Trespassers will be prosecuted: these words acted like a dare, wager and fire accelerant where my father was concerned. One of my earliest memories involves dad taking me and my big sister paddling at a fenced-off reservoir where Joe Public was unwelcome. On the way home he drove “no hands” (yes, right off the steering wheel) down a straight stretch of road to make us laugh. Throughout our school days, he would whisk us out of classes for a day at Lingfield racecourse, handing out 50p pieces to place a bet at the bookies. He ran the country pub where we lived by his own idiosyncratic tenets, which included telling drinkers to “bugger off” at the end of the night and occasionally waving a shotgun at miscreants.
It is, perhaps, no wonder that I developed a lifelong aversion to petty rules and meaningless bureaucracy. Aged eleven, I was ejected from the Girl Guides alongside my best friend Polly. A letter sent to our homes explained we were disruptive and unworthy of the “purple ribbon for good conduct” which all the other new Guides had received. At my secondary school, which had “Onward Christian Soldiers” running through its missionary DNA, I found a host of friends who strove hard to notch up detentions for creative misdemeanours. We remain proud of writing collaborative porn novels under our desks and breaking the world record for cramming fourteen-year-olds into a Wendy House (38 and one large spider). Perhaps less so for making a Ouija board from an upturned Scrabble set and summoning spirits to the sickbay.
I was impressed by a precocious friend, who had worked out that the power adult teachers had over pupils was mostly illusory. If a teacher was lacklustre my friend would openly read a novel throughout the lesson, still scoring top marks in tests. When threatened with the headmistress’s office, she would simply say, “Lovely, shall I run along now?” When the head threatened to call in her parents, she claimed they were divorcing and her mother was in a psychiatric institution. My friend was untrammelled without being obnoxious, and I wanted to follow suit. Bit by bit, I extradited myself, with the help of a glorious English teacher who encouraged wayward thinking. No one was surprised when I was deemed “unsuitable” to be a prefect.
Ever since, I’ve filtered people into those who are head girl, or boy, material – good at enforcing rules, doling out penalties and chanting the school motto – and those who sit at the back of the hall, cracking bad-taste jokes and trying to muster the telekinetic powers to spell out obscene words on misted-up windows. The head pupil types are generally charming, able people and I acknowledge we need them to oil our institutions’ wheels in a functioning democracy. Someone has to run MI5 and come up with a near-plausible defence for banging-up Just Stop Oil protestors. But they are – whisper it! – not my people. Just as I most certainly am not their cuppa.
No one was surprised when I was deemed unsuitable to be a school prefect
Instead, I’m inexorably drawn to the mischievous types who don’t want to join the officer class and have, metaphorically (sometimes literally), skipped off to join the circus. Although that doesn’t mean these escapologists have no scruples or sense of duty; you can rely on them to look after the elderly, pick up litter, fight for civil liberties and against PSOH (poor sense of humour). Some regularly toddle off to a place of worship to contemplate the numinous. They just don’t burn to tell others what to do.
And their way of thinking makes it harder to hold down what you might call a proper job. For at least a week in 1995, I considered going straight with a lucrative post at a market research company. Then two charming art dealers offered me an ill-paid job at The Erotic Print Society (which mutated into The Erotic Review) with predictable consequences. Life has been a riot ever since and I now own a large collection of corsets and peignoirs, but I’ll never have a private pension or savings for a rainy day.
I would argue, however, that I’ve enjoyed a far greater luxury: an astonishing degree of personal freedom. Those of us born female in the western world in the past six decades have lived through near-miracles: widely available contraception, erotic experimentation, shattered glass ceilings, cheap travel, childcare and, more recently, low inflation and no-fault divorce. All built on the shoulders of suffragettes, second wave feminists, fully-financed student grants, Jilly Cooper novels, the 1980s boom and low inflation. (Dear god, if I’d been born in Afghanistan, I would have been stoned to death by now for my strumpety ways.)
Nor do these liberties feel safeguarded. My lovely nieces are unlikely to enjoy the same freedom to work in the arts, buy property and have children, without such everyday decisions rendering them bankrupt. We all know authoritarian regimes pose threats to women’s professional, reproductive and sexual autonomy, but so too can faltering economies, not to mention the effects of climate events and pollution. My lovely, carefree 1990s life was very much a product of a media boom; I just didn’t realise it until decades afterwards.
In short, we off-piste, circus types need to be a bit more regimented in the fight to preserve liberty for subsequent generations. We can’t leave it all to the bossy head girls and, besides, we must make sure they don’t indulge in over-reach and thumbscrews.
But I may still have the following motto tattooed on my upper arm: “Free as a bird.”
Rowan Pelling is editor of Perspective and former editor of The Erotic Review
