After that brief, idyllic summer of Pansy I’d have to wait years to be seen and properly addressed again. I’d have to wait years to allow Pansy to grow and become happy. Stuffed down under layers of shame and self-hatred and the name Simon, which was the only name I was allowed to exist beneath. But it was never my name. When people said ‘Simon’, I never felt seen or understood, I felt invisible. Worse, I felt that I didn’t exist as a human alongside other humans because my birth unintendedly stripped me of my humanity.
But for that single summer term in 1972 most of my classmates, enemies and friends, called me Pansy. Many used the pronoun ‘she’, but not all, and those that did often hurled it as an insult which I caught between my teeth as small uncut diamonds. I swallowed the diamonds and they amassed deep inside of me. For years those diamonds and the memory of that summer term kept me alive through so much trouble and strife.
In that summer term I felt free and I felt confident and I felt alive.
Plucking up courage, I asked my teacher, Miss Honey, if she would call me Pansy like everyone else did. She hesitated, turned away from me and looked out of the window towards the old weeping willow tree. She then said that during story time on the carpet I could be Pansy if I liked and if I behaved well. I always did. As an eight-year-old I thought that maybe all the answers to difficult questions might be found from looking at that weeping willow tree.
On the round, quite threadbare carpet in our classroom I listened to stories and poems and grew to love words, associating them with my freedom, happiness and safety. Miss Honey never said ‘she’ but used ‘Pansy’ enough when addressing me or talking about me to the class to allow me to believe that this happy feeling might become my life. I adored the way that Miss Honey read stories and made them come to life. The stories she read became more and more real and as they did, so did I.
Away from the classroom carpet, Pansy loved doodling and drawing and wished that she could fly up to the top of a tree and make a nest, like chimpanzees do (but she hated heights and couldn’t even climb to the top of the climbing frame, let alone climb the rope when it came out during gym).
Pansy loved being outside and loved nature. Pansy had a pet toad that she secretly carried into school; a pet toad that she wrote stories about; a pet toad that she drew pictures of in different outfits – flares one day and a pinafore dress the next. Pansy dreamt about becoming an explorer or an artist or a poet.
Pansy also wanted to be a mother.
When Miss Honey asked Pansy what she wanted to be when she grew up, in front of the whole class she replied that she wanted to have a belly full of babies like her mum. My mum only had the one baby in her belly at a time, but to Pansy, to me, pregnancy was a magical thing and to Pansy anything seemed possible: a belly full of babies or a toad who could talk and travel on a plane to far-off countries; a toad with a passport. If Pansy had become real and happy, then anything was possible.
Towards the end of that summer term Pansy had one hurdle to overcome. She had to convince her family to call her ‘Pansy’ and ‘she’ if they wouldn’t mind. ‘Simon’ and ‘he’ made her feel very unhappy and confused. Although her family might be upset about the loss of her name, she thought they would be happy that she was finally happy and no longer a quiet and shy loner, as people had often referred to her when they thought she couldn’t hear.
Pansy waited until the end of the summer term, thinking it would be better to raise the issue at the start of the holidays. Perhaps she’d ask them in their new car, a red Capri, on a day trip to the sea (to Sandbanks in Bournemouth, which was the most exotic place she’d ever seen – her dad had said that it was like Hollywood).
Everyone in the family adored that car – flame-red and as fast as a rocket.
Driving, we’d listen to a cassette tape of The Stylistics or Diana Ross, and Pansy would crouch down on the floor in the back, push her head forward between the two front seats and sing for everyone. She knew all the words to every song. She felt safe with her family even though she often heard them whispering about her, using the word ‘effeminate’ and saying it wasn’t right that a boy would do this or that or not do this or that. She didn’t care. She was Pansy now and one day she’d make it onto a stage and sing for everyone, like Karen Carpenter or Joni Mitchell (although I never played the piano or the guitar, just the recorder badly – ‘Three Blind Mice’).
Her family loved her singing and she loved performing.
There is a photograph of me as a young child with long blonde hair, way down past my shoulders. Tied around my waist and shoulders, like an outfit from Mary Quant or Biba, were West Ham football scarves that my dad was desperate for me to bond with. I did in my own Pansy way. Looking back, I don’t understand why the world didn’t understand what they were looking at. It was blindingly obvious. I look at that photograph and only I understand how happy I could have been and how many years were lost to unhappiness.
I decided to tell my dad and older sister about my new name on the driveway next to the car. We were getting ready for our day out to Sandbanks. I was stood one side of the packed cool box and they were stood the other. It was a completely unintentional placement.
It took all of about three seconds for Pansy to be slapped away – just one quick, hard slap. It only needed one to make me feel stupid and clumsy again. A good telling-off followed and a lesson about boys being boys and girls being girls and pansies being pansies and not Pansy.
‘Never let anyone call you a pansy, do you hear?’
It was the early 1970s. My family didn’t understand; they were just worried that I’d get beaten up, picked on, or worse, bullied every day for the rest of my school days, which happened horribly to a few children who for one reason or another stood out. I was bullied anyway, whatever my name. My family couldn’t see how happy I was to be Pansy. For them, gender was set in stone at birth and was rigid. If anyone, especially their child, strayed from that (presumed safe) rigidity, then all hell would break loose.
They told me that if anyone called me a pansy again, I should come home and tell them so that they could sort it out. All of my family could fight apart from me. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to be beaten up for calling me a name that I liked and wanted to use myself. In my dreams I called myself ‘Pansy’. Should I tell them so that they could beat me up?
By the time I returned to school in the autumn, Pansy had all but disappeared, retreating deep inside of me. I disappeared with her into a pit of unhappiness that would last for many years and at times become so devastating that it resulted in self-harm and addiction.
By the time I returned to school, I’d returned to silence. I never put my hand up in class again and when Miss Honey read a story on the round, threadbare carpet, I put my hand into her bag and stole a packet of sweets. Hard-boiled toffee sweets. I stole them one by one until she saw me. I wanted to be seen.
She told me off, called me ‘Simon’ and sent me to see the headmaster, who said that he’d never seen me outside his office before and that it was out of character for me to be in trouble. I should think long and hard about what I’d done and never do it again. ‘Where was the smiling child who’d left at the end of the summer term?’ he asked with resignation.
Confused and filled with sadness and anger, I decided there and then that if I couldn’t be happy, I’d steal sweets and then steal more sweets until there were no more sweets to steal. And I did. From that day on, the day I was called ‘Simon’ again on the carpet, I behaved terribly at school.
I never thought back to that summer term in 1972 again. A term when the sun was forever shining. A term when I was so excited to go into school that I ran so fast one day that I tripped over and hit my head on the main school door. I had to have ten stitches, that’s how excited I was to be me and to be free.
That’s how excited I’d been to be Pansy.
How Did I Go About Writing This Book?
For