To Throw Away Unopened

by Viv Albertine

  Daydream

  Kathleen Usually Lucien gets on better with Viviane, she looks like him and she always says yes to everything.

  The second half of the above description of me is unrecognisable now. No one would ever describe me as saying yes to everything, quite the opposite – questioning, militant, aggressive. But acquiescent? Never. I wonder if the fact that I looked like Lucien irritated Mum. I’ve read that mothers can turn against a child who physically resembles an estranged or violent father.

  Kathleen His love is a possession of a person and Viviane often hasn’t the courage to do anything but agree with him. Although when I was out he dragged Pascale up to her bedroom and kept hitting her (all over some triviality) saying she had to stay there the rest of the day. When he came down he said to Viviane, ‘Daddy was right wasn’t he?’ and she answered, ‘No.’ He was furious, told her she was no good, she’s got no brains, mocked her about the results of her 11 plus exam, told her he wasn’t buying her any more sweets and slammed out of the room. He ignored her for the rest of the day. [So I did disagree with him.]

  State schools weren’t comprehensive at the time and after junior school you either went to a grammar school if you passed the 11-plus exam or a secondary modern if you failed. There was a stigma attached to secondary moderns and I felt written off after I failed the 11-plus. I wrote myself off, I thought I was thick. A year later my school merged with the neighbouring grammar school and became a comprehensive, Fortismere. I was pleased that no one would know I’d been to a secondary modern, but the damage was done. People in their sixties and seventies still confess to me in hushed tones that they failed the 11-plus and went to a secondary modern. The shame never goes away. Even if no one else knew I was too stupid to pass, I knew, and that knowledge still haunts me.

  I never understood why I failed. I was above average in my class, liked by my teachers and found schoolwork fairly easy. Mum mentions in her diary that she feels guilty and blames herself and Lucien for my failing. She puts it down to the stress I was living through at the time. ‘Viviane had no consideration for her 11+ years,’ she wrote. She doesn’t mention that this was also the exact time she’d taken me to the doctor and he put me on barbiturates. I can still picture myself at eleven, eyes glazed, fixed somewhere up in the air, over the top of the teacher’s head, losing my grip on learning, a perpetual daydreamer, detached, unable to concentrate, not interested in work.

  From that year on I’ve daydreamed away countless hours of my life. I still use the techniques of reverie and obsessing over minor injustices that I developed aged eleven and twelve as strategies to ‘self-soothe’ and distract myself from stressful situations.

  Windows

  Gazing out of windows – moving windows, static windows – lying in bed awake for hours staring at the sky, watching the blurring landscape or the tracks coming together and separating through train windows, rats scurrying and men fly-tipping seen from the living-room window, the inside of other people’s houses glimpsed from the pavement or the top deck of a bus. Since my childhood I’ve loved looking into and out of windows. When I moved in with Mum again in my late twenties, she and I used to walk around the local streets in Hampstead and Swiss Cottage most evenings after dinner. I was always amazed that the inhabitants didn’t close their curtains, even when it was dark. As we peered down into the kitchens I’d marvel at how some people were so confident of what they wore and how they behaved that they didn’t mind anyone walking past their house seeing them. Mum explained that in the past the families living in these big houses used to employ servants, but in the 1960s, when the middle classes couldn’t afford maids any more, they transformed the basements where the staff used to work into large kitchen/dining rooms. (When I visited friends’ houses, I sensed their parents thought they were being subversive by turning this servants’ room into the main living space. It was a radical idea at the time.)

  Those basement kitchens with large scrubbed pine tables, deliberately mismatched chairs, wine glasses and blue and white enamel bread bins looked like film sets to me, the people milling around inside like fantasy families. Life was not like that in our house. We dressed in shabby old clothes (put them on as soon as we got in so we didn’t wear out our nice ones), our furniture was second-hand and we had to sit on the settee (later learned to call it the sofa) swaddled in blankets to watch TV in the lounge (later learned to call it the living room) because it was so cold. No way we wanted to expose neighbours and random passers-by to any of that. I had no idea back then that one day I’d be called middle-class. I’d have been so happy if I’d known. Being middle-class is a dream come true for me, even though I’m prejudiced against those born into it. I never feel I truly belong to that safe, shiny world though. I always look a bit crap when I’m at home, sloping around in old clothes, talking to myself. I only look middle-class when I’m in public, which is rather missing the point. I imagine genuine middle-class people live that polite, restrained life all the time, with the curtains open. Everyone who started out poor, like I did, half dreads and fully expects to end up peering through other people’s windows again one day. No matter how close I get to financial security, I still feel nervous about the future. As if a rain cloud is constantly hovering above, waiting for a chance to pour misfortune down on me. And there I am, outside without a coat again.

  Men R Idiots

  Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.

  Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an, 1957

  Like the scorned Miss Havisham in Great Expectations raising her ward Estella (which I thought the most beautiful name in the world when I read the book), my mother raised me to be contemptuous of men. In every way she could, she communicated to me that Men Are Mean Idiots. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a mean idiot, now I think about it. It takes a certain amount of awareness and empathy to be mean, to work out how to manipulate someone and hurt their feelings, so how can someone be mean and an idiot? My father didn’t do much to challenge Mum’s hypothesis though, he did somehow manage to be both. But Dickens’s Estella secretly wanted love, and so did I. I wanted to transcend my teacher, prove her wrong and – despite her constantly telling me that romance was ‘a load of old twaddle’ – fall desperately and hopelessly in love. It took me decades to realise that Mum was right (as usual). The reason she didn’t quite manage to put an end to my yearning for love and romance when I was young was that her teachings were constantly being undermined by popular culture. I soaked up love song after love song, performed by boys with dirty hair and leather jackets, thinking that their clothes and their snarls meant they were honest and untouched by mainstream society. I watched girls – who I thought were radical because they wore miniskirts and took the contraceptive pill – being decorative in films, selling things in magazines and on posters, and being assistants in game shows on TV. But the dirty hair and short skirts were masking the same old reality, that society had the same dreary old expectations of us girls as always: to be attractive, smile, acquiesce to men, search for romantic love and become supportive wives.

  For me, love songs were the main promoters of these empty aspirations. I continually had pop lyrics chugging round my head – talk about brainwashed. I had no idea that these ditties were not a code to live by, or the constant reiteration of my inevitable and happy destiny by fellow rebels, but a potent mixture of theatre and commerce. Those songs streaming out of the radio every day were constructed to hook young female brains and hormones, to lure us into pursuing impossible goals and then convert our empty longings into money (records, clothes, make-up, magazines). Such an effective way to keep girls and women down and render us ineffective.

  … being attracted to that which destroys us keeps us away from power.

  Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, 2006

  When I was in the Slits I met numerous managers, writers, performers and promoters who were involved in the marketing of those heart
breaking love songs, and they were shocked when I asked them if they believed in the ideology they were peddling. They didn’t. I still ask men who were young boys or teenagers at the time if they believed the lyrics to those songs. Most of them admit they didn’t even listen to the words, and the few who did didn’t fall for them. The songs weren’t aimed at them. As I spent more time in the ‘music business’ I discovered that most of the musicians I admired when I was young were misogynists, a few even paedophiles. Almost none of them were the sensitive, vulnerable lovers and respecters of women and girls they portrayed in their songs.

  Until I read my parents’ diaries I couldn’t understand why I bought into the whole love and romance myth so wholeheartedly. I managed to fight off the dogmas of patriarchy, organised religion, capitalism, class deference and respect for authority easily enough. How come I fell at the last fence and impaled myself on the railings of romance?

  During my childhood and teenage years everyone and everything I knew was at war. My mother and father were at war; my sister and I were at war; I was at war with my atypical nature, desperately trying to fit in and be normal; even my genes were at war – the cool Swiss-German side versus the hotheaded Corsican. And warring away in the middle of all these wars was me, the believer in love songs, versus Mum, the love-and-romance-crusher. I was stressed, vulnerable and desperate for an escape from my everyday life. ‘Easy meat’ for grooming. I constantly fantasised about being rescued from my life by a handsome, sensitive boy, someone like Scott Walker (who is probably one of the few musicians who did live what they sang). I don’t know where my upbringing would sit on a scale of dysfunctional family situations – fairly low, I should think – but even if it was slight in the eyes of an expert, I was traumatised and grew twisted because of it. My response to the tensions inside our home and the unfairness outside it was to fill my mind with the kind of music that whipped up dreams of romance. I needed something nice to think about, all the time. It didn’t help that I wasn’t being told any stories to counteract my fantasies, that I had no alternative visions or role models, no rebellious, artistic or guitar-playing working-class women to follow. Mum alerted me to the fact that patriarchy and the romance narrative were wrong, but she didn’t have any suggestions for another path. She didn’t know of any.

  Where’s the advert on TV telling you to call a freefone number if you’ve been mis-sold, not a pension, but a belief system? My religion turned out to be bogus. I’m still unpicking those decades of conditioning that were stitched, or rather, sung into my brain.

  Kathleen Already I notice Lucien gets moody when Viviane raves over the pop stars she likes and I can foresee what will happen when the time for boyfriends starts. I can’t let her go through all I have been through with his jealous rages.

  And he will keep going into the bathroom when she is bathing, she doesn’t like it a bit now that she has a chest and puberty hair. He won’t let her lock the bathroom door. I started putting both the children together in the bath to help her as she is too afraid to speak up. I cannot say anything unless it is too bad because of the scenes. This weekend [March 1965 – I was eleven] when he rushed in, she asked him, ‘Please don’t keep coming in, it embarrasses me.’ He became angry and shouted at her.

  Mum told me to say those words. Our bathroom was big and cold, and surrounding the tub were dark-green tiles with shimmering oil-spill rainbows reflected in the crackled glaze. They were ugly and I’d spend most of my time in the bath redecorating the room in my head. I thought Mum was imagining things or stirring up friction between me and Lucien when she said he shouldn’t keep coming into the bathroom. She’s just trying to put him down, place him in the wrong as usual. I didn’t mind him coming in that much, he was just Dad. But after she mentioned it I became more aware of his presence, and one day I locked the bathroom door while I took a bath. He banged on it and shouted at me, demanding I get out of the bath and let him in. The more he insisted, the more suspicious I got. I never left the door unlocked again.

  Kathleen Once I couldn’t understand why Viviane’s new birthday skirt was torn and when I asked her, I found out that it was Lucien’s practice if the children took too long to take off their clothes for bed, to tear their clothes off himself, bend them over the bed and hit them. I was angry. I went straight to him and told him he mustn’t do that, that it was too humiliating. He went to strike me but I threatened him with the police if he touched me. He said he wouldn’t foul his hands on me.

  I remember this too. Mum asked me what had happened to my new skirt. She was surprised it was torn because I was very careful with my clothes. I told her that Dad had torn it when he pulled it off me. She asked why he was pulling my skirt off. I said because I was too slow getting undressed for bed, and added that he often pulled my clothes off and told me to lie on the bed so he could hit me. I knew he was being horrible, but I thought that was what all fathers did – tear off your clothes, put you over the bed and smack you – to children who were too slow getting ready for bed.

  After Mum found out that Lucien was secretly divorcing her she moved a single bed into the corner of my bedroom and slept in there with me. My sister had her own room and there was another spare room in the house that Mum could have slept in, but she chose to put her bed in my room. ‘It’s still your room,’ she said. ‘I won’t make any noise or bring my things in, I’ll just slip in at night and go to bed.’ But I heard her and saw her sneak in every night and it irritated me. I’d lie in the dark pretending to be asleep, appalled and transfixed by her silhouette wriggling into a nightdress and disappearing under the blankets. I hated her sleeping there and hated myself for seeing her as a trespasser. I thought she was weak (weren’t we supposed not to be weak?) for needing me, that she was doing it because she was lonely. I wanted the room to myself, with my posters and my things; she spoiled my domain by being there. A group of friends visited me one Saturday morning, and when they pointed at the extra bed and asked, ‘Whose bed is that?’ I answered, ‘Mum’s.’ I could tell from their shocked expressions that I’d said something wrong. As they prowled around my room, examining my trinkets on the mantelpiece, picking things up, turning them over and putting them down again, I felt invaded, as if they were lifting up flaps of my skin and peering into my body. I screamed at them all to go home, but as soon as they left I felt stupid. I didn’t know why I’d done it.

  Kathleen His interest in Viviane is different from his attitude to Pascale and I am not always in agreement. When I moved out of our bedroom he started taking Viviane into bed with him all night – he only has a single bed. After three nights I stopped it by telling Viviane she doesn’t get her proper rest, that it wasn’t right. I said it in front of him and in such a serious tone that he knew it was for a different reason.

  The first night my parents gave up sharing a bedroom Lucien asked me to sleep in his bed – he said he was cold or lonely or something, with a sad puppy-dog look. He didn’t abuse me during those three nights but I was uncomfortable and didn’t know how to stop the situation without upsetting him. If my father and I had continued sleeping in the same bed, who knows what might have happened – he wasn’t the best of men. I was relieved when Mum said it had to stop. I didn’t know until she intervened how awkward I felt about it. It’s often not until after a decision is made that you know whether you’ve made the right choice. The relief tells you.

  Now I realise Mum moved into my bedroom not because she was weak or lonely, but to protect me from sexual abuse. It’s so obvious fifty years later. You think you know it all when you’re a child.

  47 Mia left Vida and me alone in the room. She must have trusted that nothing more could go wrong. We held Mum’s hands and talked to her in low voices, recalling the fun times we’d had together: the field of daffodils in Regent’s Park on Mother’s Day; our trip to the South of France two years ago and the terrace she smoked on at night, me tipping her up in the wheelchair as we raced around the boulevards. She smiled and laughed. It wasn’t reall
y a laugh, more of a phlegmy chortle. We sat beside her for hours. Sometimes Vida and I reminisced quietly between ourselves so Mum could listen and not have to respond. Vida thanked her grandma for believing in her and said she loved her. Then two nurses hustled in to change the blood-spattered bedding. They didn’t smile or look at me. The edges of their mouths were pulled down and their eyebrows drawn together. They must’ve heard what had happened and disapproved. I didn’t care; they didn’t know the whole story. Vida and I sat on the floor outside in the corridor while they worked, leaning our backs against the wall. We consoled each other by saying that Mum was looking better, the blue had gone from her face and she couldn’t be too ill if she could still laugh. ‘You’ve said everything you needed to say, that’s important,’ I said. Vida was almost happy. There was no tension in her body any more, her face was relaxed, and I thought, Maybe I was right to fight.

  Guilt Trip

  I finished emptying Mum’s flat in a stunned, robotic daze. It took months for me to be able to think about her diary without feeling sick, but gradually I began to assimilate the information and make some sense of the way she had behaved throughout her life.

  When I was going through my own divorce I couldn’t spend as much time with Vida as I used to. I had to get myself into a position where I could earn money to support us (having not worked for nine years) and sort out a home and a school in a new city. I hated not being with her all the time but it was more important that I secure our future. I got through those times by telling myself over and over again that I’d make it up to her and soon we’d be together all the time like we were before. While things were terrible with Lucien and she was trying to get us out, no doubt Mum was also thinking, I’ll make it up to them. I just have to get us out of this situation, then it’ll all be OK again. I think the reason she went so far with the aggression was to try and look powerful and claw back control from a man she’d been dominated by for nineteen years. She also may not have understood the lasting emotional impact of her behaviour on us. Or maybe she loved us very much and feared we’d end up with our cruel, abusive father if she didn’t fight dirty, so the risks to our mental health were worth taking. Or perhaps she was just spiteful and deranged. I don’t know, but I don’t think so, she wasn’t cruel when it was all over. I do know she’d been hit or bullied by the only two men she’d been emotionally involved with, men who were less intelligent than her but who talked down to her, double-crossed her and dominated her. As Virginia Woolf observed in Mrs Dalloway (1925), despite possessing ‘twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life’.