Cards of Identity (25 page)

The members, having excoriated two, were now in the mood to applaud one, and they hailed Dr Shubunkin with claps and cries. The Shubunkin clique, in particular, went half-mad with enthusiasm and pressed their leader’s hands, which had gone soft and damp with astonishment. Indeed, the doctor was so taken aback that he added a score of brand-new twitches to his usual repertoire, ran through them twice like lightning, and, when at last he rose to speak, did so with an amiable look of
hubris
oblige.

What fun it was in those dear, bygone days to hear mother and father talk sex! ‘Let’s always,’ my father told her, ‘speak frankly about sex before the child, so that we don’t give society a maladjusted dwarf.’ These words are my earliest recollection: I think I was about three at the time. They impressed me because I hated the thought of becoming a maladjusted dwarf, and it seemed that conversation about sex, whatever that might be, was the one thing that would make me grow. So it was not many years before I believed that spoken sex was the same thing as religious salvation and that though people went to it on Sundays and supplicated it at bedtime and even before rising in the
morning, it was not a thing which had anything to do with the body. I think I imagined sex as a kind of doctor sitting on a cloud – one whom my father and mother had known very well and whose memory they were determined to perpetuate.

Some confusion arose, however, when I went to school. We attended church every morning, where I regarded the service as a kind of sex. But in the breaks many odd things were whispered to me which I took to be a secret form of religion. I was puzzled, but decided simply not to think about it too much, because a craze for religion is not a healthy thing in childhood. I didn’t say anything to my father and mother either, because when you know your parents treasure something, you hate to disappoint them by saying you don’t know what it is. In short, I was just like any other child except that I took for granted that sex was a philosophy invented by a friend of my father’s.

My parents did their best to teach me. They walked about stark naked whenever they could: I can remember coming home on a cold winter’s day and my dear father divesting himself of every stitch. Yes, there were giants in those days.

When I was being pubescent, both my parents were killed in a railway accident. Dr Shubunkin tells me that this is the railway accident that has carried-off thousands of obtrusive parents ever since Stephenson introduced ‘The Rocket’: before then, he says, it was done with landslides. I wish he had been present to point this out to me when I looked down on those poor, mutilated bodies, fully-clothed for once. It would have made all the difference to know that these corpses were expressions of an old literary tradition and not my parents at all.

I passed into the care of a minor aunt. At least, I think she was an aunt, though I remember calling her Nunk. I am unsure because it was at this time that I began to treasure the words which were my father’s only bequest to me. ‘Always remember,’ he had said, ‘that there is no such thing as pure male or pure female. Some wear skirts and some wear pants, but this is only convention. Every man is stuffed with womanly characteristics, every woman is fraught with man. The gap between the powder-puff and the cavalry moustache appears wide but is really a hair’s-breadth. I tell you this so that when you grow up and find yourself behaving oddly, as I trust you will, you will know that it is quite apropos. After all, think of dogs.’

Religion, conversation, and dogs – these were now my idea of the
what’s-what of sex. I tried occasionally to fit these puzzling pieces together, but in the end decided to wait till I was older. My aunt encouraged me in this. Knowing what my parents’ view of sex had been, she had braced herself for shocks. Now, I heard her whistle while she shaved.

She was carried off by consumption, just before the war began. Dr Shubunkin says that this is usually the fate of those who have lost relatives in a railway-accident. There is little point, he explains, in retaining in the flesh one who works much better, from a case-history point-of-view, as a distorted image. The whole world of today, he says, as its painters show, is composed of such ghosts, and the sooner we get rid of actual people the better we feel.

When I filled out the application-form for war service I wrote against the word
SEX
, ‘Church of England’. The kindly sergeant kept insisting that this was an improper statement, but when I stood on my principles and refused to alter it he took me to discuss the matter with a young officer, who did his best to persuade me that my obstinacy obstructed the war-effort. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he said, ‘how much classifying becomes necessary in a war. I’m sure your father was right about dogs, but that was in peacetime.’ When I asked him, caustically, if the behaviour-pattern of dogs underwent a sudden, patriotic change when the drums began to roll, he answered firmly that from an official point-of-view it did. I could, he said, take my choice: be a male or a female for the duration and thereafter be as androgynous as I pleased. ‘A pretty pickle we would all be in,’ he declared, ‘if everyone started putting dog-notions on to application forms. I am fully in
sympathy
with you, because I know how hard it is nowadays to define just what one really is. Our fathers, or mothers, whichever they were, had no such problem to face: it existed, of course, but was not yet recognized. But this is not a defined age, such as theirs was, which means that we who live in it must be all the more definite if we are going to achieve any kind of stability. That is why we have so many forms to fill out, why all the questions seem to have been chosen as a challenge to our ingenuity, and why the world has suddenly become overrun with experts who devote their lives exclusively to defining the indefinable. So if you don’t want to decide on a sex yourself, I’ll refer you to a competent chap who knows about these things and can take the plunge for you.’

I must have looked alarmed at this suggestion, because he added hastily: ‘My dear girl, please don’t think I’m going to send you for some distressing physical check-up. We live in a wiser England than that, young fellow. You will be defined on wholly immaterial grounds.’

A week later I took my place in an enormous queue and after a few days waiting was shown into the consulting room. The identifier was glancing over my history, and said crossly as I entered: ‘Really, I think people should give a little more thought to the consequences of the ideas they propound! Take this dog business, now: in theory it is perfectly correct, but how exactly are human beings supposed to practise it?’

A retort came to my lips, but he waved his hands violently and cried: ‘No, don’t tell me. Anyway, I’d much rather ask questions than hear answers. I think the best approach to your central difficulty will be an oblique one. For instance, are you accident-prone? There seems to be a leaning to it in your family.’

I recited, as well as I could remember, my blunders with knives, mangles, banana-skins, crockery, slippery stairs, puddles, and so on. I was somewhat ashamed when I had finished, but the identifier merely marked a cypher in a box and said: ‘That seems fairly good. Your choice was always a normal one; in fact, I should say rather unenterprising and dull. So don’t let’s bother with your dreams, which would be as humdrum as your accidents. Tell me some stories about your father: this is the oblique approach again: by telling me about him you in fact tell me about you. I must warn you that anything you say will be taken down and used in evidence.’

I told him all father’s ideas about sex. It was father’s belief, I said, that a pure male (who did not exist) would want absolutely to dominate a female. A pure female (who did not exist either) would want absolutely to be dominated. In fact, however, such definitions were ridiculous. I drew a chart to show how, in everyone, the male-female elements criss-cross interminably, and how their patch-work is rendered convoluted by the attitude the person takes towards it, so that one finds such interesting paradoxes as women who are relatively hairless in a physical sense but have enormous psychological beards, and men whose excessively-small moustaches proclaim the essential frailty of their masculinity. I then briefly summarized the thousands of in-betweens who fill the extremes from full-beard to hair-line moustache,
and demonstrated conclusively that to define anyone as male or female was an affront to the intelligence.

‘In brief, then,’ he answered, ‘it’s up to you?’

‘It’s nothing of the sort,’ I replied. ‘Anyone who makes a sexual decision is returning us to the Dark Ages.’

‘Well, let’s try it another way,’ he said; ‘not so oblique, either. Which sex – assuming such to exist – do you most enjoy flirting with?’

I told him I was not bigoted: my emotions, I said, responded to virtually any mixture, with little preference as to type, colour, build, stature.

He made a sound like a shot-gun going off. ‘That’s what I wanted,’ he said: ‘Remember it, next time you loose those dogs of yours. You are a born sailor.’ He wrote a huge M on my card and cried: ‘Good morning! Next, please!’

So I was to be a man! The very thought brought every female element in me into play: I went straight to bed with a sick-headache, took aspirin, and had a good cry. Soon there was a knock at my door and in came a husky sergeant in the uniform of one of the women’s services. ‘What’s the matter, love?’ she said, taking my hand: ‘The whole house is shaking with your sobs.’ ‘I’ve been classed as a male,’ I answered, laying my cheek against her iron paw. ‘And what’s so awful about that?’ she cried in a deep bass voice: ‘it seems to me you’d make a sweet little man. And what’s wrong with being a man, anyway,’ she continued indignantly, as if personally insulted: ‘Some of my best girls are men. If you are so full of prejudice when you are hardly out of your teens, you won’t be very nice to know at forty.’

‘It was not prejudice brought me to this,’ I retorted angrily: ‘it was standing on my principles.’ I then told her about father’s teachings and my examination by the identifier, and she patted my shoulder and said: ‘If there were more women like your father, this would be a cosier world. But he’s past helping, so let’s see what we can do for little
you.
The first thing is to find you a nice, friendly unit. And don’t worry about your definition. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s literally a war-measure, a yard-stick the authorities require to get themselves to scale. They feel that if they can place
you,
it won’t be long before they grasp
themselves.
Still, it might be a good thing to have you re-identified. You can always appeal, you know. But what good will it do? You don’t
think you’ll shake off your old problems by taking on a new sex, do you? That’s escapism.’

‘Of course I don’t!’ I answered, with a fresh burst of tears. ‘I only ask to remain neither one nor the other. If
you
won’t understand that, who will?’ – and letting my mouth fall open with a sort of crab-like quaver, I bent on her that gaze of heart-rending disappointment which has wrung the withers of husbands through the centuries.

To my horror, she received it with a most vulgar guffaw, and folding my face against her rough uniform she said: ‘Of course, you are simply too adorable to live! I shall keep you here for my very own. We’ll have dressing-up parties and I’ll show you to all my friends. But listen. I have to go on duty now, but I’ll be back before night. I’m going to put you in my room and while I’m away I’m going to discuss your case with some people I know and see what can be done. Don’t worry about your definition: by the time the authorities have fed your sex into the right machine and come out with a unit, we’ll have you cosily settled where you’ll like it best.’ She then yanked me, sniffling, from my bed and dragged me upstairs to her own room, where she made me comfortable in a big chair beside the gasfire. ‘Be a good little mannikin while mother’s away,’ she said, wagging a huge finger at me – ‘and
don’t
let
anyone
in.’
The door closed behind her and, to my surprise, I heard the key turn in the lock.

No sooner was she out of hearing – half down the street, that is – than I jumped from my chair, dried my eyes and began to explore the premises (sometimes, I must confess, I see myself every inch a woman!). The furnishings were of a rather rough kind – a good deal of leather on the chairs, a pair of buffalo horns, dumb-bells, and heavy curtains, much like a good club. To my surprise, the main decoration was a huge picture of a ferocious man wearing a black beard down to his heavy watch-chain. In one corner of him was the inscription: ‘To my own little Violet, from her great, big, loving Papa.’ Dear me! how very inappropriate! I thought, and looked closer at what seemed to be a leg of mutton at the side of the picture. It proved to be the shoulder of a woman: obviously Violet’s mother, who had been chopped ruthlessly from the picture. Sprigs of rosemary were tied neatly to the four corners of the frame.

More curious than ever, I examined the other photographs on the walls: there was simply no end to them. Some were of school hockey
and lacrosse teams, and of the staff with the prefects: Violet appeared in all of them, invariably sitting in the middle and obviously the captain of everything. Then there was a photograph of Violet dressed in a huge leather coat, astride an enormous Matchless double-knocker with a great grin all over her face: there had been a pillion-passenger, it seemed, but she (if she it was) appeared to have suffered the fate of Violet’s mother and been savagely scissored from the picture. Indeed, there was hardly a photograph in the room which did not have at least one gaping space with the outline of a human form: I wondered what happened to these poor ghosts; were they mutilated and burnt, and if so, what had they done? Some of them, it seemed, had been chopped out because they were destined for higher things: there were, for example, three photographs of girls which were enlargements made from these chopped-out miniatures: they looked rather silly, vapid girls to me, with round sheep’s eyes, tender skins, and beat-me-daddy expressions: I put the tip of my tongue out at all of them. But of all the photographs, none impressed me more than that of Violet with no less than seven six-foot women all standing in Arctic clothes beside a tent in the snow. Underneath was written: ‘Everest Expedition 1935.’