Читать книгу Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 6

A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and bottle-green stockings stood shivering in the vaulted booking hall of Bristol Temple Meads station looking uncertainly around her. It was 1 January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and, using the money I had earned from delivering letters for the Post Office during the holidays (£8 5s.) and writing ‘amusing’ anecdotes to the letters page of Woman’s Realm, plus a Christmas present of a £2 postal order, I had run away from home.

It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous in changing Britain’s history, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Although of course I could not have foreseen that, nevertheless it seemed a suitably significant date on which to start a new life; to leave behind the pebble-dashed house in the home counties, turn my back on the minor girls’ public school and be a grown-up at last: independent, poised to achieve the freedom for which I had yearned for so long.

It was not, predictably, that simple. Progress over the next few years would be bumpy, interrupted, contradictory, frustrating. Dependencies transferred rather than jettisoned. But the world changed around me, as it did for most women in Britain – and that is the story I want to tell. It is not only or entirely my story; not a straightforward chronological account of women’s history, nor a history, disquisition, celebration or critique of feminism. Rather it is a series of reflections or meditations on some of the expectations and experiences that I, like many other women in Britain, had, or could have had, during the middle years of the twentieth century.

I am a historian, and I was there, and that is what this book is about. It has no claims to be comprehensive: some important aspects of the period will be left out, or touched on only briefly; others might seem peripheral or wilfully quirky, but to me they are emblematic of various aspects of women’s lives and the perception of these lives both by the women themselves and by society more generally – the education they received, the work they did; the frustrations they felt, cheek by jowl with the knowledge of widening horizons, the legislative, economic, social and intimate transformations of their lives.

It is essentially my story, the optic is mine, but to put it pretentiously, on many occasions my life could hardly fail to grind up against the arc of history, and when it did, I hope recounting that conjunction will ring true.