Hawks over the sea …
As we
In our village dance
In smaller circles
TAIGI
In that coming of colour and noise, I took a step back and found myself walking along a Suffolk dual carriageway at midnight in December. I had gone to Ipswich with three friends to see Uriah Heep. We had not thought about how we might get home and found ourselves stranded, the last train long gone. We walked back out of town to the motorway, planning to hitch the fifty miles home.
The first live bands I saw were rock bands – Alex Harvey, Dr Feelgood, Santana and now Uriah Heep. They were old-fashioned performers, men getting on a bit who acted the part so well that watching them was like watching a play about rock. Their music sounded more or less as it did on record, but the vision of them, the actuality, was scintillating. I had seen bands in black-and-white on TV, or in simplified colour in magazines, but here was animation and brightness. I didn’t care who they were or what they were playing, I was thrilled by the experience of something live.
I was starting to want another kind of live experience – a real boyfriend. I had been falling in love for years, carving initials, crying and dreaming, waiting all day for a particular moment when I knew I would pass someone on the stairs between classes but that was all I wanted – the possibility. If a boy came towards me, I panicked and ran. Once or twice, I managed to say Yes, I will go out with you, and then the boy wasn’t over there but here, and not remote but eager. After a few awkward evenings he lost his charm, and I felt trapped.
Now I felt ready but the slow dancers were gone and there were only the serious boys who were my friends and they did not thrill me. I needed boys I didn’t know and the only source was my elder brother. While I was going through a series of rapid and violent transformations, my brother was consistent. At ten he moved into the garage, at university he would live in a bus and from there he would head for a Scottish island and eventually, New Zealand. He exempted himself by being himself, and this made him free.
But I didn’t want a boy like my brother. He wore a coat he’d fashioned out of a goatskin rug and went barefoot in winter until my father bought him a kit for making his own shoes. His friends were hippies but, for a brief while, they were nonetheless a solution. They looked like grown-ups, and the girls – with their muted gestures and annoying calm – like women. I dug out my mother’s afghan coat, started growing my hair once more, and acquired a quilted Indian jacket and an embroidered skirt. Joe asked me out. We did not amount to anything but went on flirting and stayed friends, and here I was with him and his friend Chris and my friend Cara walking along the Suffolk road.
I wanted the interest of boys like Joe and to demonstrate a kind of growing up, even to try out being a woman, and so I wore the Indian jacket, burned incense and listened to their rock. I went to hear Dr Feelgood or Barclay James Harvest at the Southend Kursaal because Joe would put his arms round me and his mouth on the back of my neck. That was what the evening was for.
I listened to Santana’s Abraxas and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in the same manner that I read my horoscope: eager for illumination, which I instantly forgot. This music was serious, or at least it was performed by people who were very serious indeed.
Being a woman seemed to mean listening to the music boys liked and neither dancing nor singing along. That would be annoying. And while the boys were serious about music, they didn’t expect me to be so too. A boy could impress a girl with his musical knowledge and taste, but it was something he was showing her, like a fleet of cars or a gun collection. She was not meant to join in. Girls and music were separate pursuits. Or do I mean women? Was I a woman yet? Perhaps the fact that I was noticing such things, how boys (men?) wanted me to behave, meant that I was.
We walked on along the motorway. Joe found a dead pigeon and carried it for a time, singing ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’, and we laughed more than we should have and found other things to sing. We tried to hitch and finally a car slowed down and we ran towards it, somehow not noticing that it was the police. Two officers got out. They asked us to turn out our pockets. Joe produced a bunch of a dozen or so keys.
‘What is this key for?’
‘The goat shed.’ He lived on a smallholding.
‘And this?’
‘The chicken coop.’
‘You taking the piss, son?’
‘And that one’s for the barn.’
They searched the two boys, found some grass in Chris’s pocket and arrested him. One of the officers radioed for a van to come and pick us all up. The other one turned to Cara and me: ‘I can’t search you two girls, so I’m arresting you on suspicion of possession and taking you in.’ The Black Maria arrived in a matter of minutes and the four of us got into the back, Chris murmuring ‘Sorry, sorry,’ and the rest of us smiling and shrugging and saying it didn’t matter. This was an adventure and anyway, we were glad to be out of the cold.
At the station, we were separated.
‘Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. One leather wallet containing two pounds and fifty-three pence, one eye make-up pencil, one silver bracelet, four bead bracelets, one silver necklace, three sanitary items, four cigarettes, one Bic lighter, one bar of chocolate, one sprig of heather in foil. Where did you get this?’
‘I bought it from a gypsy in the street.’
‘Take the foil down to the lab, Eric, and check it for cocaine.’
In Essex?
‘You think that’s funny, girlie?’
‘Yes, no, I –’
‘We need to contact your parents. You’re not going anywhere without one of them. What’s your dad going to say about this?’
I was sure of what he would say about this. ‘He’ll come and get me, he won’t mind. Please call him, call him now.’
The officer smiled and said nothing and handed me on to another officer, larger and more gentle, who with something resembling sadness locked me in a cell. It must have been lit but to me it was appallingly dark: a wooden bench, and no windows other than a small slat in the heaviest door I have ever seen. It shut with the force of the Pied Piper closing the mountain. Had I ever been locked in a room before – with nothing to do and no idea when I would be let out again?
After some hours I was taken to another room where a thin quiet woman asked me a lot of questions without looking me in the eye. Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. She wanted to know about Chris and Joe. Had I been with them all night? Had they given me any drugs? I knew they were seventeen and what this meant. I had heard the phrase ‘dealing to a minor’ and knew that it was like ‘having sex with a minor’ and that it was serious. I said we’d only met them there and I had no idea they had anything on them. She asked the same questions in different ways, over and over, until the only ones I felt I could actually answer were Name, Date of Birth and Address, although I was forgetting how to spell any of that.
Eventually, I was taken back to the cell. I asked the giant if anyone had phoned my parents because they would be worrying but he couldn’t say. More time passed and then another female officer took me to a room where Cara was waiting. Name? Spell it. Date of birth? Address? Spell it. This was a larger cell with a longer bench, and it was so brightly lit that my eyes hurt. Another female officer came in. They put on rubber gloves and explained what they were about to do.
I handed over the Indian quilted jacket, the silk scarf, the Southern Comfort sweatshirt, the plaid shirt, the desert boots, the patched jeans. My underwear. I didn’t look at Cara or at the women, and didn’t understand when they told us to get up on the bench and jump off.
‘Why?’
‘We want to see if anything falls out.’
‘Falls out of where?’
‘Of where you’ve hidden it.’
An hour or two later, I needed to go to the lavatory and called through the slat to the giant, who sent for a female officer because I had to be accompanied. As she stood the other side of the brief gate to the stall, she asked me what my name was. I began to spell it, to give my date of birth, my address, but she said, It’s alright, I was only making conversation. I’d forgotten what conversation was.
When my father arrived I could hear him shouting, but at them rather than me. We were taken back to the thin woman and she asked me the questions again but this time only once. As a minor, I could not be interviewed without a parent present. My father drove me and Cara home. He said little, and was more worried for us than angry. They had waited hours before calling him, until after I had jumped off that bench, but even then they told him only that I had been arrested on suspicion of possession. He had refused to be shocked or furious, as the police had evidently hoped, wanting only to get me out of there. The next day I asked him why he wasn’t angry and why they allowed me such freedom.
‘Because we have tried to instil in you a sense of judgement. I hope that while you will try things, you will know where to draw the line.’
But I didn’t know how to draw my own lines yet. And it turned out that I wasn’t ready for a real boyfriend after all. To my brother’s annoyance, I made my way through a string of his acquaintances, flirting with them till they asked me out, allowing them to kiss me and then running away. The strongest impulse I had was towards freedom. I did not have words for what I felt and it was those songs that mentioned freedom which spoke to me most strongly. I had gone to see Uriah Heep because of their rock ballad, ‘Sweet Freedom’. I made Luke play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s endless ‘Freebird’. I remembered slow-dancing to Deneice Williams’ ‘Free’.
For all my unease and loneliness it seemed that I wanted, needed, to be free. I knew this and ignored it as much as I could, as if I knew already what it might cost. Freedom. It could mean anything. Yet when I heard it sung, in whatever way, I felt restored to some deep imperative and for that moment, entirely self-sufficient – free.