Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  Judith Okely, in her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, relates how as a young girl de Beauvoir would read books as a means of translating herself into other worlds, employing ‘the word dépayser (to change scenery or disorientate) to describe what they did for her’. The precision of the French language provides words for mental processes which remain an ambiguous mush in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. I could not have expressed it so neatly, but this was exactly what I was doing when I set off with the Evergreen Review, ready to brave all on a lonely quest for profundity. Though I had no idea what this entailed, I was sure it would involve a profound disorientation from Hunmanby and Roundhay. I would live in some heightened state of becoming, seeing what had never been seen.

  Like many other young sixties rebels, I assumed that whatever I had just discovered was somehow new. We saw ourselves at the cutting edge of cultural innovation. In fact we were constantly dipping into earlier decades for inspiration and influences, helping ourselves to French existentialism and New Wave films or to protest songs and rhythm and blues from America. It was not so much the components but the particular fusion that was our own invention. For reasons beyond our control, the mix was to be perpetuated by the growth of a subculture. Structural changes as the decade unfolded were to create waves of dissident young people with some surplus cash for leisure and ideas about their destiny gleaned from growing access to the liberal education of the universities. The ripples persisted long after the sixties were over.

  At the age of seventeen, I was of course unable to foresee that this great crowd of outsiders was going to show up, nor could I conceive that they were destined eventually to turn into a greying establishment. Consequently I would work myself into a perpetual pother attempting to lure being and nothingness, by sheer willpower, over the wooded mound where Hun had been allowed to build his settlement by the Viking king.

  One sardonic voice did penetrate the ardour of adolescence; the bantering humour of my history teacher, Olga Wilkinson, could make me pause and laugh wryly at myself. Olga, then in her thirties, should, according to the conventions of the time, have appeared ugly. She had a large face, a propensity to sties and a red nose, along with a large, most determined chin. Yet even on wintry Hunmanby mornings, she contrived to look terrific in expensive suits and fashionable black-rimmed glasses. If I had known the word then, I would have said that Olga had style. She liked Vogue, stately homes and Baroque architecture. However, from an East Yorkshire Methodist farming family, she was also a specialist in local agricultural history and Methodist architecture. She taught us A-level history by taking us to churches and chapels, Palladian houses and medieval digs. It was a drive in Olga’s car along moorland roads thick with fog, to a lecture in Pocklington, which had aroused my interest in the Celtic crosses. Olga’s history lessons ingrained the habit of inquiring where things had come from; why someone expressed a particular opinion; why people came to think the way they did. Her scepticism and humanistic tolerance countered beatnik enthusiasm and her deep sense of continuity tempered the attraction of all absolute iconoclasms.

  In the autumn of 1960 Bar went off to Bristol to study French, while Lindsay and I stayed at Hunmanby to do the entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. I awaited Bar’s letters eagerly. She was at university and thus on the front line. Her excitement sprawled over the pages of hastily composed epistles. She longed to be able to talk. She had met a boy who spoke ‘our language’ – it was as if we were a tribe apart. Finding similar people was delightful, for it meant that our enclaves of oddness began to extend outwards and that existence was about to burst asunder and form afresh.

  ‘There’s so much to think about,’ she wrote, and the ideas tumbled out about Gide’s views on classicism, New Wave films and the Alder-maston march. She had gravitated towards left-wing students from the drama department, several of whom were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. From 1958 CND had begun organizing marches every Easter, originally from London to the weapons-research establishment at Aldermaston, though later the route was to be reversed. They were demanding that Britain should unilaterally ‘Ban the Bomb’. CND was the first social movement which broke with party politics and represented a moral cause as much as an explicitly political one to the marchers.

  While CND was to act as a catalyst for a counter-culture in which many kinds of youthful dissidence assumed visibility, for me politics remained peripheral. I was preoccupied with new kinds of personal relating rather than commitment to external social change in any conventional political sense, following in the steps of Bloomsbury and the beats rather than Marx and Bakunin. E. M. Forster’s Howards End, our A-level English set text, had left a strong impression – all the more so because the two main characters doing the relating were advanced young women. As for sex, like many adolescents in this era I had imbibed the torrential and earnest D. H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been published by Penguin in 1960. But the evidence was mounting that neither Forster nor Lawrence fitted the dilemmas we faced about how to behave as young women.

  Bar’s letters puzzled away about the young men she met in Bristol CND or in the university drama department. They were not looking for oneness, nor did they share our intensity about ‘relationships’. They were preoccupied with being cool, discarding conventions and living, as far as possible, from day to day. And they wanted sex. She reflected, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s most different in men and women where relationships are concerned is the sense of urgency in women and the lack of it in men.’

  Without realizing, she was expressing a turmoil of confusion and a collision of assumptions which many young women like us were facing all over the country. Determined not to follow the patterns set by our mothers in being women, we wanted to relate differently to men, but there were no received assumptions about how this might be. We appeared to have no history, no culture, certainly no movement, just snatches of suggestion to ponder. Too romantic for the cynicism of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, I made my own compilation of Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Greco singing ‘Je suis comme je suis’, Edith Piaf’s wail ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ and Bessie Smith’s earthy blues.

  Basing your life on faraway echoes could be a little unnerving, so it was a major advance when Bar found lodgings with Mrs Watts, whom I met when I visited Bristol during half-term. Accustomed to ‘theatricals’, Mrs Watts was the ideal landlady, her qualifications being that she enjoyed chatting about our life and (would-be) loves and seemed unshockable. Nonetheless, despite her racy twinkle, unlike Bar and myself Mrs Watts was a realist. She thought the earnest frankness we applied to sexual relationships was misguided. Untouched by either existentialism or Methodism, she tried to tell us that we should play the field strategically and recognize our power as young women. ‘We used to demand a mink at least for what you are willing to do for nothing,’ she exclaimed in the kitchen, waving a cup of tea for dramatic effect. Of course we didn’t listen. We were going to break all those old irrational rules and restrictions. And what would we do with a mink anyway?

  I was still in that concertina time of adolescence and those few extra months at Hunmanby crawled interminably. One day in the school Bible class, which was held in a room surrounded by bookcases looking out on to the stables where Pete, the only sexy young workman in the school, used to take a succession of girls, the chaplain asked, ‘How do you feel, girls, personally about this moment of communion – that special moment of contact with God?’ It sounded like a line from the satirical script of Beyond the Fringe, but I kept a straight face and inquired wickedly, ‘Was the ecstasy of communion comparable to orgasm?’ When the poor gauche man blushed I felt no remorse, just the rage of a seventeen-year-old against confinement.

  To my Leeds townee eyes, being stuck in Hunmanby an extra term was the equivalent of exile in Siberia. The arrival of a new French teacher from Cambridge with a baby, a broken marriage and a duffel coat who was prepared to read Les Mains Sales was the only g
ood news. She would struggle across the freezing quad, her long light brown hair escaping from combs and clips in the wind, a harbinger of hope who had miraculously reached Hunmanby.

  My own hair growing had received a setback. Olga, who maintained that I increasingly resembled a Pekinese (my layers had to grow out), made a deal with me. If I had a tidy haircut before my interview for Oxford, she would persuade my father to let me go to Paris, to join Bar for several months before the university year started. So a Leeds hairdresser had clipped a tidy bouffant haircut and my aspiration to look scruffy had to be placed on hold.

  In my Oxford exam I had answered a question wrongly. ‘ “Age of Faith” or “Age of Reason”? Discuss.’ You were meant to do one or the other; I did both. Though I had never studied medieval history, I had read stuff about the Renaissance being preceded by medieval humanism. By a lucky fluke this delighted Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, who was a scholar of medieval humanism, and I was accepted.

  Being given a place at Oxford was an honour, but it left me permanently perplexed by the arbitrary nature of what was defined as ‘intelligence’. For years I had been regarded as stupid until I could specialize in history and literature, whereupon I was classed as clever. Now I had done what teachers warned you against and answered the wrong question, and I was being rewarded. It didn’t make sense. It never did. However, even at seventeen I could be a bit pragmatic. I proceeded to dump my red-brick Angry’ credentials for Oxbridge.

  It was Lindsay, who didn’t get in, who nonetheless managed to have a much more interesting time going for an interview. On the station she met Tony Kaye from a Catholic boarding school, Ampleforth. Tony was tall and extremely thin, with dark hair and glasses, a cross between a Gothic perpendicular church and a daddy-long-legs. He was the son of a bluff Hull tool manufacturer who was undoubtedly perplexed by his bizarre offspring. Thanks to their love affair, I found a soulmate. I regarded Tony as the fount of all scientific knowledge (he was to study psychology at Cambridge) and interrogated him on everything beyond my literary or historical ken, from mescalin (we read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception) to the geometrical puzzle of sexual intercourse. He was also wonderfully ready to listen to my latest profound ideas about existence. Bar and Lindsay, who knew me rather better, were inclined to take my theories with a pinch of salt.

  Like us, Tony lived in perpetual alienation from where he happened to be. In his case it was Hull and Ampleforth instead of Leeds and Hunmanby. Lindsay and I once visited him at Ampleforth, a vast brooding building of dull dark stone, part monastery, part fortress, rising amidst woodlands and low hills. I’d never seen a monk before and was intrigued by the oddness of men’s legs moving in skirts as their robes swished past us in the corridors. I stared at the vigorous faces of sixteenth-century benefactors in the portraits along the walls, pondering their Catholicism.

  Despite being so different from Methodist Hunmanby, Ampleforth had somehow produced a similar rebel and the first male addition to our hitherto completely female band. The four of us combined to invent an imaginary space out of our sense of displacement, a realm where existence would be always real, always poetic. We were willing it through talk, like the Parisian intellectuals we admired. But instead of boulevards we had Briggate in Leeds and our Deux Magots was a coffee bar near Lewis’s called the Flamenco.

  Early in January 1961 Tony, Lindsay, Bar and I sat round a table at the Flamenco in our carefully studied brown and black clothes, bursting with the future. Three of us were relocating physically. Tony had a job as a school assistant in a little place called Bressuire; Bar and I were heading for the Cours de Civilisation at the Sorbonne in Paris, where we would listen to great French professors. We were not just changing scenery, we were cultural migrants.

  As the taxi from the airport headed towards the Latin Quarter and my room in a cheap hotel, I watched the meter anxiously. My sense of cities was still measured through Leeds, but Paris went on and on. Suddenly young people were spilling over the pavements of the Boulevard St Michel, their clothes signalling ‘French students’ with a deft precision. The young women wore dark brown suede jackets in those Parisian styles which made the Leeds ones look clumpy. The young men were in fawn belted macs, some with neat goatee beards or rimless glasses. These Sorbonne étudiants constituted a recognizable and unembarrassed section of French society, where education was accepted. In contrast, their English equivalents, either in college scarves and sports jackets or defiantly ‘scruffy’ in duffel coats, would have been regarded with a resentment mixed with contempt.

  As the cab slowed down in the congested traffic I could see exercise books in stacks outside a shop selling those white, soft-backed French volumes along with colourful cheap ‘Livre de Poche’ editions. My driver pressed his horn. The hooting din all round, accompanied by shouted altercations through car windows and much waving of arms, amazed me. This was definitely not Leeds. I was in France! I sat back, relaxed and breathed freedom, preparing to transmogrify into a cross between Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot.

  But it was still me looking into the mirror of a small hotel room, the red hair I was intent on growing falling in two wings over my brow, the Hunmanby pink of my cheeks blotted out with pale make-up, which also concealed my lips, while two black existentialist lines accentuated my eyes. I sucked in my cheeks, sighing at my failure to look at all gaunt and raddled. Whereupon I turned to the making of my new ambience, unpacking my white ‘modern’ fibreglass case and pinning up my postcards of Picasso’s blue period and Toulouse-Lautrec, cultural treasures from a school trip to the Louvre. Then I drew back the shutters and looked out over the roofs. I was free – and terribly lonely.

  As Bar was living far out in the suburbs and working for her keep as an au pair, I would wander alone around the Left Bank, leafing through the second-hand bookstalls by the Seine, staring at the windows of little shops full of strange objects from Africa, visiting art galleries or laughing to myself at the Ionesco one-act plays in the tiny Théâtre de la Huchette. Monsieur at the reception desk was all insinuating smiles as I came and went. However, Madame regarded me with stony disapproval.

  Alone for long periods for the first time in my life, I drew on the inner world I had acquired secretly in defiance of the routines and enforced collectivity of boarding school. I imagined myself as unique; in fact I was an entirely predictable cultural phenomenon. The Left Bank was full of young Britons and Americans drifting through Paris searching for traces of forties existentialists. Among them was Judith Okely, busy underlining sections of The Second Sex about the young girl becoming intoxicated by her solitude and promising that the future ‘will be a revenge upon the mediocrity of her present life’.

  Student life in Paris was not as I had imagined. The great French professors, for instance, were a real letdown. During the week, we foreigners on the Cours de la Civilisation would cram into a vast auditorium at the Sorbonne to listen to them intoning what seemed to me to be platitudes. Everything was cut and dried, without openings for questions. They may have been great minds, but they were not wasting any pearls of wisdom on the students on the Cours de la Civilisation. I slowly realized that paradoxically the regimented French education system was much less open to intellectual inquiry than the teaching I had received at Hunmanby. Our Cours Pratique was even worse: a grammar lesson taught by rote by a man who never smiled. Cherishing every last moment of freedom before it began, I used to saunter across the Luxembourg Gardens, reluctantly dragging my feet in the direction of the classroom.

  After a month or so I gave up, occupying the grammar test by writing to Tony in faraway Bressuire on the square-lined paper I had bought in the Boulevard St Michel. I had been reading Camus’s Les Justes and was troubled about the revolutionary who believed that the ends justified the means. I admired people who were committed but thought individuals were ‘often more attractive than causes’. Was my sympathy for the individual socialist, intellectual sentimentalism? This did not help my French grammar but
it was a dilemma that was to travel with me for the rest of my life.

  Things were not going at all well on the deep-conversations-on-the-meaning-of-life front, when a group of French students invited me to see Brecht’s The Preventable Rise of Arturo Ui at the Théâtre National Populaire. I thus stumbled inadvertently upon an adventurous production by Jean Vilar, who was to inspire a new generation in Britain and France with the possibility of a democratized drama. I was already interested in Brecht and could recognize the innovative verve of the performance. But it was very hard for me to follow in French and went on for three hours. So despite my desperate desire to understand, I had to admit to Tony, ‘alienation in an alien tongue unfortunately often = incomprehension’.

  There was more incomprehension during the interval when the French students chatted together in slangy camaraderie. I was puzzled not only by their French but by their whole approach to plays and books. Unlike me, they did not regard these as containing meanings to live by, vehicles for the examination of the inner soul, but simply as an acceptable veneer for the intelligent bourgeois. In England their equivalents would not have found this easy familiarity with an intellectual culture necessary for small talk. The sexual mores foxed me too. Elaborate rituals of flirtation led more or less nowhere; it was all diversion. The reason was basic and practical. In 1960 contraceptives were still illegal in Catholic France. Moreover, the intact hymen retained some symbolic meaning; older women shop assistants would murmur ‘jeune fille’ sotto voce in doom-laden voices when I asked for tampons at the chemist’s.