Women with Brains

or
‘I’m a clever bugger, me’

‘I used to be clever’ is what I told a lot of my school students.
Even now it’s hard to write that I was smarter that the average bear. I find myself trawling through my past for evidence. My mother’s dad was a fisherman and people in the village would attribute the braininess of his children to their diet of fish. All of the cousins were bright: it was normal. Then we started school and Being Different. Policemen move house a lot, so I got to be different 4 times before I was 10. In the end I was in the class above my age and needed pegging back (they said). Which is how I ended up in an all girls’ school in the city rather than a nice mixed comp at the seaside. At least there were others there who were pleased to feel normal at last (and there were those who had been trained to pass the entrance exam – seemed a bit weird to me). I settled in fine, well apart from the school students union and a notice with The F Word on the back of it.

At first I was proud to have got a free place at such a posh school (there were posher ones around town though). I quickly learned that it was best not to wear the (nice, panama) school hat too close to home, and later that not everybody was impressed to hear where I went to school. In a nutshell, nobody wants a clever woman. So I stopped speaking out with strangers for years. With my friends and cousins I was the same person, but with anyone else I was right there shrinking into the wallpaper. I also started the denial – ‘oh my brother’s much cleverer than me’ ‘just lucky in the exam’. It wasn’t until I was 13 when a friend came to stay that I found out about revision. We did exams, it was just that I thought you were supposed to remember stuff. Revision seemed like cheating. I still didn’t do too much though, on the principle that I could be run over by a bus on the morning of an exam and deeply regret missing the previous week’s fun.

Kate, the matriarchal leader of the Gas Order Office where I worked later was holding forth to the team about her 15 year old daughter’s attitude. She’d told the girl straight:
“ put them books down, and let me do your nails. You’ll never find a man with exams”.
She did my nails for my wedding.

Nevertheless I spent years being a closet KB (Klever Bugger). It’s only recently I’ve decided I’m doin’ OK actually. Mind, a lot of the old brain cells are struggling to remember how it goes these days.