Sarah Perry - Essex Girls

ESSEX GIRLS

ALSO BY SARAH PERRY

After Me Comes the Flood

The Essex Serpent

Melmoth

For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere

Sarah Perry

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Serpents Tail,

an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London EC1A 7JQ

www.serpentstail.com

Copyright Aldwinter Ltd

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Typeset in Elena by MacGuru Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 745 1

eISBN 978 1 78283 821 0

Audio ISBN 978 1 78283 829 6

For my sisters

As I write this, I cannot but wonder when and how you will read it,

and whether it will cause a single throb at the idea that

it may be meant for you.

Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick-Room: Essays, 1844

EARLY ONE EVENING some months ago, I returned by bus to the town where I was born, and alighting in Chelmsford at a stop on Wood Street I found myself attended by Essex ghosts. Some distance from where I stood, I saw a red brick wall stained by efflorescence and surmounted by black iron railings. Behind the wall, beyond a length of grass, I saw for the first time a row of modern houses, which had been built since I last visited. Standing in the dusk, the bus departing behind me, I could read this wall like a manuscript. It is all that remains of the hospital where I was born weeks early in the autumn, not having been expected until winter: I was blue, my father tells me, and a shocking sight. The hospital was demolished thirty years after my birth, and had by then been empty and derelict for years. In a photograph taken before the demolition and published in the local press, a black iron fire escape extends up the exterior wall of a forbidding building, and vegetation is rampant at the windows; it is just possible to make out the white chimney of the hospital incinerator beyond the pediment. On the tarmac, which is cracking open in the carpark, a solitary chair has been abandoned, as if an anxious patient has just departed the waiting room.

But I knew this wall was a palimpsest, so I went on reading, and found beneath the corridors down which my mother had walked with me in her arms the Chelmsford Union Workhouse, whose fourteen rooms and infectious ward became the St Johns Hospital; and behind the workhouse an almshouse, which was always wanting repair; and behind this the barracks that stood on that same ground. Then I thought I saw, in the passages that ran between the modern houses, the dead remnants of an Essex past still going about their business: Hetty Alderson, for example, who in 1893 was sent at the age of fifteen from the workhouse to be employed and beaten by the wife of a cycle manufacturer, and coming up behind her, farm boys from Prittlewell and Steeple, too thin for their scarlet regimental tunics.

St Johns Hospital, Chelmsford, shortly before its demolition in 2010.

Then I was in no hurry, and the evening was pleasantly dark I saw, passing without effort through the wall and iron railings, the ghosts of three Essex girls coming out to greet me. First came Rose Allin, with her head wrapped in a length of cloth, and a jug of water in her right hand: she was young and walking briskly, and had in the folds of her dress the scent of burning wood. Then bustling little Anne Knight, with her piercing pale eyes, holding up a white sign, and gesturing fiercely to it: Chelmsford was her home town, and she hadnt come far. Then after a minute or two, and with an apologetic air, since she was an Essex girl not by birth, but by temperament Emily Hobhouse, concealing a slight cough in a fine lawn handkerchief.

As I saw them there, I recalled how late I had come to feminism, and how each of these women had in their way formed my sense of myself as a feminist. I suppose I am not alone in having once been oblivious to what I owed to women before me, and to the notion that I ought to find ways of repaying the debt. I had not been raised to see any inequity between the genders, still less to deplore it; and if I thought of feminists at all, it was with a vague sense of a militant effort which had once been a necessity and was now mercifully redundant. It did not occur to me that the Essex girl joke which I inhabited was a feminist matter, and that I ought to interrogate and challenge it. Later, and by small degrees by dint of speaking with women, and reading women, and listening to women; by understanding that if I felt Id slipped through life without encountering misogynys knocks and slights, this was in large part owing to the comfort and privileges of my life and identity I came to understand that I should cultivate and harden my feminism for my own sake, perhaps, but largely for the sake of other women.

In her essay Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit says of the feminist project:

That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere.

These three ghosts set out early on the thousand-mile road, and Im afraid I joined them rather late; but it is because of their company Ive come to believe that it is a matter of pride, and not of embarrassment or shame, to be called an Essex girl.

LEFT TO MY OWN DEVICES, I might have given little thought to the county where I was born, and its various regional ghosts. My Britishness seems to me largely an administrative matter, and Id no more think to be proud of my Englishness than of my fingernails or feet; but the fact that Im an Essex girl has been more difficult to evade or deny. As a child and teenager, when visiting towns in other counties or arriving in 1998 at the polytechnic in Cambridge where I studied English, I was asked where I came from or where I lived, and would find my response met with a knowing smile. An Essex girl, theyd say, laughing, and look me up and down for evidence, in the manner of a witch-finder seeking a suspicious wart: I see. It seems curious to me now that it was never necessary to ask what it was they meant. I understood without explanation that an Essex girl was a contemptible thing, if not absolutely beyond a sort of mocking affection. She was blonde, but not naturally so, and if her clothes altered with the fashion of the years they altered only slightly, and were always designed to display a body that rested precisely on the boundary between desirability and repulsion. She wore leopard print; she wore stiletto heels; she was not stupid exactly, but devoted what intellect she had to the acquisition of sexual partners and the ramshackle care of innumerable squabbling children. She was certainly not educated, nor did she wish to be. She lived in council housing I felt I was to understand that this, too, was a mortal sin and when she danced, which was often, she danced around her handbag. This handbag was white patent leather, and from the rear-view mirror of her car she hung fluffy pink dice. She was called Tracy, or possibly Sharon; she was all appetite. Anne Boleyn had spent a good deal of time in Essex, and this probably explained her scheming rapacious behaviour, her determination to get her man. Essex girls usually come in twos, wrote Germaine Greer in the