Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  I was still so intent on shedding the familiar as fast as I was able that it never occurred to me how much I too had assimilated from home and school. Nor did I bother to observe what was close at hand or consider that things might not be as they outwardly seemed. For instance, Olga was to write describing a Workers’ Educational Association class that autumn at Hunmanby on ‘The Modern Novel and Social Problems’ in which the school bursar, a Methodist lay preacher, two teachers, a postman, some farmers and sixth-formers, along with herself, could be found arguing about race relations, totalitarianism, religion, fatalism, capital punishment and sex. I might have made the connection to Sartre’s observation on Brecht in my own 1960 Evergreen Review, and wondered about ‘the familiar’. Though this was to become a preoccupation which pursued me in many guises over the years, it was not for me then. At eighteen the unfamiliar had to be somewhere else.

  My sexual miasma persisted. That August I wrote to Tony, inquiring whether ceasing to be a virgin was, ‘i) after a penis has gone in, or ii) after there’s been an orgasm?’ I added, ‘Isn’t it ridiculous how ignorant people are kept, because people don’t just discuss sex naturally?’

  I had been talking with Mel, who was about to return to France, and we had both decided that everything would have been easier if I’d been a man. I complained to Tony that women were ‘expected to take an interest in cooking and kids, clothes and look attractive’. Moreover, even ‘intelligent’ people accepted that men could say things about sex which were taboo for women. If women said they wanted sexual relationships, for example, they were seen as whores. I resented having to opt for either being seen as ‘nice’ and acting hypocritically or getting categorized as ‘naughty’. The letter grumbled on, ‘No one seems to think about just being honest. I’m beginning to sound like a suffragette or something, but you know what I mean.’

  After Mel left that August I began spending time in a café near Ilkley moors, where Lindsay had assiduously assembled a circle of advanced people who wore Chelsea boots and enthused about Gurdjieff amidst the sauce bottles. I found myself between the devil and the deep blue sea, being rather too earthy for their higher planes and too mystical for Viv Wellburn, who had turned into a staunch socialist at Leeds University. Viv was unimpressed by my life and times in Paris, upbraiding me for going ‘beat’ and letting myself be directed by events. I held Viv, who had had a play put on and a review by Irving Wardle in the Times Literary Supplement, in awe. Nevertheless, I found her talk about ‘commitment’ rather abrasive, writing in protest to Tony that I thought I did control my reactions to events and this, I considered, was all you could hope for.

  Even so, when the positive-minded Viv hectored me to create, rather than drifting, I was stung enough to write a short story based on an anecdote I had heard about an anti-Semitic Polish refugee who had found himself in Leeds, a strongly Jewish city. Viv disapproved of the subject matter, but convinced me to send it to a literary magazine called New Departures, which presaged the underground. An encouraging rejection letter came back from the editor, Michael Horowitz, and I read out his criticisms to my mother in great excitement. He advised that if I wanted to write about people’s strongest feelings I should listen carefully to ‘all the stops in Charlie Parker’s rehearsals’, adding that Jack Kerouac was wrong – it ‘won’t just come like an orgasm’. ‘Fancy writing about orgasms like that to someone you don’t even know,’ commented my mother in surprise. But she was impressed that a real magazine person had written to me. I was particularly chuffed that he had asked me to send a stamp next time, as this suggested he considered me the type of person who would write some more.

  I scuttled off to play Charlie Parker. I was bothered about those orgasms though. How could you even tell that it wasn’t coming like an orgasm if you’d never had one?

  Michael Horowitz wished me ‘Happy New Departures’. That October, I was indeed to depart from Roundhay to Oxford. There I would quickly start burying recollections of adolescence, embarrassed by that earlier self, adrift without bearings and devoid of points of comparison.

  CHAPTER 2

  1961–4

  The first few days at St Hilda’s felt like a tape rewinding. At Oxford the fifties had been preserved and in a women’s college I was enclosed once again in an institution which returned me to the claustrophobia of Hunmanby. Certainly here you had your own room and the teachers were called dons, but you were still shut in at night, not free to come and go as you pleased. They called it ‘in loco parentis’.

  I had imagined myself meeting students with profound and intense minds, searching for truth and plumbing the universe, unaware that southern public schools and London ‘crammers’ studiously groomed young women for Oxford and Cambridge along narrowly defined tracks. ‘Why have you got poetry?’ inquired one undergraduate, peering at the dark-green hardback edition of Christopher Logue’s poems, chosen as my school literary prize, and the pale-blue paperback Livre de Poche’ collection of Rimbaud purchased in Paris. ‘Aren’t you doing history?’

  Feeling deflated, I unpacked my antique washed Levi’s, my shift dress with muddy gold and wine stripes bought in the Bon Marche in Paris, and my black tight dress with its halter-neck collar, which, despite its origins in Leeds Lewis’s, had an existential look, and hung them in the wardrobe attached to the wall – so like school. They dangled there in culture shock, waiting for someone with the requisite discrimination to open the door and appreciate the nuances of my carefully assembled beat identity.

  The first-year college photo caught me staring out like an alien, my hair now long and completely straight. I disdained ordering a copy; no Oxford college camaraderie for me – the lone misunderstood rebel. In long letters to Tony I announced that I was going to be miserable at Oxford.

  I had spotted someone with two pigtails and a fawn duffel coat in St Hilda’s who looked like a fellow spirit. This austere and beautiful figure, with dark eyes accentuated by black lines, possessed the high, pronounced cheekbones, made the ‘in’ facial feature by Brigitte Bardot, to which I vainly aspired. Judith Okely and I were to become friends, but our first meeting did not go well. Parrying, we checked one another out: Paris, tick; Camus and Sartre, tick. Then Judith asked me about my politics. Politics! I had been so intent on my beat reflections on the human condition that I had barely considered politics. Politics as I understood them took place in a removed terrain of elections and parties. Clutching at straws, I remembered that Olga had supported the Liberal Party. ‘I’m a sort of liberal,’ I mumbled. A terrible hush fell. Judith’s lip curled and she announced emphatically that she was a socialist. I realized glumly that I had said the wrong thing.

  I then gravitated to Anne Henderson from a Bromley grammar school (‘Direct grant,’ she explained). Anne was completely without any of my pretensions. Not at all existential, she still had the remains of a bouffant hairdo and liked clothes, a chat and a laugh. But the most important thing was that she wasn’t posh. Together, Anne and I could take on Oxford, lower middle class and proud. Having put so much effort into leaving Leeds, I set about rediscovering my roots at a distance.

  However, while the idyllic working-class hero was just arriving on the horizon in 1961, there was no such romantic literary genre to elevate a lower-middle-class woman. You were presumed thick in Oxford if you had even a middle-class Northern voice and my Yorkshire vowel sounds, which had resisted the best efforts of the Hunmanby elocution teacher, evoked complicit smirks. You were either a comedy routine or you lost your accent and talked posh.

  I had no sooner decided to dig myself into a position of uncompromising hostility as a defiant Northerner when Hermione and Catriona, in jeans and dark sweaters with scarves tied under their chins, came to visit my room. They sat on the bed and with many groans, giggles and grimaces toldme that they had been’debs’. I was amazed that debutantes, whom I had read about being received at court and attending balls in Tanfield’s Column in the Daily Mail, were sitting on my bed and were recognizably n
ormal people. Even though sounds came out of their throats which were unfamiliar – my Leeds voice seemed to use different zones of the larynx – they were fun and I took to them both.

  Hermione Harris, who became a lifelong friend, had a dissident Quaker strand in her background and, already at eighteen, looked out at the foibles of the world with an eye of undeceived clarity. Like a character in a Jane Austen novel applying herself to a contemporary setting, she explained that the beatnik-dressed upper-class girls who did the season could be the most ‘phoney’ people. Appearances, Hermione observed sagely, could be deceiving. This revelation disrupted my social categories. A few weeks in Oxford were making me dither.

  In Oxford things were not so clear as they had appeared in Leeds or in the Monaco. This was not simply a matter of my subjective perception. Barriers which would have remained tightly closed anywhere else were exceedingly permeable. The result was a mélange which reminded me of my mother’s descriptions of the boat to India. You were together, willy-nilly, for the duration of the voyage. Young women like myself, being of little account within the prevailing masculine ambience, could move back and forth, not only through class demarcations but between sets. Sex clinched this licence to shape-change; a five to one male to female ratio guaranteed a welcome. The advantage was that you could nose around and observe. Fascinated by dissolving boundary lines and ever curious, I found aspects of this social fluidity, inconceivable in most parts of British society at that time, intriguing. Thus, while wanting to be embedded, I also fancied flitting about. This enduring contradiction in my life posed itself as a particularly acute dilemma in my first term at Oxford.

  Gadding about was enjoyable, but I was determined not to be mopped up by Oxford, with its amoeba-like capacity to absorb all kinds of bits and bobs in their youth and turn them out stolid and double-chinned with the same creaky accents. The unknown might beckon, but a staunch combination of Northern pride and beatnik principles made me disdain not only the upper-class public school boys in their sports jackets, but the ‘smoothies’ and ‘arty types’ who wore corduroy jackets.

  Consequently, when I opened my door to an aesthetic-looking young man with light ginger hair falling in that peculiarly upper-middle-class way over his brow my hackles were up. In two bounds he was on the other side of my room and was seated cross-legged on top of the wardrobe, looking down on me like the caterpillar in Lewis Carroll. This was Derek Parfit and my first introduction to that distinctive Balliol confidence and charm. He wondered if I’d like to sell Mesopotamia,a satirical magazine which preceded Private Eye. In the late fifties and early sixties satire was ‘in’; laughing at records of Tom Lehrer and Lenny Bruce or at Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s satirical show Beyond the Fringe was an acceptable way of demonstrating a radical stance without being exactly political. So off I went, up and down the ancient staircases of that other Oxford outside the snug confines of St Hilda’s. By importuning all those lonely-looking, lost young men tucked away in rooms they seemed never to have left, I discovered that I enjoyed hawking things. A youth spent visiting National Coal Board offices with my father, selling Horace Green’s pit motors, had incongruously prepared me for Balliol’s Mesopotamia.

  These trips round male colleges confirmed the statistics: there were a lot of men at Oxford. However, statistics have their limitations and finding a man you could fancy was far more difficult. My convoluted criteria of correct accoutrements obviously made this particularly tricky, but to be fair I was prepared to modify the clothes inventory after a few weeks. The real problem concerned attitudes. Oxford male students sniggered to me about ‘buns in the oven’ and told me women were inferior and should be treated like dirt in order to make them crawl back for more. ‘I think that’s very immature,’ I would declare in lofty indignation, beating a hasty retreat. A more liberal slant was that women, like Robert Graves’s ‘White Goddesses’, were essentially different from men, their sexuality closely linked to fecundity. Being put on a pedestal felt uncomfortably like being put in my place and fostered a lasting aversion to goddesses.

  Beatniks’ views on sex might have been rough and ready on fidelity, but they held convictions about honesty and direct relating which were much more democratic and egalitarian than the conventions on offer. However, by that November I had abandoned hope of any beatnik sightings in Oxford, attaching myself instead to a group of students who also came from Yorkshire. We huddled together like expatriates over our Tetley’s beers.

  Among them was Barry Collins from Halifax. A politics student at Queen’s, Barry was conducting a one-man cultural offensive against Oxford mores on behalf of the working class with all the heroic self-destructive fervour of a nineteen-year-old. He took the piss out of the chiselled upper-class voices with those precise angles which somehow gave them the power to make banality seem incontestable. Barry saw it as a con and Oxford was part of the plot.

  We went out to the pictures and he made me laugh and laugh. His Halifax accent was reassuringly familiar, but he carved out meanings with words so that unexpected implications and irony were suddenly everywhere. Barry had the black hair and white skin of his Irish ancestry and a way of hunching himself against the cold in his donkey jacket and screwing up his eyes. He told me he was going to be a poet.

  And, well, what could I do but fall in love with Barry Collins – which meant, of course, that sex came up again. Through Barry I was to discover how passion takes hold of your body as well as your soul. Great gobs of longing and shaking paroxysms would sweep me away on the back row of the pictures, outside the gates of St Hilda’s, by the light of his gas fire. But I remained afraid. Like me, Barry’s outlook on sex had been formed by D. H. Lawrence. Skin must meet skin. Barry had thus concluded that sheaths were un-Lawrentian.

  Neither of us knew about any other form of contraception. We had reached an impasse. By this time I was able to envisage the terrible consequences of pregnancy more clearly. Not only would I be chucked out of Oxford: much worse, I would never, ever leave Roundhay. I could not imagine either an abortion or what having a baby would entail, but an abyss of dread would open before me, a terror even stronger than my desire. This fear of pleasure was meant to make us moral and I loathed it. I still loathe it.

  At the end of February Barry gave me a copy of Jacques Prévert’s poems for my birthday and told me it was over. He gave up Oxford, returned to Halifax, married his real girlfriend from school, Anne, and worked as a journalist before becoming a playwright. Nearly two decades later we were to meet again briefly. ‘Nowadays nobody would be as ignorant as we were about sex,’ he said.

  *

  By the end of the second term I had decided I had had enough of this falling in love with vanishing men. Numb and devastated I might be, but I was just nineteen and it was dawning on me that there was a frivolous fun in discovering you were attractive to men. It was spring and I set out to have a normal, nice time with a normal, nice and handsome young man. I bought an elegant shift dress, we sipped sherry at parties on Oxford lawns and I discovered that being driven over cobbles on his scooter aroused a vaguely pleasant sensation between my thighs. He did use sheaths but they seemed not to quite go on or to burst and my anxiety did not abate. Eventually, exasperated by my evasive sexuality, he told me angrily that I must be frigid. And that was that.

  I was not the only one steering without a compass between the dreaded Scylla of frigidity and the humiliating Charybdis branded ‘nymphomania’. A troupe of St Hilda’s women in my year, investing me with an undeserved wise-woman status because I was not a virgin, were coming to my door, asking for advice. Should they sleep with their boyfriends? I found counselling a heavy responsibility. Of course, I believed all the fuss about virginity was absurd. But what if anything happened? Not only were we all ignorant about contraception, but we had no idea who we could ask for advice. We felt terrified of asking the college doctor about contraception in case we would be exposed to the dons. Abortion, an inconceivable horror of gin and screams, wa
s still illegal. We couldn’t be expected to see round the corners of time, to realize that it felt so uncomfortable because we were living through a turning point when sexual attitudes were changing quickly and old ideas of propriety were in the process of being junked. Change seemed so painfully slow. Even in my last year at Oxford, one friend who did become pregnant concealed her bulging stomach in flowing shifts and sat her finals without telling a soul, giving birth shortly after.

  By the end of my first year I had grasped that beneath the superficial resemblances between Methodist Hunmanby and life in an Oxford women’s college there were very significant differences. Methodist Hunmanby, preparing us for a life of moral witness, had instilled the virtues of honesty: regardless of the consequences, you answered to your inner conscience. Ruling-class Oxford, in contrast, was based on getting round the rules; the crime was to be found out – especially if you were female.

  St Hilda’s was replete with regulations which seemed to me and my dissident friends to be archaic. For instance, every evening we had to sign out and report in by twelve. You could easily evade this by going out earlier in the day. However, when you returned late, you then had to climb in. This involved dodging the porter’s prodding torch and making your way over spiked railings, across a roof, through a window, out of the building, across the lawn, to scale up a fire-escape ladder flat on the wall for three storeys before clambering to safety. Games of commandos and cricket at Hunmanby fortunately enabled me to accomplish this cross between an outward-bound course and the Gladiators dressed in my customary tight skirts, stockings and stilettos without mishap. One St Hilda’s student was not so lucky. I found her in the morning desperately staunching an open wound between her breasts with a bloody towel. She had slipped and impaled herself on a point of the railings but was too terrified to ask for a doctor during the night. Even that morning she wouldn’t go to the college doctor. The rules were callous, not just absurd.