by
Glyn Brown
How long had I wanted to write a book? Oh, y’know, since forever. An ambition you might not expect when I grew up in a house where the only reading matter was the back of Daz and Rice Krispies packets and books my builder dad lugged home from demolitions. Once I learned to write, though, words gushed out of me as if from a leaky pipe Dad might encounter in a basement. I wrote diaries – a Wombles, a Thirlwell, a Letts – full of observation and poignancy (‘double maths; dreading it’). I wrote stories that I read to my little sister, demanding awestruck reverence. At my comprehensive, where swots were detested, I was remorselessly bullied after having to read my essays aloud in class (what kind of freak teacher demands this?) So, like a delinquent, I ran away from school, spent an uncontrollable year in the local library hoovering up everything from The Times to Spare Rib, did a secretarial course and got a job on the switchboard of a tiling firm. It was all going swimmingly.
By now, however, I’d seen His Girl Friday, the 1940 screwball comedy starring Rosalind Russell as intrepid reporter Hildy Johnson. I’d spent my year absconding, trying to write features for the magazines I read, hearing nothing back until, midway through typing school, I got a letter from the editor of Look Now. Could I go to meet him? Me and Mum travelled to the offices off Oxford Street, where laid-back Richard Barber offered me a job as a sub-editor. What he didn’t know was that I was 14. And Mum had got me onto this course. Surely I had to finish it? If I’d been Caitlin Moran I’d have grabbed the job, illegal or not. Had I squandered my Golden Ticket?
But my Golden Ticket, my heroine, was my lovely mum, a cleaner who couldn’t really understand my longing to be a journalist. She got me into a Further Education college, where I tore through O and A levels. I found a secretarial job on demure Woman’s Realm, became a sub on Woman & Home then, because I liked music, answered an ad in headbanging rock weekly Sounds. The office was strewn with bits of women’s underwear, singles were used as coasters and the features editor – with whom I shared a phone and a bin – was on methadone, but it was here that I started to really write. I interviewed Morrissey, who at that time we admired, and who insisted on having his picture taken with his head in a puddle; Robert Smith of the Cure, who wanted to meet me on an inconspicuous traffic island in front of his favourite pub; Nick Cave in Berlin before the Wall came down, a fantasy in every way for this fledgling goth.
But my longing to write for broadsheets remained. Eventually I left that job, went freelance, and punted feature ideas while I paid the bills with subbing stints on She, Elle, B&Q magazine, Tractor Today, the Daily Mail and the News of the World (someone’s got to do it). Eventually I broke in, writing live rock reviews, then features for the Guardian, Sunday Telegraph and Independent and reaching a high point of interviewing Tony Bennett in his Manhattan apartment about Judy, Liza, Sinatra and his own immaculate voice. ‘So when I saw the lyrics for I Left My Heart in San Francisco, I thought they might go something like this…’
But it’s a fight as a freelance. You’re only as good as your last piece, and once it’s published the chase starts again. It’s badly paid, so you’re always doing other work, and as editors changed and brought in their own people, I began to find myself sliding down the glass mountain. With a mortgage on my shoulders, I applied to do Transport for London surveys door-to-door. I tried to be a postwoman, but didn’t get past the first interview stage. I joined a local cat-sitting firm, cycling around south-east London feeding up to 20 cats a day, and 60 a day over Christmas.
I was still writing. Not always, because you get tired. But there remained a longing, a niggling ambition I’d had since I was a child, to write a book. I mean, that’s a big thing. I knew no one who’d done it, and yet I kept trying. Because, well, writing made me happy. A project like this was something sustaining, that I could think about and return to, sitting at my desk each night, or before dawn hours before I had to set off for work, in a pool of lamplight with my coffee and my typewriter and then my quiet computer. I could forget myself, the world dissolving into mist around me. I sent off chapters, they were ignored. I’d vow to give up. But I’d start again.
And then I came across an 18th century woman whose background was as bad as mine. With a brain like a planet she longed for intellectual stimulation, but her options were so limited she sold peas and beans then became a whore, one of the few jobs available, determinedly working her way through the ranks until she was a high-class courtesan, sought out by parliamentarians and the cultured elite. It ended badly, but she’d experienced something of a world she’d dreamed about. Fascinated, I looked for other blue-collar females from the past, when things were even harder than they are today, who’d had creative hopes or cerebral ambitions. They were hard to find: few women managed it, and no one wrote about those who did because their backgrounds weren’t of interest. But eventually I discovered 17 swashbucklers – from artists and pirates to writers and pilots. Immersed in tracking down their stories, it seemed they were striding into my room, perching on my desk to smoke a pipe, eat an apple and give me a bit of tough talking on how to get my life back on track.
I had no time to finish the book in London, but in late 2017 we moved to a docker’s cottage in Whitstable. Space to give myself a chance. I got a part-time job, used my savings and roamed the beach, planning chapters. And this time I did find a publisher, an independent based in Wolverhampton, with an open mind, sensitivity and humour and no celebrity agenda.
So now I have a book, full of tales of rock and roll, of lurching through Fleet Street, of terrible relationships with bohemian posh boys – and of how a posse of women from the past changed their own lives and altered my future.
Dancing Barefoot: How to be Common is published by Ignite Books, £14.
About
Glyn Brown has written about music, books, film, history and travel for everything from The Times, Guardian, Independent and Sunday Telegraph to NME, Melody Maker and i-D. Kind words on her stuff include those from Nick Cave: ‘You’re the one good cop’. Her story Dog Night won the Time Out Short Story competition and she’s had fiction published in a number of collections. Dancing Barefoot: How to be Common is her first book.
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