When I was very young, all I wanted to do when I grew up was to be a writer. However, if anyone asked me, I would say I wanted to work with animals (mainly because I’d rather spend my time with them than with other people). I never told anyone about the writing idea, because I knew that writers were very special and talented, and I was far too dull and not at all special, and besides, there was another girl in my class who wanted to be a writer, and she wasn’t the sort of girl I could ever compete with. Also I knew that the main goal of a girl’s life was supposed to be to find a man, get married and have children (although I never really liked children, didn’t even play with dolls), or, if she couldn’t find a man who was interested in her (which seemed the most likely scenario for me), she had to stay at home and look after her elderly parents, and most likely become a teacher (a horrifying prospect). At least marriage and children (if achievable) offered some likelihood of financial security and time to write (when the children started school).
Before you ask, no, this wasn’t the Victorian era, it was the 1960s, but when I looked at my mother, and my aunts, and the neighbours, and my teachers, there didn’t seem much evidence of women breaking free of those stereotypes. The pattern was: you worked until you were married (or, if hubby was particularly enlightened, till the babies came along), then you gave it up, and maybe when the children were older you got a part-time job in a shop, or the Birds Eye factory, or the biscuit factory, or cleaning offices, for ‘pin money’.
As I grew older, I discovered there was a route out of this: university. If I did well enough in my exams (which I would), I could leave home and go away to a place where there would be lots of young people, in a new, exciting town, probably in the sophisticated, even decadent, South, where no one knew me as the pathetic little nobody I truly was, and even I might stand a chance of finding a boyfriend (boys outnumbered girls three to one in universities at that time), and best of all, I could go with my parents’ blessing, and as long as I kept my nose clean in the holidays, they wouldn’t have a clue what I got up to, they might even be proud of me, and at the end of three years I could get married, and maybe a job, and never have to go back again.
Funnily enough, that is more or less how the plan worked out. I met someone in the second summer vacation, when I’d managed to wangle a job in Reading so that I didn’t have to go home, he asked me to marry him, I said yes, and that was that. Sort of.