that hadnât been invented then was young adult fiction.
Anyway this book (canât remember what it was) was on the table. My father picked it up and said, I donât think you should read this. I donât think this is a fit book for you to read. He knew because heâd already read it, he was a very keen reader. All right, I said, Iâll take it back. A good girl, you see, obedient. But hereâs the morally tricky bit. I didnât let on that I had already finished it. My father was right, it was rather a nasty book, not really a suitable thing for me to read at all, I knew that. I have often wondered if he was surprised by my acquiescence, but if he guessed what was going on he didnât say. That book was unpleasant, with some very weird sex scenes, but I donât think it did me any harm. I put it out of mind. I was robust; the delicate ones were my parents, I often felt they had to be spared the knowledge of difficult things, like the fact that their innocent daughter had read this book.
My father might have been surprised that I didnât argue my right to read it. I often did have energetic conversations. Not because I defied him but because I disagreed with things he said. I remember one night at dinner a vigorous argument about modern art. I was studying art at school, very much my fatherâs doing. The school had put me into the Latin stream but he wrote flowery (and very Latinate) letters to the headmistress saying how important it was that I study art because I was good at drawing. The school fought back but he won. I regret the Latin but loved the art. The streaming was art and geography, or Latin and history, and yes, the former was certainly thought to be less intellectual. The art teacher, Jean McGilchrist, wasnât having that. Her art involved history, language, philosophy; there was a practical side, painting, drawing, but what mattered was the ideas. She cultivated me. I was an ardent modernist in my youth and took it for granted that I would one day live in a Mies van der Rohe-style house with Bauhaus furniture. Ha, that didnât happen. The argument at dinner was about Picasso. Miss McGilchrist taught us to look at paintings, gave us a technique and a vocabulary to understand them, and I wanted to make my father see what I did in Picasso. But he couldnât, he liked art to be a recognisable picture of some obvious reality, a Constable, or a Gainsborough, whose beauty was clear to the most ignorant eye. I said that Picasso could paintlike that if he wanted to, but that had been done so thoroughly in the past that he was keen to do something different. I got a book and showed him some paintings. No, he said, Iâll never see it, that, thatâs an abortion.
I was stunned by that. You didnât ever use that word in our house. Even the word pregnant was going a bit far. But what really shut me up was the realisation of how strongly my father felt about these things, so strongly that he was prepared to use a word like that to a 15-year-old. Seeing how thoroughly I had lost, I stopped arguing. I know there were other fierce arguments, but that one has stuck in my head for 60 years, my fatherâs vehement faint stumbling over an unsayable word.
I sometimes see myself as a kind of John the Baptist figure where my sisters were concerned, the one who came before, who paved the way. Consider the bicycle. My high school was a long way away, it took more than half an hour to walk there. You could catch two buses, but it was a dreary long way round. A bicycle would solve all my problems, and I would not have to carry my large Globite school port full of books. My father wasnât keen. I talked and talked, nagged and nagged, probably. I felt I was close to persuading him, when my friend Louise riding to school got the front wheel of her bike caught in the tramline and tumbled over the handlebars. She broke her two front teeth.
All my work was undone. I never did
Anyway this book (canât remember what it was) was on the table. My father picked it up and said, I donât think you should read this. I donât think this is a fit book for you to read. He knew because heâd already read it, he was a very keen reader. All right, I said, Iâll take it back. A good girl, you see, obedient. But hereâs the morally tricky bit. I didnât let on that I had already finished it. My father was right, it was rather a nasty book, not really a suitable thing for me to read at all, I knew that. I have often wondered if he was surprised by my acquiescence, but if he guessed what was going on he didnât say. That book was unpleasant, with some very weird sex scenes, but I donât think it did me any harm. I put it out of mind. I was robust; the delicate ones were my parents, I often felt they had to be spared the knowledge of difficult things, like the fact that their innocent daughter had read this book.
My father might have been surprised that I didnât argue my right to read it. I often did have energetic conversations. Not because I defied him but because I disagreed with things he said. I remember one night at dinner a vigorous argument about modern art. I was studying art at school, very much my fatherâs doing. The school had put me into the Latin stream but he wrote flowery (and very Latinate) letters to the headmistress saying how important it was that I study art because I was good at drawing. The school fought back but he won. I regret the Latin but loved the art. The streaming was art and geography, or Latin and history, and yes, the former was certainly thought to be less intellectual. The art teacher, Jean McGilchrist, wasnât having that. Her art involved history, language, philosophy; there was a practical side, painting, drawing, but what mattered was the ideas. She cultivated me. I was an ardent modernist in my youth and took it for granted that I would one day live in a Mies van der Rohe-style house with Bauhaus furniture. Ha, that didnât happen. The argument at dinner was about Picasso. Miss McGilchrist taught us to look at paintings, gave us a technique and a vocabulary to understand them, and I wanted to make my father see what I did in Picasso. But he couldnât, he liked art to be a recognisable picture of some obvious reality, a Constable, or a Gainsborough, whose beauty was clear to the most ignorant eye. I said that Picasso could paintlike that if he wanted to, but that had been done so thoroughly in the past that he was keen to do something different. I got a book and showed him some paintings. No, he said, Iâll never see it, that, thatâs an abortion.
I was stunned by that. You didnât ever use that word in our house. Even the word pregnant was going a bit far. But what really shut me up was the realisation of how strongly my father felt about these things, so strongly that he was prepared to use a word like that to a 15-year-old. Seeing how thoroughly I had lost, I stopped arguing. I know there were other fierce arguments, but that one has stuck in my head for 60 years, my fatherâs vehement faint stumbling over an unsayable word.
I sometimes see myself as a kind of John the Baptist figure where my sisters were concerned, the one who came before, who paved the way. Consider the bicycle. My high school was a long way away, it took more than half an hour to walk there. You could catch two buses, but it was a dreary long way round. A bicycle would solve all my problems, and I would not have to carry my large Globite school port full of books. My father wasnât keen. I talked and talked, nagged and nagged, probably. I felt I was close to persuading him, when my friend Louise riding to school got the front wheel of her bike caught in the tramline and tumbled over the handlebars. She broke her two front teeth.
All my work was undone. I never did
Similar Books
Ole Doc Methuselah
L. Ron Hubbard
Sweet Hell on Fire
Sara Lunsford
Anzac's Dirty Dozen
Craig Stockings
Riptide
Cherry Adair
The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman
R. P. Lester
FriendlySeduction
Gillian Archer
Justice Falling
Audrey Carlan
Agent X
Noah Boyd
Savage Smoke
Kay Dee Royal
