The principal of the sixth-form college ushered my father and me into his office. He sat down behind his desk and pulled out a packet of Lucky Strike.
‘Do you smoke, Miss Greenlaw?’
‘No,’ said my father, ‘she doesn’t.’
One of the first people I spoke to at the college was the sharp boy called Tom. He was my brother’s age and I had seen him across rooms for a year or so. He was one of those who made a concession to punk as fashion. He spiked his hair and wore a leather jacket but stuck to jeans and the Rolling Stones. Even this half-measure had a powerful effect on me. He was halfway towards the kind of boy I was realising I wanted to be with. We flirted and, probably as part of the flirtation, he borrowed an essay. He returned it as if it were something he had come across by accident and wished he’d never seen. In almost any other situation, he would have seized on this chance to humiliate but I watched him hesitate and decide to say nothing. I read his face exactly but I too said nothing. What could I say? I knew when I was writing it how bad it was. I don’t know how to think or how to talk about what I think. I haven’t learnt anything for years. I don’t listen. I can’t speak. I am watching myself happening or not happening. I watch myself and I can’t, or won’t, do anything to help.
Things did not improve. My attendance record for my A-level year shows that I missed an entire term’s worth of classes. I read all the French and English books on the curriculum, and was still making my way through every novel and book of poems on the shelves at home, but my habit of not absorbing and so not learning was still too strong, and it became if anything stronger as I was drawn into a group which operated rather like a teenage-girl gang, through toughness, mockery and exposure.
Sophie was a tall blonde in my English class who had a face like a Nordic goddess but wore her hair too carefully. She looked both cool and prim. Tom was pursuing her too. One day after class she introduced herself: ‘You know what? You can have him. I’m not interested.’ And neither was I. From that moment, Sophie and I were best friends.
Tom stayed friends with us both and we formed a gang with Robert, a boy with the kind of skinny misfit looks which punk made desirable, and another girl, Julia, who, like Sophie, was so beautiful and feminine I had not thought her interesting.
I decided it was time to draw the line and began by finishing with David, who had just shaved off one side of his hair. I then went to get my hair cut off. Sophie, Julia and I skipped class, bought a bottle of wine and went to the hairdressing salon upstairs in the clothes shop, Miss Selfridge. This was a girly shop – its logo was a lipstick kiss – but the hairdresser was excited by the idea of doing her first punk cut. She turned up the music and let us pass the bottle of wine back and forth and reduced my long shaggy layers to a spiky crop. I walked back through town feeling lighter. A boy called out ‘Punk!’ and I was thrilled. The pleasure was more than that of being different. The boy had meant to be insulting and another time might have shouted ‘Slag’ or ‘Cow’. But ‘Punk’ had nothing to do with being a girl. It neutralised, rejected and released me.
I made myself strange because I felt strange and now I had something to belong to for which my isolation and oddness were credentials. Suddenly the lanky boy with spots and bad teeth was sought after; the fat girl was a goddess in bin-liner and chains. For years I had hated being so pale; now I made myself paler. In that little Essex world, there were so many taboos that it took little effort to break them: buy clothes from a jumble sale, men’s clothes – pin-stripes, cricketing whites, vests, ties, belts and braces.
I was reversing out of being a girl, perhaps in the hope of regaining the freedom of my tomboy childhood. I stole my father’s Fifties coats and suits, a school blazer from my younger brother and my ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket. It was as if I were borrowing a little bit of masculinity from each.
We travelled down to London to buy synthetic, metallic, graphic tat on the King’s Road, and to peer through the windows of Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex. In the spirit of appropriation, adaptation and do-it-yourself, I was constantly on the look-out for something that could be cut up, ripped apart, dyed, bleached and pinned back together. I didn’t want to add up. I didn’t want to form an argument or make a point. I had a weakness for the then fashionable term ‘eclectic’, but the outfits I put together were just plain odd: Thirties men’s flannels with a brick-red cropped Chanel jacket and a Victorian silk shirt with a lace collar and cuffs that was so fine I shivered putting it on; skintight plastic trousers bought from Chelsea Market, with my great-uncle’s World War One leather flying coat – so enveloping and brown that it was like walking around inside a cow. Then there would be chains, scarves, badges, gloves, and lurid, shapeless garments knitted out of synthetic mohair on the biggest knitting needles I could find.
As I grew even more guarded, the colours I wore became more subdued until most of the time I just wore black. I had already dyed my hair black, which did not suit me, and then bleached out streaks which I tinted aubergine or peacock blue with Krazy Kolor. Whatever clothes I had that weren’t black, I dyed. This alchemical process involved bringing gallons of water to boil in the cauldron (my mother’s enamel preserving pan) and then adding the dye by piercing a tin and releasing its concentrated acrid powder. As I added salt and stirred in the clothes, a bitter cloud of steam filled the room and it did seem as if I were performing a spell that would dissolve me and my world into shadow.
Perhaps I wanted to be shadow. Certainly I did not want to be known but then I barely knew myself. I was still a child in that I operated instinctively and while I could be horribly talkative, on certain matters I was mute. I was discovering the pleasure of belonging to a different kind of gang in which name, appearance, sexuality and personality were so confusingly and overtly constructed that we were all strangers. Identity was worn rather than embodied. We were keeping ourselves apart and it was a respite from becoming, and having to be, clear.
* First published in Muziekkrant Oor, September 1981, in the Netherlands. Interview by Bert van de Kamp. Translated by Hans Huisman.