In Search of Mary Read online

  When the cold-calling is over, we check in with people that Lucy already knows about. Our first visit is Gloria. She’s a single mum from Eritrea with refugee status.

  “Hello Lucy!” She says, smiling.

  We step inside. Lucy doesn’t explain my presence, and I just smile too, as though I’m a useful person here in an official capacity. Gloria has baby twins and rotten window frames. Vigorous black mould flourishes up her walls and curtains. It looks like some kind of prize-winning dark harvest. Curious, I reach out and rub a patch. It comes away easily. “It always come back though,” says Gloria, adjusting the towel she has hung over the mould growing next to where her two babies sleep. They are five months old.

  Gloria shows us around her house. This is where she’s tried to secure her loose kitchen window after being burgled. She’s hammered three flimsy planks of wood across the window frame.

  “Lucy, I’m so scared they’ll come back.” she says, and her voice changes. Up until this moment she’s had the tired demeanour of someone who’s just sat down but can’t find the TV remote. Now she starts wiping her eyes. She’s crying.

  “Every night I sit on the stairs with Emergency Call ready on my phone.” I examine the pathetic woodwork job. About as helpful as spaghetti. Any self-respecting burglar would be through it in a trice.

  The twins wake up, and Gloria hands one of them to me. Holding a small baby and hearing a weeping mother describe four years with broken windows is too much. I carry the baby to the window and look out, rocking him while my eyes blur over with tears. Thank God I never tried to be a war correspondent or report on famines. I try to muster a more professional aspect while Lucy briskly checks the records of contact with the council and puts in some phone calls. Gloria’s windows have apparently been subcontracted out, then subcontracted out by those subcontractors. This goes onto Lucy’s “follow up” list.

  Gloria and Lucy then do a baby massage session together, and by the end Gloria is playing with the twins on a blanket. “Sun and moon! Sun and moon!” we sing to the babies, and they wriggle around and laugh. Gloria is doing the best she can. I’m pretty sure she just wants us to see that she’s doing her best. Isn’t that what we all want, after all.

  As we leave, though, she grabs Lucy’s arm, pleading: “Please, come soon, I have no one, Lucy, please come back!” But we have to leave. Back out on the street afterwards, it feels like we’ve come up from under water. Gloria’s small polite voice is still in my ears. I shake away the thought of that mould clinging on, bright-black and alive.

  “Bloody hell, Lucy. How do you deal with it?”

  “It took about a year to be able to leave work and not worry about them,” she says. “Sometimes they’re right up against it. It can be so desperate you want to rush out and buy a pint of milk and some bread, but you can’t do that. I just keep my manner professional.”

  The next visit is even more challenging. On our way there Lucy tells me that this mum has nearly had her baby taken into care, because she was unable to clean up her house. I suppress a snigger – how bad can it be? I think about the state of the floor after my own kids’ dinner. We pick our way past tipped-over wheely bins and a burnt-out car. Some of the homes are well cared for, though. Holbeck’s back-to-backs may be small, but they once were very pretty houses.

  “Here we are.”

  The front door’s open.

  “Hello!” calls Lucy, and pushes our way in.

  We walk through a crowd of flies – the air makes my throat ache. Piles of stuff crowd inwards around a narrow pathway between the sofa, the TV and the door. It smells like the lower colon of hell. We are dwarfed by towers of fizzy drinks in crates on all sides and mounds of boxes cramming up the walls. I freeze. I’m battling hard to keep my facial features set to neutral.

  “Well done!” cheers Lucy. “You’ve even got the curtains open – it’s much nicer.”

  Sarah is sitting on the sofa with her baby, complaining. Someone reported her to social services. She feels persecuted, and she’s sick of being bossed around by family-support workers. She grudgingly acknowledges that one of them did bring her some fly spray though. I immediately feel the fly spray entering my lungs and poisonously coating my innards. Lucy talks animatedly about playgroups for the baby, and how it’s great for mums as well as kids. Sarah says she doesn’t want to go out. She’s extremely fat and can’t walk far.

  My heart droops as Lucy reels off the details of Sarah’s nearest playgroup. This is hard to process: I’m crashing into my own prejudices on every side. Her baby is drinking Diet Coke. When we head outside, I try to gulp in some clear thinking with the fresh air. A Coke-guzzling baby can’t be the worst thing I’ve seen today, but somehow I can’t get over it. Diet Coke too, not even full fat. My mind scrambles to recalibrate what should constitute the basic human rights of Sarah’s world. My world has an altar piled high with organic vegetables.

  Remaining firmly in knee-jerk territory, I wonder out loud how come poor people have such big tellies. Lucy frowns and says being vulnerable has nothing to do with material possessions. But she’s far from humourless about her work. She tells me about her sessions at the children’s centre, where parents learn to discuss sexuality and relationships. There’s a special ice-breaking exercise to tackle awkwardness:

  “We get them to write down all the slang words for genitals, and we stick them up on the walls – it just gets it all out there: everyone has a laugh, and then we can talk properly. But one time a council inspector came by.” She shakes with laughter. “He walks through the door, right in between big signs saying cock and beef curtains…”

  We rush to make picking-up time at the nearby primary school, for some leafleting. The leaflets she hands out could be on anything from healthy eating to road safety. What doesn’t change is Lucy being there, rain or shine. It’s drizzling as the parents start arriving at the school gate. Some ignore her, others greet her, one comes up and whispers urgently. She’s showing Lucy her black eye: the boyfriend breached his restraining order. Another comes and rages about nursery provision. Lucy has to remember all this so it can be followed up.

  The leafleting is a way for Lucy to maintain regular contact with her mums, but they don’t all love her. When one mum said she’d punished her kid by washing his mouth with soap, Lucy told the health visitor. “That mum won’t go near me now.” By now I feel exhausted and out of my depth. There’s no way I could do this job: I’m just weakly grateful that there are people out there who can.

  We walk quickly back to Lucy’s office: she has to finish the follow-up paperwork before collecting her own kids. It’s at this point that she drops a bombshell. Lucy was recently told that her tax credits are being cut. Her pre-tax salary is below £18K; without the credits she won’t be able to pay for her kids’ after-school care. In short, she can’t afford to keep doing this job.

  She’s considering going part-time, but worries: “I’m already fighting to get time to help these families – what will it be like if I go part-time?” There’s a pause, and Lucy’s voice drops almost to a whisper. “They’ll probably think that I’m not bothered, that I don’t care about them. I’ll still be thinking about them when I’m not working. And I’ll just have to get used to that.”

  The urgency of the question of what Gloria, Sarah and the other mums have got to say about feminism seems to have withered somewhat throughout this day of mould and fly spray and black eyes. But I ask anyway: “Feminism is surely about helping these women, so why is it women like me who are the ones talking about it?”

  Lucy looks at me and points out: “They’ve got quite a lot on their plates, Bee.” She adds: “I asked some of the school-dinner ladies about feminism. One of them’s a granny, and she goes: ‘Well, if you’re talking about bra burning, I’ll tell you what: if I burn my bra you won’t see my wrinkles no more, cos it’ll all go south, love.’” Lucy laughs so hard that people look over from the other side of the office.

  “But I think the
others, especially the younger ones, they haven’t got a clue what it means, and they aren’t bothered. They’ll just say: ‘You talk about inequality: at the end of the day it’s all about kids and work and getting by. Someone’s got to do it, so you do it for yourself.’ For them it boils down to just getting by.” She pauses. “But I don’t even think I’d class myself as a feminist, to be honest: to be a feminist don’t you need to read about it and know what it is? Anyway. I’m off to take my bra off so I won’t have any wrinkles.”

  She laughs again, scoops up her bags and gets hurrying. Lucy’s got her own kids to worry about on top of other people’s. Every day they’re dropped at pre-school club early and collected late. “I just want to see them in daylight,” she says, as we hug goodbye.

  I walk through the light rain back to the station and board the 18.03 from Leeds to London King’s Cross. I drink two huge cups of buffet-car tea in a row, then go back for a mini-bottle of red wine and a Snickers. The wooden bars over Gloria’s windows keep floating into vision. I have never seen people living like this in my own country. How have I not seen it? Most of the country doesn’t see it. It’s not only the privileged of London: plenty of ordinary people in Leeds will drive right past the end of Holbeck daily, never once seeing what’s inside.

  I knock back the last of the wine with the bitter insight that Wollstonecraft’s primary motivation, her obsession with usefulness, is far better served by what Lucy is doing than by me prancing around the world admiring my fantastic baby. But at least Lucy is doing it. And even if none of Lucy’s mums see her work, the support, the networks, the policies and laws designed to support them – if they don’t see any of this as feminism, then it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s still happening.

  The book I brought along for the train journey doesn’t help. Wollstonecraft’s fictional works are a downer at the best of times. In the novel Mary her protagonist witnesses the darkest effects of poverty on women and children, and as a result:

  She could not write any more; she wished herself far distant from all human society; a thick gloom spread itself over her mind, but did not make her forget the very beings she wished to fly from.

  I will never forget Gloria. As the train pulls back into London, I stare out into the tunnel walls with a guilty feeling of relief, mixed with sadness. My reflection stares back. I look knackered. I feel like… well, like a crock of shit. Wollstone-craft thought and fought for women like Gloria and Sarah, and for their children. But I’m just me, feeling pretty useless right now.

  Labouring the point of uselessness to its outermost extremities, the next week I’m at a literary lunch. In West London. I stride into the gleaming white mansion, wearing what I believe to be my most literary-lunch-looking skirt. There’s Ottolenghi food, plenty of wine, and several rooms full of people having a splendid old literary time of it. How young they are. Young people are supposed to be occupied these days with mountainous debts and knife crime. Not round here though.

  I’ve come seeking information. Having never been to California before, someone invited me here with the promise of some inside track on the Golden State. Apparently there are two people here who are intimate with the place, in all its radical, alternative glory. Acting like I do this all the time, gulp of wine and notebook at the ready, I sway into the beautiful crowd to find them.

  Kala has a feline gaze through 1960s spectacles, and a zip all the way up the back of her skirt. She loves California and says I should totally get in touch with some performance artists she knows who do lesbian porn. Between mouthfuls of chargrilled vegetables, she delivers a condensed history of feminism.

  “The Suffragettes and getting the vote obviously came first.” (“First apart from you,” I whisper loyally to Wollstonecraft inside my head.) “Then the Second Wave was in the Seventies: reproductive and labour rights, basically escaping from housewife hell via Women’s Lib. And in the Nineties you’ve got the Third Wave, with sex positivism, racial inclusivity and queer theory.” At no point does a vegetable attach itself to her teeth or a blob of pastry fall from her fork. I take lots of notes.

  Damian is in the corner of the room towering over a cluster of stylishly dishevelled people. He’s tall with a youthful, surprised-looking face, cuff-links and excellent shoes. Apparently he is a salonnière. Whatever this is, he definitely looks like one. A lot of people want to talk to him. I join the hoverers and wait my turn. When he hears I’m planning to go to California to meet 1970s Second Wave activists, he lights up. “You’re going to love it!” He fires off a mouth-watering account of the Grand Sur, San Francisco’s Mission District and hipster ice cream at the Bi-Rite Creamery.

  In a moment of treachery I briefly imagine Wollstonecraft here among us in her rebellious baggy old clothes, with her heart on her sleeve and her chippy, volatile ways. Does California go far beyond her – will I leave her behind? I look around. What world of fabulousness have I entered?

  Then Kala and Damian turn to me and politely ask what my book is about.

  “Oh. Well, it’s – it’s kind of just a… bumbling around kind of… bumble.” They smile encouragingly at me, willing me to succeed.

  “Bumbling is marvellous!” they say. Then, igniting each other’s enthusiasm: “Bumbling should definitely be encouraged as a literary form. Shouldn’t it! I mean, just think of Geoff Dyer.”

  “Who’s he?” I ask. “Some kind of legendary bumblemeister?”

  “You really must read him. Such a genius. He backs up all of his bumbling with so much insight – just pure, soaring intellect.”

  I go and get another glass of wine.

  Reading stories to my kids, I’ve always secretly editorialized and changed bits. You have to. The blonde girls should become chestnut-haired heroines, and so on. Then there’s the old trick of trying to miss out a few paragraphs here and there. This is definitely allowed if you’re really tired or it’s something intolerable like Enid Blyton or Thomas the Egg-Faced Twat. Eventually they will notice, though, and hold you to account.

  But the Grimm tales have never let us down. I’m biased, having grown up among them. There’s a satisfying unity in the rhythms: always three sons and the third is the cleverest, or three daughters and the third is the bravest. The small and lowly shall outwit the big and powerful. There are always three attempts, or three companions, or three animals that transform the traveller’s fortunes. One evening, tangled up in some blankets on the sofa, we talk about this.

  “Why is it always in threes?” the three girls ask.

  “Maybe for suspense? If you won on the first go, it wouldn’t be so exciting.”

  “But it’s not fair that the third is always best,” adds the second daughter.

  “Mummy, you’re doing three trips and so there should be a happy ending.” says another.

  “And what’s a happy ending?” I ask.

  “Getting married! Having pudding! Killing the dragon! Custard!” they chime.

  I start to wonder, and hastily wrap up that evening’s story so I can go and think about happy endings. No, not those ones, you perv. The thing is, I’m already happy. With a happy beginning and a happy middle. Happy endings aren’t the problem. If there is a dragon to slay, it must be some nuanced kind of beast. Perhaps the kind of feeling that British people describe by using a foreign word because we can’t handle it. Ennui. Saudade. Weltschmertz. Joie de vivre.

  Or more specifically, in my case, a low-level rebellion against some of the realities of motherhood. The tiredness, the repetition, the inevitable laundry – all the pointless and invisible stuff. In a word: domesticity. The Dragon of Domesticity. Who, it turns out, is closely followed by his scaly friend the Dragon of the Crock. The one who says: “Shut your faces, all you women with childcare.” I’d happily turn a fire extinguisher on him.

  Maybe not slay him, though. Something that has lingered on from Paris is the idea that freedom also means freedom for your enemy. Even fire-breathing enemies. How about me and the dragons exchange a brief
Yorkshire nod: “Y’alright?” “Alright.” And then we carry on, and go our separate ways. As few battles as possible, and minimal slaying. Oh God – does this make me some kind of closet hippy?

  Here ends my Vindication of the Rights of Dragons.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Electric Calpol Acid Test

  The very long flight is surprisingly OK. The emergency Calpol remains unused, even as the words of certain mummy blogs come echoing back: “Don’t ever travel on planes with babies under five.” OK, so he does keep running up the aisle, looking back with a huge smile and then bursting through the curtains into First Class, but who among us hasn’t dreamt of doing the same? No, he’s charming company. And only does a leaky poo right at the end.

  We collect our unfeasibly shiny hire car, hoping it will soon acquire some dusty respectability and stop looking so rental. Accommodation-wise the gods of travel are already smiling on me: we’re staying with an old friend. Maria Clara was my flatmate back in our student days. She’s now married with two young sons and lives in a wooden-fronted Victorian house in the Mission District.

  We haven’t seen each other since she’s had the babies. My mind does a hasty update, in which the entire data bank of a person on her wildest student nights out morphs into someone scolding a toddler in a car seat. As we catch up, I soon get dizzy with tiredness. Maria Clara and her husband Tim say their kids wake them regularly through the night and are worried it’ll disturb me. I assure them what a pleasure it is to hear a baby that you don’t have to attend to. We go to bed early.

  I wake up at six o’clock – ping – wide awake. Will is snoring quietly. It’s still quite dark. I look around the room, longing to be out on their large terrace looking at the sky. I might even get some reading done, if I tiptoe. So I ease myself out of bed onto the wooden floor, grope around for my jeans and T-shirt, slowly lift my bag and creep from the room. It’s lighter in the hallway, and I gently, so gently, pull the door shut behind me. I hold the handle tight and keep it twisted until the last second, fractionally pulling the door until a final gentle click shuts it. Phew. I creep down the hallway into the living room.