supplicium post mortem

My first and only encounter with a hostile authority (in scene) came during my first visit to Englandland. I stayed with M for three weeks. It was our third visit, in the sixth month of knowing each other. We played a lot that trip in the voracious way that you do when you are just starting to play. The setting was still “College” (standard issue English Public School, co-ed), and RP was making inroads with his relationship to Casey, as TL was with Mark. There was an exploration of implements, and even, sometime during the visit, experimentation with That Thing (a first for both of us, and a whole other story). M was living in a small, rented flat and working his corporate job during the day. I was mooching around, attempting to write (mostly unsuccessfully), and pretty much waiting for him to get home in the evenings so we could be together.

The scene in question arose out of some joint story-telling about a certain unpleasant prefect in the House by the name of Martin Halstead. Arrogant, sadistic, scornful, he was not to be trifled with. Via some confusion on my part about the way the hot-water storage worked in that flat, Casey managed to get on the wrong side of Halstead by using up all the hot water one morning before he got to have his bath. More out-of-scene storytelling floated the idea of being “sprung” into a scene first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to this, but I wasn’t against trying. I think I didn’t know if he’d actually go through with it.

But he did.

Malcolm McDowell's character in If never beat anyone, but he looks like Halstead here.

Early morning, I found myself awakened by a very nasty specimen in College school uniform. Martin Halstead demanded that I report to the Houseroom in full uniform in five minutes. Exit.

I hauled myself from sleep, feeling 1) a combination of scared/excited that this scene was actually happening, and 2) violated, because I’d been descended on when I was asleep, wholly unprotected. At any rate, I put on Casey’s preferred uniform (gray trousers, blazer, tie) and reported to the Houseroom.

There Halstead lit into me.

MH (with profound scorn): Just what do you imagine you’re wearing, girl?

cdm: My uniform.

MH (with even greater scorn): Girls at this school wear skirts.

cdm: We’re allowed to wear the boys’ uniform, too!

MH (witheringly): Go and change. Now. And be quick about it unless you want more than you’re already getting.

I/she went off and changed, feeling uneasy and slightly gross. Not only did a skirt afford only one layer of protection, but it also made it much easier for a creep like Martin Halstead to… I wasn’t sure what. I/she was also incensed at the injustice of it. Girls were allowed to wear the boys’ uniform. It was perfectly legal, and here he was saying I couldn’t do it! I have a tendency to get overwrought about injustice I am powerless to affect. This is why torture films, like the spate of political dramas that came out in the 1980s about South Africa and South America, squicked me. Here was Martin Halstead already demonstrating his unjust authority, and the scene had not even properly begun. I felt desperate.

I returned to the Houseroom, feeling under-dressed in skirt and gray knee-socks. Halstead delivered a searingly condescending ticking-off about my insolence at having used his bath water (as if water were reserved). I needed taking down a peg, he declared. And, he informed me, that was precisely what he intended to do.

from "The Moral Reformers"

I should say that this was in most respects an authentic prefectorial scene. School literature was full of these kinds of despots, as was M’s actual Public School. By Kipling’s standards, Martin Halstead was a pussycat. Up until this moment, I had loved reading stories like this, chapters like “The Moral Reformers” in Stalky, or even the war with Flashman in Tom Brown. Now that it was happening, however, it was having a very different effect. It was pushing my powerless/injustice buttons and winding me up dangerously.

Then the sentence: Halstead announced I would be receiving 18 strokes of the cane. I can’t remember the arithmetic, but this chilled me to the bone. I had never before taken that much in one go. The most I’d ever taken was nine (I think, though possibly 12). But what really filled me with dread was the character I was facing. Martin Halstead was going to hit as hard as he could. He cared nothing for my feelings. Nothing would make him back off. He hated me and wanted to see me suffer. He intended to break me.

I removed my jacket as instructed and stood before the Houseroom table. I don’t remember now whether he announced the protection then or half-way through, but I was to get nine over underpants and nine unprotected. It was unheard-of in severity. Also, the lack of protection struck me as obscene. Here I was a 5th form girl with this Upper 6th form boy, and he proposed to cane me unprotected, without witnesses? There was no arguing with him, however; and perhaps I was beyond arguing. I was moving rapidly into survival mode.

I bent over, and the first stroke confirmed my suspicion that there would be no holds barred. It was uncompromisingly hard, and it was delivered with complete hostility. It was by far the hardest whacking I had ever received.

I don’t remember the stroke-by-stroke details (this was almost 15 years ago now), but I remember that I stayed in place; and I remember that my body was yelping involuntarily through most of the second half. What I remember most is what happened to me mentally. Pushed to my limit, I found myself very calm, and very cold. I was a million miles away from crying, breaking, or even actually caring. Under attack, I retreated into a concentration-camp-like deadness. I could never win in this situation; I could only hope to survive it intact. And the only way to keep myself intact was to hide that self very far away. My body might have been yelling, but the real me—the real Casey—was not there. This was happening to someone else, someone not-us. Martin Halstead got his licks, but he didn’t get us. He would never touch  us.

When it was over and I stood up, I think he was disappointed. I was utterly dry-eyed, neutral, and stony faced. Robotically, I gave the replies he wanted. I only pretended to look him in the eye when he demanded it. He did his best at a devastating after-jaw, but eventually he dismissed me.

Unperturbed, I left the Houseroom. And Casey, wearing her entire uniform—blazer, shoes, and all—got back into bed and crawled under the covers, where she stayed most of the morning in a kind of suspended animation.

I think M kissed me goodbye before leaving for work, and I think I faked it enough to reassure him. I can’t remember very well.

Later in the morning, Casey got up, and I say Casey because the adult me was nowhere to be found. She had taken charge and no amount of pulling myself together could have ejected her. Casey, still stony, got up and wrote a long and measured letter to Dr. Malcolm (the Headmaster) registering a formal complaint about what had happened that morning. She was well aware that complaining wasn’t Done. She did not care. At this point, she took a perverse pleasure in violating School Practice.

The thrust of her complaint was that it had been unseemly for Halstead to have caned her unprotected without any witnesses. She also argued that, while she may have deserved punishment, the punishment given was out of proportion to the crime, and that a common understanding of uniform had been contradicted. She appealed to Dr. Malcolm to uphold justice.

She and I went out later, around the time M was due home, so that he could find her letter and figure out what to do about it. I seem to remember later that evening (right after we got back, or later?) Casey being summoned to see Mr. Prior. She went, still dead-in-heart, figuring he, too, could do whatever he wanted to her. She was beyond caring.

But Mr. Prior was no Martin Halstead. He was distressed to have learned what had happened. In fact, he informed her, Martin Halstead had been stripped of his prefect status. He would not be tormenting anyone else. Casey, gobsmacked. Furthermore, Mr. Prior wanted to apologize personally to Casey, for having failed to keep a sufficient eye on her. It shouldn’t have happened, he told her. It wouldn’t again.

This was not the end of the trip, and we played many more scenes, though none that hostile or that severe—not then, and not, that I recall, ever (at least with me bottoming). There wasn’t any blame on either side for this scene, but we both learned something about me, and about the ice-cold survival instinct I appeared to possess.

I have read a lot, then and today, from people who achieve a kind of release or catharsis from very hard scenes, from being taken beyond their limits. It always sounds appealing in theory, but M and I both learned in that early scene that it would never work that way with me. He, as a bottom, had cravings to be pushed like that, but as a top, he concluded that a) I would never respond that way; I would merely go dead; and b) if by some extraordinary action I ever was pushed that far, the results would be utterly destructive.

I know many people are different from me in this regard, but knowing this about myself has saved me from thinking I might enjoy playing with hostile authority. Despite having organized myself around it as a child, it was, and still is, a place with nothing but damage to offer me.

And connected with this—in my retrospective mind—is RP’s instinct, sharpened over time, generally to give Casey less than she asked for. She had, and has, an enormously provocative streak, and in the beginning he sometimes mistook it for a request for lots of whacking. As previously discussed, there were times in that first year when she would bring home a pile of dockets from an absolute train-wreck of a day. Pretty soon, he cottoned on to the fact that this was an expression of anger, a self-destructive impulse, like her impulse to break things or tear up her punishment book. Pretty soon he got to the point where he would leaf through her pile of dockets, chuck them aside, and proceed to deal moderately but non-legalistically with her, giving her just enough to stop the downward spiral and not a touch more. Sometimes he refused altogether to whack her and would simply grab her and hug her against her angry will.

Where, dear Lord, is another man like this?

Don’t you wish you could do that more often? I can think of several conversations, subsequently requiring mind-bleach, which wouldn’t have got to that stage if I’d been able to safeword, lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.

Not that way, perverts. This is about the other kind of playing you do with yourself when you find you have lost your playmate.

Playing with yourself is hard, as previously discussed here and here (among other places), and it is most unsatisfactory for exercising anything but your imagination (and even then only a fraction of it); but, playing with myself is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.

Mostly this takes the form of conversations between TL and Casey, or me and Casey. Sometimes Casey turns up around other people, though she is pretty careful only to show her face around people who won’t recognize her. Once, for instance, we were going around a part of a wildlife park where you could pet the smaller animals. We were with a younger relative, and Casey was “in” 100%. There was one part where there were mice and squirrels nesting inside socks. Casey started literally to jump up and down: Socks! They sleep in socks!! Younger Relative was also experiencing cute-overload, though he was a bit more stiff upper lip about it. At one point he said, Oh, it’s your inner child. I said, That is exactly who it is! Unfortunately, I couldn’t introduce him to Casey just then, lol.

As a child (APD) I played with my dolls a lot, when I wasn’t at rehearsal for children’s theater. My brother and I were close in age and played together, but he was in many ways an unsatisfactory playmate. He was terrifically stubborn (a necessary defense, probably, against my bossiness) and although he could be made to go along with my schemes, he rarely seemed to make anything up himself. Also, he was a musical prodigy so from a young age spent hours in solitary practice of his instrument. So, I played with my dolls. Sometimes, now, it feels like the same thing. The only difference (besides the lack of dolls) is that I know now what real playing is, with a real playmate who will invent with you and move the play along and surprise you and blow your mind. I know enough to miss it.

M used to play all the time, in every way, not simply roleplay or tgi. It’s hard to convey, or even to think of an example. The plastic seedling trays were labeled by him. The onions say, for instance, unyons. Maybe you had to be there.

Last summer I went back to Englandland for the first time, and I met a couple of people whom I described to my mother as “blogging acquaintances.” Friend 1 took me out to lunch and then wandered with me through the streets of Eton. I had not wandered around Eton since I was eighteen, but it hadn’t changed much. We walked and talked, and then it started, inconspicuously. Watching a begowned teacher walking down the street carrying books, we caught our breath. “Except,” she said, “he should be carrying something else.”

Imagine a giant permission slip.

And so it continued, casually, as asides to the regular conversation: “Oh, I’d like to report to his study after games.” or, apropos of some boys in sports kit bending over to pick up gear, “Oh, you can stay just as you are, thank you.” You have probably done this kind of thing  yourself.

I think I might have burbled a bit to dear Friend 1. Simply talking this way was like being awakened from a kind of winter’s sleep. I hadn’t realized until just then how very much I missed it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I found myself g-chatting with Friend 2. We both type as fast as we talk, so the conversations tend to be dizzying, but at one point she said something about us going back to Switzerland. It was some kind of typo, as we had never been to Switzerland, at least not together, so I joked, “We had so much fun, didn’t we?”

She didn’t hesitate: “I know!”

Me: I liked that youth hostel where we went hiking.

Her: I preferred the chalet.

Me: It was very pretty, but you know that guy broke my heart.

Her: He had the most awful sweater!

Me: So true! I was blind…I miss that rather authoritarian rest cure place.

Her: Oh, man, no kidding.

Later, I realized: she was playing with me. I had a playmate! You may think I am grasping at straws, and in fact I am, but the point is how it felt to play, even with faraway Friend 2 via text chat, or faraway Friend 1 last summer. It felt like moving after being locked up for longer than you can remember.

This week, Casey has been pressing hard, against whatever it is she presses. (viz. the experience that gave rise to Double Teamed). One way it expressed itself was a powerful desire to buy her a dress I’d tried on at H&M. This dress was so cute (gray flannel pinafore, buttons up the back, tie at waist, knee length) and I thought Casey would look so cute in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well (I have a large cup size and it was fitted in the chest). I was bemoaning this to Friend 2, saying it might fit if I lost some more weight. Friend 2 suggested I get it and put it in the back of the closet, knowing that from H&M it couldn’t cost that much. So, yesterday, we went back to the store and I got the dress for Casey, in gray and in navy. And, now it even fit.

Home we get from the store, but she couldn’t try it on yet because TL had a student. Turned out the student needed help with a Latin translation, and it turned out one of the words was verberare, which, we discovered, means to flog. It was very difficult to keep Casey in check at this news. She tore open her own dictionary and scoured the page: verberabilissumus, altogether deserving of flogging! At one point TL’s student forgot what the word had meant.

Casey: To flog!

Kid: Oh, wait, I thought it was to beat.

Casey: Right, flog, beat, whip.

Kid: What’s flog mean?

TL at this point asked Casey to fetch something from the other room while she defined flog for the kid. When Kid worked out that the criminal in his translation was being threatened with verbereris, his response was, “Wow, harsh!” Casey had to be sent on another errand at this point.

Finally, TL’s lesson ended and Casey was allowed to put on her frock. Navy blue, white blouse, navy gym knickers, white ankle socks, black school shoes. And let me tell you, Casey has never been more In for the last twenty months. My body was taken over by her, walking like her, skipping around, even – wait for it – smiling. I felt quite literally possessed by someone else. Except I knew her. I had known her. It had been a  long time.

“Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world.” He didn’t, though. It would have been over-the-top. With a heart as out-sized as his, he had learned to resist acting upon it, for the most part.

He’d been told her name was Thomasina, but she introduced herself as Tommy.

“With a Y or an I?” he’d asked.

She had paused, as if he’d committed an audacity, then contracted her lips and eyes faintly and let slip a hint of a smile: “What do you think, blue-eyes?”

A grin had spread across his face before he could stop it. She leaned against the window casement as if she belonged there, the Garden Quad blazing green beyond, a lock of her auburn hair falling out of its clasp and across her forehead, like a boy in need of a haircut.

“I think,” he replied, “that it’s hard to imagine you reading maths.”

Her brow raised, slender and accusatory. “Oh, yes? Over my head?”

“Not a bit,” he answered. “Only, too circumscribed. You look more the secret agent. Languages, ancient and modern.”

“I suppose you’re pondering some witticism re. cunning linguists.”

“Never,” he smiled.

The host, his friend, interrupted to introduced two other boys, sincere drips passionate about philosophy. He could see Thomasina’s gaze detach. She pretended to converse with them, but he could tell she was putting up a front. He caught her glancing at the clock on the mantel, and an image crossed his mind—her hair cut properly, wearing a fifth former’s uniform, standing at the window of his former study and answering to the name of Tommy.

“I’m sure Lenin was the most thrilling raconteur,” she said, her irony too suppressed to disturb the drips. She turned, as if to include him in the conversation: “I always go weak at the knees around zealous Russians, don’t you?”

He stood up straight, his heart speeding at the unexpected attention. For she was indeed paying him attention, and had been, though he’d only just noticed. He lost control of his grin again as he recognized it, that quality he encountered so rarely – the fascination with figuring people out.

It was one of his hobbies, and he missed so painfully those evenings in his Housemaster’s study discussing the boys. His Housemaster had learned much under his tutelage, and he himself had enjoyed the challenge and satisfaction. Now, half-way into his third term at Varsity, he longed, suddenly, for that companionship, that common purpose. Other people seemed to accept the surface of things so readily.

“Heavens!” she exclaimed when one of the drips identified him as the star batsman everyone was wittering about. He suppressed the urge to administer a clip round the ear. “I’d no idea,” she said, turning to consult their host’s bookcase.

The drips waffled away, but his heart still labored. He’d heard the mockery in her remark even if they hadn’t; and he recognized it for what it was, barely suppressed boasting from one who not only had every idea about him, but had known long before the party.

He rested his elbow on a shelf above her head, boxing her elegantly into the niche by the cupboard. “I stand by secret agent,” he said in an undertone. “What fascinates me is which side you’re playing for, and who your grandmaster is.”

She flicked through a book as if he weren’t there. “What makes you think I’m not playing both sides, or all of them?”

“You’re doing what I’m doing, I think.”

“Yes,” she replied, still apparently absorbed in the volume. “There’s more to you than leg-before-wicket, we think.”

He turned away, surveying the room. The punch-bowl balanced on a table beside the drips. A simple jostle would introduce a most wicked diversion, the kind he hadn’t exercised in… he couldn’t recall precisely. Once, he would have weighed certain amusement against the threat of of the cane. Now, what price beckoned, and what reward?

She re-shelved the book and tucked the strand of hair behind her ear, sighing wearily and allowing her sleeve to graze his hip. He felt it, then, the unnerving arrival of irrational notions. He knew nothing about her save mathematics and her name, but he was certain, suddenly, of this: she liked people who made their own scrapes for themselves before they fell into them, and then got out without being fished for.

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• Tom

m4w – 17 – British Museum

To the young lady who asked about the mummy this morning, I apologize. For behaving like cad, for thrusting my leaflet at you and striding away in a cloud of disgust. You were more than alluring in your pleated grey frock. Circumstances were not as they appeared.

Over the past four weeks I have a) watched someone die; b) been disposed from my school; c) been reinstated; d) been held hostage in an ecclesiastical household, from which I have only just emerged sore in more ways than one. Since then, I have come unaccountably under the authority of my soon-to-be Headmaster, who flogged me round the museum today. After recent events, he would have skinned me alive (just for starters) if he saw me conferring with a charming young lady such as yourself. You may not have noticed him examining papyri nearby.

Your smile made my chest go queer. I can’t seem to stop thinking about your hands as they took possession of my leaflet. I’m no use at dancing, and I’m pretty much a dead loss as a human being. I did hit a hundred and fifty in an afternoon last summer.

You seemed a modern girl of 1926. If this hasn’t appalled you, why not leave word with a librarian in the reading room? I’m sure to be dragged there every day this week. Direct your notice to Anton O’Masia. Not my real name, but I promise to make it worth your while.

Read other missed connections this week:

• Frenchies
• PapaTomLA

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

She just plays one on tv. LOL.

A couple of people have asked recently, whether I’m of British extraction, and while that’s almost as flattering as having people think I’m a boy, I won’t fib.

I was born & raised in the mid-western USA. Thankfully, I don’t talk like that any more. Also thankfully, I don’t talk in a Gotham accent. And unless I’m in Englandland trying to blend in somewhere, I don’t talk in any of their accents either.

I was married to an Englishman. Certainly that had a big impact on my imagination and ideolect, but less than you might think. The schoolboys, for instance, already existed when I met him.

I do write in that world in my regular life, so I guess it has developed over time. I don’t know if it’s got much to do with skill, though. These people just appear, and I listen to them. So thanks, people, for appearing.

I miss his voice, by the way. His accent had softened drastically since moving here, but – God – I would give anything to hear him talk to me now, to hear him whisper the things he used to whisper in the dark. Or in the light. I miss his expressions, and the way he was always making up new ones. I miss his often manic playing with words. I miss the language jokes we had. I miss all the jokes. I miss the ways he said Casey: “Case-ey.” “Casey!” “cdm-cdm-cdm.” I miss the way he said my real name. I miss how he called me Sweetheart. How, when I said, “It’s me,” he said, “Hello, me.” I miss his whistling. I miss his snoring. I miss what he’d say when he came through the door. I miss what he said in our first phone call: “You need a lot of looking after…”

Kids!  Writing from a public pc at the Shepperton Public Library. Gives new appreciation for NSFW, ha ha. I don’t really dare to twitter lest I scare off the OAPs hunt-and-pecking next to me. I apparently have 45 minutes left. There are many good things about Englandland, but first gripes:

1. The internets are locked up over here. I found one cafe near Covent Garden with free wifi, but nothing else. Here in the suburbs, they look at you like you’re speaking Greek when you ask about it. When you open up your laptop somewhere to see if you can mooch off anyone’s wifi, you find that everyone has wireless, but it’s all locked up. This would surely be so that your neighbor in Surrey doesn’t…hack into your pc? It’s just not like this where I come from, even in rural US. So I’ve had interwebs withdrawal.
2. This keyboard has a foreign layout, starting with the @ key which is not above the 3. Slows typing down, reducing efficiency of 60 minutes pre-booked (yesterday) free library time.

OK, some good things about Englandland:

1. Gardens. Everyone has beautiful front gardens, even on the most unprepossessing street. It smells like roses here.
2. Footpaths. We just don’t have this in the US, the ability to walk freely through countryside. Like UK internets, a lot of land in the US is locked up under private ownership. Here you can be right by a motorway, even hearing it, and still be walking down a tree-covered footpath, smelling nature. I miss my dogs!
3. Jam donuts. Even gourmet expat places in the US don’t do them like Englandland, and certainly not as simply, ubiquitously, and economically.
4. LUSH. Less expensive than home, and newer products we don’t have.
5. Roundabouts. Why don’t we have more of these at home instead of the awful blight of stop signs and unnecessary traffic lights? Traffic just flows better with them.
6. M&S sandwich container design – you zip it open and it lies flat like a little tray.
7. Theater ticket prices. I saw Oliver with Rowan Atkinson on Wednesday. Cast of hundreds. Fun. I’m glad I saw him do the role, but to be honest, I was slightly bored by his shtick in places.

the local pub

In other news, I’m driving on the left & shifting with my left hand, successfully so far. Yesterday I had a terrific time walking around Windsor & Eton with @adelehaze. Tonight, off to Somerset for a family weekend, which will hopefully not be too suffocating & hopefully include some walking in Dartmoor.

Because I managed to get this library slot, I posted wildcards for Flash Fiction Friday. Sorry I didn’t get to take words from other people this week – not possible logistically. I’m going to try to post my entry from my mother-in-law’s dialup, if it still works.

I’m trying to find things to enjoy here, and I did enjoy my afternoon in Windsor yesterday. Otherwise, though, I have been disappointed to discover that the world over here is just as empty as the world at home. And, amazingly, M is not here. He wasn’t waiting for me at the airport. He wasn’t that guy who looked like him from behind on the Hungerford Footbridge. And I don’t think he’s going to be waiting for me at his mother’s house.

Seeing Oliver was the kind of thing he would have taken casey to do. During other trips (and sometimes for other trips), he took casey to the revival of Another Country, His Dark Materials (all one day), and The Secret Garden. So, even though we had no appetite for anything (including breakfast, which literally was like dust – those psalm writers knew what they were saying), TL went and bought tickets (in the center, row E) so casey could see everything up close like she likes to. Also, this was a nostalgic experience since I’ve been in the show four times in my life, plus my first novel featured it heavily. To me it represents the joy of children’s theater, pure playing, and (since my first boyfriend played Oliver) the pure niceness & excitement of first romantic affections. So when the overture started, I teared up. However, I got over this and enjoyed the first half.

At the interval in England, people come into the auditorium and sell you little ice-creams. So we queued up and bought casey an ice-cream because that is what you do in England, and it’s what RP always did. She didn’t feel like it, but we got it anyway, not even begrudging the £3.20 price, because RP always bought it for her, and we thought she should have it.

So there we were, in the middle of a crowded, lit matinee auditorium, eating vanilla ice-cream with the little plastic spoon, and casey was so in (where are the quotation marks on this keyboard?), meaning so fully present in me, and it was like RP really had bought her the ice-cream, except he hadn’t, or had he, from the grave? We’d bought it with the £5 note that was in his wallet when he died. And then she/I/we… my hands were trembling like they did the day he died, and I felt nauseous, and tears were streaming down my face though I was trying as hard as possible not to break into full-scale sobbing in public. Casey couldn’t finish the ice-cream. We threw half of it away. People sort of understand grief, I think, but I’m not sure how many people can grasp having an attack of grief through different parts of your personality.

After the show, we roamed around London for a long time, and eventually made it back to the footbridge by the Embankment. Walking down that big street that leads to it, mostly empty, we had to sit down on a bench and sob – because the world here, the world everywhere, was empty without him. Other people seemed perfectly able to enjoy it, but I just couldn’t. Can’t. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy says (melodramatically) that without Heathcliff, the universe would be a mighty stranger. With me, it’s the other way around: I’m the one who has become the mighty stranger.

Still – unfortunately – we breathe in and out.

And still – fortunately – England is beautiful and full of roses in June, daylight lasts until past 10pm, there are good and nice people into tgi here and elsewhere, and jam donuts can be bought in the shops. So…

I’m off to Englandland, kids. I don’t know what kind of internet access I’ll be able to have over there. Yes, I know the interwebs exist across the pond, but it seems that free wifi might not be very common in stingy-old-England. Lots of places seem to have the attitude: you can mooch our wifi, but only if you pay us £5 per day, or per hour. I am trying hard not to get wound up about money and prices, but it’s a real challenge because a) I have so little discretionary $; b) I normally live in the absolute thriftiest way possible, cooking at home, cutting my cellphone, riding my bike, never travelling more than 2 hours away, turning off lights, fixing everything I can myself, rarely going out, etc.; c) It’s tough to be a traveler at the mercy of the local economy, in this case the UK, which features a trifecta of resentful service, appallingly high prices/poor value (even if the exchange rate were 1 dollar to the pound), and a meanness towards customers. I am reminded of the last time I was there and got a chicken salad sandwich at a small (empty) cafe in Somerset. When I got it (dry chicken, dry bread, lettuce), I asked nicely if I could possibly have a little mayonnaise on the bread. I was told I could have mayonnaise on the side for 15p. Because, you know, it would absolutely put them out of business if they were to go around dispensing a tablespoonful of condiment to every customer who had the Oliver-Twist-like arrogance to ask for it. Besides which, it would only encourage people to ask for what they really want – and if people did that, then – Shock! – well, the country would go to Hell in a hand-basket because people would stop whinging and actually do something about their complaints.

But let me not get started. Anyway, the small-empty-mean cafe in Somerset probably had to gouge on the mayonnaise because they’d been forced to to shell out tens of thousands of pounds for health-and-safety appraisals, equality training, local tax, council tax, refuse collection, national tax, European Parliament tax, and carbon offset fees – and all that in the month of January alone. They probably aren’t even in business today. We shall see when we go visit Mrs. RP.

OK, rant over. To my UK friends – *hugs*!

Suffice to say, I may be able to log on and host Flash Fiction Friday, or I may not. Either way, I’m sure that somehow the blogsphere will get on without me.

Hey, kids, guess what? After much tedious drama (and on, and off, and on, and off, ad nauseum), my trip to Englandland is a go! I’m going to be staying in Surrey June 17-19, then again eve of 21-24 (weekend booked by family obligations). It would be fun to meet up with nice people in the vicinity for a drink, bite to eat, chat, etc. Help me love England again.

caseydamnmorgan at gmail …