Girl Trouble (17 page)

Lynn Barber, another journalist, has written an account of her girlhood and education at Lady Eleanor Holles School in London in the 1950s.
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Barber's background was different from Tweedie's and Tennant's in that her parents had raised themselves into the professional middle class through a fervent belief in education and social betterment. Lynn was born, bred and trained to achieve, and confidently expected to go to university. However, as a teenager she found herself sucked into a relationship with an older man who subsequently proposed to her. Initially attracted by his worldliness and sophistication, she was unsure about the situation and confidently expected her parents to object. She was shell-shocked when they didn't.
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Not only did they approve of the idea of their daughter's engagement but they immediately backtracked on their ideas of Lynn going to Oxford, suggesting that marriage was much more important for her future. The bubble of illusion popped when Lynn's fiancé turned out to be a crook and a conman who was all set to embark on bigamy – he already had a wife and children. With
some effort, Lynn was steered back on course for A levels and university. What is interesting about this story is that it shows the fragility of expectations around education and career success for daughters in even a bookish and professional middle-class family in the 1950s.

Most girls learned that their education mattered less than that of their brothers. It was the old story: daughters were expected to marry and men didn't like women to be too clever. Even in the more academic schools of the 1950s, girls were often steered into sitting for two rather than three A levels, since that would get them into teacher training college if not university. After all, teaching was probably what they'd end up doing if they didn't get husbands. Better still, in the eyes of many parents, was secretarial college. Even girl graduates often followed up their degrees with a stint in a secretarial college. Hopefully they might marry the boss. There wasn't much else. Hardly surprisingly, many intelligent girls in the 1950s experienced femininity as a form of belittlement. Jill Tweedie (a tall girl) remembered that

You had to become the Incredible Shrinking Woman. You had to make yourself smaller than them [men] in every way possible: small ego, small brain, small voice, small talk.
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The educational writer Jane Miller grew up a tomboy and went to Bedales, a coeducational and ‘progressive' school. She learned early that boys ‘were simply and obviously better than girls', and she acquired ‘a contempt for anything girlish' in consequence.
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Jane's bookish and artistic background supplied complex messages about gender. She had strong-minded aunts, for instance, who also disdained feminine frippery. Jane recorded a poignant memory of going to a family party ‘wearing modest court shoes, with what were known as Louis heels, and raspberry-pink lipstick –
all this in order to try out what felt like a new and transvestite femininity'.
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The aunts, Jane remembered, ‘honked and spluttered' with laughter. Femininity itself could be experienced as a form of humiliation, a ‘passport to shame'.

The 1950s, then, were not altogether a good time to be a girl. Things were beginning to change, however. The (Butler) Education Act of 1944 had introduced secondary schooling for all in England and Wales. The school leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen from 1947. The Butler Act later became notorious for enshrining a ‘tripartite' system of education, which was effectively class-based. Children were divided into brainy types, those who were good with their hands, and a lumpen, ‘less able' majority. The eleven-plus examination was there to weed them out and to grade them, like eggs. But the Act broke new ground for bright working-class children and for girls. Indeed, girls did so well in the eleven-plus examinations in the 1950s that some local authorities began to discriminate in favour of boys, lest the girls take over the grammar schools.

A grammar-school education could be a lifeline for a clever working-class girl. The writer and poet Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 and was brought up in difficult and impoverished circumstances. School was hugely important, in spite of conflicting messages and the strains and competing emotional claims of home. She learned to be guarded about herself and her sexuality, later coming out as a lesbian. Maureen Duffy noted in her autobiographical novel
That's How It Was
(1962) that ‘the great enemy to advancement for working-class girls' in the 1950s was to become pregnant.
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The literary scholar Lorna Sage was born ten years later than Duffy in 1943. In her brilliantly insightful autobiography
Bad Blood
(2000), she describes growing up in Hanmer, Flintshire in
the 1950s.
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Lorna's social background defied easy description. Her grandfather was an Anglican clergyman, a difficult man with dodgy morals. Lorna's father was in the haulage business and her parents lived in a council house. Lorna tells us that her father only stopped hitting her as she entered her teens, a point at which spanking acquired sexual overtones. Sex and disappointment seethed beneath the surface of family life.
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Lorna's grandfather lusted after her friends. Her uncle Bill made leery passes at his niece, seeing her as ‘the poor man's Brigitte Bardot'. Access to books and a sound education at Whitchurch High School nurtured Lorna's imagination and provided her with a rich intellectual and imaginary life. At the same time, she and her best friend Gail were lured by the sounds of a new teenage culture. Brushing their hair into ponytails, they experimented with black eyeliner and white lipstick. They ‘crackled with emotional static', brooding over the allure of Elvis-type bad boys.
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There were clever girls, and there were ordinary girls. Whitchurch High, like so many of the girls' grammar schools of the time, suggested a choice: ‘You were supposed to choose between boys and books,' Lorna remembered. Girls were seen as ‘the enemies of promise; a trap for boys', although as she ruefully observed later, ‘with hindsight you can see that the opposite was the case'.
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At sixteen she met a clever boy, Vic Sage, and the pair became close. Their physical intimacy seemed natural enough. However, without even being aware of having ‘gone all the way', Lorna found herself pregnant.

There was consternation – and shame – all around. But the outcome confounds any assumptions about the 1950s as a completely hopeless decade for girls. Lorna's and Vic's parents eventually came round. The teachers at Whitchurch High also rallied, and Miss Roberts, her English teacher, was non-judgemental
and supportive. The young people married and continued with their A levels. Getting into university was more of a challenge, for Lorna if not for Vic. Eighteen-year-old mothers were not seen as ideal applicants. County Education Officers would routinely stop girls' grants if they married or became pregnant. But the University of Durham eventually accepted both Lorna and Vic, and Lorna's parents looked after baby Sharon during termtime. Both Lorna and Vic went on to build successful careers in academia.

The 1950s was a decade characterised by troubled beginnings for girls. The widening of educational opportunities was slowly raising aspirations. This in itself increased the frustration and conflict that would eventually drive social change. Young women who made it to university in the years after 1945 certainly expressed frustration. Autobiographies and novels of the time exude it. Clever girls cooped up in the women's colleges of Oxford and Cambridge often felt excluded, relegated to living on the margins of an extended, male-public-school kind of world. Margaret Forster's first novel,
Dames' Delight
(1964), wittily caricatures the world of the women's college.
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It depicts ageing, scholarly spinster dons focused on understanding the intricacies of medieval strip-farming and totally failing to communicate with younger students who are obsessed with sex and living in the shadow of the atom bomb. In Andrea Newman's novel
A Share of the World
, also published in 1964, women students in London similarly agonise over sex and relationships and show uneasy commitment to academic work.
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Outside secretarial work or teaching, jobs for women seemed scarce. None of the women graduates in these novels has a clue what she will do after graduation.

These novels about women students can be seen as analogous to the ‘angry young man' literature written by men in the 1950s.
There are obvious parallels between
Dames' Delight
and
Lucky Jim
, for instance, although Kingsley Amis's novel was published ten years earlier, in 1954. The sense of blockage, of being stuck in a cul-de-sac of unhelpful social expectations, is pervasive in both texts. But in women's novels and plays of the 1950s and early 1960s there is a stronger sense of marginality and exclusion. In ‘angry young man' literature written by men, male working-class outsiders seek revenge on – or access to – power and social privilege by seducing middle-class girls. Two key texts written by women in this period are arguably more radical in that in each case their central protagonist looks outside the pale of respectable society altogether for some kind of hope or salvation. Nineteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney's play
A Taste of Honey
, first performed in 1958, showed a teenage girl, Jo, finding solace in relationships first with a ‘coloured' sailor and later with a homosexual, Geoff, whose care and attention help her manage through the turmoil of coping with an illegitimate pregnancy.
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Lynne Reid Banks's
The L-Shaped Room
, first published in 1960, dealt with similar themes.
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The novel's heroine, Jane, is a middle-class, unmarried girl who has been thrown out of her father's house on account of her pregnancy. She takes a bedsit in a seedy lodging house in Fulham. A gay black neighbour, John, and a Jewish lover, Toby, provide support. A spinster aunt, Addy, turns into something of a fairy godmother, leaving Jane a bequest which provides her with another dimension of independence. There is an implicit critique of patriarchy. Jane's male doctor, like her father, is judgemental and controlling, but also capable of benevolence. The novel ends with reconciliation. Jane's father, after a bout of misery and alcoholism, wants her back. Jane, her independence and autonomy now secured, returns on her own terms.

A Taste of Honey
was adapted into a hugely successful film,
starring Rita Tushingham, in 1961. Lynne Reid Banks's novel proved an instant (and lasting) best-seller. A film version of
The L-Shaped Room
, with Leslie Caron as Jane, appeared in 1962 and created a strong impact. Both Shelagh Delaney and Lynne Reid Banks had succeeded in telling stories about girls which challenged conventional morality. These were stories from the young woman's point of view. In the past, unmarried mothers had often been silenced through accusations and shame. Now, questions about teenage sexuality and how society should deal with unmarried pregnancy began to be asked more openly. Neither ‘respectable society' nor patriarchy looked as if it had all the answers.

5 | COMING OF AGE IN THE 1960S: BEAT GIRLS AND DOLLY BIRDS

Beat Girl
, a British film directed by Edmond T. Gréville in 1959, heralded the 1960s with a dire warning to fathers. An early poster for the film featured a wild-haired girl in saucy black underwear and a rah-rah skirt. The girl fingered her bra strap while a rather unhealthy-looking young man in the foreground strummed his guitar strings. The poster announced threateningly: ‘mad about “beat” and living for kicks, this [girl] could be your
teenage
daughter!'
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Beat Girl
starred Gillian Hills as Jennifer, a Brigitte Bardot-style, sulky ‘sex kitten'. A sixteen-year-old art student, Jennifer goes increasingly off the rails and is a trial to her middle-class architect father Paul Linden. Linden, coming across with suave masculine reasonableness, was played by David Farrar. There were performances from the pop musician Adam Faith, Oliver Reed and Christopher Lee. Lee played a creepy strip-joint operator. Noëlle Adam played the part of Jennifer's French stepmother, Nichole, disconcertingly close to Jennifer in age and appearance – tousled hair, tight gingham – if not in attitude. Jenny excels in awfulness, a true daughter from hell. She sneers at Nichole and sneaks out of the house at night to jive in a basement coffee bar. The Off Beat coffee bar in Soho happens to be close to a strip club, Les Girls. From a chance encounter it emerges that loyal new wife Nichole had something of a dodgy past, before redeeming herself by falling in love with Jennifer's father. This knowledge supplies Jenny with opportunities for further persecuting Nichole, this
time with blackmail. At the same time, she herself weighs up career prospects as a stripper in ‘the vice trade'. In the meantime she amuses herself with wild parties in her father's house, and episodes of dangerous driving with the gang.