Growing up not comfortable exactly, there
were deaths and silences and other difficult things,
when you talk about that history later people
are sometimes lost for words. But as you are
growing up, things happen to other people which you
observe, not fully understanding. Once I said to her,
that particular schoolfriend, surely that
kind of thing doesn’t happen here? and she
just looked at me, and I understood that I
had a limited perspective. And there she was,
my new friend in my new school, with the best
singing voice in the school, a high clear
penetrating soprano, effortless and perfectly
in tune, when she opened her mouth and sang
you could hear her from the back of the hall.
Everybody knew she had this incredible voice,
like everybody knew that Jill was going out
with the coolest boy from the boys’ school,
and Jenny was going to get astonishing marks
for A-level dressmaking – we watched her sitting
confidently over a tailored wool jacket, fixing
the lining in place – and also there was Elizabeth
who sat quietly at the back of the classroom
where A-level maths was being taught, with her
own books, and occasionally raised her head
to correct the teacher. But back to singing. That year
they were casting the school play, which was not
a play at all, but Dido and Aeneas, an opera,
seventeenth-century, Henry Purcell, written
for schoolgirls’ voices. So it was taken for granted
that my friend, who I will not name, because this
is her story not mine, and she is still out there
somewhere as far as I know – we all knew
that she would sing Dido, who has a passionate
affair with the passing hero Aeneas, he being
destined to found Rome, and when he leaves
she dies, singing her heart out. But that is not
what happened. Some other girl got the part,
a year younger, a pretty white girl with a clear
soft voice, perfectly in tune but nobody
sitting further back in the hall would hear a note.
My friend got the slave girl: a single difficult aria.
There was quiet shock, how could the adult world
make such an obvious mistake? Somebody walked past
as the music teacher was being interrogated
by another teacher, and what the music teacher said
was, ‘But you couldn’t have a black Dido.’ As though
this was self-evident. Common sense. I went home
and told my father, who was himself not always
reliable on matters of race, I knew that already.
But on this he was spot on. ‘Oh for gods sake, Dido
was Tunisian, she probably was black.’ And when
he came to our not very good performance and sat
somewhere near the back of the hall, he reported
that the only audible soloist was the slave girl. I sang
in the chorus, having a sweet voice like Dido, inaudible
to anyone at a distance. Other things happened
and some of them were worse, but this one sticks
in the mind. Also I can’t be repeating everything
that happened to her in those years, it was her life
not mine, and even this retelling could be taken
as a betrayal, an exploitation. I can’t send this poem
in for a competition, suppose it won, and I don’t own
the subject matter. What I was learning from her was
that I was comfortable in ways she would never
be able to take for granted. I had my own issues,
the two of us bonding around not having our mothers,
muddling through adolescence, struggling with things
that were easy for other girls. And then our lives
diverged, she married, moved north to university
while I stayed down south, and afterwards I became
busy with feminism and work and finding
my own ways through life, and eventually
took myself off to Australia. We were both up
to our necks in life. I remember A-level French,
sitting together, the teacher late for class, and we
compared our hands. Hers were curved and brown
with beautiful fingernails. Mine lanky and about
as pale as any human skin ever. I wish I had
long thin fingers, she said, and I longed for fingernails
like hers. I remember that as though it was last week.
What I’ve forgotten is the name of the music teacher.

Image: flickr