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EARLY ONE EVENING some months ago, I returned by bus to the town where I was born, and alighting in Chelmsford at a stop on Wood Street I found myself attended by Essex ghosts. Some distance from where I stood, I saw a red brick wall stained by efflorescence and surmounted by black iron railings. Behind the wall, beyond a length of grass, I saw for the first time a row of modern houses, which had been built since I last visited. Standing in the dusk, the bus departing behind me, I could read this wall like a manuscript. It is all that remains of the hospital where I was born weeks early in the autumn, not having been expected until winter: I was blue, my father tells me, and a shocking sight. The hospital was demolished thirty years after my birth, and had by then been empty and derelict for years. In a photograph taken before the demolition and published in the local press, a black iron fire escape extends up the exterior wall of a forbidding building, and vegetation is rampant at the windows; it is just possible to make out the white chimney of the hospital incinerator beyond the pediment. On the tarmac, which is cracking open in the carpark, a solitary chair has been abandoned, as if an anxious patient has just departed the waiting room.

But I knew this wall was a palimpsest, so I went on reading, and found – beneath the corridors down which my mother had walked with me in her arms – the Chelmsford Union Workhouse, whose fourteen rooms and infectious ward became the St John’s Hospital; and behind the workhouse an almshouse, which was ‘always wanting repair’; and behind this the barracks that stood on that same ground. Then I thought I saw, in the passages that ran between the modern houses, the dead remnants of an Essex past still going about their business: Hetty Alderson, for example, who in 1893 was sent at the age of fifteen from the workhouse to be employed and beaten by the wife of a cycle manufacturer, and coming up behind her, farm boys from Prittlewell and Steeple, too thin for their scarlet regimental tunics.

St John’s Hospital, Chelmsford, shortly before its demolition in 2010.

Then – I was in no hurry, and the evening was pleasantly dark – I saw, passing without effort through the wall and iron railings, the ghosts of three Essex girls coming out to greet me. First came Rose Allin, with her head wrapped in a length of cloth, and a jug of water in her right hand: she was young and walking briskly, and had in the folds of her dress the scent of burning wood. Then bustling little Anne Knight, with her piercing pale eyes, holding up a white sign, and gesturing fiercely to it: Chelmsford was her home town, and she hadn’t come far. Then – after a minute or two, and with an apologetic air, since she was an Essex girl not by birth, but by temperament – Emily Hobhouse, concealing a slight cough in a fine lawn handkerchief.

As I saw them there, I recalled how late I had come to feminism, and how each of these women had in their way formed my sense of myself as a feminist. I suppose I am not alone in having once been oblivious to what I owed to women before me, and to the notion that I ought to find ways of repaying the debt. I had not been raised to see any inequity between the genders, still less to deplore it; and if I thought of feminists at all, it was with a vague sense of a militant effort which had once been a necessity and was now mercifully redundant. It did not occur to me that the ‘Essex girl’ joke which I inhabited was a feminist matter, and that I ought to interrogate and challenge it. Later, and by small degrees – by dint of speaking with women, and reading women, and listening to women; by understanding that if I felt I’d slipped through life without encountering misogyny’s knocks and slights, this was in large part owing to the comfort and privileges of my life and identity – I came to understand that I should cultivate and harden my feminism for my own sake, perhaps, but largely for the sake of other women.

In her essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, Rebecca Solnit says of the feminist project:

That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere.

These three ghosts set out early on the thousand-mile road, and I’m afraid I joined them rather late; but it is because of their company I’ve come to believe that it is a matter of pride, and not of embarrassment or shame, to be called an Essex girl.