And the wave sings because it is moving;
Caught in its clear side, we also sing.
PHILIP LARKIN, untitled, 1946
I am of that generation who were told that all was nurture and not nature, while being brought up by parents who enacted traditional roles. My mother was cleverer and more original than the rest of us, but said least. While my education was left to look after itself, I was pulled up by my father for a poor argument: ‘Don’t come the dumb blonde,’ he would say. So I thought that if a man made a statement, he was inviting a response. Perhaps my father let me hold forth because I was not his equal. Was it after all that men wanted to tell women things and not be told? Is that what my mother knew and why she kept quiet?
I thought I had escaped being a girl but what else could I be? I talked to boys about music and they tried to take off my clothes, which were after all sensual – leather, mohair, muslin, silk, net and lace. I caught my reflection in a shop window: black raincoat and beret, white shirt and spotted chiffon scarf. Even with my dyed and spiked hair of course I looked like a girl, and a good girl at that. And while I aspired to the fuck-off looks of Siouxsie Sioux, I had fallen in love.
Punk lyrics were the same old love thing after all – The Buzzcocks’ ‘Love You More’, the Vibrators’ ‘Baby, Baby, (Won’t you be my girl?)’. Punk wasn’t just about making it new as most bands sang cover versions: Siouxsie and the Banshees covered the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’, Sid Vicious took on Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. Of course music came out of itself; of course I was going to be a girl.
On 20th June, I sat my last English paper (Eliot, Jonson, King Lear) and went to London with Daniel to see A Certain Ratio at the ICA. I had one French exam to go but essentially I was free. A Certain Ratio were boys in baggy old army shorts, with army haircuts, playing trumpets and bopping around. They had put out a single, another cover version, of a Seventies funk hit, ‘Shack Up’. Here was the love thing once more – ‘Shack up, baby, shack up.’ As they played, people unbuttoned their raincoats and started dancing until eventually everyone was dancing and kept on dancing and for those hours it lasted, and for some small hours afterwards, it seemed possible that I might be released from whatever it was that made it so hard to be a girl, or this girl, or the girl Daniel wanted.