The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  We filled in our forms and took them to a teacher who said, ‘No, not this here, in that column there, no, you’ll have to do it again.’ We rearranged course codes, entry dates, and what little we were asked about ourselves and went back. ‘It’s quite simple really. Just follow the instructions.’ We couldn’t follow the instructions and took five forms each to get it right. We were never going to get to university.

  After that it was a matter of whether or not I liked the person I saw at interview. I only went for two in the end, deciding that Sussex sounded like too much fresh air. At London University, I arrived in the rain and my streaked hair dripped pink on the professor’s desk. But we talked about Ted Hughes and Russian folktales, and he offered me a place on the spot. The woman at the polytechnic was so warm and interested that I didn’t want to go home.

  It never occurred to either Sophie or me to consider Oxford or Cambridge. We despised them and were in any case not encouraged to be ambitious, and I at least never worked. I also strove hard to disguise the fact that I lived in a big house and that my father was a doctor. The Doctor’s Daughter would have gone to the grammar school. She would have been romanced by the Landowner’s Son. She would have been Head Girl and gone to Cambridge. My mother’s contempt for privilege meant that I was not this thing and from what I saw of doctor’s daughters and landowner’s sons, I believed she was right.

  I extended my contempt to myself and did not allow myself to achieve or excel in any way. This was the time when people said reflexively, ‘That’s so middle class’ and we, the young middle classes, said, ‘Yeah, fucking right it is. Fucking bourgeois.’ To be bourgeois was to have a career in mind, to own a chequebook, to possess a job. The bourgeois paid for their education and so paid for their entrance into university. Then people started paying them. They wore bad clothes, drove new cars and listened to terrible music. In fact, music didn’t matter to them at all.

  I wrote essays and sat exams, although I never stopped going to gigs. My sixth-form college reports are single despairing lines about my ability and refusal to work. Yet I thought and read, always carrying Dostoyevsky, Joyce or Eliot, and going to London most weekends, not just for bands but also to visit galleries and see films. I was lucky in that I had access to my father’s books without him telling me what to read. I was gripped by what I was discovering and resistant to what I was taught and could not connect my intense interest in the world with what was left of my education.

  A friend’s elder brother was at Cambridge and so one weekend, out of sheer curiosity, Sophie and I hitched there to visit him. We arrived at the house full of our adventure to find seriousness of a kind we had not encountered before. No one laughed or made jokes. A bean stew was portioned out. I was invited to help myself to seconds and then reprimanded for taking too much. There were four other people who might want seconds as well. I had helped myself to as much as I could because, from what I could see, that bean stew was the only food in the house.

  That night, we were taken to a party. We got dressed up, put on make-up and followed our hosts out of their quiet house and through the quiet streets. This was a party? Boys and girls sitting on floors and chairs, talking. The air seemed remarkably clear. I sat in a corner of one of these well-lit rooms and noted that these girls did not wear make-up. They wore jeans, jumpers and flat lace-up shoes. They did not talk to me or to Sophie, and neither did the boys. They might have impressed me with their austerity and made me feel ridiculous with my spiky hair and eye-liner were it not for the fact that this was a party without music. I couldn’t understand anything without music, above all a party. I couldn’t grasp that at all.

  51

  Unquiet

  … what I need is soothing lullabies, and I have found them in abundance in my Homer. How often do I lull my tumultuous blood to rest; for you have seen nothing as changeably unquiet as this heart.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Sorrows of Young Werther

  The last days of 1979: a new government, a new decade and the prospect of leaving home within the year. Home was in trouble, only I wouldn’t find out why till my father left six months after I did. There was much that I had refused to notice or had been told but would not hear.

  Among my friends nothing was said but we knew that we were separating. I could feel life opening and wanted more than anything to go off into it but as yet I had no idea what life might be. I still did no work and in any exam argued in one direction and then in the other. I had unpicked my handwriting so as to render it completely unfeminine (nothing rounded) and illegible. I was warned I might fail on my handwriting alone.

  I was trapped in Youth, which was different from adolescence. Youth meant being sensitive but out of control, pretentious, ambitious and overwhelmed, having feelings too big to know what to do with, wanting every feeling to be that big, wanting others to feel big things for you and then being terrified if this came to pass. Youth takes for granted the heart’s lead, as Werther admits: ‘I am treating my poor heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted.’

  Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory – Barthes and Foucault. We could go no further without talking about what was wrong, which was that neither of us knew how to manage what we felt. One day we were on a coach going to see a band and I experienced a terrible shock. It was like what you feel when someone jumps out on you, a lurch of nerves, only usually it’s over in a moment as you make sense of the situation (and laugh at the joke). My nerves kept lurching. I couldn’t move or speak and was having difficulty breathing. My heart skittered, my bowels melted, my bones fused. Yet nothing had happened. The coach was quietly proceeding along the motorway and Daniel was holding my hand. Nothing had happened but my mind had chosen that moment to open a trapdoor in itself.

  So much could not be said. Was that why my body started screaming? Daniel tried to help and he tried, too, to talk about his own difficulties and while I wanted more than anything to hold onto him and say that I understood and everything would be alright, I was speechless. We lay in each other’s arms but all we did was listen to music.

  We didn’t decide to stop being in touch only all of a sudden we weren’t. I longed for him to phone me but never thought of phoning him myself. Christmas passed. I watched old films late at night and wept. Why did I not contact Daniel? Nothing had been said. We had simply stepped back.

  On New Year’s Eve, I went to see Joy Division at the Electric Ballroom. Ian Curtis was an epileptic whose spasmodic, quivering bursts of dance emulated fits and sometimes were fits. He was twenty-three, the same age Goethe had been in 1772 when he met Charlotte Buff, on whom Werther’s beloved is based. I imagined that Werther had Ian Curtis’s pathetic beauty and the same doom-laden voice. Like his idol Jim Morrison, Curtis could, through tone alone, enlarge what he sang into the epic. These young men were alienated; it was a word the music papers used a lot, and which I understood from Shakespeare to mean a stepping out of the human net, letting go of the human scale and finding yourself unable to function out there and unable to get back. Hamlet:

  … I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myselfe a King of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreames.

  Ian Curtis spoke to me of feeling beyond what a single person could bear, of something fundamental and archetypal – not a boyfriend who wouldn’t pick up the phone but a man on an odyssey who takes twenty years to come home, or a man who mourns his wife so powerfully that he enters death in order to find her. I wasn’t so interested in the woman who waits. I identified with the fated hero who cannot help who he is and what he has to do. I wasn’t in love with Werther, I was Werther, until he shot himself and took all night and several pages to die.

  I was Ian Curtis, too. Watching the lightning pass through him as he shook on stage, I thought of my panic attacks which were also electrical, a long moment of shock. I was about to go into the world and it kept pulling itself out from under my feet. Four months later, Ian Curtis hanged himself and I realised that h
e was not Werther but a man in pain. I wasn’t twenty-three but seventeen, and I was a girl. My pain erupted into panic every time I tried to walk away.

  52

  Ping

  Ping murmur perhaps a nature one second almost never that much memory almost never.

  SAMUEL BECKETT, ‘Ping’

  And then it was June and A-levels and I wandered through the exams knowing already that I had lost to them. I sat at home typing out notes I didn’t read, taking comfort in my typewriter. I would type anything – letters, lists, essays for friends. Typing was writing put to music – the clack of each letter, the injection of the space bar, the ping at the end of the line, the ratcheting revision of the carriage return

  PING

  And between exams we gathered on people’s living-room floors to watch Wimbledon, Borg and McEnroe, back and forth, on and on, the one year I followed it or cared, only for the endless back and forth, the carriage return

  PING

  And at home, the table-tennis table in the hall, so that when two people passed, they might pick up the bats and smash a ball back and forth, spin and slice for all they’re worth but unless you knew the warp and camber, the dead spot, the sweet spot, you were lost. A tiny ball ricocheting off the walls and windows, the phone, the fireplace, the floor

  PING

  And in the exam hall, the heat and tedium, the knowing I was lost and being too uncertain of myself to stay in one place long enough to shape an argument, too sick of myself to care about what happened next, the heat and the open windows and music drifting in, always the same song on a radio somewhere out there, ‘Ring My Bell’ with its synthesised pulse as if happiness depended on something mechanical

  PING

  And time bouncing off the walls, from one side of the page to the other, a pointless way of exhausting itself

  PING

  And for all the changing and saving of the world, for all the not being a girl, for all the black and white of it, the rising above and stepping aside, and for all that music had carried and shaped and shown, this was the truth: the carriage return

  53

  Won’t you be my girl?

  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.

  54

  Fuck art, let’s dance

  And still in my dreams I sway like one fainting strand

  Of spiderweb, glittering and vanishing and frail

  Above the river.

  JAMES WRIGHT, ‘On a Phrase from Southern Ohio’

  That last summer at home seemed to be getting longer and longer. I’d heard about cheap flights to America, how you could just turn up at the airport and buy a ticket on the spot, and decided to go and see Beth, who lived in Columbus, Ohio. I asked Luke if he wanted to come along and he said, Sure, why not? I wrote to Beth and suggested a trip and she wrote back, Sure, why not? I don’t think any of us consulted our parents.

  I had told Beth my deepest secrets because after all, she was several thousand miles away. In our eight years of correspondence we had marvelled at one another’s vocabulary of experience. What was a hayride? A prom? A youth-club disco? A jumble sale? When she’d come to London two years earlier we’d looked similar enough, with our jeans and longish hair, to feel at ease. She had taken the Vibrators gig as an adventure and was amused to hear that I had become a punk. Before Luke and I left for Ohio, I wrote and asked her to destroy my letters.

  Luke’s father drove us to the airport. ‘Are you sure about these tickets?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said confidently. ‘I read about them. You just turn up and buy them on the day.’

  Only there were no cheap flights. We were there at the airport and Beth was expecting us. Someone cobbled together a route through New York and Pittsburgh, and Luke’s father lent us the money. When we arrived in Columbus it was raining but warm, a combination I couldn’t make sense of. Beth picked us up (she could drive!) and took us back to a low sprawling house. There was no sign of her parents, although one of her sisters put in a brief appearance.

  I changed into black trousers, black T-shirt, blue jacket. Beth looked at me. She didn’t get me. Eventually she pointed at my plimsolls: ‘My mom wears those.’ I followed her through the shopping malls and downtown streets, a tanned leggy blonde in tiny cut-off jeans trailing a short pale girl with pink cheeks and black-and-blue hair.

  Away from England, Daniel, my music and friends, I was suddenly uncertain. No one would understand that my style was ironic. I retreated to jeans and a T-shirt, and sat in the shade reading books while Beth and Luke sunbathed, got stoned and bounced with her friends on the trampoline. Eventually they persuaded me to join them and so I gave up my seriousness and from then on smoked and bounced, ate ice-cream and lay around with the rest of them.

  One night, Beth and Luke came giggling into the kitchen.

  ‘Beth told me about your letters,’ he said. ‘How you used to tell her everything.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I told her that I ought to see them. I mean you could have told her stuff about me. Anything.’

  ‘She’s thrown them away. Haven’t you, Beth?’

  Beth hesitated. ‘I put them in the garbage just before you came …’

  ‘They’re gone, right?’

  What had I told Beth? Everything. All the crushes and excitements and mortifications I had left behind me might now be exposed to someone who wasn’t safely thousands of miles away from my life but at the centre of it. And what had I told her about Luke? Had I mentioned the brief strange phase in which we nearly kissed but then decided not to? We had said nothing, I told no one and we were free to move past it, only I may have told Beth.

  I had known that coming to see Beth would bring me face to face with a self I had despatched along with thos
e letters. It was why I had asked her to throw them out. She had done so but maybe only out of politeness. She didn’t seem to understand the danger I felt myself to be in.

  Luke grinned. ‘We went out to the garbage.’

  Beth laughed and rolled her eyes. ‘He made me!’ only she wasn’t really embarrassed. It wasn’t that important. She began to look around for her sun cream.

  Luke shrugged. ‘They’d gone. Who’s for a beer?’

  I was shaking.

  That afternoon, I’d come across a tape I’d made with Cara and Janey and had sent to Beth when I was thirteen. While Beth and Luke went out I put it on and found that I could not tell which was my voice. It was as if I were in another country, speaking another language or taking part in a play. I said nothing about the tape to Beth because I had immediately erased it.

  Beth’s friends had cars and fake IDs. They climbed in our windows at midnight and drove us to apartments with gunshot holes in the walls. Yet they loved their country. On the Fourth of July, I watched the parade through Columbus of majorettes and marching bands followed by a number of tanks. Tanks rolling through the suburbs! Did no one see the irony in this? Perhaps you needed more history to develop irony. Perhaps the English had too much.

  I found a record shop, and bought Banshees and Clash bootlegs. Back at the house, I put the speakers in the garden and played ‘I’m So Bored With the USA’. Beth wandered past.