Sometimes all wound close in a ring, to which as fast they spunne As any wheele a Turner makes, being tried how it will runne While he is set; and out againe, as full of speed, they wound, Not one left fast or breaking hands.
HOMER, The Iliad, Book 18
When children meet other children, they have to do something – fight or play. Our games were disordered, their rules the subject of further meta-games. We four were born each twenty months apart and so these games were also predicated upon wanting to kill one another. I persuaded my older brother to climb on to an aerial railway when I knew the seat was unhooked. He flipped over and fell, cracking his head open on the path below. He would dare me to eat a wasp, climb on to a roof, jump out of a tree, confident that I could not refuse. When we had building works, my little brother made a game of throwing bricks at the rest of us. My sister was quieter and more frightening. As I sat reading in a chair, she liked to inch silently across the room and then throttle me.
Four was in any case an uncomfortable number. Two people can dance alone and a roomful of people can dance together. Six people make a decent-sized ring. But can you imagine four people dancing? It would look awkward – halfway between intimacy and an occasion. Whereas two is concentrated opposition, three cleanly unbalanced and five rich with possible alignments, four is too obvious. The only way to achieve tension within it is three to one, and I, being too close to my older brother to want to admire him and too close to the younger ones to be admired, was the one.
When I was five and started school, I had to give up fighting as a way of expressing myself. It was around this time that dance became a dangerous thing. At school I had to sit still and be quiet, stand up when a teacher came into the room, walk on the left in the corridor, go to the lavatory only at break, sit cross-legged with arms folded during assembly, queue to enter a room, queue to leave, queue for lunch, raise my hand and wait to be given permission to eat or speak. I was bewildered. I did not know how to order myself, how to exercise that amount of control.
It was even harder to master the rules of playground games; not words and steps, those I picked up quickly, but the nuances. These games involved attentiveness and co-ordination, which were not only physical but social. I had no idea how to make friends, having relied until now on the scrum of my siblings to overpower or exclude any other children we met. I felt held in place by them despite our battles, and had little need for anyone else. And then I did: at school, I suddenly wanted my own world and my own people to go in it. The children I looked to were those who had already found their place, formed their circle and closed it. To have friends, I had to break into a ring.
I already knew circle dances such as ‘Ring-a-ring o’ Roses’ and ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, but I had no idea how potent they were. In a playground full of girls, the circles were large. If you were not part of the discussion in which the circle was proposed then you had to rush in while it was being formed. Once all hands were held, the circle was closed. You might hover on the edge and hope for someone to stumble and create an opening or, if you felt more confident, you might tap someone on the shoulder or tug their sleeve. Once you were in, you had to keep up and there would always be someone older, taller and sharper, who was going to move the circle faster or send it into reverse. They might add extra rules, gestures or steps. You had to keep up.
I don’t remember the songs to which we danced these circles. We were not interested in what the words might mean and they were so familiar that they had become abstracted into a rhythm and a set of cues, like conversation. Being in the circle was a perfect state. I was invisible but component, moving but held. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, no one was looking at me but I was at the heart of things. The faster we went, the tighter we held on to one another until we knew that if we let go, we would all fall down but while we kept hold, we might be flying. The song lost shape or wore itself out through sheer repetition. We grew lighter as our breath grew heavier until we were just that, breath – released, ecstatic.
For the first time I understood that belonging was a way of escaping myself and of finding a place in the world: the blur of the round-and-round, the speed at which each member of the ring becomes indistinct, where nothing can be seen any more so all is felt, and difference flattens into figures on a vase.*
I could keep up, but I did not belong because I had not learned to contain myself within the figure I was making. Nervous, furious and barely aware of myself, I drove other people away. I was tolerated on the edge of the circle until one day the leader announced that I was not to be included any more. She proposed this as she might a new game: ‘I know, let’s …’ and the other girls followed her to the opposite side of the playground. Usually, something like that would send me into a rage of rejection. I once hit someone for not wanting to be my friend. But something came to me that day in the playground and as the ring closed without me, I made to step outside it and took myself off and made myself busy within a ring of my own imagining. Quickly, the girls returned and invited me back. I accepted and the whole thing was passed off as nothing more than a dance.
School was a series of rings: friends, gender, class and year as well as classroom, building, playground, grounds. The doors and gates were always unlocked, but it seemed inconceivable to pass through them at other than the permitted times. One day I made a paper lion. For once it looked like what I had hoped for and the teacher was pleased. The bell rang and I rushed out to the school gates clutching the lion, desperate to show my mother what I had done. She wasn’t there so I waited, with such intentness that I didn’t take in the fact that no one else was around. When I eventually realised this, panic soared – where was my mother? Then I looked about and the thought became Where is everyone? I looked and looked and it became Where am I? The building and playground behind me were quiet. In front of me was a weekday grown-up London I did not know. Eventually I understood that the bell I’d heard had only been for break and that the rest of the morning’s lessons were now taking place.
In my hurtling excitement, I had compressed the day. I was on the edge of school and no one appeared to have noticed. I looked back at the school and it seemed as impenetrable and remote as the city in front of me. I was nowhere, a point from which I could step in or out, forwards or back.
I don’t remember how I returned to my classroom that day but know that I must have done so. The experience, though, had offered a possibility I could not let go. Not long afterwards, I decided, aged six, that I wanted to go home. I walked out of the gates, along the road, across Hampstead Heath, up the hill, and rang the front-door bell. It was so simple that when my mother opened the door I could not understand what hit her, and it was as if something had hit her – as if by stepping out of place, I had stepped into her.
* This is what Homer described as khoreia (which gives us choreography), the dance in a ring in which everyone is equally component and the thing is its own momentum like the wheel set to run downhill. Homer is describing a detail on a vase, so the ring is doubly a ring – fixed in itself and fixed in the circle of clay.