much punk and rock music as I could – usually in my favourite cafés, sometimes in the garage on Ian’s old radio when people were out. I was loving Toyah, Debbie Harry, the Stranglers, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders. These voices, these songs, spoke to me: raw, passionate, angry, energetic.
I would ‘pogo’ wildly for five or ten minutes, jumping up and down like a maniac and getting my fury out in the garage. It was wonderful. I loved their look: dark hair, pale faces, big molten eyes, serious gothic looks. I began to make that my own style. I loved make-up and creating a face, a mask. It was my body art. I experimented, scouring the second-hand shops (familiar territory for me) and found black satin Chinese slippers, lime socks, pink socks, black clothes. Dirt cheap. I got some old Doc Martens boots. I’d use my needle and thread to customise things. I wanted a ‘don’t mess with me’ look, like Chrissie, Blondie or Patti. I wanted to look beautiful; I wanted to be a new me.
I would get studs and push them through my ears in several places with a needle and cork. I was used to pain, so I didn’t flinch. I was used to not feeling things happening to my body, so there were no tears. I loved the Human League, so I began to train my hair over one eye like the lead singer. Earlier I had found a way of putting on barely-there mascara, foundation and lipstick, as make-up was banned at school. But now I was coming out as me, I began to sculpt my own image. I was attracted to all that was theatrical, dramatic and wild. I loved burnished gold, shiny silver, multi-coloured glitter, bright colours like shocking neon pink and purple. I craved colour, colour, colour – just like the colours adorning beautiful flowers.
I loved the look of Cleopatra in the film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: I copied her fabulous eye make-up. I wanted lashings of black eye-liner and mascara. I wanted to do everything that both school and home disliked. I found cheap, multi-coloured scarves and wound them round my head, African style, and I had ponytails and thick frizzy backcombs. I loved old prints and weird styles, which I changed into strange garments. I wore pale lips and blood-red lips, according to my mood. I became my own focus.
Because I was so sensitive to smell (and always smelling bad), I got some patchouli, chocolate and coconut oils from the Body Shop, which was a revelation to me (best part being you could fill up and re-use bottles cheaply). I was my own art project. Bowie was in my soul: I was creating myself, creating my image, feeding myself. I had been starved for so long of any self-expression that it was beginning to burst out of every pore as ‘ME’. I was becoming a Rebel with a capital R; a Dropout with a capital D. Nothing was going to stop me now.
When I did hang out at school, under threat of this or that, I signed up for Religious Studies CSE. It wasn’t a popular subject, but I ended up having one-to-one lessons with a great teacher. He was a nice Greek man, Mr Papadopolous, much younger than the other stuffy teachers, and we would sit on the windowsill next to each other and talk about politics and ideas. He explained about Nelson Mandela and his fight against oppression in South Africa that was raging at the time – he was still in prison, still fighting.
I understood, instinctively, how bad apartheid was, coming from my own oppressive, unfair regime at home. We talked about Mahatma Ghandi in India, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the problem of British Colonialism. I hadn’t really understood any of this before. He also explained what was happening with women’s rights in the UK and America, and I began to get very excited about these ideas. Women were demanding equal pay, they wanted sexual equality, they didn’t want to be wives and chattels. He explained how the contraceptive pill had changed women’s lives for ever in the 1960s; now they had choice when and if to have babies. He told me to read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Mr Papadopoulous told the story of what had happened to Martin Luther King in America and I was appalled: shot for fighting against the oppression of his people. I hated slavery. I could understand the anger of people who had been put down, imprisoned, oppressed, violated, used and abused, and it was like he was opening up my mind to a whole new world.
Being with Mr Papadopoulous was wonderful. He treated me like an equal. He spoke to me like I wasn’t stupid. He made me think about things. I had lost the plot with the rest of school (except art), but he didn’t speak down to me. We talked about social problems, about identity and class, and the bad things going on in the world. I asked him, ‘Why do people do such bad things in the world?’ and he said, ‘They do it because they can – until they are stopped.’
That stayed with me: people could hurt others unless they were stopped. And it seemed – in America and in South Africa and even in the UK – people were trying to stop people hurting black and minority ethnic people. Women were trying to stop being hurt across the world. I thought about Sandy going off with t
he creepy men, and wondered if she knew about women’s rights.
I started questioning my own identity (as Jewish, for instance). I started writing poems and drawing all sorts of new things. I felt, when talking to Mr Papadopolous, that there were some beginnings of hope after all. While I spent the mornings hanging out with the rough and tough girls, or dropping into art or religious studies, I would often go round to the ‘popular’ and ‘nice’ girls’ houses in the afternoons and some evenings. I liked hanging out with their families and their mothers, in particular. I began to find other girls’ mothers to talk to. I had learnt for a very long time with Barbara to be polite and to present myself well. I was never really part of the family at home, always the stranger, and I had to ask permission for everything as an outsider. So, when I met new people I knew what to do. I could make myself very presentable, could be polite and charming, despite looking increasingly punk.
I guess I was now looking more ‘artistic’ too, and the more middle-class friends and families actually respected it (unlike at home, where I got criticised all the time for everything, especially anything creative). One of my ‘posh’ friends, Petula, had parents who were both working: her dad was an architect and her mum was a teacher. Their house was a huge ramshackle pile with Heals furniture, giant beanbags and lampshades that hung low over the dinner table. They ate brown rice and interesting vegetarian food with spices and colourful salads. I’d never before had anything spicy, and I loved it straight away.
Her mum was kind and took to me. Their cat had just had kittens and she was gentle and sweet with them. I was used to crude violence towards animals, including drowning them in buckets, once Barbara felt they got in the way. Petula’s mum reminded me of the hippy mums I’d found so welcoming when I was younger. Even though she’d long stopped wearing flowing dresses, beads and bracelets, she still came across as ‘alternative’. I would sit at the dinner table, next to Petula, and discuss with them things I’d learnt from Mr Papadopoulous.
Petula’s mum (‘Call me Susie’) would put her head on one side and listen. Listen! I was being listened to. This was a whole new experience. As we forked rice and peas and vegetables into our mouths and drank red wine (she poured me a glass), we actually conversed about things. I was included. It was a wonderful experience. We talked politics most of the time: Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch, or about the Common Market. We listened to the Stones and the Beatles quite openly, all together. Everyone laughed as Petula’s dad (‘Call me Jimmy’) danced round the kitchen, washing up. It was fun. Life could be fun. Families could have fun. They could actually be nice to each other, and co-operative. This was a total revelation to me.
However, the one topic of conversation I never entered into was what was really going on at home. This was a dark, shameful secret that I kept totally to myself. I did not want people to know. I didn’t want to be pitied, or to be different, so I tried hard to fit in. My lying continued, and sometimes I made up huge fibs about what we were doing for our holidays or what my parents were up to: ‘Oh, we’re trying France this year.’
The only holidays we actually had were day trips to the asylum to visit Barbara’s long-lost youngest brother – he was a permanent inpatient in a local mental hospital, and we brought sandwiches with us and ate them on the dry, brown grass. Apart from that, there were no holidays. But I was too ashamed, too humiliated, to really let on what life was like in the house of horrors. I wanted to fit in with the nice posh people. I didn’t want to be different, the oddball. I was so tired of all that now.
One of the nice things about the ‘New Age’ mums was that they respected and appreciated me as an artist. They could see, in the way I was dressing, that I was artistic and it didn’t put them off. If anything it gained me respect. This was amazing for me. I wasn’t put down, slagged off or criticised. I was accepted. Everyone knew I was good at art. I was now determined to go to art school, and that was something I talked about to the groovy parents.
The one thing I did reveal about home was that my parents were not keen for me to go. One day, unbeknownst to me, Petula’s mum dropped in on Barbara without warning to talk to her about me going to art school. This was after a particularly heated row at home, when I’d been slapped about by Barbara and told, ‘Don’t be so stupid, you’re not going to any bloody art school. Over my dead body.’
I wish, was my thought.
Apparently Susie had just turned up at the house unannounced and knocked on the door. When Barbara opened it she was already red in the face, as she was in a fury about something else altogether, and she snapped, ‘Who the hell are you?’
I was out at the time, probably with the boys down the Rec, and had no knowledge of this encounter. I was told afterwards by Susie that when they went through to the kitchen, Barbara had already thrown a lot of crockery out on the lawn and smashed it. The lawnmower had been turned on its side and there were other things, like saucepans, lurking in the flowerbeds. Susie had thought this all very strange. So when she reported this back to me, over macrobiotic vegetable curry later in the week, I wanted to disappear under the white throw rugs.
She asked me about Barbara’s behaviour. She looked at me with sincere warmth and kindness, and I just said, ‘Oh, she’s had some bad news about her family, so I guess she was feeling upset.’
