Friday 18th: Mathilde

The flats were a constant image through her childhood: from the imaginary interiors she constructed based on zero actual knowledge, through the looming presence on gloomy mornings as she walked to her junior school, to the time when, as a teenager, she actually gained entry to the building – first as the playmate of a new friend at senior school and, latterly, as part (the major part) of her evening newspaper delivery round.

The corridors of the flats did have a distinctive smell, it turned out, but not the kind that she’d imagined. Instead of an exotic mix of food smells and incense, the atmosphere was actually laced with the smell of disinfectant and sour milk, which combined with the bright strip lighting to create a rich, sickly feel to the corridors. She was always glad to leave the flats and have that sickly odour replaced by the good clean smell of car exhaust fumes smoke from the rubbish that someone was burning on the waste ground.

The ‘foreigners’ motif hung around until this time, too. Her [uncle] sometimes reminds her, when she’s railing against bigotry or racism, that she once came home after her paper round and railed – with equal vehemence – against the dark-skinned denizens of the flats, complaining that “They get all the best flats without having to wait, and they’re all drinking the gold-top milk. They ought to brick the place up.” It troubles her to be reminded of this, and to know that she could so easily repeat words that represented positions that she hadn’t adopted in any considered or reasoned way, but which she had copied from people who were older, or who seemed more worldly, or whom she found attractive. Hanging around the playground at school with her friends, in vague proximity to the cool boys that all the girls wanted to be with, it was easy to pick up these kind of outlooks: the boys seemed to throw these overloud loops of words out of their testosterone-ridden circle like lassos, hoping to pull in the close attention of one of the girls so that they could engage with her for a while and then humiliate her with their crass, guffawing dismissals. Mathilde would stay on the fringes of the groups of girls, furthest away from the boys. The tomboyishness of her younger childhood had vaporised after puberty, and she liked the comfort of distance, with the buffer of braver, cruder girls between her and the boys.

This pseudo-gang phase didn’t last long: it quickly became clear to her that she didn’t belong with the girls who swiftly moved from sparring with the boys to actual snogging and cigarette-smoking, and neither did she fit in with the ‘girly’ girls who were more interested in keeping within their own circle and comparing infinitely detailed notes about their moods, fashions and passions. She liked school, she liked her lessons – especially her history and language classes – and she was quiet and undemonstrative, not comfortable with emotional expression or exposure. She liked to hide away in the cloakroom’s shadows, tucked in between the damp coats, whenever people started discussing who they had kissed, how they kissed, and how it made them feel. It was all too embarrassing – not just because she hadn’t yet made that journey of discovery (though that was a big part of it), but because she couldn’t bear to see other people exposing themselves to potential ridicule and vulnerability: she knew how easily you could be exposed and hurt, and seeing people reveal their weaknesses and points of sensitivity was like watching a small faun walking up the ramp into an abattoir.

[…]

She can remember two distinctive moments when her thinking about skin colour and race underwent radical transformation [it’s interesting that, for me, this didn’t happen as a purely ‘abstract’ thing – that is, I didn’t suddenly realise that ‘it’s bad to be racist’ – it came from having two epiphanies, each one about a particular ethnic group – so, ironically, the general abstract truth about the moral bankruptcy and repulsiveness of the racist position was based on judgements made within what were essentially racist categories]. The first small epiphany came when she watched a television programme [‘Roots’ analogue] that dramatised the history of a [Slavic] family [echo in her school trip material – the slave market etc] whose generations of members had lived through the whole of the European slave era, the progenitor arriving from the East in the 18th century on one of the Baltic trade ships and sold into servitude in the Central Market Square, in the shadow of the cathedral that’s still standing there. The television series, told from the point of view of the slave family, provided her with the profound insight that this racial group [the Slavs] were distinct, unique individuals [just like the ‘Caucasians’], and that they had their own generational/individualistic/personality-base characteristics and desires. That they were all different – “just like us”. It’s a little hazy in her memory exactly why this seemingly obvious insight came to her at this particular juncture (although she does vaguely recall a scene where a slave, a would-be absconder recaptured by his owner, had one of his feet removed with an axe as a punishment and a deterrent to further escape attempts (she remembers a sudden, shocking gush of shock and outrage at this, rooted in the narrative that she had already shared with this person, who had become an individual to her [OK, she DOES actually remember, doesn’t she?!] And she does remember how she phrased her post-epiphany pact with herself: “On Monday, when I catch the bus to school, I won’t look at the bus conductor and see just a [black] face [cf the stereotyping and demographic constraints of 60s/70s Britain]: I’ll see a person. I will smile at them so that they know that I can see that they are a human being, too. I’ll never think about Slavs as all the same again.” And she remembers her shame that she couldhave felt like that before, and her sense of stupidity, that she had somehow been cheated into thinking like that. […]

[Second analogous epiphany is the World at War ‘Genocide’ episode, and especially that terrible footage of the bodies being bulldozed (at Bergen-Belsen, I think). How that started me off down a reading road…and how I can divide my intellectual development into the time ‘before I knew about the Holocaust’ and the time ‘after I knew’…and how you sometimes wish you could ‘unknow’ something.]

(c.1090 words)