Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Ratlow came out. ‘Help her with her things, you two, do I have to do it all?’
    I had a tiny room that looked over the back fields. I put my books in piles and folded my clothes; three pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four jumpers, four shirts and a week's supply of socks and knickers. And a duffel coat.
    ‘Is that it?
    ‘There's a tin-opener and some crockery and a camping stove, and a towel and a sleeping bag but they can stay in the car.’
    ‘You'll need a hot-water bottle.’
    ‘I've got one, and a flashlight and shampoo.’
    ‘All right then. Get some jam and bread and go to bed.’
    She watched me as I got out Gertrude Stein.
    ‘S,’ she said.
    Gertrude and Alice are living in Paris. They are helping the Red Cross during the war. They are driving along in a two-seater Ford shipped from the States. Gertrude likes driving but she refuses to reverse. She will only go forward because she says that the whole point of the twentieth century is progress.
    The other thing that Gertrude won't do is read the map. Alice Toklas reads the map and Gertrude sometimes takes notice and sometimes not.
    It is going dark. There are bombs exploding. Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: ‘THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.’
    Gertrude drives on. She says, ‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’

10
    This Is The Road

    I
DECIDED TO APPLY TO read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do. I knew no one who had been to university and although clever girls were encouraged to go to teacher training college, or to take their accountancy exams, Oxford and Cambridge were not on the list of things to do before you die.
    The Equal Pay Act had become law in Britain in 1970, but no woman I knew got anything like equal pay – or believed that she should.
    In the industrial north of England traditional kinds of blue-collar employment were strong – factory work, manufacture, mining, and men held the economic power.
    The women held together the family and the community, but the invisibility of women's contribution, not measured or paid for, or socially rewarded, meant that my world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men. My mother did it to my father. She held him in contempt (and that wasn't fair), but she called him the head of the household (and that wasn't true). That marital/domestic pattern was repeated everywhere I looked.
    Few women I knew had professional or managerial jobs and those who did were unmarried. Most of my female teachers at school were unmarried. Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said – and I will never forget it: ‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’
    It is quite a quote, and should have made her a feminist, but she had no time for feminism as a movement. She adored men, even though the lack of one rendered her invisible in her own eyes – the saddest place in the township of invisible places a woman can occupy. Germaine Greer had published The Female Eunuch in 1970 but none of us had read it.
    We were not sophisticated. We were northerners. We didn't live in a big city like Manchester, and feminism seemed not to have reached us.
    ‘Battleaxe’ has always been a word used both for and against the strong northern working-class woman. That cleaver image split our identity too. Northern women were tough, and reckoned that way in the home and in popular comedy – all the seaside postcards were drawings of weedy little men and dominating women – and in the drunken working men's clubs, stage acts like Les Dawson dressed up in headscarves and aprons, parodying, but also celebrating, the formidable women the men loved, feared, and were dependent upon. Yet those women who were supposed to stand at the door waiting to whack their men with a rolling pin had no economic clout. And when they had, they hid it.
    The women I knew who ran their own small businesses, like the market stall I worked on, or the fish and chip shop that supplied me with many of my meals, pretended it was their husband's enterprise, and that they just worked there.
    When we had our one and only sex education lesson at school it was not about sex at all, but sexual economics. We should pay our own way,