Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  Oh dear, I thought, there’s some poor old cow ahead of me. She must be in a terrible state. Of course, it was me. I forget how old I am. It’s the age I’ve reached. It’s not like when you are young and people ask you every five minutes. The ER team hauled me on to some kind of operating table. The pain was indeed exquisite and I cried out. I was ignored and without so much as a by your leave people began to cut off all my clothes. They started at my feet, slicing through my jeans and working their way up to my good bra (you know how you have one really good one that you travel in). I tried to focus and remember what underpants I was wearing. I do have a couple of pairs of those big girls’ pants and I thought if it was the ones with the double gusset they were going to need a knife. A young nurse tried to remove my signet ring and couldn’t.

  ‘Shall I cut it off?’ she asked her superior.’

  ‘I’ll sue,’ I said, deliberately using the one word that makes Americans listen. They left my ring alone and carried on with their work. By now my head was clearing a little and I had time to think. I still didn’t know if my life was about to go the way of Christopher Reeve’s. Was I destined to be wheeled about for ever more and take my sustenance through a tube? What I did know with a fair degree of certainty was that the one thing I had failed to do on leaving England was to take out any travel insurance. Suddenly the mass medical attention seemed less welcome. It was all very well having the might of American know-how focused on my broken body but how the hell was I going to pay for it? The US of A is not a place to be poor and poorly at the same time. Naked and covered only by the merest hint of a sheet, I was wheeled off for a CAT scan.

  I lay in the large white tube while the technician searched about with rays to see if I still had a functioning brain. White lights passed intermittently over my eyes and I found myself counting them in one hundred dollar increments. It all took a very long time. After five hours and many tests they were finally able to tell me that I had sprained my shoulder and I wasn’t pregnant. I don’t know which piece of information was the more surprising.

  I think there is something to be said for the ages you have to wait to be seen in a British National Health hospital. After you’ve sat there for about three hours you think to yourself, Actually, I’m not as bad as I thought I was.

  What happened to me is that I completely panicked.’ I was so prepared for disaster that the instant I fell I believed my fears were realised. I did hurt my shoulder quite badly and had some rather nasty bruises (mainly sustained, I think, during the helicopter transfer) but what I suffered from mostly were deep and profound shock and uncontrollable fear. Maybe it is an age thing. Here I was on a journey to retrace my youth and yet made to come face to face with my advancing middle years. The only good thing about the whole story is that when I got home I made a very pleasant discovery. A year before, I had taken out an annual travel insurance policy to cover a skiing holiday and it still had a week to run. The bills kept coming (a helicopter is a surprisingly extravagant expense) and I simply sent them on to be paid. An angel must have been sitting on my shoulder after all. I just wish she had been paying closer attention to Shirley.

  I tell the story now as though it were a funny thing to have happened. It has become a set piece joke in my life and each time I tell it I get the same reaction. I lie dying in the desert and the Americans say:

  ‘Gee, Sandi, weren’t you scared?’

  And the English say:

  ‘What happened to the horse?’

  CHAPTER 1

  The Gladys Society is Born

  ‘Do you come to the play without knowing what it is?’

  ‘O yes, Sir, very frequently; I have no time to read play-bills; one merely comes to meet one’s friends and show that one’s alive.’

  Fanny Burney

  It was a German humanist called Martin Waldseemüller who named America. I don’t know if it was what his parents had hoped for but in 1507 Martin was rummaging around for a name for the New World. He was writing up a trip that the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci had made five years previously. I know, he thought, Ab Americo inventore… quasi Americi terrain sive Americam (from Amerigo the discoverer… as if it were the land of Americus or America).

  Thus America, first South and then later the North, became America. I am sure it has occurred to other people that had Martin gone with Amerigo’s surname instead, today the world would have 280 million Vespuccians.

  The discovery of America is shrouded in confusion. Columbus, who I thought took the credit, actually only ever found the Bahamas; the Irish sent a monk called Brendan; and the Vikings got lost going to Greenland. The latest theory is that the Chinese got there first but they didn’t stay Presumably half an hour after they arrived they were hungry to discover something else. The only certain thing in all this is that no one was looking for what they actually found. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries endless explorers prowled up and down the eastern seaboard of America seeking a passage to the sea, which they believed lay on the other side. The vast landmass that is America frankly got in the way of what was wanted. Who found it first is a matter of conjecture but discovered it was and in 1966 my family was delighted because that is where we were heading.

  That summer, my father, mother, brother and I steamed in on the SS United States, past the symbolic welcome of the Statue of Liberty.

  ‘Bring me your tired, your poor…’

  And indeed you people in first class on that ocean liner.

  I think it would be fair to say that my family, the Toksvigs, has always had a slightly strange history and connection with the United States. We come originally from Denmark. The name Toksvig literally means ‘burial ground by the small river’ and indeed there is a farm in Jutland still called Toksvig Farm (Toksvig gärd) where you can go and see a small tor or burial ground, next to the advertised river. (I recommend this, as there is little else to do in the area.) Not, I think, genetically predisposed to working with soil, the family drifted away from farming after some generations and moved to the big smoke of Copenhagen. It was a time when the young United States was calling across the waters for the energy of Europe to come and make its mark.

  Great-grandpa packed his family on to a vast steamer and headed west across the waters. They passed through the immigration controls at Ellis Island and on to the glories of Albany, the capital of New York State. Here my wise relative did what anyone fresh off the boat would do — he started a Danish language newspaper and worked as a spectacle lens grinder. These were, sadly, not happy business choices. Either there were not enough Danes to buy their own paper or their eyes were so poor even glasses couldn’t help them read. Within a very short time both enterprises foundered and Great-grandpa Toksvig lost every krone he had arrived with. The whole clan returned to the fatherland entirely penniless. The folklore of America is packed with tales of peasants who arrived poor and became rich. My family went poor and came back poor. The American Dream but not as we know it.

  My more immediate family and myself landed at Pier 92 on the island of Manhattan. We had travelled across the waters from Denmark to England and then journeyed for five days over the Atlantic from Southampton. ‘Strangers In The Night’ was a huge hit, skirts were mini, deaths in Vietnam were escalating and Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Coming from a tiny suburb of Copenhagen, the city of New York seemed unbelievably fast and noisy to us. Manhattan, once sold to the Dutch for $24, was impossibly modern.

  I arrived, aged eight, knowing my family followed not just our own tribe west but also a swathe of immigrants from across the world. I came with an English mother, who felt comfortable in a foreign land where she could speak the language; a Danish father, who loved an adventure; and a ten-year-old brother who had watched too many movies and thought we were sure to be gunned down in the street.

  From the late 1960s, my dad, Claus Toksvig, was the most famous man on Danish television. He was Foreign Correspondent for Danish television. I say this as though Danish televis
ion had many men in the field but in fact Dad was the Foreign Correspondent for Danish television. When he was first appointed in 1966 TV was still in its infancy in Denmark. There wasn’t much to it. Nothing happened until about 7p.m. Then Dad would come on and read the news. This might be followed by an hour-long programme on the Queen’s silver spoon collection, then some rather thrilling indoor circuit racing for bicycles with close-down coming around 9 p.m.

  My father was excessively handsome. There was much of the Paul Newman about him and he was the first TV star Denmark had ever known. Sending him out to cover the whole world seemed very glamorous and daunting. The naïve TV company (still known to this day as Danish Radio) sent him to New York to view the world via the offices of the United Nations.

  We moved into the Hotel Concord in downtown Manhattan and spent our days marvelling at the fact that television was available whenever you wanted, that there was such a thing as ‘fast food’ and that people in the street thought yelling was a reasonable form of communication. Dad treated all life as an endless education but as autumn approached, the notion of formal schooling for me and Nick occurred to him. With this in mind we moved out to the small town of Mamaroneck in ‘the burbs’.

  Westchester is a wealthy suburban county just north of New York City with many large, detached houses. Here rolling lawns run one from the other under a barrage of sprinkler heads. The town of Mamaroneck is not large. It has one main street of shops, which runs up from the small harbour. The name is of Native American derivation. Originally it was ‘Merrinack’ meaning ‘the place where the fresh water falls into the salt’.

  By the time my family arrived the Native Americans were long gone, bought out for a few dollars, some beads and a final case of smallpox. Now the harbour that had once cradled the swift and silent canoe was filled with endless ranks of expensive sailing boats. On summer evenings all you could hear was the clang of halyards against the aluminum (not aluminium) masts as even larger, sleeker, more expensive yachts sailed in to Robert’s Boatyard for a tweak before some challenge on Long Island Sound. We settled in. We wore sneakers, ate peanut butter and rode chopper bikes. We were American kids. Summers were endless as we ran from sea to shore and back or played ‘spies’ in the early twilight with the neighbourhood kids. Then things changed. When I was twelve my sister Jeni was born and by high school, aged thirteen, I had fallen hopelessly in love. Not with any one person, I wasn’t that precocious, no: I was in love with The Theatre.

  I had always been interested in writing and performing. From my earliest days I had crafted small plays to perform in the garden with reluctant friends in unsuitable garments from my mother’s wardrobe. By the age of twelve, I had spent some time in the American public school system. I had learned the rules of baseball, become a fan of the New York Mets, was accustomed to thundering out the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and knew how to save myself from Russian nuclear attack by standing facing my metal locker in the corridor. To my father’s horror, my accent changed and soon I was suffering some kind of irritable vowel syndrome where ‘school’ became ‘skul’ and I wasn’t ‘sure’ about things, I was ‘chure’. I don’t know that I learned much but I was happy.

  Then, inexplicably, my parents decided to send me to one of the most exclusive, most expensive girls’ schools in the state. It involved a car journey from home of just under an hour. Every morning a black station wagon would tour the neighbourhood collecting other offspring of the faintly wealthy and transport us to the girls’ or boys’ school.

  My brother Nick and I travelled with Homer, a bespectacled and spotty young man. None of the other kids liked him. The car was quite elderly and everyone always made Homer sit by the dodgy door. Then we would lean on him as we went round corners. We were supposed to be heading for an expensive education but no one said you had to be a good citizen on the way.

  I don’t know why, but the school and I didn’t get on. There was Miss Coe, the English teacher, who I felt could take the heart out of a book with a single breath. Miss Coe’s great skill was to take a sentence and ‘deconstruct’ it. This was done with a diagram of many branches upon which you placed the noun, the verb, the adverbs, adjectives and so on in their correct relation to each other. I would sit and look at a rather fine piece of J. D. Salinger reduced to a small, spiky diagram of the Hudson River Railway and want to weep. I couldn’t see the point. It just looked ruined to me. To this day, although words form a huge part of my life, I cannot spot the parts of any sentence. I wouldn’t know an adverb if it wanted to marry my daughter. I have Coe dyslexia.

  Then there was the social studies teacher. She was getting divorced and as that was a social issue, she decided to involve the whole class in it. We learned nothing about society or the ills of the world but I became quite adept at ‘therapeutic listening’. This was, after all, the sixties, when love was free and therapy was about to heal the world. I remember a small group of us going to her apartment to help her pack up. She sat on the floor and wept a great deal. Some of the girls hugged her. I’ve never been good at that kind of emoting so I stolidly packed things in newspaper and wondered why grown-ups needed so many different kinds of glasses to drink out of.

  I quite liked the art teacher. He had only four fingers on his right hand and would insist on pointing things out using just the stub. We did very little art and mostly sat watching black and white French films in the dark. He was particularly fond of one called Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) about a group of children who took to torturing and killing small animals during the Second World War. I used to go home feeling quite disturbed and utterly unable to play with the dog.

  In the yearbook photo, I look quite the individual in my peaked captain’s hat and rather firmly tied boy’s tie. I don’t know why I wore a tie. I had never been to an English school in my life but I thought it marked me out as a European. I didn’t know then that I was gay but I already felt different from everyone else and it was important to me to stand apart from the crowd. To stand up for myself. Although I had never lived in England, in that American school I inexplicably decided to be rather English. In the end the school decided that I didn’t belong. The headmistress called me and my parents into her office at the end of the year.

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr and Mrs Toksvig, this is just not working out. Regrettably we have come to the conclusion that Sandra is not academic. We think you might find somewhere else more suitable.’

  She paused and looked at me with utter bewilderment. Clearly nothing more suitable occurred to her. ‘Maybe agricultural college,’ she finally managed.

  I think about that now. That crossroads in life where I might have been taken from the halls of academia and made to plunge my hands into large piles of animal manure instead. Perhaps it was the ancient Toksvig rebellion against the soil but my father exploded.

  ‘It is, madam, not my child who is inappropriate for your school but you who are inappropriate to judge anyone. You have failed her and it is a disgrace.’

  I loved my dad. He was great. I left and, after a summer by the sea, was sent to the local education establishment up the road, Mamaroneck High School.

  Oscar was Wilde but Thornton was Wilder

  I joined Mamaroneck High as a freshman, the first year of senior high school, a ninth-grader. In my high school yearbook picture, I have abandoned the tie and the hat but now look like a small boy with a haircut from a well-meaning charity. The plaid workshirt suggests I had given up trying to be English and was now going for something a little more native. I had braces on my teeth (well, this was America) so I kept my lips firmly damped shut even when smiling. I don’t feel too bad about the picture. There are a couple of old friends in the book who look like serial killers.

  The school was daunting. One thousand five hundred students, a mile sometimes between classrooms in the labyrinthine building and endless choices of classes. From the outside it was the classic American high school building of the movies. A gigantic red-brick construction with tow
ering white pillars over an entrance into which streamed clean-cut youth awash with orthodontic work. The long corridors smelled of disinfectant. They were lined with grey steel lockers and ceramic tiles, presumably because tiles are easy to disinfect. A few teachers had made a stab at displaying artwork but the corridors were not places to linger in and admire. The only corridor-dwelling was done outside the gymnasium where the ‘jocks’ posed for the cheerleaders and the cheerleaders pretended not to notice.

  I don’t think I had cheerleading in me and I certainly wasn’t going to run for anybody. I wanted to ‘do’ theatre. I knew no one and yet I had the gall to audition for the autumn play. It was partly because I had already fallen head-first for the drama teacher.

  Regina must have been in her late twenties when I met her. Even in America there was still a modicum of respect for teachers and I didn’t know then that her first name was Regina. I don’t think I even knew she had a first name. Regina had long brown hair, wide eyes and a rather freckled face. From my first day in her English class I felt she smiled only at me. Choosing classes at all had been something of a lottery. On arrival at the high school I had been introduced to my ‘Guidance Counselor’.

  The school buildings ran for several blocks between Palmer Avenue and the Boston Post Road. The guidance counselor’s small office was on the Palmer Avenue side. It took me some time and a small compass in the heel of my shoe, to find the place. I had never come across the concept of the guidance counselor before and I sat in his untidy booth of an office with no clear idea of what to expect. The office had all the charm and creative stimulus of a tax inspector’s in a deep recession. On the wall, a careers poster advised me that ‘You can always teach.’

  This notion of the teaching profession as a bit of a fallback position didn’t inspire me with confidence. My counselor wore a dark, faded jacket which didn’t match his trousers and an open-neck white shirt with no tie. Coloured shirts for men had not yet really come into fashion. My own father had only recently begun to accept that wearing a blue shirt to work didn’t make him a faggot. The no tie thing was to show that the counselor was on the side of the students. The high school had eight full-time guidance counselors. Their job was to keep an eye on the students. In all the schools I had been to previously the teachers had done this. At Mamaroneck, however, every student had an individual timetable. Classes were selected from a long list and juggled to fit into some kind of coherent day. It was the counselor’s job to assist me with this but he had many people to get through and a limited amount of time.