by Bee Rowlatt
In Search of Mary
The Mother of All Journeys
BEE ROWLATT
ALMA BOOKS LTD
Hogarth House
32–34 Paradise Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 1SE
United Kingdom
www.almabooks.com
First published by Alma Books Limited in 2015
© Bee Rowlatt, 2015
Bee Rowlatt asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
ISBN: 978-1-84688-378-1
eBook ISBN : 978-1-84688-385-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
Chapter One
There’s Something about Mary
Chapter Two
Half a Million Small Things
Chapter Three
“I Feel Myself Unequal to the Task”
Chapter Four
“Sympathy in a Strange Land”
Chapter Five
“In a Little Boat upon the Ocean”
Chapter Six
Obvious Progress
Chapter Seven
“To Achieve That Moral Improvement within Half a Century”
Chapter Eight
Baby, You Can Drive My Career
PART TWO
Chapter Nine
A Hopeful Feeling
Chapter Ten
Allons enfants de la matrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé
Chapter Eleven
How Not to Betray the Light?
Chapter Twelve
Enter the Dragon of the Crock
PART THREE
Chapter Thirteen
The Electric Calpol Acid Test
Chapter Fourteen
The Rainbow-Brick Road from Interconnectedness to Juicy Nubs
Chapter Fifteen
The Unopened Chapter of Death
Chapter Sixteen
I’ve Drunk of These Cups and I’m Walking away
Chapter Seventeen
The Croak
Chapter Eighteen
“Acquire Sufficient Fortitude to Pursue Your Own Happiness”
FOR JUSTIN:
MY OTHER HALF, MY BEST MATE,
MY LOVE
In Search of Mary
The Mother of All Journeys
Advertisement prefacing Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark:
The writing travels, or memoirs, has ever been a pleasant employment; for vanity or sensibility always renders it interesting. In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person – “the little hero of each tale”. I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived I could not give a just description of what I saw but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings whilst the impression was still fresh.
A person has a right, I have sometimes thought, when amused by a witty or interesting egoist, to talk of himself when he can win on our attention by acquiring our affection. Whether I deserve to rank amongst this privileged number, my readers alone can judge – and I give them leave to shut the book, if they do not wish to become better acquainted with me.
My plan was simply to endeavour to give a just view of the present state of the countries I have passed through, as far as I could obtain information during so short a residence; avoiding those details which, without being very useful to travellers who follow the same route, appear very insipid to those who only accompany you in their chair.
– Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796
Me too.
– Bee Rowlatt, 2015
PART ONE
Chapter One
There’s Something about Mary
I’m nineteen, and Paul and Nello are arranging my thong. It’s white diamante. We’re backstage in a corridor – dancers and musicians are rushing by in both directions. They yank it higher up my bum, chatting across me about my body shape and how I got on in rehearsals:
“She can’t do round kicks either, not high enough anyway.”
“Well yes, too balletic maybe?”
“Exactly – well, it’s not fucking Swan Lake, is it.”
It really isn’t Swan Lake. Nello is the entertainment boss at the Isla del Lago Theatre, and Paul is the captain of our troupe. Nello has a bright-black bubble perm and wanders around singing in an open towelling robe and patent shoes. Paul has bouffant hair and a face weathered by sarcasm. And he’s taken against me and my offending balletic arms. “Are you a virgin?” he sneers. I’m being heaved around like a farm animal, on my second day as a showgirl.
I’m scrabbling at the lower slopes of a steep learning curve. After years of dance training, this is my first ever professional gig. It follows a series of bizarre and innocence-murdering auditions. I’d trail down to London from my hometown of York, following little adverts in the back of The Stage newspaper. Some jobs were legit, others were not. It took a while to learn to decipher them. At one audition in London’s prestigious Pineapple Studios, we were shown a routine and made to repeat it again and again. After each performance a handful of girls were told to leave. An hour later I was still in, and my fear began to be tempered with a growing sense of triumph. But then the auditioner shouted: “OK girls, it’s a topless job. So get them out or leave.” Most of the girls obediently peeled down their leotards to reveal their breasts. A few of us walked out. I slowly made my way back to Victoria Coach Station in tears, vowing not to tell my mum.
But finally I’ve landed a proper job, and here I am. It hasn’t got off to the best of starts though. On my arrival, after watching the show, I go backstage into the dressing room to meet my new colleagues. I am met by the reflection of around a dozen almost naked women, staring at me in the large mirrors. Mirrors with – great joy – those light bulbs all around. Sequinned showgirl costumes and headdresses are strewn about like a disco-goddess crime scene. The dancers are still in full stage make-up, with the most enormous eyelashes. They look like those scary dolls with swivelling eyeballs that snap open and shut.
“This is Bee,” sighs Paul.
“Hi!” I say brightly, and then, to my very own horror: “I’m, er, taking a year out before university.”
The entire row of eyelashes snaps back to the mirrors, as every single one of the dancers blanks me. Anguished pause. They, like everyone else, hate students. And I’ve just dissed their profession as some kind of gap-year jollity. I stand there for quite a long time. Will any of them ever talk to me again?
And I don’t even know how to wear a thong properly. Hence these two, wrenching it up between my buttocks and adjusting me around it. The white diamante bra, the wired backpack with streams of huge feather boas bursting out, and the tiara – these are all very good indeed. And the thong, well, I’ll get there. But the silver high heels are a problem. I can’t dance in them. From the safety of my hometown and the old dance studios where I spent the hours around school, I’ve fallen into a parallel universe. Somewhere that is not what it looks from the outside. Som
ewhere glittery, but very very hard.
I may still be a teenager, but I consider myself pretty worldly – and a feminist to boot. I’ve got good A Levels and an inspirational mother. I enjoyed a quirky childhood of books and no Barbies. I’ve done all kinds of other jobs, and can clear a pub at last orders quicker than most. I propelled myself into this world to satisfy my desire to be a dancer, a proper real dancer. The dream of so many young girls. My childhood dream of my future self. And this is what it’s about?
After a week of rehearsals, I’m still hopeless. I cannot dance in those heels. If you’ve spent years training with your centre of gravity in one place, that’s hard to change. I keep toppling back. I hate the silver shoes, and kick them off after every rehearsal to examine the day’s blisters. My first night gets closer, and one of the dancers, a tall blonde called Debbie, takes me to one side. She warns me in the kindest possible way to keep the shoes on at all times: the gossip is that I may well get sacked and flown back home. The silver shoes go straight back on.
The day of my first show comes and I get furious diarrhoea, an unhappy condition for someone in a small white thong. The fear is so paralysing that I can’t eat, and pass the hours praying that I will somehow die on my way to the theatre. Then they’d all be sad and say, “You know, she could’ve done OK at dancing in heels if she’d only survived that tragic lorry crash.”
But I don’t get squashed on my way to the theatre. I put on unfeasible quantities of make-up with shaking hands and warm up. The music comes up, we’re backstage, the lights come up – and out I burst. Huge feathers and all. Complete panic ensues. The intervening years have kindly blurred this moment: my mind doesn’t want to go there. But if I force it, I can see myself lurching around like a hallucinating goat, bumping into other dancers. They are screaming at me, maybe instructions, maybe to get out the fucking way. This is one of the worst memories that I own inside my head. From deep within this agony, I catch sight of the other troupe from the flamenco show. They’re watching the whole thing from the wings, eyes wide in delighted horror.
Somehow I survive. Nello says he’ll give me a second chance if I work on my high kicks and improve by the next night. I hide from Paul, the jaded captain. Debbie, the tall blonde, comes and gives me a hug, saying she was so scared in her first show she’d been made to stand and pretend to be a tree. She turns out to be a saviour, known to all as Aunty Debbie. Aunty Debbie’s been in the business since she was fifteen, but is now the oldest of the dancers and is completely ancient. She’s at least twenty-four.
Things get better quickly. I learn about “weigh day”, how to keep sweat out of your eyelash glue and how to keep tampon strings invisible during the high kicks. I learn to sleep during the day, not to get suntan lines, not to eat or drink before the show and never, not ever, to get in the way of the principal dancer during a quick change. I move victoriously into a little bedsit flat of my very own, with half a kitchen and a balcony where my diamante laundry hangs out to dry. When I finally nail those pirouettes and round kicks in high heels, I’m there.
We spend long hours in the dressing room with those wonderful mirror lights. Conversations generally range around blowjobs and sexually transmitted diseases, diets (the four-day orange fast versus the one day a week eating only toilet tissue), abortions, anorexia and waxing. These nocturnal ramblings paint a new and foreign landscape. I quietly take it in.
Every so often a cockroach sprints out of the showers and across our dressing room, to be met with a barrage of screams and a blast of toxic spray. The cockroaches are peculiarly large and insistent, and come in a variety of shades. Once we even got a translucent albino one. The spray causes prolonged bouts of acrobatic dying, as though the cockroaches’ deaths are their own baroque form of revenge, making us scream even more.
Weeks upon weeks of nightly performances, with never a day off, does strange things to your mind. We create mischief to counter the repetitive strain. One night we experiment with hair-pieces, and in the first pirouette my face gets tangled up inside a long blonde ponytail. Another time we “borrow” someone’s medication: a dancer has been prescribed local anaesthetic for her toothache, and for fun we all have a go. On stage our lips are so numb we can’t close our mouths properly, and every turn releases a flying trail of spit. We choke on snorts of dribbly laughter.
Night after night we sit around sewing our tights, semi-naked in the dressing room, and bare our souls. Bad boyfriends, tricky childhoods, same-sex encounters, boob jobs gone wrong – we discuss it all. These are tough and independent women: none of them are stupid. Yet I am stunned by what they deem acceptable in life – have I been so sheltered until now? There is a general tolerance of starvation in various forms. Abuse is the norm. One dancer’s former captain threatened her: “Move your cunt or I’ll set fire to your tampon string”; another had ice cubes forced up her vagina by jealous colleagues. She relates this while picking her herpes scabs. These are examined and dreamily flicked away.
One night, the word “feminist” is uttered. Not by me, but I prick up my ears. “No way would I grow hairy legs, bloody lezzers!” is the blistering riposte. Do I leap to feminism’s defence? No, I keep quiet, probably gluing on some giant eyelashes. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it to this day, sometimes adding an alternative ending where I proclaim the sisterhood and convert them all, maybe getting carried aloft on their shoulders.
Something in this flippant remark begins to germinate, deep within. Here I am, in a room full of hungry women on low wages, who’ve endured public weighings, been called bitches and “fat cows on ice” in front of their colleagues, whose very living depends on being looked at – and if they look down on feminism, what has feminism done wrong? If you can’t mention it here, what’s the point?
Being a showgirl equipped me with a nascent sense of feminist outrage, and the twin habits of wearing only underwear on a night out and never having to buy a drink. Untroubled by any inherent contradictions, my next stop is Glasgow. The diva-ish corners are soon knocked off in my new life as a student. I actually have to buy drinks. But I’m still haunted by the dancers’ acceptance of physical abuse and casual sexist bullying. Why do they put up with it?
Still wondering this, I have the luck to encounter someone who changes my life. An unforgettable woman of courage, a woman who inspired me then and still does now. A woman who had all the mud thrown in her face but achieved greatness, who was smashed and reviled but kept going, who invented her own life and was, in her words, “the first of a new genus”.
Annoyingly she’s been dead for a couple of centuries, but that doesn’t hold our relationship back. This is where the book comes in. Lights go on when I read it. Entering her world for the first time many years ago set off a chain reaction that’s still taking place now. The book was first published in 1796 as Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This was affectionately abbreviated by the author’s future husband to Letters from Norway. And as a rollercoaster ride into the life and work of the world’s first feminist, it has no equal.
This is the story of how Letters from Norway got into my life and took over. This book seeks to proclaim that book, the woman’s life and her legacy, and how they came to infiltrate my waking hours. I want you to love her as much as I do. If I could reach out and squeeze your arm I would do it right now. Mary Wollstonecraft does not disappoint. My first reading of Letters from Norway is followed by three escalating phases of interest in its author. They are: the Romantics, the Vindication and Motherhood. Handily these are also passing decades, successive life stages. How was I to know that she would be the star and chief informant of all three?
1. Wollstonecraft and the Romantics
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven. I was young when I first read Letters from Norway. It influenced the great poets that I was now studying. Romantic literature suits this early life phase, with its intensity and urgent possibilities. The teenag
e anthem of “it’s not fair” is in fact an understatement. This is nothing less than the battle of trying to become yourself. For some of us this doesn’t happen again so awkwardly until the day we abruptly turn into parents. Romantic literature, with its quests, iconoclastic visionaries and brave horizons – this is where you need to be for life’s big dramas.
It’s easy to check whether you yourself are a Romantic (NB: this does not mean people who send Valentine’s cards). Look into the sky on a clear night. Some people pick out the constellations they recognize and point them out.
“Look, there’s Saturn.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes I am – look, you can tell because X Y Z.”
“Oh.”
Other people look out for satellites and discernible aeroplane routes. Avoid these people. Some respond with excitement: the outer edges of human understanding are delineated right here. They’ll mention a Brian Cox thing they read. These are sexy and confident New Scientist types who love a challenge.
But some people look up into a sky full of stars and think: “Oh God, it’s just too much – how can any of this be possible?” Their mind reels with all the people who’ve died beneath these stars and those who are yet to live. Humanity is so vulnerable, so flawed. Nature is so ineffable. Infinity is so… infinite. They might mention the Sublime and other words elevated by capital letters. They feel a spiky restlessness, deep inside a mystery internal organ. This person is a Romantic.
I was in the right place to identify this. In the furthest-away university, with the darkest weather and most glowering Gothic spires. The elements drive right into your face. It’s a fact that Glaswegian rain falls in all directions at once, even upwards. The baffling depth of the winters, the soaring stone tenements blackened by the years and the savage landscapes beyond – this was the place for sensibility. This was right up my moody street.
The undergrad literature curriculum at Glasgow University had something for everyone, even people who like aeroplane routes. Among its many genres are the Romantic, the Medieval and the Augustan. Over a plastic pint in the corner of the Queen Margaret Union bar we’d imagine these three categories as blokes. First comes a dark hero, a-roving on a galloping horse. He’s a lover and a fighter, and he never gets old. Behind him comes a monk croaking in Latin, telling bawdy fart jokes on the side. He, in turn, is pursued by a desiccated old grammarian in a wig, who mocks everything in sight.