“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.” Margaret Attwood
I used to feel that fells and mountains were my refuge but lately I have been forced to confront this central question head on—why is it that I’m living like a refugee, an outcast, someone who feels so fundamentally like an outsider? Why do I need refuge? And why can’t I inhabit the world like a citizen instead of feeling like a banished soul. The hills have given me a home, kept me safe, but they have also been a hiding place. The events of the last two weeks have flushed me out of hiding. Which feels frightening, and painful, and right.
A couple of days ago I was sitting at our kitchen table with a friend on either side of me relating how the whole sorry political circus, the fallout from Epstein the Monster, has affected me. For me, along with millions of other survivors of sexual abuse, these scandals are not merely news. I feel broadsided by them. Of course, the arrests are good and of course I knew the score, but…
it all feels like a spectacle when it ought to be a revolution.
Sitting at our kitchen table one of my good friends asks me,
“Where do you get your strength from?”
My mind’s eye immediately travels to the fells outside my door, to the top of wind-whipped Skiddaw, to the Bleaberry bogs, to the fresh song of Newlands waterfall. And I know that, although it is true that I do get strength from these places, it is the kind of strength which props me up in my life as an exile, unable to feel at home in the culture in which I find myself. This is not easy to admit but—out there cannot help me feel like a citizen. Out there I feel free in my animalhood. I have often fantasised about being a hermit living in a wild untamed place and sometimes I feel that unrealistic fantasy is closer to who I really am than anything which is real. But that feeling is maybe a reaction to my inability to be at home in the real world as it is now.
The question hangs— my strength? I’m not sure I even answered it, although of course, the answer was physically staring me in the face. I get my strength from the close ones who love me. Sitting with one on my left and one on my right and drinking tea, they do not try to give me answers, but they do give me strength. Every child who has been raped knows what it is to feel like an outsider—a keeper of banished knowledge. And nobody wants the labels of victim or survivor, we just want the dignity of feeling like any other person, a citizen of the world. It seems our prime minister does not understand this; it seems my MP who serially ignores my cordial letters does not understand this. But maybe there are, at last, some cracks in the patriarchy. Maybe.
I was in a different social situation recently when the subject of casual misogyny arose, not brought up by me. My brilliant wife looked one of the men directly in the eye and said, “so do you call it out, do you tell other men when they have crossed the line?”
“No, I don’t do that.” Well, I suppose at least he was honest. And then he changed the subject.
After Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a police officer and the police arrested women for holding a vigil, I wrote a poem because it is often the only thing I know how to do. And I know, as we all know, the reason that for all the undeniable good Me Too has done it has not dismantled the patriarchy because it has largely been about women. If we fight a war between women and men then we will all lose. Brothers, we need you. We need you not to be cowards and for you to call it all out, every time, regardless of the personal cost. And we need you to do a whole lot more besides. Speaking as one who has paid a high price, but not as high as the price paid by Virginia Guiffre and her family, I feel entitled to ask you to do this. Abstaining is not an option, abstaining is being complicit. Being a dumb witness holds the same status as being a perpetrator. Accepting the status quo and thinking this has nothing to do with you is—well…
I write this in a state of turmoil but somewhere mixed in there is hope, even joy. Not the joy of retribution but of a tiny glimmer of hope for real change. Change is not fast enough. Today I read that due to lack of investment in CCTV the current epidemic of sexual assaults and harassment on trains in the UK is going unchecked.
Where do I get my strength? — from the heroic Gisèle Pelicot, from the writers and activists who dare to speak, from my friends and my brothers and my sisters who know in their hearts that when women can truly come home into our powers and into our own skins, then it really will be, a different world. But it needs all of us, all of the time, to make this world come a little closer.
On ClaphamCommon
After Sarah Everard
Watch her run / such a natural / she could run / without ever stopping / Watch her lightly / landing almost flying / Watch the touch / foot to ground / Watch – it’s not /
shins or thighs/ or anything which / could be named / as a body-part / except the heart / Watch my words / I said soul / Watch for that / can you see? / her soft-centre /
redly-hotly oozing / from open skin / the searching gleam / running from her /eyes she’s watching /you Watch her / look how fast / she gets away / how slowly/
she / gets caught.
