What finally pushed me back into normality was leaving home. Of course, as I said, I was unready, but if I had stayed, I would never have been ready. I might have been disabled for life. What do children need? They need to leave home, even if home will always come with them. I was nervous, but in a different way, and that normal nervousness, that fear of gaffes, that intense busyness of the first term at Oxford, trying to make friends and fathom the system, going to lectures, joining clubs, slowly crowded out the blankness, the bat’s feet, and made me so tired that I slept at night. Fear came back at Christmas, in my narrow bed, and less strongly in the vacations that followed. Was it the dreadful quietness of the Sussex night, without the happy cries of drunken young people? Was it the oppression of life at home?
And let’s not forget the deep task of parents is to see that their children can leave home, are enabled to have a life of their own. My parents somehow made it possible. Even my father let me go. There are too many children who never leave. I left, ineptly. I was able to. Though if they had not pushed me so hard at school, I might have been older, and better equipped.
I see this chapter reads like an indictment of my father, and maybe it should. Maybe he deserves it. Maybe it’s time to recite the charges.
But if so, I have to defend him too, because he is dead, and I am the writer.
I hated him, and yet we recovered. I recovered, and he recovered, and one day he would say ‘Sorry’ to me. My mother told me that after they had seen me off at Horsham for the train to Oxford with my vast brown trunk, hand-initialled by Vic in his over-careful lettering, M. M. GEE, my father came home, went straight into my bedroom, and cried for an hour, could not stop.
What do women need?
what do men need ?
I was nineteen years old when I first had full sex with a man, which seemed shamefully behindhand. I think we were all eager not to be virgins, we clever girls at Somerville, but men were not allowed to stay overnight, and college rooms had thin walls like eggboxes. So it couldn’t really happen till I moved out of college. The man, also, had to be vaguely right, though the muddle and chaos of those times, and my life, is shown by the fact that to this day I am not quite sure which of two men first went ‘all the way’. One seemed to get quite far up my way, and it didn’t hurt, and felt fairly pleasant; I was glad it was happening at last; but then the second one went deeper, further, and I liked it, and him, a great deal better. On balance I decided the second was The First, and told him he was, and I think he felt betrayed when in the course of a quarrel a few years later I chose to announce it wasn’t him after all. The truth was perhaps that a girl who’s been a tomboy and done a lot of hurdles races at school has little physical virginity left.
I found I had no shyness about sex. It seemed perfectly natural and very exciting and I wanted to try out more of it. The fear I had felt that evening in France (which came back again when on two more occasions I was physically attacked by strangers, once in Italy, once outside my house in Oxford) never affected consensual sex. I think I came across as rather highly strung and difficult in ordinary human intercourse, because I was shy, so men were often pleasantly surprised to find that in sexual intercourse I was quite different (my animal luck: my luck, again. Though of course it is also about both partners, and I can think of four or five times when I didn’t enjoy it; once when the man was very much older, and something in me felt it was wrong, and shrivelled; twice when there had been a lot of begging and drinking but I still in my animal heart did not want it; once when the man in question and I had spun an overstretched myth of romance and the sex was doomed to be a disappointment, for my body was truthful when my mind was not.)
There followed more than a decade of practising before I found my lifetime partner. The sex, in itself, was enjoyable, and yet I never knew what lay behind it, and nor, I think, did my male partners. I was on the pill, so the obvious biological point of sex was missing, and besides, we were all deaf and blind to that aspect. I wasn’t really pair-bonding. What was going on? I don’t think we knew. The late sixties were an astonishing time. We were no longer using a rule-book. What did men want? What did women want?
What do women need? What do men need? I didn’t have a clue in my twenties.
I don’t have an answer even now. Except that the sexes intertwine. I have always felt both male and female, have always known I could be bisexual, though the love I cleaved to was heterosexual. Women need men; men, women. In my novel The Ice People, set forty years hence, in the middle of this century, I wrote about what I called ‘segging’, a segregation that comes upon the sexes as fertility drops and each gender turns inward, suspicious and hostile, resentful of what it is no longer being given. We aren’t there yet, and I hope we never will be.