“Little put-upon sisters” For Ivy, Lisa, Betty and Trace, and for all those we have failed to care for

Four girls sitting on a flint wall in winter; four girls poorly dressed beneath a grey sky. It is November and the sky is low hanging: a grey ceiling I think as I try to look up. Four girls sitting after school on a wall in front of Lisa and Betty Humphries’ house getting cold. Lisa and Betty don’t have proper coats, only bits of knit wear, a hand-me-down school cardigan, bobbly hats and bobbly scarves, the sort thrown together by old ladies for other old ladies with disabilities or something missing – bits of their brain --- because they are S.E.N. and so they wear those sorts of clothes. The sort you wouldn’t be seen dead in. Grey and brown, the colours of middle age and old age and school uniforms in the 1980s. The colours of charity shops.

The road leading down from our school is narrow and there is  not much room for manoeuvre; for women passing with push chairs and prams; for arrangements on the pavements; for holding hands. Houses hug themselves closely on Elmgrove where homes are mainly council. A road frequently anticipating a storm. Shouting. Cursing. Sharp Knives. Glass flying. The police. On the other side of the road boys slouch home from school using curse words I don’t know. We don’t swear at home, only my aunt does who comes from another place --- rage – where it is red.

One girl sits slightly apart. – Ivy -- the largest dumpling in the set, the most abject. Ivy almost certainly smells for these are the smelly kids, the rejects, those almost in Care and most uncared for, the drowned out, the disowned, the forgotten.

I can’t remember whose sister Ivy is, but I know already Ivy is almost entirely discarded -- forever and ever -- and nothing will bring her back because Ivy is a truly abject creature. Put out in the cold and the rain on this oppressively dull day in winter, nobody cares for Ivy. She is the stray catbegging for food; the dog carrying fleas at the bottom of our twitten mum will not let us adopt. It might be November today; it will never really matter what day it is because Ivy’s brain doesn’t work like mine or yours. Ivy is S.E.N. as we said then. Betty might be too, but less so. Lisa is just a slag.

Ivy and Betty are not slags truly because I don’t think you can dress as badly as they do -- from the school jumble sale -- and be a slag. A slag is someone self-appointed and drawing attention to herself. Boys notice slags, slags notice boys, this is the slag’s social equation; and she is damned to danger.

I am not a slag either and no one has called me one yet that I can remember, because I don’t have the right clothes. Mine are too old fashioned and homemade like Anne’s clothes in Anne of Green Gables; because I suffer from Victorianitis, which is a condition, unbeknownst to me then, inuring me from danger. And although I despise my clothes --- they are as far away from fashion as Land’s End to the Sussex Coast – Victorianitis keeps me from being interfered with by boys or men. Sexually I don’t fit in; I do not socially register. Sewn into an historical casket of crochet and embroderie anglaise and velvet ribbons, I cannot be a slag, and I am not quite one of the smelly girls, but I feel for them.

All my life I have felt for them: the socially discarded, those locked out of their own homes wandering the streets. In the case of Ivy and Betty, and probably Lisa too, (almost certainly Lisa) it was because their mums were slags or sluts. A slag is someone looking for a sex and a slut is someone who has had sex in a dirty sort of fashion. For a slut, things usually went badly; perhaps less so for a slag who nonetheless had it coming to her, whatever it was, but certainly something nasty. Still, a slag might be lucky because it might amount to nothing at all, the something nasty in the woodshed. A slag might just be pouting her lips and showing her legs and hipsand boasting over boyfriends.

Lisa and Betty’s mums had boyfriends, and the boyfriend had the key to their house, and boyfriends, we knew, lock you out. So we had a long, cold wait. There were no boyfriends in my house and no slags, only sad women singing prayers andtrying to learn Greek and play Rachmaninov from a keyboard perched upon a dirty carpet.  

Ivy is locked out from her own home, her sister too, and her friend. We are all friends after a fashion but in truth I am the babysitter. We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters. (Sylvia Plath, ‘The Babysitters’)

​​​​    *

It is late November sometime in the 1980s and I am the babysitter sitting on a sharp flint wall trying to keep the babies safe. Ivy is the most babyish of all, the one who will wander off because someone will snatch her and degrade her, although Ivy is already pretty degraded. These days, Ivy would be groomed, they would all be groomed, meaning they would be forced to do things against their will. Their hair combed and back combed which hurts terribly, violently; allof the hairs on their body, including their privates, ripped off. Dolls battered and used and discarded in charity shops, their red lips worn off.

I did not know the particulars then, and I cannot bear to know all the particulars now, but I know danger lurked; the older boys on the other side of the road were a clue; their rude, sexual words blared about the bottom of the hill as they turned towards the newsagents where they would grab at sweets and run. I did not know the words, but I knew from their leery faces they were rude. And I was reminded of the goblins in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market leering at the adolescent sisters, Laura and Lizzie, with their alluring, fruity wares. And so Laura, who knows more, says to her sister:

“We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?”

“Come buy,” call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.”

And I knew this: that I must not leave these babies sitting alone on the road leading down from school on a darkening winter’s day. Not until I knew they were inside, safe, until someone had a key.

I take a look at Ivy, pale and overcooked and overdressed; Ivy really is unsightly. A poor little mite Miss Marple would say, except Ivy is not little: she is fat, and she is dressed in jumble clothes. No one will ever have Ivy Humphries, not even the men patrolling the streets after dark; men hanging around the school gates. I think of the two thieves in The Aristocats (or is it 101 Dalmatians? They blur), stealers of cute innocence. Neither of them will want dirty stray cats; they want pussies, sleek well brushed clean creatures with bows in their hair that trot along nicely behind them and sit on their laps. Ivy would never fit; they would toss her off; and they would never feed her because Ivy already eats too much. They will beat her, starve her, lock her away.

​And I thought of the fate of Ruby Keene in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library which I had just finished reading in my passionate phase for crime. Ruby, aged 18, twice Ivy’s age, and twice mine.

​​​​​ *

​Ruby Keene is slim and fair and baby looking and Ruby Keene is dead. It is her young body found on the floor of Colonel Bantree’s library in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Ruby’s corpse bothers the Bantree’s terribly because scandal erupts like lightening speed in a small English village. But no one seems that bothered about Ruby being dead except the old man who had planned to adopt her, the wealthy Mr. Conway Jefferson who loves Ruby as a daughter, as a baby daughter. Ruby is a ‘bit dumb’ and she went down better with the older men than with the young ones’ her shrewd cousin Josie tells Colonel Melchett when he inquires after the nature of the dead girl. Ruby was a baby girl looking to be adopted. A nice enough dancer, Josie says, good enough, and nice-looking too although she overdid the makeup a bit . . . but you know what girls are like”.

​I read of Ruby Keene, and I knew she was a relative of Lisa Humphries and of Betty, her sister; no one was the relative of Ivy, because Ivy was special, she was unique, and the most baby of all. Poor Ruby Keene, “what swine men are!” says her cousin, with feeling; because in truth she does know there are men who would feed like wild boars upon the likes of young Rubys – despite the fact she has arranged herself for Ruby to be murdered -- because Ruby has got in the way of her own plans for sexual attention and self-advancement. Ruby has queered her pitch, so to speak, and so Ruby must be removed. Ruby, who, according to the man who wishes to adopt her, was “natural, uncomplaining” a “hardworking child, unspoilt and charming. Not a lady, perhaps, but thank God neither vulgar nor abominable.”

​Ruby Keene who has drawn the attention of a wealthy patriarch is now dangerous to others. To her cousin. To the relatives of her adoptive father. They are plenty now jealous of Ruby, despite the fact she is, as Miss Marple knows immediately, a poor little mite. When Inspector Slack goes to inspect her room at the Hotel Majestic where she was paid to dance for men, he finds a tawdry Cinderella’s wardrobe: a foamy pink dress, some sordid underwear, sheer silk stockings flung into a ball because Ruby wore bare legs; she did her legs up with make-up. Ruby Keene: a real circus act.

​​​​               *

I spot posters of missing girls around town, around the bus stop at St. Clements, east of Oxford city centre near where I live; on the edge of the district where a grooming gang was busted some years ago. Some got away – the men I mean --- because no one seems to mind so much about what happened to the Ruby Keenes, although I did hear there was a conscientious policeman on the case. Let’s call him Inspector Sharp, and he was in the paper’s the other day speaking of those who got away, naming no names of course – no one wants the scandal – but this Inspector must have been a different sort from Christie’s Inspector Slack in The Body in the Library. Detective Sharp caught some of the offenders but as usual, some got away. He wished he’d caught more because those men are out again patrolling the streets. You can see them even in broad daylight. And they are posters of Ruby Keene up again by the bus stops.

​I catch a bus along the London Road and up the hill to Headington, my heart heavy thinking of Ruby and her forlorn poster-face. I meet a nice lady from the Quaker meeting I know, and I tell her I’ve seen Ruby’s face again, and behind her the face of Lisa Humphries and her sister Betty and their friend Ivy. And the nice lady tells me she is glad her daughter’s child is being taken care of by a lovely adoptive family and so she has no need to worry that her grandchild will come to harm. No need for a poster.

​I am on the bus going up the hill to see a nice doctor. I call him a wizard, but he doesn’t know that, because I want to believe in magic, and he is unlikely to approve of such habits;my willing myself into a state of enchantment to protect myself from danger; my reciting of word-spells, poetry, lyrical mantras, hymns and prayers. Doctors can also be dangerous, I know. You have to be careful what you tell them: they will use it against you. Doctors, remember, keep notes.

So he doesn’t know today how much my heart aches for Ruby on the poster; and how much I pray she will be safe; and how I keep developing over and over in my mental dark room the image of Lisa and Betty and Ivy on that flint wall sitting, not pretty, but susceptible. So I do not tell the kind and serious doctor anything of my thoughts on Ruby whose body was brutally violated because he is full of functional thinking and functional words such as ‘biomechanics’. His is the world of the body and adjusting the body; the alignment of pelvis to spine is all biomechanics, he tells me, mechanical measurements and adjustments. But what of magic, I think. And what of faith and superstition? Bodies are just as likely to alter and recover, to heal and reassemble, under the influence of a devout creed. Half of medicine, after all, is the placebo effect, faith and hope and magic.

And so I think of Queen Isis following the brutal murder of her brother and King, Osiris, combing the Egyptian desert looking for the dismembered parts of his body  -- fourteen – until she found them all and breathed upon them and put him back together again. Love and devotion are an absolute creedand attention in its highest form is a kind of prayer says philosopher Simone Weil. Isis resealed the parts of her beloved brother’s body by absolute attention and devotion to the missing parts as she gathered them together and made awhole. And I know now, years on, I narrowly missed dismemberment because I was paying a small part of attention to the danger; I was picking up some clues by reading oforphan girls in grave danger. But more practically, it was my clothes that saved me: my dreadful old-fashioned Jane Eyre-turning-maiden aunt clothes.

Because my skirts were always respectably lengthened to below the knee, midway to the ankle, and carefully lined.Nothing see-through ever! Mum was highly alert for the see-through garment. My mother, a trained seamstress, loved Victorian and Edwardian pinafores and dresses, so I resembled a shepherdess or a maid --- Victorian and virtuous, a dowdy innocent --- and I knew nothing of men, but I knewto stay away from the rude boys on the road. Dressed as I was, I had no chance in hell of becoming a slag. Instead, I was being whisked away by other girls in danger, brave girls; by Jane Eyres and Anne’s of Green Gable who had passionate yet practical exit plans: concise forms of poetry ready for swift declarations no one around them would understand. Strange and bewitching spells to distract them, the dangerous ones; the lascivious goblins. Those selling luscious grapes, those little, merchant men.

​And when the nice doctor tells me about his newborn son, I think to myself as he lowers me down upon the strange workbench to adjust my cervical spine, I am glad you have a boy and not a girl. The world is dangerous for girls, especially girls lacking fathers, those baby girls. And I think of Ruby again and how hard she worked to wear to makeup and dye her hair so she could twirl beneath the ballroom lights like Cinderella; Cinderella who, at midnight, runs away, back to her kitchen, where she is instantly reduced from princess to stray cat sleeping upon a stone-cold hearth.

​​​​                *

Aged fourteen I signed myself into Care because at home I was provoking just too much rage. I will puff and puff and blow your house down. Rage was the big bad wolf, and the house I lived in was about to blow down and this was my fault. I had become unbearably provoking with my insistence on a new plot. New ways of seeing. My forms of play. Certainly it was better for my aunt I left because without me she could continue her regime. With me out the way, her main threat was gone.

Regimes need rulers and my aunt was a ruler; she was one of the men although she despised the male species, which is something of a  paradox; but life is full of those, and so is poetry, at least the good stuff – read John Donne – he will show you what I mean. So in the end, it was better for me that I locked myself outside the house and threw away the keys. But you can’t know that fully until you start to embark, and embarkation takes faith and hope, some clarity. It takes otherstories and other plots. And so I did not leave home alone. I took with me the small but the fierce sort. Other sisters: Anne, Jane Eyre.

​​​​*

​Care, I soon realised, was full of baby girls locked outside of their homes. I was now one of those girls; but unlike Ivy and Lisa and Betty and Trace – I will tell you about her next --- I was devising my own plot. I was at least half the master and captain of my story. 

​O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

(“O Captain! My Captain!”, Walt Whitman)

No one was ever exulting for Little Trace, and she had no captain. Her ship had sunk some time ago. But Trace was a real innocent, a dowdy innocent, she just didn’t have the brains I had (a genetic accident) and she believed boys were great, meaning she longed for their attention. Trace would’ve loved to have danced like Ruby Keene, and she’d have done it for no money at all. She’d have done it for anyone because she had mistaken sexual attention for love.

​It was Trace who gave me my first lessons in sexual attention. She was appalled at my lack of trying for the boys, appalled at my lack of breasts and behind, appalled at my lack of sexual dressing. Girls, she believed, should try as hard as Madonna and so Trace danced her heart out to ‘Like a Virgin.’ Little Trace, five feet nothing, who twirled around like a small plastic beach ball dressed in shiny colours, her beloved charity shop clothes. Trace, who I have written of elsewhere, because she was my adopted sister: I watched her dance when no one else in the wretched home would stomach her routines.

​‘Shut the fuck up Trace, you slag! No one wants to hear your fucking racket!’

We were both locked out of our homes and Trace had been signed into care because at fourteen she still didn’t know how to wash and dress herself properly because her mother lay in bed all day stuffing her face with chips and beans. Baked beans, Trace’s favourite food, her baby food. Trace was not ready for adult fodder, the goblins with their strange and exotic fruit.

​​​​​ *

In this new home with its bare linoleum floors there was no place for innocence and play. No space for trying anything out, for growing up. If you were not already hard as nails, perfected a false self, you were done for. During my time in care I met a lot of professionals who doused me in expert opinions, and I noticed that most of them, like the leering goblins in Rossetti’s poem, were selling their wares, their routines. Psychology, psychiatry (see-through psychology with drugs), art therapy, social work, religion, all requiring a persona, expensive apparatus (therapy) a professional routine.None of them seemed to have any real faith and none of them seemed to know how to play.

Almost no adult I met was happy. My social worker was positively miserable. Or was she trying to perfect a depressed attitude because she thought I was? I was not depressed; I was just in the wrong world with the wrong role-models. I was looking for the world of play where no one took themselves quite so seriously. Where a sense of self was more fluid and then, in actual fact, more resilient. Trace was the closest I had come to finding real play. She made me laugh with her frank criticisms of my appearance: ‘Look at the state of yer. Yer can’t go out looking like that, Sal! Yer gotta make an effort!’ Later, and perhaps because of her, I learned to make others laugh and it made me happy.

One psychiatrist called Herb who liked to play golf told me that the day he saw me eat a Mars Bars would be the day he knew I was cured. I had been eating Mars Bars for years but not much else. I’d also been eating Battenburg cake and cherry topped shortbread, all sorts of treats – probably because I wanted the world to be more colourful and cheerful, more celebratory. All the adults I knew were dreary and lacking in confidence. Nobody seemed to truly believe in anything, certainly not the nurses who sat at the end of my bed in that scuff-marked linoleum-dreary home. They all seemed depressed; to have fallen from that oppressive November sky above Elmgrove Road. Forsaken, forlorn, on the wrong side of doubt, they sat at the end of my bed and told me their woes. ​

I was learning that adults were not convinced by themselves. They lacked confidence and faith, real vision. Chronically disappointed, they never seemed to have tasted joy. Years later, I’m beginning to think this might be because none of them were allowed to play; because we have not created a world confident enough to permit growing children to try things out; because we exalt the already-made, the pre-purchased false persona, the professional routine.

Because we do not trust the wisdom of innocence and innocents; and so we try to cheapen it as the world continues to run along the dangerously predictable lines of sexual attention. A world committed to selling sex of the cheap and nasty sort to young girls. Sex and being sexy (we lie and call it ‘beautiful’, but surely real beauty does not need special effects? And in the world of the goblin market we do mean sexy) makes you desirable. Someone will have you. You will carry a price and if you can be priced you have a place in the world. You are on the market where everyone must be.

Sex sells, and we have taught our children, and especially our girls, to turn on the special sexual effects as early as possible: from the age of seven or eight to show your midriff. To sashay your hips, to pout your lips, and to look about for the goblins who will evaluate and sell you alongside their luscious peaches and grapes. Goblins come in all shape and sizes and the goblins have a clear routine too; they hobble, they intrigue, and they cry out their sales song:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy.”

And so they bring the innocent children to market; children who would like to play; to try out all this list of exotic fruits. To dare to touch and taste upon their tongue; to see what it might be like to try something new.

​We are a society ashamed of innocence, and we are ashamed of those who play. Ashamed of non-conformists, ofimaginative beings; those who have not perfected a synthetic self; those not selling their wares. In those leaden-grey years of living inside state-owned, state-run homes, Little Trace was the most real person I met. And the most playful. She was alsoone of the most tragic. Because I knew, that as soon as she went back into the world, the goblins would get her, and my Little Trace, with her fat breasts she was so proud of, would be gobbled up.

Meanwhile, my Victorianitis, my rail-thin, pale skinned symptoms, were keeping me safe; and it kept me safe for several more years. Long enough to extract myself from those grey skies: from Elmgrove Road and its low lying flint walls; from the society of the poor little mites I had grown up alongside – Lisa, Betty and Ivy --- from the depressing environs of state care; from my depressed, lack-lustre wardens; from the clutches of the golf-club swinging Porsche driving psychiatrist Herb who threatened to section me because of my defiance (my vivid imagination). From all those forsaken souls who, as it turned out, had no faith in themselves and no vision and whose budgets were running out; whose bureaucracy was strangling them and everyone attached to them.  

When Jane Eyre leaves Thornfield Hall behind her it is her faith that carries her away; and it is her faith that carries her back. Inexorable is the word Charlotte Bronte applies to this process. She means Janes’s is an unavoidable exit; her plot is fate driven, predetermined, and there is no going backexcept to find what is she loves. Mr. Rochester. It is Jane’s imagination that propels her; her belief in the unseen elements, whatever we call those; the invisible world where hope gathers; where we can make what we will of our circumstances and generate our own creed.

I could only do this because I had stored up the heroes and heroines of literature and their exalted, playful and resilient plots. David Copperfield, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Miss Marple who always had a sharp eye for the Ruby Keenes of the world, those poor little mites as she calls them. And because I remember those girls, my old school friends, sitting on that flint wall waiting to be let in; Ivy, Betty and Lisa waiting under a cold, louring sky. I only wish I could have reached out my hand and taken them with me, but I could not. I was only the temporary babysitter. And that is where a deeper sorrow lies, because not a week goes by that I don’t think of them, my little put-upon sisters susceptible to the cries of the goblin men. Those sisters whose faces I still see across town sitting on the roadside waiting to be seen.