Since I reached adulthood, night-time has always been my time. The time when – for better or worse – the city belongs to me. Whatever city I’ve happened to be living in.
Reading some of the excellent comments in Chris Clarke’s excellent diary Hating Women reminds me of how rare it is for a woman to feel that kind of freedom. So I’ve been trying to puzzle out how I came to be that anomalous. And what that anomaly means and what it doesn’t mean.
“Don’t you walk home from there by yourself.”
“If you’re staying late, make sure you call for a cab.”
“Do you really think you should go there alone?”
“Stick to the main paths if you go walking in that park by yourself, there’s too many places where someone could grab you”
“You’re brave, setting off by yourself like that! Aren’t you scared of what might happen to you?”
“What do you think you’re doing, letting her walk home in the dark by herself. You should have gone and picked her up.”
“It’s best not to go if you’re not sure. Better safe than sorry.”
“Will you be alright, going off by yourself like that?”
“It’s her own fault, what did she think she was doing walking around on the streets at two in the morning?”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I’ve never been on a `Take Back the Night’ March. I don’t need to: I took back the night when I was 18 and I’ve been taking it back ever since. Truth and falsehood, all in the same sentence.
When I was 18, I moved into my first flat – a four person, two-bedroom flat in a somewhat dodgy neighbourhood, with very dodgy plumbing, dodgy perpetual scaffolding and a dodgy landlord who gave new meaning to the word. I loved my life there. It was full of complications, tensions, drama, angst, moral dilemmas, intrigues and decadent parties (which in due course inevitably led to complications, tensions, drama angst, moral dilemmas – etc). I remember it as a time of exhilarating freedom: that year Spring held such promise. The sun was never warmer.
And I’ll always be grateful to that flat because it taught me about the impossibility of following the rules about sensible women and freedom of movement.
Sensible women aren’t supposed to walk around alone at night. If they have to walk somewhere, they arrange to go with friends, or catch a taxi, or drive, or get picked up. If they can’t do that, they curtail their lives. They don’t walk into town to meet a friend for coffee, or stay late to study at the library, or work late at the lab because they’re so absorbed in what they’re doing, or stay as late as they want to at that party, or pop down to the late night store to pick up fresh milk for the morning, since they realised they used the last of it in their coffee. They prune their lives to stay within the borders. Their every move is planned. They follow advice like this that
And – and this is the tricky bit – they are supposed to act as though this curtailment of their freedom was acceptable. As though it did not cause them pain or diminishment.
My flat was a 20 minute walk from the town centre and about an hour by foot to the university. In Christchurch it’s dark by 5:30 in winter. I had lectures that didn’t end until then. And I had other things to do – pupils to be tutored, friends to hang out with, meetings to attend, parties to go to. And I had no money for taxis. I didn’t want to prune my life of the things that made it precious to me. So I didn’t.
Instead, I stopped being a sensible woman and slowly, tentatively — and yes, fearfully – started getting to know the city by moonlight.
I learned which places stayed open late.
I discovered that you can see better under amber streetlights than white streetlights.
I learned how to look into shadows, how to hear what was going on around me.
I learned to combine attentiveness and reflection – to be simultaneously alert and lost in my own night-dream.
I found that less people are out walking on cold crisp nights when your breath hangs in the air.
I listened to the hum of the pylons out near the bypass and the scuffle of rabbits at its base.
I smelt the cold mist rising off the river, wrapping itself about me
I heard the wind in the pines in the park, made louder by darkness
I saw the moon riding the clouds.
I walked to the beginning of the Port Hills and smelled fresh roses by night.
I stopped to greet cats standing sentry on gateposts
And what began as simple defiance borne of necessity slowly became one of the richest pleasures of my life.
Near misses? Lucky escapes? Yes. A couple. Someone grabbed me in Cathedral Square once. But he was drunk. I wasn’t. And there were still a fair number of people around. Much more frightening was the morning I opened the paper to find that someone had been sexually attacked in a park about twenty minutes after I’d walked that same route. But I’m one of those who believes the factoid that women are more likely to be assaulted by someone they know than by a stranger.
Sounds all rosy doesn’t it? Just being strong and feisty and independent is obviously the solution! Women just need to follow my glorious example </rolls eyes and gets off high horse>
Alas, my beloved Samuel R. Delany pointed out the catch in his Tales of Neveryon (sadly missing its umlaut). It’s one I’d suspected, though I’d not ever managed to articulate it until he did it for me.
`Nor,’ said Norema, `am I particularly annoyed by sitting here in our alcove.’ Then she pulled her hands back into her lap and her serious expression for a moment became a frown. `I would be annoyed by the bothersome men; and I could ignore the simply trivial ones – which I suspect would be most of those that actually approached us, Madame Keyne.’
`But for you to ignore, for you to not be bothered, there must be one of two explanations. And, my dear, I am not sure which of them applies. Either you are so content, so superior to me as a woman, so sure of yourself – thanks to your far better upbringing in a far better land than this – that you truly are above such annoyances, such bothers: which means that art, economics, philosophy, and adventures are not in the least closed to you, but are things you can explore from behind the drapes of our alcove just as easily as you might explore them out in the sun and air. But the other explanation is this: to avoid being bothered, to avoid being annoyed, you have shut down one whole section of your mind, that most sensitive section, the section that responds to even the faintest ugliness precisely because it is what also responds to the faintest nuance of sensible or logical beauty – you must shut it down tight, board it up, and hide the key. And Norema, if this is what we must do to ourselves to “enjoy” our seat in the sun, then we sit in the shadow not as explorers after art or adventure, but as self-maimed cripples. For those store-chambers of the mind are not opened up and shut down so easily as all that – that is one of the things I have learned in fifty years.”
Well, I’m not the first kind of woman.
I know about walking alone at night, through silent city streets, wandering out near the industrial estates where the rabbits are surprised to see anybody about, walking in despair through the dangerous parts of town until the numbness recedes a little, home from parties, under a full moon near the foot of the Port Hills, by the Huron River on a cold, clammy Spring night, past the `massage parlours’ to Caffiends where coffee and friends await at 2a.m., through Hagley Park at midnight with a friend in full gothed-up glory assuring me with slightly nervous bravado that “We’ve nothing to worry about. The only people who walk through Hagley Park at night are people like us.” I’ve seen Manchester’s uneasy slumber, stumbled half-asleep to the station in Hyde to catch that pre-dawn bus so I can make my train.
Always – except the third item on my little list – with that edge of fear. Sometimes slight, sometimes not so slight.
At night, the city belongs to me. There’s truth in that. And I know about walking alone by moonlight in all kinds of places. But I don’t know about walking alone and unafraid. And so Delany might well say that there are sections of my mind that I’ve boarded up tight and hidden the key. How else can you be enjoying a stroll by the river after dusk and simultaneously be staring into shadows?
And so, fifteen years on into my nocturnal peregrinations,
“I’m waiting for the night to fall
when everything is bearable
and there in the still
all that you feel is tranquillity.”