A girl thing

A couple of years ago I had almost reached my front door after returning from work when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. I was outside a neighbouring house and I could hear loud, continuous sobbing and weeping. It sounded as though a woman was in great distress.

I really did not feel like sorting out anyone’s problems at the time, I was tired and fed up, but this was days after the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped as a young girl and held for 18 years. I decided that I did not want to be one of those people who noticed something and did not act on it. So I dumped my bag just inside my front door with an explanation to my partner, walked back and listened again. The sound was still coming from a first floor window. I rang the bell and explained myself to the man who answered the door. “I suppose you want to see them for yourself?” he said before turning and calling to someone upstairs. Two teenage girls appeared who seemed perfectly happy. So I left. A week later the same thing happened but I ignored it. I’ve seen both girls since then and I still have no idea what was going on.

At the time I was already aware that the suburb I live in was home to a number of brothels, with convenient transport links. The ads in the back of the local paper testify to it and I suppose that most of us regard it as a fact of life. What the majority of people who glance at those ads do not know is that apart from the women who engage willingly in prostitution there are now many who have been forced into it. Women desperate to earn money and gain independence are brought to the UK by traffickers, discovering too late that the men who promised them a great job and a new life are actually selling them into the worst situation imaginable. Even if they are rescued they are cut off from their old life forever, knowing that other young girls from their home town are being targeted by the same traffickers.



The cases of Elizabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch are bound to chill the blood of anyone who thought that women in the West were no longer vulnerable to this kind of ill-treatment. There has been much speculation, particularly in Austria where these incidents occurred, that the men who held them captive were fossils, throwbacks to an earlier time when women were expected to do as they were told. Others suggest that these cases are symptomatic of an underlying desire to keep women in their place.

It is tempting to think that, one hundred years after the first International Women’s Day, the repression of women is restricted to countries where it is part of a cultural tradition. The truth is that all around us women suffer in silence, treating the bruises they get from an angry partner as part of the deal. It was revealed recently that it is common for there to be an increase in the rate of domestic violence after football matches involving Rangers and Celtic, in fact they doubled after one game.

At the same time I have noticed the capacity for violence is no longer restricted to men, if it ever was. There was a time when it was taken as read that a young teenage girl who caused trouble was a fluke and likely to come from a challenging background. How things have changed. Last year a young women was convicted of manslaughter, having stamped on and kicked a man who later died. She was seventeen years old at the time, her fashionable ballet pumps and handbag covered in her victim’s blood. So much for an expensive education and a comfortable home. I see Ruby Thomas in many of the teenage girls I now encounter, the smart back chat that some see as confidence as likely to be a first step in a potentially violent encounter. I never underestimate the dangerousness of girls in school uniform.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still at school, a fellow students was told by one teacher that she was not welcome to study technical drawing in his class as he did not feel that a career in engineering was suitable for a woman. Even then this comment made jaws drop amongst students and staff who took it for granted that a woman could have any career she wanted. By then women had begun to take control of reproduction using the Pill and, especially with the advent of AIDS/HIV, by insisting on the use of condoms. That made it easier for them to delay having children until they wanted too but it has become clear that some have delayed too long and it has now reached the stage where women are being warned not to wait until their forties to get pregnant.

The influx of Eastern Europeans, largely Poles in my area, has shown up this element in the change of women’s fortunes. I don’t suppose that many of the young women who moved here several years ago planned to stay more than a few years but have in fact settled down and had babies. They stood out, often slimmer and healthier than their British counterparts and now that they are mothers they are unusual again in that the fathers of their children are in evidence and even live with them as part of a family unit. In my street it had reached the stage where there were barely any young children living in the surrounding houses. One morning I found that I had spent several minutes standing by the bathroom window transfixed by something unusual - the sound of a baby crying, coming from a neighbouring house.

The impression I get is that in my area British couples wait until they can get a mortgage before they begin having children whereas other nationalities are quite happy to raise their families in rented accommodation. These newcomers have at times seemed to have old fashioned values that were once common in the UK and the women in that group don’t seem to regard motherhood as restrictive. Personally I don’t believe women can have it all. I think you can be a good mother and hold down a job once the children are at school but I now find it difficult to accept the idea of a woman heading back to work leaving a very young child in someone else’s care. Perhaps I’m getting old and conservative.

Even so I was stunned when I heard about the impact that the notion that a male is worth more than a female has had on ante-natal care in the UK. Hospitals in areas where there is a large Asian population do not advise the expectant mothers in their care of the gender before the child is born as it can be a death sentence for a female foetus. It could lead to a “miscarriage”.

During my life I know that things have improved beyond recognition for so many women but it is hugely dispiriting to think that we are still being paid less because of our gender. In Portugal, a short flight away from the UK, women can still end up in prison if they have an abortion. In Guatemala it is almost commonplace for women to be murdered. In Afghanistan women continue to kill themselves in despair at forced marriages. In my own country women return to the homes where they are beaten and abused because they have no other choice.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I was prepared to challenge someone over what I thought might be a case of domestic violence means that things aren’t as bad as they once were. People used to look the other way when I was a child because they felt that it wasn’t their business. Worse than that, the policeman who attended the incident might actually commiserate with the perpetrator. Today, the police officer who attends is as likely to be female but still capable of standing up to a man who thinks that pounding his wife after his team loses on a Saturday night is a form of leisure activity. Perhaps that is the biggest gain of all.

Two minute heroes

I turned up at the war memorial rather too early for the event, in company with a few others. Everyone else around us, apart from a handful who cast a curious glance in our direction, carried on doing all the things they usually do on a Saturday morning. The UK’s second annual Armed Forces Day had not been promoted particularly well in our area.

As someone waiting with me pointed out, it wasn’t for a lack of patriotism. The cross of St. George fluttered past us on cars and vans in the hot June sunshine. The World Cup had the lion’s share of the publicity and it was the three lions on football shirts that preoccupied most people rather than the young ones thousands of miles away under a different, hotter sun.

Perhaps things were not so different in 1921 when the memorial was completed, the money for it raised slowly almost reluctantly by a village that had lost nineteen men to the Great War. Perhaps it was too soon, too painful for some to cope with then, and again in 1945. Following both world wars there could have been very few people who did not know someone who had been in uniform, or recognise a name on a local memorial. These days it is uncommon to have a family member or friend in the armed forces so perhaps it is not surprising that there is a lack of awareness of such events. Most of us are left out of the loop.

Waiting for the parade I wondered how much the area had changed since veterans had first stood there one Sunday in June, 1921, before the plane trees had grown to such a height that they shaded us as we waited. They would have been a small group of local men, perhaps wearing suits made by the local tailor. A generation later that suit would have come from Burton’s, across the road, and after that it may have been a demob effort. The butcher, the baker and, in our case, the farm labourer took off aprons, put down tools and, during that two minutes of silence, became once more the young men that they had been, bound by shared experience, surrounded by the friends who hadn‘t come back. Then back to the Legion for a pint, memories carefully recalled and stored away again between Novembers.

“Ye who live on mid English pastures green,
Remember us, and think what might have been.”
War memorial inscription

Maybe it is because of them that we are so complacent and detached from current events. A lack of desire to brag, a need to return to “normality” as soon as possible in spite of the nightmares, a decision to take advantage of the prosperity that was coming their way and forget what had gone before. The Second World War largely disappeared with the tape that had been on the windows, but lingered on in army surplus and Utility goods which would do until you could afford something better. Perhaps it was both their gift and their fault that in the sixty-five years since the end of World War Two we have lost that everyday connection with the military.

Because when it did arrive that parade was such a grand and alien thing, pounding past the supermarket, the take away, the estate agents. We heard it before we saw it, loud and martial, and by the time it reached us, the glitter and snap of banners dismissing the mediocrity of everything about it, our hearts were probably beating in time with those drums. What a contrast with the slouchers in their football shirts, the girls in their summer clothes. It silenced the drivers stopped by the police and the teenagers on their mobile phones. In a world where we rarely stand up straight these people might have come from another age.

Yet however separate and different they may seem from the rest of us they still attract our support when we are afforded the opportunity to give it. The turnout for the main Armed Forces Day event in Cardiff was impressive and the words “Help for Heroes” are now seen and heard everywhere. A recent link up between a national radio station and the British Forces Broadcasting Service led to the posting of thousands of goodwill messages on their website, more than they could cope with. It isn’t the average person’s fault that this year Armed Forces Day had to compete with the National Squad for the average person’s attention.

Since then En-ger-land have lost a match and are out of the World Cup. Most of the flags will come down, although some will be left to the mercy of the elements. The team will fly back to a less than joyous welcome and scrutiny that will last considerably longer than two minutes. In the meantime, far away and out of sight their less well paid contemporaries will continue to watch dusty children score goals with bundles of carrier bags or plastic containers, as they have on many other postings, and dream of coming home.

http://www.armedforcesday.org.uk/
http://www.warmemorials.org/