A conversation between ourselves

I see my dear friend and co-contributor (a.k.a. Rose, EV’s Managing Editor) is at a loss to know what is going on with the UK and Brexit. I’m going to try and answer! I am British (probably English) as far back as I can go but share many of the feelings that Rose describes despite our contrasting provenance. Of course that is because we are both active participants in London’s diverse and lively culture where identity, on the whole, is open, flexible and welcoming.

For this reason alone, it’s easy to see only the positives about the current status quo (that we don’t want to change) for it is one that embraces the mingling of cultures from near and far and the sharing of lives jointly committed to the development of common values and outlooks. Yes, a thousand times, yes, we must remain! We metropolitans love it and don’t want anything to change.

But even in London, it would be foolish to assume wholesale acceptance. Material conditions are poor for many Londoners, and yet, somehow even for them, optimism pertains. Move out of London, though, and life and outlook can be very different. Go to the run-down northern industrial towns, the depressed agricultural areas, and the coastal resorts whose Victorian splendour has long gone, there is little optimism and scarce expectation of benefit deriving from an opening of arms and a welcoming of strangers. Life has dealt them a hard hand of cards and Brexit might just be one way of transformation.

What’s more, the views of the so-called “liberal elite” (largely the remain-supporting intelligentsia) – a demeaning term used by Brexiter-leading-lights to spread class-based division between remainers and leavers – are scorned in Brexit-land. The intelligentsia is depicted as arrogant and superior, as well as urban and educated, and Brexiter hard-liners continue to poison the minds of pro-leavers by luring them into ever-more drastic ‘no deal’ positions which, most predictions suggest, will be dire for everyone.

But remainers are not free from blame. The early failure to impose checks and balances (such as raising the threshold for what counted as a necessary majority in the referendum and ensuring that accurate information about the pros and cons of both sides’ cases was provided prior to the vote) can perhaps be seen, with good reason, to be a direct consequence of a certain elitist (and remainer) “we know best” arrogance, seized on by the Brexit ideologists, thus guaranteeing its own defeat. Sadly, a second “people’s vote” (a term, in its own way, conveying a certain sense of “them and us”) will only confirm for leavers that their “superiors” have still not got the message.

But we remainers struggle on!!

Gillian Dalley

Crossing Borders

Twenty-four hours on deck, under a scorching sun through the day and a warm starry sky at night. Waving goodbye to Marseille and anticipating an unknown land across the Mediterranean. Cheeks burned by the sun and the strong wind off the sea. Hard deck, lack of sleep, picking a way gingerly in the dark through mute heaps of sleeping people. Going below deck to find an overflowing toilet, an ordeal that had to be endured. Morning broken, the sun returned, the first signs of human habitation coming into view. The ancient ruins of Carthage stretched up the bank on one side of the ship as it nosed its way down a long narrow waterway towards the dock at La Goulette, the port of Tunis.

Fifty-five years ago, I was a student, little travelled, finding my way with a clutch of fellow students, across France and the sea beyond to Africa, heading for Tunisia to attend an Arabic language course at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes. In port, we disembarked, part of a heaving crowd glad to be liberated from the smell, the crush and the flies. Dragging bags down the ramps and stumbling as we went, we made our way along the quayside, through dilapidated marine warehouses, towards a line of customs officials standing behind a rough assemblage of trestle tables ready to receive and inspect our baggage.

One signalled me to place my suitcase in front of him. He opened it and then closed it perfunctorily. With a few words in French, he pulled it off the table and ordered me to go with him. I followed meekly, looking round for my companions at the same time. But amidst the jostling crowd they were nowhere to be seen. The customs officer took my arm and led me away, right out of the docks, going through a big gate in the middle of an impregnable fence of iron railings. He hailed a taxi. Fear began to take hold and in halting French I asked him to let me go back. He shook his head, with a peremptory “Non, venez avec moi ”. Holding insistently onto my elbow, he pressed me into the tiny cab. We drove off.

Eventually the driver stopped outside a modern block of flats. I followed my captor out of the car. He took my case. I thought, this is the moment I disappear from public view for ever. We went into the building and took a lift to a flat on the third floor. He opened a door and took me in. A young woman, casual in European clothes, greeted my captor in Arabic. They offered me sweet mint tea. Later we left the flat, taking another taxi across the city. Finally, the taxi stopped and we alighted, going into another building, older and more traditional. Marble floors, cooling the air and masking the heat of the day. They knocked on a door, a woman in a long, flowing dress, her hair bundled up in a scarf, greeted us and ushered us in. Another young woman peered round an open door nearby, smiling and inviting. It must be, I feared, a brothel.

Again I was offered sweet mint tea, accompanied by a small plate of dates. Several other women and now young children appeared. Smiles, stares and tentative pats from them all. Food later that evening, then a mat on the floor by shuttered windows, sleeping alongside the females of the house in a long, airy withdrawing room. Next day, the customs officer left for work and, later, two other males of the family proudly showed me Tunis. And the day after that, they took me to the hostel where my fellow students greeted me with relief. Six weeks later I gained my certificate in Arabic – no problem. But I never knew the reason why all this had happened.

Gillian Dalley, Autumn 2018

Out with the Old and in with the New?

Gillian Dalley, Summer 2018

We’re told that it’s good to move on, don’t live in the past and keep up with the times and I’ve been trying to observe that maxim. To that end, I started on the cupboard in my study this morning – planning to clear shedloads of files dating back some 20 years and more. But it turned out to be less a salutary and invigorating exercise and more a bittersweet angst-laden encounter between past and present. It made me sit down and think hard.

I’d forgotten how experienced – and even competent – I had been in my earlier life. The realisation came as a surprise. Although I’ve written my CV many times, rehearsing the catalogue of posts I’ve held, the lists of articles, reports and books I’ve written, and organisations I’ve worked for, I’ve never really dwelt on their significance as a record of a ‘career’. But coming across the written record of those times now made me see things rather differently. The hard evidence – the research papers and other publications, the minutes of countless meetings chaired or attended, all types of other work-related ephemera – sat there in sealed boxes waiting to be shredded. While I had remembered much of it in the abstract, the detail surprised me. Reading some of it now, 20 years on, I confess I was impressed. What – me? I asked.

But that led to greater reflection. I realised it’s been a part of me that I’d consigned to the back of my memory – perhaps associated with the growing public invisibility that most women in their seventies experience (and writing those words now alerts me to this absence of a presence). Those younger than us are unaware of our past, our experience, our views, our value. We are started on the slope to oblivion, unable or unwilling to knock sharply on the table and say – hang on! stop! listen to us – our lives may have something to tell you and our knowledge and insight may be useful! Scientific progress may be built by standing on the shoulders of giants according to Newton – but, who knows, at a less exalted level, even on the bent backs of old women.