By Caroline Bobby
When I was thirteen I ran away from home.
That is almost fifty-four years ago.
I came from privilege. Not high-end wealth, but certainly white middle class privilege.
First off I got expelled from a ridiculous girls boarding school. I had gone in with high expectations, delusions, longing for a place to belong. I was a girl that read books as life support. I’d read about boarding schools and was anticipating a magical experience of what I understand now was my desperation for connection.
Of course that didn’t happen. I didn’t know how to do connection. I had a target on my head that spelled out desperate, and that has a particular odour. Catnip for bullies and beasts. I can’t tell you for sure how long I lasted; maybe four or five terms. One afternoon my parents arrived and took me home. Nobody told me I’d been expelled, and it was some years later that I found correspondence between the school and my parents. They had been asked to come and remove me. That is called being expelled.
There had been issues, a rolling narrative of enacted distress as I didn’t get to grips with being on the margins with the other outcast girls. The bottle, goggle glasses girl, the one that smelled of pee, not to mention the tiny girl with the most pornographic breasts anyone had ever seen.
A girl from South Africa arrived. Her parents were diplomats. She was sixteen to my eleven or twelve. She’d never lived in the UK and was a fish out of water. We connected. I was drunk on connection. It was very intense, and the staff were not impressed. We were directed to desist from seeking each other out. We were told the age-gap made our friendship inappropriate. In the letters I found later it was spelled out in much more explicit language. Hilariously I was expelled for being a lesbian, which was a word I didn’t really understand at that point. My attachment to Mary from South Africa probably did have an erotic undertone, but it was the felt experience of heart, of mattering to and being important to another that had me hooked. I think Mary’s parents were seriously wealthy so it was me that had to go. We wrote for a year or so, back in the old days of letters. I stop and wonder how her life rolled out. She’d be seventy now.
After the boarding school eviction I went to the local comprehensive. The little lost girl with a target on her head was now let loose in a much bigger, louder, mixed sex, and ruthless ballpark. I don’t remember fine detail, but I started to unravel. That is called ‘acting out’. I went through a psychiatric hospital (there were no child mental health services back then). First I was sectioned. I’ll skip the middle bit and jump to the end. In a manner of speaking I was ‘expelled’ from the asylum. I just wasn’t treatable within an adult system as a 12 year old child. Apparently I set fire to a bed, but if I did it isn’t something I remember.
Back in the nice on top, psychopathic underneath family home, I made a run for it. I headed for Lancaster. I hitch-hiked, giving men in lorries hand jobs and blow jobs along the way. It seemed that was the expectation, and I had no idea I had a choice.
I went to Lancaster because my cousin Tony on my father’s side was in his first year at the university. I didn’t know him very well, but it made sense because being part of a highly academic family constellation, he’d had a breakdown after his first year at Cambridge. They’d sent him to hospital and patched him up. He then went to Lancaster to start again. I headed for Tony because I felt the common ground of having both been mad.
He was very kind.
I hadn’t told him I was coming, and just rocked up in a million broken pieces, with a little bag of useless clothes, and all the benzodiazepines I’d been liberally prescribed.
He was in a relationship with a woman who’s face I can still remember, trying to pretend he wasn’t gay. It ended in tears, and Tony came out. He got much more perky after that.
Lancaster university was a campus. It was a large, relatively modern micro world of its own. Everything happened on site. There were pubs, music venues, shops, a bank, a canteen, and residential areas where constellations of dorms and single rooms, kitchens, lounges, launderettes, all wove everything into one country.
I was an oddball in that a child had turned up with nowhere to go, looking for so many things that she was so far away from being able to articulate. I just was.
This enclosed world welcomed me. It just did.
Gratitude abounds.
Through the backwards lens of many decades I now understand what an important place that campus world was in terms of LGBTQ+ history. Tony coming out, took him, and of course me, right into the vortex of activism, gay liberation, feminism; high octane radical was happening, and it became my new home address.
I don’t know how I managed to eat, have somewhere to sleep, and somehow money in my pocket to spend on cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. I did a bit of shop-lifting, but nowhere near enough to sustain life. I was adopted by the lesbians. They took me under their wings and for the first time ever I experienced a taste of belonging and of home.
Because I was asked to write a few words about this chapter of my life for HOWL, I did a bit a google trawl back to Lancaster in the early 70s and am deeply touched to be able to fully appreciate, just what an extraordinary place I resided in for a few years.
Because I was so fundamentally ‘not okay’, and because let’s face it, I was a kid, I did not have the capacity to understand the deeply complex dynamics of radical pushback and sea change. I got a lot of the gist.
We were standing up to be counted.
We were revising and giving voice to the history of being pathologised, criminalised, and gaslighted.
I went to women’s groups that were grappling without a map, and with so many difficult issues of difference within the community we were.
Class.
Sexual orientation.
Transgender (not yet called that) women and their place in feminism. Carol Riddell was a transgender lesbian and a professor of sociology at that time and became a kind of surrogate for all sorts of projections as this hardcore discourse became utterly entangled.
Was being a lesbian a political choice, the only way to really commit to feminist ideology? What about class? Wages for Housework? As for racism, well, let’s just say it was an ocean of white people with Maya Angelou, Angela Davis et al books on their shelves and posters on their walls.
I remember attending a women’s conference that by the final plenary was outright warfare. Sisterhood was being battered on the rocks of just how hard it really is to see and hear each other across the great divides. The rhetoric of inclusion and diversity was a motorway pile-up with so much carnage – yet it all kept rolling forward and through so much silence and taboo.
I had a lot of drug and alcohol fuelled sex with women. I was still so far away from any kind of embodied experience. I mean decades away. I loved it though. I put my lesbian coat on and felt as real as I’d ever been able.
I wore that sense of myself as a lesbian throughout the next four decades, even as I had various iterations of sex involving men. Around the age of fifty I found myself actively interested in exploring the erotic with men in a way the put my lesbian credentials into ethical question. I couldn’t in my own integrity, be investigating men as lovers and still stand steady as an old school lesbian. I was upset. It felt like a loss, not to mention my longstanding bi-phobia. Never could get past that small critical voice about being bisexual. Maybe I am just a creature of my time; a throwback to those intense days of arguing about lesbian feminism, and what if being a dyke was a prerequisite to march beneath the banners of woman’s liberation?
I don’t really know, only that having to hand back my felt right to call myself a lesbian broke a little corner of my heart. I bit the bullet of standing in the ‘bisexual’ section of our landscape, full of ambivalence and judgement.
Caroline in the early 1970s
Now more miles have rolled and I am older than I was.
What is more, the younger demographic of our rainbow flag, are rewriting language from the frontline of the community that saved my life (and I think I mean literally) way back through the looking glass to Radical Lancaster circa 1970s. Our youngers started to throw gender norms up in the air, and a lot of boat rocking started and continues to upend our original rhetoric. Somewhere in the highways and byways of that, I recognised myself as Queer.
Now, that feels true.
It was true before we had claimed and taken occupation of this vocabulary. It was always true, and I gladly pick up these colours and make them mine and make me theirs. I’m glad though, that before Queer was a word and a country that I live in, I had the lesbian years.
Even though many women still stand in the truth of a Lesbian home address – I do think our children are being born into post lesbian/gay identity. I mean god knows how many more generations will see a life on this planet as we know it, and as many say so much more eloquently than I can, if life continues to roll we need our children to have focus, stamina, vision and fortitude. In the most part their legacy is more akin to endemic narcissism, but that my friends is another essay entirely.
I wanted to bow to this small but deeply grooved into my body memory, period of early me. I was so broken, and it was so long ago.
The grooves are deep but the detail is hazy.
Through the backwards telescope I see that I was all but a child. My childhood was such outwardly nice carnage, that I like to think of this hazy remembered interlude, as benevolence and healing. The lesbians saved my life – maybe without that wave of lesbi-kindness I would have given up.
Caroline is the author of Postcards From A Little Life, which can be ordered from any good bookshop.