The Rat Pack – and in loving, joyous memory of Susan

When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

The cartoon version above, is by me and is not a joke. For clarity, that illustration also includes Mr Kenyon (physics) and Mr McKee (bowling), my music teacher. The latter was an absolute diamond, who I came to regard almost as a surrogate dad because of the way he seemed to genuinely understand me. And he was an absolutely superb teacher who essentially gave me a lifelong appreciation of classical music. 

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

 

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 

It was Susan who came up with a plan. Remember that I said she was the detail one of us? She knew that the rules actually said that you had to have a school scarf … or a school beret.

 

I went to see Miss Bell again. She hadn’t thought of it, but was tickled pink and found me one – remember that I said that Big-O and Riggers unified the rest of the staff and the pupils?

 

My next appointment in Big-O’s office arrived one morning after an assembly. I had the beret with me, behind my back, as I entered her office.

 

“So … have you got a school scarf yet?” she intoned. “No,” I replied simply. You could see her inflating with pleasure.

 

“But I’ve got the alternative,” and produced the beret from behind my back, on a single finger.

 

There was nothing she could say – she had been done. I wore that beret in class for days – a glorious sign of victory.

 

The legacy continued. Susan was the first of us to leave for higher education – and while at Oxford, wrote a tome that the rest of us had been contributing to with ideas etc. It was called Murder on the Medium Wave, which managed to combine … well, murder, the England cricket team – which at the time included Botham, Gower and the Rat Pack’s beloved Mike Brearley – plus radio commentary of the sport and a (very) thinly disguised roster of our teachers and ourselves.

 

Forty-plus years on, I look back on those times with absolute relish. It was a barking, utterly unrepeatable experience. My Other Half had listened to the stories with a sense of tolerance, over some time, ultimately believing that there was a serious degree of exaggeration going on.

 

Yet when he joined me and Susan in an east London pub and the subject of LGGS inevitably came up, he was staggered to hear the same – and other – such stories, realising that no, I really hadn’t been making it up.

 

I consider myself very, very lucky to have shared that extraordinary experience with the rest of the rats – and not least, with Susan.

 

I’m posting this on an evening when I should have been in Manchester to say ‘farewell’ to Susan at a celebration of her life, after she died very suddenly a few weeks ago. With the extreme heat and all the don’t travel advice I cancelled my arrangements.

 

So I’m posting this now as an act of remembrance – and celebration.

The Minions take on the culture war warriors

Most people who know me know that I love the Minions. Okay, I was late to the game – finally catching up via shorts, social media and mash-up fan art before watching the first two Despicable Me films on TV and then making 2015’s eponymous prequel my first trip to an actual cinema in 16 years. But these days, I even have the t-shirts.

Now I’m not, in general, a big fan of slapstick comedy – my father forced me and my sister to sit through short reels of Laurel & Hardy when we were children and it rather put me off. Later, I grew to appreciate Buser Keaton – though very different – I loved Steve Coogan and John C Reilley in 2018’s Stan and Ollie.

 

But once I’d seen stuff online, I got hooked on the Minions. As I said, the 2015 film tempted me back to a cinema where nothing else had, until that time, worked for a decade and a half, for various reasons.

 

We didn’t see much else that year – what we did see included Star Wars: The Force Awakens at an IMAX – but our cinema going did increase. In 2018, we made 21 cinema visits. In 2019, it was 18. In 2020 – year one of the pandemic, it was five. Last year – the second of the pandemic – 13. This year, the third of COVID, we have already managed five trips to the cinema.

 

In terms of COVID, we’ve been fortunate that our local cinema chain is within walking distance and, with 10 screens and an online booking system, it’s easy to pick times for films when it will be no difficulty to be socially distanced. In that way, it’s the one entertainment medium we currently feel comfortable using.

 

But setting all that aside, Minions: The Rise of Gru was originally slated for a 2020 release and, in my pre-release excitement, I’d had an idea for a blog to explore what I think may be an underestimated element of the Illumination studio’s Gruniverse success. Having just seen the new film, I remembered what I wanted to explore.

 

And the point is that is has an essentially transgressive nature.

 

Co-creator Pierre Coffin has noted that there are no female Minions. In 2015, indeed, he told TheWrap: “Seeing how dumb and stupid they often are, I just couldn’t imagine Minions being girls”.

 

In general, I have a problem with this – it rather reminds me of people who have commented that they struggled to believe that Margaret Thatcher was really a woman, as though women are, by their very nature, intrinsically Good and only go Bad, when influenced by men … The Patriarchy. It ain’t so.

 

But back to the Minions. And a lack of Minion females is not what you see on the screen in any of the five films to feature the little yella fellas. There are cancan dancers and maids, for instance. In the latest film, Bob becomes a female trolley dolly on a plane – who actually offers an infant a peanut. And Bob is far from being alone.

 

Within the wider iconography that includes collectibles, Stuart has appeared as a version of the Bride of Frankenstein to Bob’s Frankenstein’s monster.

 

In the era in which we live, we still have puritans (I have family links to the Plymouth Brethren, so I do know what this means) – in the US particularly, but not exclusively, and some of these are currently going full ‘snowflake’ about things like ‘drag storytime’ where … and take your time here, drag queens sit and tell children stories.

 

Heaven forfend that these far-right, reactionary twerps ever hear that British children have been being subjected to men dressed up as women and women dressed up as men for over a century in pantomimes – as essential Christmas family entertainment!

 

And let’s not even begin to engage with the broader history of cross-dressing and how it was and is used, and what it has allowed artists from Shakespeare to the present to do.

 

There is so much around at present about ‘men pretending to be women’. But there is a very long history of ‘women pretending to be men’ – hence the phrase ‘drag kings’. Those included people who successfully hid within general society to the likes of Marlene Dietrich donning male evening wear, including a bow tie and top hat.

 

And as with things like the Asterix books and much more, British pantomime would have content that children could innocently enjoy, but that also had deeper levels that their parents could find a different reason to giggle at.

 

For example, take Asterix with the Swiss. This includes a little Roman citizen in Switzerland repeatedly losing his bread in the fondue, even though the punishment if you do so is being whipped. He loses his bread deliberately.

 

The joke is quite clear – and perfect proof that Asterix is not only for children.

 

I will be 60 later this year. My attire at present (as for several summers since) is big, baggy, military-style ‘male’ shorts with loads of pockets (dear Odin how I spent decades hating ‘female’ clothing with no feckin’ pockets!), a t-shirt and a pair of Birkies.

 

Yesterday, while on Broadway Market to get a few basic fresh additions to our regular online deliveries from supermarkets, I was called “madam”. Later in the day, in the park, someone called at me: “Hello sweetheart!”. Today, I was addressed by someone as “Lady”.

 

It doesn’t matter how I dress, my fucking tits betray me every time – just as when, after I got the running bug in Lancaster in the 1980s, I’d get calls from drivers telling me: ‘Watch you don’t give yourself a black eye, love!’

 

How do you be yourself, authentically, really?

 

And can you now see, against such a background, why the Minions are, in effect, non-binary wonderful?

Oh ... and while there is nothing really new about the latest film, it’s huge fun, with enough gags and nods to other films to ensure it'll be watched more than once.

 

I peel

 

I peel dead eczema skin

From my palms

Peering close to see

What’s underneath

 

I pick at the ephemera

Of memory

Questioning closely

What’s hiding there

 

I worry at crusted sores

Of well-intentioned

Attempts to coax me

To normality

 

I scratch the surface of

Performative conformity

And try to find an

Authentic person

 

I scratch and pick and peel

And at long long last

I start to glimpse

What just might be

The real me

Amanda Kendal, 17 June 2022

Image courtesy of fdecomite

 

Stars: looking up at the heavens

Stars

 

‘We are all in the gutter,’ said Wilde

‘But some of us look for the stars’

 

Yet the heavens are blank over London

Since light cancels out such a view

 

So I travelled to Travemünde

And I stood on the Strand after dark

 

Below pollarded trees in the cold

Ursa Minor winked down from above

 

The sight made me breathless with joy

And I wept with a new sense of life

• Image courtesy of Wikipedia

 

Spring 2022: A poem for a troubled season

Spring 2022

A furious wind screams in across the Baltic,

Winter’s raging farewell that cuts clean to the bone.

Crows scythe through the air, scanning for mussels,

While decaying munitions dream beneath the churning grey

And the Gustloff lies at sleep.

Halyards yammer against poles on the Strand, as the flags,

Wrapped round and round and round,

Cling on for dear life.

Yet blossoms still prick through the eye of the storm,

And a sheen of green can just be seen caressing the skeletal trees.

Two and a half thousand kilometres south east

It is a different storm and a different spring.

There, fire is in flower and blood blossoms across pavements.

A pall of dust hangs over blasted ruins and

Settles on the charred bodies and cars in the graveyard streets.

Once more, the world wonders where the hatred springs from and

How to make it stop.

Seemingly impotent in the face of the tempest,

Fingers cross with the hope that it will blow itself out

So spring can come once more.

Until the seasons turn again.

4 April 2022

Photo: The Baltic at Travemünde, by the author

A book about a cat and books – what could be better?

It was The Other Half who, late last week, pointed me toward the Waterstones website for The Cat Who Saved Books, a slender novel (224 pages) by Sosuke Natsukawa, a hospital doctor and writer in largely rural Nagano, Japan.

And since it involves a cat – and books – well, it was instantly ordered and arrived, very speedily yesterday morning, allowing a sense of perfect timing to offer a weekend of relief from the doom-scrolling.

 

Expertly translated by Louise Heal Kawai, the book tells the story of Rintaro Natsuki. After being orphaned when a very young child, he was taken in and looked after by his beloved grandfather, who ran a small, second-hand bookshop, Natsuki Books.

 

The novel opens with the teenage Rintaro at the funeral of his grandfather, who’s sudden (but apparently peaceful) death has left him in a void. A perfectly pleasant, but previously unknown aunt is going to give him a new home – away from this one – but he is having difficulty trying to sort out the emotions involved in all this.

 

To add to the complexity, the book-loving Rintaro is what the Japanese call hikikiomori – effectively, someone (largely male, but not exclusively) who has withdrawn from society and social engagement.

 

But shortly after the funeral, as Rintaro sits alone between all the books in the shop that is his grandfather’s legacy to him, an orange and yellow striped tabby appears in the shop and speaks to him.

 

The cat introduces itself as Tiger and explains that it (there is no pronoun for the character in the original Japanese) has come in order to recruit Rintaro to help him on a vital mission to save books.

 

And so they set off on their first adventure.

 

Japanese fiction involving cats is pretty much a genre in its own right – including, but not limited to, The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, I am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume, If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

 

These and others are on my own shelves – enough as to help me recognise the tone here.

 

This particular novel is Japanese magic realism – that’s a global concept, not just a Latin American one – and it is fascinating one.

 

On one level, it seems to have a naivety and, as countless reviewers have suggested, ‘charm’, that one could dismiss it quite easily. But it has some profoundly moving moments, together with an underlying quality that is faintly disturbing, in a way that you sense will live with you for some time.

 

And while the morality of Natsukawa’s tale is essentially simply, in other more philosophical ways, it is not.

 

It has a rather formal Japanese style, but is also deeply felt, though never mawkish.

 

I heartily recommend.

 

 

C+nto – a stunning poetic riff on being a butch dyke

It was arguably a fortuitous coincidence that saw me pick up a copy of C+nto.

Having read a review of Joelle Taylor’s 2021 collection of poems in the Observer in mid-February, just after it had just won the TS Elliot award, less than a week later, I was on Broadway Market in Hackney – my local shopping street for over 30 years, in case you imagine I’m part of the more recent trendification – and, after getting incredibly tense about the lack of mask-wearing in shops, happened to walk past the Broadway Bookshop.

Glancing inside the wedged-open door (good ventilation), I could see that the owner was masked, behind a screen. I felt so absurdly grateful that someone was still taking COVID seriously that I went in, heading straight to the poetry shelves, which are not much more than a metre from the door.

And there was C+nto. So, what else to do but buy a copy? And since February is, in the UK, LGBT+ History Month, it also seemed apt.

It is a simply outstanding collection.

“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world”, says Taylor (pictured above) in her introduction.

“According to the Human Dignity Trust, it is illegal to be a lesbian in almost a quarter of the world’s countries.”

She goes on to cite how Brexit has led to a “nationalist confidence”, with “bigots from both sides emboldened to assault homosexual and trans people.

“The word ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with that hated epithet, ‘TERF’, and, as a community, we spend more time policing each other than protecting.”

Quite. And indeed, I am writing this a few days after reports in the LGBT+ press – and even appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun – that the Russian forces currently waging war on Ukraine have drawn up lists of those to be murdered, and that those lists include known LGBT+ people. For the ‘crime’ of being LGBT+.

Vladimir Putin has form on this – not least in terms of Chechnya, which tells us that his support for genocide against LGBT+ people is not imaginary.

However, in terms of the book itself, let’s start with the title.

“Cunto

– inflection of CUNTARE

(third person singular past historic)

“Cuntare

– (transative) (obselete. literary)

To relate, tell, or recount (a story)”

This is an incredibly powerful selection of verse that centres around conveying a sense of a specifically butch lesbian history; of pubs and clubs now gone; of individual dykes now departed.

Taylor very powerfully explores the idea of having to work out not simply who you are, but how you authentically present to a world that does not, largely, want an authentic you – unless you conform to a hetero normative – and in a horrifying large number of cases, will murder you for daring to present as anything other than that.

And indeed, this also touches on what the very process of having to do all this actually does to the person having to do it.

Her idea of a symbiosis between one’s skin and suits of clothing is stunningly effective. As are her portraits of specific dykes that she has known: in particular, in Valentine, where she introduces us to a black dyke – or ‘stud’; a black, masculine presenting lesbian, according to the glossary.

But more widely, in her conjuring up a fictional lesbian club, Maryville, and an origin myth for butch dykes, she has given voice to a world that most people will not know exists.

Scene Nine is set in a crematorium, where butches file past the open coffin of one of their own, only for the lead butch mourner to find that her deceased loved one is to take her final journey dressed in a “cerise ballroom dress, as though the coffin were the display case for a doll. Her face is battered with makeup. Her hair is hair, but the boi knows that under the wig, the stud has a clean undercut. Her severed strings are arranged carefully around her. The woman in the coffin looks at the woman standing over her. The woman in the coffin looks like a woman.”

It is a short, but utterly tragic and heart breaking and powerful representation of the brutal and dehumanising nature of homophobia, that is so very much more than the sum of its words.

Taylor – predominantly know as a performance poet (there are videos online and QR codes in the book for a couple of her performances) is from Lancashire and there are definite moments when you think of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

But this is in terms of overlap of experiences – perhaps not least in both having made comments on fundamentalist Christianity.

In ROUND THREE – the body as trespass, Taylor writes of how “... three Pentecostal pastors   hymning holy Nazi insignia   break into your home [God is an atheist who no longer believes in Himself]   they unscrew the lightbulbs slowly  eyes fixed on the unfinished girl sobbing war   on the corduroy settee & whisper   a prayer for you to leave your family”.

Her use – and relish – of language is simply breath taking and astonishingly effective.

Sex, gender and so forth is complex – and as a bisexual who struggles even now, at the age of 59, to use the word ‘woman’ to describe themselves (it just really doesn’t seem to fit and never has), there was a vast amount in this collection that I could directly relate to – not least in terms of the ideas around one’s skin as a suit, and picking the ‘wrong’ one off the hanger.

And if there has ever been a better collective noun for butch dykes than “an insolence of leather jackets”, then I dare you to find it!

But I cannot recommend this enough. It is an absolutely incredible work and, I would suggest, as essential a piece of literature as one might wish to find.

 

Joelle Taylor

 

Broadway Bookshop