I: So first of all, can you say when and where were you born? R: I was born in Malta, during the Siege of Malta in 1941, and my mother looked out on to Valetta Harbour, watching the bombing in the harbour from her birthing bed, and that hospital was destroyed by German bombers a year later. I: So how did your parents - were they both there? R: Yes. Yes. Yes. I: What were they doing? R: My father - it was strange. It was rather like possibly a sort of gap year. He'd graduated from Oxford in German and French - and, by the way, they both met in Berlin as ex-pats. My mother was au pair to some of the leading Jewish families there, and my father was teaching English at the Berlitz School, so they met there. And then he - it's a bit long question/answer - but he had joined the sort of Army, signed up as an undergrad, to be connected to the Army, because, he said, "you could get to ride horses". I've got a wonderful picture of him riding horses, bareback, with one of his close friends. And then, under Colonialism, there was a suggestion that you could go off to one of these lovely places - it was before the War - and he went off to Malta with my mother. They'd married, been married for a year, and they thought they were just going to a lovely Mediterranean place, in about 1938, and he was Head of Supplies. Then, of course, the War came and that was a disaster. Malta was one of the most bombed places in the whole of Europe. He was Head of Supplies. Again, I've written an article, it's called "Hybridity: Birthplace and Naming", about the fact that my second name is "Melita", after the Island. I was brought up, for a while, on stories of the horrors. They didn't have food. Nothing. And my mother said she saved a packet of biscuits, and she finally gave it to me when I was a year, and I sat on the table and she picked up all the crumbs. She said they would go to this one remaining cinema, and there were just two films there, and whenever there were shots of people eating in a restaurant or something - in this film - everybody in the audience would say, "Throw us a few crumbs!" So I was brought up, I said, with a wonderful hybrid Maltese identity, which I've written in The Journal of Mediterranean Studies. And my Maltese connection continues. I've lectured in Malta several times, and only two months ago, a Maltese student asked me to be on her Open University Post-Grad Committee, because I taught her in Malta. So it continues. I: Oh, that’s nice. And do you have direct memories, though? R: Nothing. No. Because then - and again, I haven't published this - but I gave a paper in Belfast two years ago. I don't know whether it's a Society, but there's also a journal about travel, and the theme was "traumatic travel", and I gave a paper on my mother's travel. Because they evacuated all British women and children, and my mother, four or five months pregnant, we were put on a plane with other Brits., sent to Cairo. She said there were no seats in the plane, she just sat there, so many months pregnant, with me sitting between her legs. The amazing thing is that before I gave the paper, I asked my sister if she had any memories of what my mother said, and my sister produced some tapes, cassettes, where my mother had dictated the journey. I still can't bring myself to listen to those tapes, but this lovely Maltese student says she will listen to them with me. But Elaine, my sister, read out passages, which I put into the paper. We were sent, as evacuees, and my mother apparently went to the hotel kitchen looking helpless, because she needed milk for me, and then we were sent, as evacuees, to South Africa, with white Afrikaans families, and my mother and I were called "our little evacuees". I: Where is this? R: In in Cape Town. And my mother had no money. The deal of staying in this family was that she had to be out all through the day, so she had to walk the streets - and she said that's how she got flat feet - with me. And then the only free hospital was a Salvation Army Hospital, and she gave birth in the Hospital, and she said they took my sister away, and she thought she was dead, and she didn't know that you get a shuddering thing often, after your second baby, and she lay there totally going "Errrrrrrrrrr" like that, nobody to help her. So it was total squalor. Then my father, ironically, was run over by a lorry, the very day that he'd said goodbye to us at the airport, because there were no lights allowed, and he was run over on his motorbike, and he was then in crutches, and eventually - again, I said I'm living part on the memories that I was told through my childhood, I don't have those memories, because my sister's 18 months younger than me, so you know, it's only 18 months. Eventually he arrived in Durban, in crutches, and I always remember, from childhood, he had a great big brown scar on his leg because of the accident. Then the Brits. - and I could never understand this - the Brits. decided, I think because they thought the Afrikaans were going to win the next Election, they decided that all women, all Brits., Anglicans, had to be moved from South Africa. So we went, in a boat, from Durban to Liverpool, during the War, in a convoy. My mother has got a description of 200 women and children in each cell. I think there were nearly 2000 - I've got the figures somewhere - of women and children, with the men in the hold. My father would have just sunk if the boat had gone, because he had leg irons. The ship in front was torpedoed, and the ship behind was torpedoed. And we survived. You know, I went on a trip to South Africa with a friend, a sort of SAGA tour, it was all very luxurious, and I stood at the beach, and I was telling the lovely young woman guide, and I said, "I've been on that water, and the ship in front and the ship behind was torpedoed, with the loss of hundreds and hundreds of women and children, and men". Then we arrived in Liverpool. I said I got the quotes from my sister, [she] had quoted them on the phone, but as I said, I've got the cassettes upstairs, but I can't listen to that as yet, listen to my mother's voice. But when people say, "You're a fucking privileged bourgeois bitch", I think, "God! Do you know - " And then my mother described when the boat came into the harbour at Liverpool. She said there was a band to greet them. We'd been three weeks on that sea. And the Germans had torpedoed all those boats, and we survived. I: That’s amazing! You were how old by the time you got to Liverpool then? R: I suppose I was probably about two and a half, and ironically, then we took a train from Liverpool to Bristol, and my mother's parents - well, my grandfather had died during the War, not of war problems - but the first memory I do have is the train pulling up at Bristol station, and my grandmother holding out a teddy bear, and I've got that teddy bear upstairs. My family, my mother's family were upper bourgeoisie. But in those days, you didn't own houses, you rented, and they had a lovely house in Martock, next to the church where my mother had married - there's a photograph there. I just remember being in this wonderful place, and hearing the bells of the church, and having that teddy. So those are my earliest memories. I: But let’s talk about the grandparents a bit. R: Yes. Yes, yes. I: Could you describe them a little bit? R: Yes. Well, I said this young woman, Sarah, said, "Tell me about your grandmother". And I said she couldn't understand this thing that my grandmother was one of 17 children, many of whom died. Her parents had died by the time she was about seven, and she was brought up by older brothers. But they were called Stocker, and they owned the kaolin mines in Cornwall, and also something to do with china up in the Midlands, and so it was private enterprise. I had to take over from a colleague who had a course on kinship, in Hull, I had to take over at a month's notice, and I wasn't going to do new reading lists or anything, and I decided, in order to have people understand what kinship was, I put up a photograph of my grandmother's wedding, and I said, "People say that arranged marriages are just something that happens in Asia". I said, "My grandmother had an arranged marriage. She was white, upper middle-class. She was 18. She was married off, at 18, to a lovely guy, from all I know, called Bradford. A Branston Bradford. And his family were coal and corn merchants". And she told me, through my childhood, that when she was put on the train, after the marriage, she said to people, "I don't want to go away with this strange man". And she was, apparently, a brilliant singer, and I think my grandfather got all her money, of course, when she was 21, and he forbade her ever to sing again, because she was a real latent opera singer. It was only years and years later she came to live with us when my mother was widowed, and my grandmother was given the heave-ho by her landlord. It's the bizarre thing of, "Here am I, in my property that I own". In those days, the bourgeoisie didn't invest in property, you rented, and she lived with my mother's nanny. We had a nanny in the family. So my grandmother told me these stories. And then my mother became Head of Old People's Welfare in Hammersmith and she would take my grandmother to some of these social events, and my grandmother, in her sixties. There was a performance going on with kind of Music Hall thing, and my grandmother said, "I want to get up and sing". And my mother said my grandmother got up and sang. She had the most beautiful soprano voice. But she became an alcoholic, apparently, in her twenties. My mother's memory of her was of a total alcoholic. My mother had to go to the bottom of a tree and get my grandmother to climb down in order to come in for supper. Because she disappeared into alcoholism. And so there's the historical position of bourgeois women not being allowed to develop their talents. I: Did you see it like that at the time? R: No. I: It’s just retrospectively. R: Exactly. I mean, all I knew was that my grandmother was - because my grandmother moved into the middle floor of our house, you see, when my mother was left near destitute - my father died of polio. My mother could only get a mortgage because my grandmother would be guarantor, because she had these shares in Bradford and Stocker, so she could be the guarantor. A married woman, a single mother/woman, couldn't get a mortgage, even though my mother had a full-time job. We would hear the noise on the ceiling, and my mother would say, "Oh, there's the old girl boozing at the gin again!" So she was boozing away. And it was only thanks to this lovely young woman, Sarah, that I put this into a pattern. Then my father's mother was extremely gifted as well. That picture up there, of Cirencester, is the original of her grandfather. He was an artist, and also either him or another grandfather - they were called Beecham - they wrote a defining history of Cirencester, and he was interested in the Roman villas in Cirencester. When a friend of mine was doing a painting course in Cirencester, I was going to visit her, and she happened to say, "Oh, a descendant of Beecham is coming to visit me", and they all gasped, and they said, "My goodness!", because they have a museum, and so there was that. And my grandmother would - I've got postcards, somewhere, of his paintings and other things, and she would write, in this spidery thing, "The great great grandfather of Judith and Elaine Okely ". But she, in a way like Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, she took to her bed, and so all my memories of her is visiting her and my grandfather in Wimbledon through the fifties, and she was lying in the back room, in bed, and my grandfather, who was a civil servant, would just wait on her. And my cousin - that's my father's brother's son - I see him every Christmas, we both agreed that we think this was psychosomatic, that she was a brilliant, gifted woman, who could never go to university, who read books but like Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, you take to your couch. Ironically, my mother was considered to have gone downwardly mobile in marrying my father! (LAUGHS) I can't understand it! Because he didn't come from a family of property! And he was a graduate of Oxford, but that just shows the anti-intellectual streak in British upper class culture. You know, the Queen was taught by somebody who had two years' training as a nanny. The Brits, or the English, hate culture. Now, it was only when I thought about it, and was talking to Sarah, and also maybe swapping notes with my cousin up in Edinburgh, that we both agreed that this was psychosomatic. And that's the fate of the upper class woman, or the bourgeois woman. We weren't aristocracy, they didn't own land, they were business people, and, you know, I still have money from those Bradford and Son shares. I: Really? What about the grandfathers, are they worth a mention? R: I know! Well, I've never met the Grandfather Bradford. I did have a lovely picture, or I saw a lovely picture of him in the Corn Market, because he would deal with corn. He was an expert. He'd come with a handful and sell corn, and from my mother's reminiscences, he was a very gifted intelligent man. He was friends with Thomas Hardy. And my mother's memory is being left in the car while Branston went to say hello to Thomas Hardy, leaving my mother in the car, befriending him. And we used to have first editions of all of Thomas Hardy's books, but again, my mother's brothers are totally anti-intellectual, and God knows what happened to half those things. So from what I can gather, my grandfather was an intelligent man, also a businessman. But those were the days [when] you can't have a woman out of control, singing and getting to be high profile and attracting attention. And my other grandfather, I just have these memories of this tall thin man, very very silent, just serving my grandmother. I: Was he working? R: He was a civil servant. Yeah. But they did have ambitions, because my father won a Scholarship to Dulwich Public School, they weren't rolling in money, he won a Scholarship, and my father's younger brother who - he turned to booze and God knows what - and he only died about five or six years ago, but he was eaten up with jealousy and anger, because he said, "Do you know, we had to move near Dulwich so that your father could be near the school". He was just eaten up with jealousy, and he never went to university, but my father did. Then this is what came out, my father's sister, who died in her nineties, she obviously worshipped my father. And again, here was a very very intelligent woman, a brilliant woman, but there was no way a woman could go to university, but her son showed me pictures of my aunt visiting my father in Oxford, and she always kept that by her, and then right by her bedside, she had a photograph, which was the last photograph of my mother, my father, my sister and me, in a studio in Lincolnshire. We didn't know that my father would be dead by the end of the year, with polio. And when I visited her in an Old People's Home, my cousin hadn't turned up, and the carers said, "Well", you know, "Paul hasn't turned up", and I said, "Well, Margaret Torné" - because she married a Belgian miner, by the way - and I went to her room, and I said, "Oh, that picture! That's of me!" so I could prove my identity. So here's another woman who'd lost out. I: Yes. Seems to be a pattern, doesn’t it. R: Yes. I: Now, you just said about your father dying. How old were you when he died? R: Nine. I: Nine. Yeah. So do you have much memories of him, or not? R: I do. And it's - it brings tears to my eyes really, because I know that that is the driving force in my life. I: Mmm? How’s that? R: I was just at the Elektra stage when my father - after the War he was still in the Army, they didn't let them free, as it were. Then he came back eventually, and we moved into a house that his parents owned in Sussex, near East Grinstead, and he taught in a local school, but he hated it, so eventually he got a job lecturing in French and German at Cranwell, in the RAF, and we had one year there. Of course, Lincolnshire was the worst place for polio. But my memory is, through those three or four years before he died, he would sit me on his knee, and he had - and I've still got these books somewhere - there were French cartoon-like stories for children, and I remember him - I was in awe, because I could see it was French, and he would read out the English, so I understood something about this mystery of translation. Then, in Lincolnshire, we would go for nice long bike rides, just the two of us, and it was flat country and there weren't many cars. Then we were all destined to go on holiday in Cornwall, picking up my mother's mother, who lived in Yeovil, Somerset, on the way. We had a tiny little rented cottage in Lincolnshire, and the night before we - my mother and I, and my sister, I don't know if my grandmother was with us then or not - we had supper, and my father said, "Do you know, I feel very stiff. It's like I've got polio". And my mother said, "Oh, don't be silly!" He wasn't going to come with us because he was going to stop off in Wimbledon to see his parents. My last memory is of him standing at the door, in his pyjamas, waving goodbye with his toothbrush - he was just cleaning his teeth - you know, I thought I was going to see him in 48 hours. I never saw him again. We got down to Yeovil, and suddenly - I've since heard later, that the police turned up at the door at 4 a.m. or something, and they said to my mother, "Your husband has got in hospital, paralysed from the neck down". In those days you had what they called the "milk train" - we didn't know any of this, all we knew is that my grandmother and I and my sister and the nanny were there, and they just said, "Daddy's got 'flu, so you won't be able to go on holiday". And always mysteriously, my grandmother would shut the door, and talk on the phone in the corridor, every morning, talking to my mother. And do you know, at one point, I actually said to my sister, something like, "Daddy's ill", or "Daddy's dying", I just picked it up. In the end, after about - maybe that was July/August/ September, you know, we just said, "My mother's ill". We didn't know, my mother, with shock, nearly died of double pneumonia, and she was in the same hospital. And my grandmother - that's my mother mother - sat Elaine and I down, and just said, "Well, Daddy's been ill with polio, but now he's better, and he's out of the iron lung, and he's happy. But you're going off to boarding school". Which was the school where my mother had been sent. In [earlier] days, women didn't go to school, my mother had a governess until she was 16, and her sisters never went to school. They said, "You're going to your Mummy's school". And what happened was, my mother had kept in touch with the Headmistress of this school, and incidentally she'd been brilliant at school, but her father made her leave before 'A' Level, the equivalent of 'A' Levels, you know, "My daughter's not going to need any further qualifications". So we were packed off to boarding school. And the Headmistress had said we could be there free for a term. I kept thinking, "Why do we miss our holiday, just because Daddy's got 'flu?" And you can imagine the guilt that a child would feel later! The anger I feel about it, you know. And then on the hockey pitch, a girl came up to me and said, "We've been told to be nice to you, because you're Daddy's dead". Can you imagine that! I said, "He's not dead! He's fine!" And then suddenly, in this terrible regime - and incidentally, my article on the boarding school is now on the Harvard University reading list in the Psychology Course, because they can't believe the weirdness of this culture, and it's also on the 'A' Level in Anthropology now - we were suddenly called out of Prep on a Friday, which you never do, because you only see your parents if they visit at the weekend, and we were summoned to the Headmistress's section of the house, and there was my mother, in a suit, all dyed, and I recognised it. You know, children notice these [things]. I said, "Mum! Your suit! It was your check suit. Why is it black?" "Oh, I like the colour". And then she sat with us at supper, and I said, "You're wearing Daddy's ring". "Oh, he gave it to me". Then she was staying in a spare room in the Headmistress's luxury part of the house. Then finally, at about 2.30 on the Sunday I think it was, I was sitting reading the Illustrated London News, and Elaine and I, we were very happy, we're sitting with our Mum, and my mother just said, "I've got something to tell you. One day Daddy was taken up to Heaven by God". And I remember sort of staring at the Illustrated London News, and then we started crying. And then she had to take the train back to London. I lectured to, it was called "NAGC" - National and Gifted Children" - I was asked to give a lecture, in Oxford, about five years ago, and there were lots of multicultural gifted children, and one young Asian said, "When did you become an anthropologist?" And I said, I said, "I'll tell you when". I said, "I went back to the dormitory, eight people in the dormitory, and the great sin was to talk after lights out, and I was sitting there, weeping, on my bed, and the Matron said, "Why are you crying?" - the lights weren't out then - and I said, "My Daddy's died". And she said, "I know. But you're not to cry, because you'll keep the other girls awake at night". And I said, "I think that's when I became an anthropologist without knowing it. I thought, 'I hate this culture'". In my gypsy book - I was taught by Edmund Leach, I dedicated my latest book to Edmund Leach, and he was a student of Malinowski, where you had a holistic view of every society - you looked at kinship, beliefs, family, economy, politics, ritual. So I did the standard thing on my gypsy book, and a French anthropologist wrote an amazing book in which, in the first paragraph, he said, "It was thanks to Judith Okely 's discussion of the death rituals amongst gypsies, that I began to think about my own work on the Manush in France. And until I'd read Okely , I'd never thought about that". Then he wrote a whole book on the Manush and the dead, and inspired also by a lovely Italian anthropologist. I mean, you could count, on one hand, the number of anthropologists doing gypsies in the whole of Europe. And I began to think, when I reviewed his book, "Why did I also focus on death?" I thought, "Oh yes, holism, ritual". But then I thought, years later, I thought, "There's a psychoanalytical reason". That I was absolutely mesmerised by the fact that gypsy children were not separated from the knowledge of the death of their parents, and in my article, which I've republished - I've got photos in my book, The Traveller Gypsies - and I never identify the people. I got the photos from the local newspaper offices. It was wonderful, because they were photos taken with consent. They didn't even ask me for money. I could even disguise the name of the newspaper so you didn't know the area. And there's one loving picture of a man with his daughters and another man, and I know that that man was dying of a brain tumour, and the little happy daughters were aged about seven, and later in the book, I've got pictures of his funeral, which I attended, and there's kids in the front, they're babes in arms, and nothing was hidden from then. And then I've got a picture, in the book, of a child throwing earth on to the grave. And so I thought, "Yeah, on psychoanalytical terms, I got fixated, unconsciously, on the link between children's knowledge of death in another culture". And, of course, the Lady Diana death, that suddenly blew apart the whole upper class stiff upper lip thing, which the Queen had been brought up to believe in. At my dreaded school, and, of course, because we were there at that school when my father died, the RAF paid. My father was a Socialist, he would never have agreed to us going to this dreaded boarding school! He wanted me to go to Sleaford or Lincoln Grammar School. I do remember he said he wanted me to go to Oxford. So I must have remembered those things. And then at this dreadful school, we were all supposed to be debutantes or, you know, elegant ladies. Of course, we didn't have the money, my mother was left with nothing, and no education. She took a degree, part-time, at the LSE, by the way, in sociology and social administration, to the horror of her brothers. I: At what point did she do that? This is before having children? R: No, no. No. She was a widow. She'd been a voluntary worker in the Citizens' Advice Bureau, and then there was that awful thing that carried on where you had to prepare for war or something, it was a particular organisation, voluntary, or what Cameron would call "The Big Society". I: That was the WVS? R: Well, she was in the WVS as well. She did all that, all voluntary. She was a hive of activity. I mean, she had an overactive thyroid, I have an underactive thyroid. Then she was widowed, and my father hadn't left a Will, so what tiny amount of money he did have, one-third was left to me, one-third to my sister, which we'd get when we were 21, and a third to my mother, which was enough for a [house] deposit. She spent the next 20 years paying interest, whereas if she'd had the whole money, she could have had the house cash. But she then applied for a job in old people's welfare in Hammersmith - she saw it advertised - and she got the job, and later, she was told by the councillors, "We knew that as you were a widow, you wouldn't cause us any trouble because you'd need the job". So then she started getting interested in a social work certificate, and she started going to evening classes. It was like you did an External Degree at the LSE, you hardly went to any lectures, and there was this amazing man called Skidelski, who was a White Russian, who lived in Notting Hill, and in the holidays Elaine and I would sit in the car, and Mum would go and have a tutorial with him. I: What was his first name, do you remember? R: No, I don't. And it's nothing to do with Bob Skidelski. I: No. No. R: No, because that was an undergraduate with me. I: Yes! R: But there's a wonderful picture of Gauguin somewhere, a self-portrait, and he looked like that. To me, this was the ultimate intellectual. He wandered around with just two blankets pinned together with safety pins! (LAUGHS) And he was a White Russian! He was actually a Marxist Communist but he'd fled Russia because of the killing of all these White Russians. And there were books everywhere, and he was so brilliant. And, in fact, my mother paid for him to prepare me for the Oxford Entrance, and he had all the tricks. So my mother - and then he said to her, "You're far too clever! You don't need just a Certificate, you should do a [degree]". She had to go back and do 'A' Levels. So she did 'A' Levels, and then she did her degree part-time, and, of course, it was convenient for us being at boarding school, because she would work six o'clock in the morning. She'd do work at the table before she went to Hammersmith, and then, of course, in the evening, we weren't there to trouble her. So she finally got her degree at the LSE, in about the year before I left school, I think it was about 1958. I: And what sort of work did she do after that, then? R: Then she got a job. She couldn't stand the corruption. She was exhausted. So she applied to be Head of something at Stevenage New Town, and they wanted somebody to co-ordinate all the voluntary services, and she got a job there, but she kept the house in London, but she had a rented one in Stevenage. And then she was invited to teach, part-time, at Battersea Poly, to teach social workers, and she got more and more involved, and then Battersea moved to Surrey University, and they offered her - she then became a lecturer at Battersea, and then she ended up as a lecturer at Surrey University. So that was quite a meteoric rise. I: And did you talk together a lot? R: We did. But she had no idea how dreadful the institution was - the School. Because for her, she'd had a governess until she was 16 or something. [INTERRUPTION] R: She was absolutely hooked on ethnography, incidentally, and she introduced me to Marsden and The Education and the Working Class. But it was when I was about 15, I said I couldn't stand the School any more, and of course, tremendous pressure, because my mother had thought, when she went to the School, she was going to Paradise. Because she'd had [and] her two sisters had the governess, her best friend who'd shared the governess with my mother until she was 12, and then she went to school, [so] my mother was totally isolated. Suddenly she was sent to boarding school, though she said she stood outside the school dining room, was totally terrified to hear 200 voices of children, girls, but for her, it was liberation. Although she was shocked because they knew nothing about the Classics. She'd had a brilliant brilliant governess. Now that was another frustrated woman, but who was utterly brilliant, called Kate Nicholson. I've still got her books. She became my Godmother. God, she was well read! I did meet her. So I said to my mother, "I can't take this". I was weeping, I wasn't eating, because you weren't allowed to read or do anything. I used to read with a torch under my blankets at night, and I hated sport, so in the end my mother said, "Well, take the exam for St. Paul's". I took the Entrance Exam, but I realised, talking to the other girls, they'd all been to the Junior - maybe I was 14, 15, I can't remember - they'd all been to the Junior St. Paul's School, and they'd all been taught a certain syllabus, and the exams were on books I'd never even read. But these people, they'd done a particular era in history, and they were asked questions on that era. We hadn't been taught that era! So I didn't pass. But then the Headmistress said to my mother, they were so impressed, because I had five 'O' Levels at the age of 14, and so they would give me a place. Then the School Headmistress summoned me to her office - and that woman only died last May - and she said that I was not to tell my mother this, but I shouldn't go to St. Paul's because it would be very very selfish because my mother wouldn't be able to do anything in the evenings. Who would look after me when I came back from school? So my reasons for wanting to go to St. Paul's were totally selfish, and I should consider my mother, and I was very lucky that I was being paid for. By this time the Local Authority were paying. It was scandalous! The Middlesex County Council paid, they took over from the RAF! And so the woman said, "This is our secret", and so I told my mother I wasn't going to St. Paul's. Years and years later, I wrote an article which appeared in New Society, called "The Girl and her Body" - that wonderful editor of New Society, Paul Barker, he loved my article on the boarding school, which he'd seen in proof stage, and he said, "Would you write an article for New Society called 'The Girl and her Body'?" It was a brilliant idea! And it hit the national headlines! It was on the Saturday morning, the weeklies, and I had offers from two publishers to write books on a girls' boarding school, and, of course, I forgot my mother was still contributing to New Society - she was retired by then, it was 1978 - and I remember her sitting, her back to me, digging in the garden, and she said, "You humiliated me. You humiliated me with that article. I did my best, and you got a place in St. Paul's, and then you suddenly, on a whim, turned it down". Then I told her. I said, "The Headmistress told me I'd be selfish if I took up the place". And my mother never said another word. But I know, over the years, she saw - and I don't want to say too much about this, but my sister is, in the long run, [suffered more than I did]. ... I: But did she work and have children and so on? R: Well, my sister was also very talented, and people cannot believe this, I'll just say what was said about me. The French mistress - she was English but taught French - the teachers had a wing and tiny little bedsits about half the size of this room, and Miss Lodge, I remember her, she summoned me up, and said, "Judith, I'd like you to read some more French books", and, "You should go to university". And I said, "The Headmistress summoned me to the study, only this term" - and that time I had 14 'O' Levels, or 12, something like that, 12 'O' Levels, I was taking four 'A' Levels - "and she said I would be selfish to go to university, I'd be depriving a more worthy person of a place". And Miss Lodge said, "I think you should go to university - but that's our secret. Don't tell the Headmistress". Similarly, my sister, she had a mentor - science, of course, was taught hopelessly at the School, but we had a woman who taught at a grammar school, and they brought in grammar school teachers for physics and chemistry, and my sister proved to be brilliant at zoology and biology, and this woman said to Elaine, "You should go to university". Then when I was 17/18, you know, I'd taken my 'A' Levels, and Elaine was obviously lagging behind. Apparently - I'd forgotten this, but my sister, in the middle of a row, suddenly said, "You saved me" - this was years later - she said, "You saved me". She said, "You wrote a long letter to our mother saying that I must leave the School". And my mother agreed, and my sister went to the Ealing Tech., and she got mega marks, although because she hadn't done Latin, or physics, she couldn't go to any British university to do zoology. She even got a State Scholarship. But she went to Trinity, Dublin. She was always much better than me at unseen exams, she's always got top - I was hopeless at unseen exams - she got a First Class Degree. She, again, had a wonderful male mentor, and she registered in Imperial College, and she did a Ph.D. on insects. She did a wonderful thing on the insects that you find on cow pats. She had one of those little things where you puff up and you count the hairs on the back legs of these insects, and she found a different one that had extra hairs on its back leg! She's an amazing one for memory. But again, she was always tormented because the School had always told her that she was no good. I: Did she go on working, though, as a scientist? R: Well, then she got married, and her husband went to Brazil and, you know, he had to work for the Royal Bank or the World Bank, and it was better for them to be married. So she got married and went to Brazil, and her two sons were born in Brazilia. But where were the jobs? And she was a full-time mother. Then they came back - well, a long dodgy sort of history, but Elaine always kept her hand in by having nature walks and teaching part-time and everything. But then her husband abandoned her when her children were about 10 and 11, ... so she was left in relative poverty to bring up her children in Salisbury. But, you know, they've done well, and there's one of them receiving his MBA at Texas. They went to the then Grammar School at Salisbury, where you had to take the 11+ still, and they were very gifted and he wanted to go to university, and I think they even said, you know, "Nobody goes to Oxford from here". And Daniel visited me - it was not when I was living here, but oh yes, I bought a house here when I sold my Dedham property - and I gave him an aunt's tour of Oxford, and I said, "This is where your grandfather studied. Here's the Oxford Union. Your aunt was first woman member of the Oxford Union. Your aunt went to St. Hilda's, she did PPE", and at the end of the day he said, "I'm going to Oxford", and he did! (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) Oh good! And you’re close to Elaine, then, or not. R: Well, there are things I won't put on tape. It was lovely when I got this place, the garden was a total wreck and then she redesigned it. She works a tremendous amount. She lives in Exeter. The wonderful thing is that she found a new partner after some years. It was a man she'd met in Brazil, and he's Godfather to my nephew, and she's Godmother to his son, and then Colin was tragically widowed, and then they got together in about '96, '97, and they live in Exeter. ... And so she came up to do my garden, but unfortunately, because she's now developed what's called "golf elbow", she can't do any physical work, and she hasn't been and done my garden for a year, which means it's more tacky! But that was a tremendous bond, because she could use her skills, and then I could also, I hope, pay her pretty generously. ... [Then after our mother died] this thing came out, that I have no memory of! She just said, "You saved me. You saved me. First of all you wrote a letter to Mum, saying I must leave the boarding school", and then she said - and I have no memory of this, it's just repressed - she said, "Every night, in the dormitory, I would cry, and the only thing would stop me is if the Matron woke you up and brought you, my sister, to my side". So I realised I became a mother at the age of nine. And that put me off screaming children. Until this lovely boy was born, I hated the sound of babies, crying. And when I saw that lovely little boy, I suddenly thought, you know, "He's in pain", and my heart melted. But before, I had become a mother at nine. I had to be woken up at night to satisfy this child that was screaming for its mother. And now what could I do? So I said that British upper class culture leaves its wounds forever. When my brother-in-law, who was very very upwardly mobile, he thought when he'd got a lot of money, he said he'd send his boys to boarding school. My sister threw a fit. She just said, "There's no way. I'm not going to have a job", you know, "I'm going to …" And the care and the love she devoted to her boys was just to compensate for the lack of love that she received in our dreadful institution. I: Do you mind if we just go back to your mother? R: Yes, yes. I: Because I don’t feel I quite understood, because it is slightly an unusual situation, her going to almost a parallel thing to you really, in social science. R: Yes. Yes. I: And I’m not quite sure how you related. I mean, did you talk a lot about things, share ideas and so on, or not? R: Well, we became extremely close at the end of her life. It was ironic. The year that my sister married, in '76, was the year that I got my first lectureship at Durham, and she also retired. It was a traumatic experience at Durham - I've written a whole article on that, called, "Gender lessons in ivory towers", the sexism in Durham was absolutely horrendous! When I went to the library to register - I was 30 - as a member of staff, to get my staff card, I was accused of fraud, that I couldn't possibly be a lecturer, that I was a student, and how dare I cheat and ask for a staff card. And then when I went to the Staff Common Room for eating, I was blocked at the door, saying, "We don't allow students here. Go away". You know, I was a lecturer! So I had that trauma, but I still hadn't completed my D.Phil.. And then I spent the summer, after my first year in Durham, I spent the whole summer in Cornwall, writing up, finishing up my Ph.D., and my mother would do all the shopping, I'd get my breakfast, and then I'd go up to the spare room, and I would write and write and write. And so she identified with a fellow academic. And the other thing I remember is that she was always interested in qualitative research in, like Marsden and Jackson. She used to teach - there was a wonderful book about Glasgow, and about the terrible high-rise flats and everything, and the students would love my mother's emphasis on the minutiae. But she was the only sociologist in the Department, which included medics and psychologists, and the Head of Department was determined to turn it into a Medical School Department, and they rubbished her work. I remember her in tears, at some point - that was before she retired. Because when I first got the job at the Centre for Environmental Studies, after my Cambridge - I did a one-year Conversion Course at Cambridge, in anthropology, that's where I was taught by Edmund Leach. I hadn't yet bought a house with my then partner, and so I lived in Ealing, in that house, and I would go to Regent's Park where the offices were, and I would support her because they couldn't understand ethnography. The students all adored her, and she would supervise undergrad dissertations that were qualitative. Then the External Examiner would be a quantitative person, who would say the sample was, you know, "you haven't got this, and haven't done that. This is not scientific". I mean, there weren't even quantitative sociologists there, it was … and the students would be failed or given a low mark. And they were brilliant students. So in the end, when the students came and asked to be supervised by her, she said, "If you want a good mark, don't be supervised by me, because the External will rubbish it". And she would weep. And then, you know, this same tyrant man, he blocked her promotion up the salary scale, he said that she hadn't fulfilled enough, and she hadn't got a doctorate, and as you know from Essex, many people got jobs then without doctorates. She hoped to do one, but how could she do it with a huge teaching load? And she always had fantasies of doing it. And the Department blocked her going up the salary thing, and saying that she was no good. And fortunately, my mother was able to argue that she taught both sociology and social administration, that she was teaching two disciplines, and she went to the Union, and she jumped the hurdle. But I used to hear these stories, and in the end she took early retirement because she couldn't stand the stress any more. But I do know that there were totally loyal students who adored her, one of whom, in the end, was the husband of the woman that was the psychotherapist that I've mentioned, she actually said to me when she knew that life was ebbing away, she said, "I want Malcolm to speak at my funeral", and he did. I: But didn’t she become a Feminist? R: Oh, she was always a Feminist. I: Always? When you were a child, she was a Feminist? R: Well, what she knew was that - she always said to me, "You have to get a training. You have to get a job. You have to get qualifications". She had no idea that the Headmistress was telling me I'd be selfish to go to university. She thought the place encouraged you. And she just said, "Judith, you can't depend on marriage, because your husband can die or leave you, and you'll be penniless". And she had this bizarre thing about - because I was terribly interested in fashion - and she said, "Judith, you should be a buyer at Harrods", that was the sort of thing. And then, "You must be a secretary", because those were the things. I actually was interviewed for a Secretarial College - Mrs. Hoster's - it was a terribly upper class private place, but fortunately, after leaving school, I - a contemporary of mine, they would go to Paris, usually to learn to speak French in order to go to Finishing School, and in those days, one of my contemporaries, she went to the Sorbonne for a one-year course called "Civilisation Francaise", which was geared for foreigners. It was actually the Baccalaureate, and my mother was very positive, and in those days, it was I think it was only £20 a term fees, and you went to a hostel, and my grandmother - my father's mother, who my mother always hated - she left my mother some gas shares, that's before they discovered North Sea Gas, my mother said, "I'm selling my gas shares so you can go to France". But actually, that was before my grandmother died, that's right, my grandmother wrote a severe letter saying that it was very dangerous to send me to Paris, and that I would be raped or that kind of thing. So I went to the Sorbonne for a year, and this was my freedom. I: This was at what age you went? R: I went at the age of 18. I: After leaving the School, in fact. R: Yes. And having failed French 'A' Level, that despite this wonderful woman encouraging me, the teaching was so bad, I failed my French 'A' Level. I went to the Sorbonne, I could read and read and read. I didn't need to read with a torch under the bedclothes! I wandered free through all the streets - I've written about this in my de Beauvoir book - and I was just blotting paper. We had the most brilliant lecturers, they were superstars, who then taught a bit to the foreigners. I came back in about Easter, for a holiday, and I said, "Mum, I'm going to Oxford". And she said, "Get that out of your head. I can never afford to send you to Oxford". Of course, this is what galls me now with the fees. Fortunately, my mother sent away to the Local Authority to ask if they could contribute some money towards the Sorbonne, and a brilliant civil servant sent her a leaflet saying, "We don't finance overseas universities, but it depends on your salary, whether you can go to an English university". And on the form it showed my mother's salary was sufficiently low for her to be able to have a full grant for me. So I felt under no guilt. I said, "Mum, you don't have to pay a bean! Your salary as a social worker …" - because she was still a social worker - "… is so low, I'm going to Oxford". And despite the Headmistress, I went to this lovely Mr. Skidelski, who geared me for how to take exams, and at the interview, I was told, "You've read more French literature than you'll have time to read in the whole of your three years!" (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) How very good! Yes! Yes! But I’m still a bit confused about your mother’s feminism - because you’ve described her as having rampant Feminism, I think. R: Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, women must fight to have employment, she knew, because she was left a widow with £1,000 - the rest was put into trust to me and my sister - and no qualifications, nothing. I: And she taught you that in that message? R: Yeah. She just said, "Whatever you do, you've got to have qualifications. Either you become a secretary, or you become a buyer in Harrods" - because she knew I was interested. It hadn't really occurred to her to think about university because she thought she would have to pay. I: Mmm. And didn’t she give you J.S. Mill at some point? R: Yes, that's right. Yes. The night before I went to Paris, that she packed up The Subjugation of Women into my suitcase. You know, I think she'd changed radically under Mr. Skidelski. You know, she was probably apolitical, but Mr. Skidelski totally radicalised her. She visited me at the time of the Suez Crisis, in boarding school, she came down, and she was repeating what he said, which was that the Brits and the French and the Israelis got together in order to have a reason to invade the Suez Canal. And, of course, that's come out years later. It was Skidelski who said it. In the Civics class I repeated this. Ooooh! I was nearly beaten up by my contemporaries, whose daddies were flying into Suez. I was totally cold-shouldered by all my contemporaries, that I could say that the Brits and the French and the Israelis got together. So I was radicalised through this Skidelski then. I: That’s very interesting. R: That was 1956. I: Now, one thing I was just slightly confused about is the geography of your early life, because you got back to Liverpool, and then you were in Somerset - is that right? R: Yes. Yes. I: And then where did you go? R: And then we went to East Grinstead, because my father's parents had a house - it was called "Ripswood" - outside East Grinstead. So they allowed us to live there, rent-free, and that was when my father taught at East Grinstead Grammar School. But apparently - I hear from my mother - that he hated being a crowd controller. He was a real intellectual. My mother said he was nose was in a book all the time. And again, I've got half his books here. He actually said to her, to her horror, you know, "I don't care if I live in a pigsty". He was no domestic interest in nice furniture or anything, he was just always reading - in German, in English, in French - and he was a scholar. And then he saw this job in Cranwell. I: Cranwell, which is in Lincolnshire. R: In Lincolnshire, which is the elite RAF College, and I've got a lovely picture of him and my mother with a French prince visiting, he was a duke or something, so my father was always the intermediary. I: And then you go off to boarding school. R: Lincolnshire was probably something to do with being flat, and my father loved swimming, and polio is waterborne, and they had no idea what caused it, and so we were sent to boarding school. I never saw my father again. My mother went back to that tiny cottage - it was in a sort of farmyard next to a big posh house, where we befriended the girls who were our age - I: Where was this one? R: Near Sleaford. I: Oh, in Lincolnshire. R: In Lincolnshire, Ruskington. That was where we lived in a rented - it was just a sort of farm worker's cottage, and after my father died in October, eventually my mother, who recovered from pneumonia, I think she went back in November/December, the cottage hadn't been inhabited since, and she gave away most of our toys to jumble sales. I: But your mother came down to London then, did she? R: Well, she was staying, at first, with her mother, in Yeovil, but then she got the job in Hammersmith. My father died in 1950, my mother got the job, I don't know whether it was that December, or whether it was January, but then she managed to get a mortgage on a house in Ealing/Acton with my grandmother as guarantor, so we would go back, in the holidays, to Ealing and Acton. My mother had quite a drive to Hammersmith, but to us, that house was just an enclave, it was Paradise really. Ironically, when I think about the design of this house [in East Oxford], it's probably rather similar - unconsciously I probably chose the same bay windows! Although it was semi-detached. I: And then can I just go back on the school side. Did you go to a school before the boarding school? R: Yeah. Yes, first of all we went in East Grinstead we went to a primary school, and then when we moved to Lincoln, again we were in a primary school, in Ruskington. It was called Ruskington. I was only there for a year. I: And were there any significant teachers at those schools? R: Well, it's funny, because my mother showed me a school report by the Headmaster - God knows where it is now, if I've thrown it away - but it actually said, "Judith is brilliant". And I was eight then. But what was interesting was that both my sister and I, like children do, we picked up a Lincolnshire accent. We 'd say, "grass", and we'd say, "water", and my father and mother would tease us, but children are bilingual, they do that. I was taught to write with amazing looped handwriting, and when I went to the boarding school, they said, "That's how maids write". And so I had to go back, at the age of nine, to writing with unjoined up letters and no loops, in order to re-learn that I shouldn't have a working-class writing, and no trace of a Lincolnshire accent. Again, I've got another article. Huddersfield University have a Centre for British Identity, and suddenly, by chance, on group e-mails about anthropology of Britain, they said, "There's a conference on the other British Isles". So I sent an abstract, 18 months ago, on the Isle of Wight, and I said it was a place of prison, that it was where you imprisoned the upper classes, but also the most dangerous prisoners were put in Parkhurst. So I said, "There's this other island that has this paradox of being close to the upper classes with the Cowes sailing. Even the Head of BP went on a sailing Cowes thing, when he escaped Florida, and that was considered a scandal. So it's got all these paradoxes, and I said that I've been obsessed with prisons ever since, because I was actually imprisoned there for nine years. I: So the School was on the Isle of Wight? R: Yes. Yes. I: What was it called? R: The Upper Chine, because it was named after an amazing little stream with huge banks. Ironically, I went, with a friend, in 1998, he was External Examiner at Southampton, and he said, "Oh, let's do a day trip to Isle of Wight", because he was the son of a railwayman, and he said, "We always had free travel, and we would go to the Isle of Wight as a holiday", you know, working-class. It was a place for mass tourism as well as the upper classes and Queen Victoria and Alfred Tennyson, it's got all these paradoxes. We drove to my boarding school, and I started wandering around, and he said, "It's closed". I said, "It can't be closed!" He said, "Look, there's nobody here. It should be 'A' Level time". And it was just being sold off. And I managed to get permission to return a month later with a professional film-maker, and with somebody I'd meanwhile met at a conference, because she'd read my boarding school article, and she revealed she'd been to the School - she recognised it from my article. And we filmed, we went all round. I've got an article on that, and it was actually bulldozed and demolished a month later. I: I think it would be nice if we could put on record some of what you felt about the School, even though you’ve written that. R: (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) Yes! It’s quite strong, actually, saying that you felt it was a prison, isn’t it. R: Oh, it was. Mmm, yeah. The irony is that the international elite were sent there. We had a cousin of Queen Soraya of Iran. We had a number of children from Iran, from Singapore, from Canada, Africa, and after lights out, I had a bed next to a woman called Mina Movaga, and she would teach me Persian. And that was my escape. She would tell me about the Caspian Sea and everything. Only three days ago I went into a newsagent in Oxford, behind that awful Bonn Square, and I heard these two guys talking, and I said, "What language?" And they said, "Parsee". So I said, "Yeck dor ser johapanshish" (PHONETIC) "Doctor, a bad doctor", and they went, "Oh!" (LAUGHS) It's magic! So there were wonderful things in that I learnt, ironically, about other cultures. But there was a wonderful woman called Mimi Calvarti, who I've since seen, she was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot poetry prize 18 months ago, two years ago, and they were talking about her work on the radio, and she's got a book of poetry called The Chine. So I contacted her through her agent, and then I sent her my book with the two articles on the boarding school that are in here, and she said, "Judith! Oh, how did you remember that?! My God!" And she sent me a copy of her poetry. And this is the moving thing, is that she said she was awarded a Royal Mail Poetry Fellowship. She was sent to this school, aged five. She didn't go back to Iran until she was 18. And she said, "As I was writing, thinking about what themes for this Royal Mail thing, I thought, 'Letters home', and then I thought, 'What's home?'" And she thought her home is Upper Chine. So she went back to the School two years after I had filmed it, and it had all been bulldozed, and she was devastated. And all she could remember and see was the vegetation, because it's been turned into a sort of B & B and houses have been built. But then I had this historic meeting with her. I taped our interview, and I came with a shortened DVD of some of the footage. She was desperate, she said, "Judith, can I use this? You've got the Chapel! You've got the gym!" It was so poignant! So I'm saying there are the memories, but I learnt, very early on, that I hated the place, and I think my sister didn't know she hated it. I: What did you hate about it? R: I went there - I only discovered a year later, the day my father died. I was reading in The Times in the library, and there was "In Memoriam", which my father's parents had put, "October 9th". I wasn't even told. So then I discovered that we were sent off to that school only ten days before he died. We weren't told till November. So I think I hated it that I was not allowed to grieve. The most important person in my life, who was teaching me French, who was taking me on wonderful bike rides, and we weren't allowed to show emotion. It was breaking the rules to cry. So I think, from then on, I became a rebel. I've been to psychotherapy and all sorts, and one woman said - I went to a therapist here who specialises on people who go to boarding school - and she said, interestingly, "Judith, no wonder you've emphasised autobiography, because that's the only thing you had. You had to retreat into yourself". I would imagine that my father was still alive, and that one day he would be wheeled out in a wheelchair, and they were hiding him. I'm saying it's retrospective, but I hated the rules. I wasn't sporty, whereas Mimi Calvarti, she said, "Judith, I was encouraged, because" - and she came up with this dreaded word, "I was an all-rounder. I was good at hockey, I was good at netball, I was good at languages, I was good at this, and good at that." We had compulsory sports every day, an hour and a half of compulsory hockey, and it was all orders, orders, orders, whistle, whistle. Then when I went back with this film-maker, we bumped into several other of our contemporaries, because they were busy clearing the Chapel. They were devoted. They knew the School was going to be dismantled, and they were trying to find the owners - the donors - of these Chapel chairs. And I took a chair, I took one for my sister and one for myself, and I've got one in my study. The one thing we all said was, "Do you remember Miss Passmore?" Called her "Pig". And she would come up behind you, and she'd put her finger, like a bayonet, into the back, saying, "Stand up straight. Stand up straight". The emphasis was on sports, and I was an intellectual. I: Mmm, posture and that, I suppose. R: Yes. You know, we couldn't put our arms on the table. You could never eat with your fork, shovelling peas up like that. Of course, when I went to France, you put your hands on the table like that. Everything - I've got all that in the article - is bodily control. That's why one of the most inspiring books I read later was, Discipline and Punish by Foucault. So it was bodily control. I knew this inner resentment. Every book you had that was your own, it had to be passed by the Headmistress. She would look at it, and put a signature, in pencil, to see if it was all right. I: And how much could you talk? R: Well, you couldn't talk in the passage, you couldn't talk after lights out. When could you talk? You had break time at eleven - the bell, the electric bell would go every 20 minutes. When the bell, electric bell, rang in the morning, and you were lying in bed, you had to be standing by the time the bell stopped, which was maybe three minutes. So it was all orders, orders, orders, discipline, discipline. This lovely woman I went with, Susan Caffrey - she was a lecturer in sociology at Greenwich University - and we both realised how we became intellectuals, we said we didn't fit in, because her mother was divorced, and that was an absolute stigma, and her mother, in order to be near her daughter, her mother became the Housekeeper at the School. And in the end, I think it was Susan, anyway, at least one of the children, they just stopped eating. In the end, Susan - I think she stopped eating - and the Headmistress said, "You're daughter's got to leave, because she's going to die". We didn't fit into the nuclear family, and both of our mothers were downwardly mobile, and so we thought we were critical. And she became a sociologist. She also said, she said, "They couldn't handle crises". I've written in this article on the Isle of Wight, that one of the girls went mad. Her parents were in Kenya - and this was the height of the Mau Mau - and she saw them maybe once a year for maybe a month, but she had grandparents in Sandown, next to Shanklin - the School was at Shanklin. It was wonderful, because a girl would be allowed to take out another girl to go out with visiting relatives, and these lovely older grandparents in Sandown, we'd spend the Saturday afternoon with them, and then go back to the School. Suddenly Jenny's grandfather died - and again, no account was taken for mourning - and Jenny would lie in bed, weeping, howling, and I would break all the rules and go by her bedside, and try and comfort her. In the end, she became totally distracted, and I think she got 'flu and she was in the Sick Room, and she became mad. She kept saying there were little men coming through the windows, also black men, and they were falling down the walls. She was going mad. And we had a rota where we secretly went and said, "Could we see Jenny?" They didn't understand it! Then there was a day out where we went, once a year, to the cinema, and she was at the cinema, and she started going down the aisle, acting like a dog, lifting her leg, pretending she was peeing on all the seats. And she was sent to a mental hospital, and I never know what's happened to her since. So they couldn't even understand madness. And yet they thought they were caring for us. I broke my arm, they told me I was trying to get attention. For two weeks I had it in a sling, and then the Matron said to me, "You've got to stop trying, you're just trying to get attention because your Daddy's died" and, "Take this scarf off". Then she turned me round, and she said, "Okay, darling. You can wear that sling". I didn't understand what was happening. The next day, we were marching out - because we had to march to military music - she stood in the corridor, and she went like this - this is the Matron - and then she took me up to the local cottage hospital for an X-ray. And it was broken here. She just said to the X-ray woman, "Yes, well, I turned her round, and her left shoulder was hanging lower than her right". So my mother thought we were being cared for. My sister broke her foot. It was never - she's still got a permanent bump. It was a brutal regime. I don't care when people say, "Look, after the War, you needed to pretend that everything was normal". I'm sorry, it's left its wounds. It might be explained by the War, but that's not the way you deal with it. Like I said, the Queen didn't understand, ironically, that the nation was mourning Princess Diana, and that her boys this, that, and the other, and it just completely unleashed - it broke the stiff upper lip British culture. Actually, most of those people were crying for other deaths. It was vicarious mourning. They weren't really mourning for Princess Diana, who, again, she didn't even have an 'O' Level. I: But were there no positively significant teachers at the School? R: Well, this French woman did encourage me. Then there was one who Mimi remembers, and she's written a whole poem about him, he's called Aubrey de Selincourt and his daughter married Christopher Robin - he was friendly with A.A. Milne - whole sort of elite. He was retired. He'd translated The Iliad and key Penguin texts were translated by him. He was a retired intellectual. He was inspiring, but I think he was wary of me. I mean, I didn't idolise him, but after I did get my 'A' Level in English Literature and English Language. I wrote him a really emotional letter, "What an inspiration you've been", and he never replied. Whereas Mimi said she wrote him a letter and he did reply. So I think, again, did he think I was looking for a paedophile? I don't know. But his lectures, his teaching on Keats and Shelley - but then, at the same time, there was a thing in me that thought - I didn't have the words - but he represented the status quo. I think he thought, "Girls are just going to be nice wives". That he was passing time with these girls, but there was no question of any of us going to university, it was just a pleasure and a fun for him. We were just being geared to make nice dinner conversation as the correct sort of wives. So, no, no, the only inspiration - no, I think it was only when I got to Oxford, but in most cases, St. Hilda's hated me as well. I: Well, we’ll come to that in a while. And you describe the School as a preparation for dependence. R: Yes. Yes. Yeah, you were supposed to make a good marriage. And my best friend, called Sue, she was not an academic, she left at 16, after 'O' Levels, but she died of cancer about three years ago. I broke up contact with her, but I heard through somebody else, that she was very very bitter. And my sister had a reunion with some of our contemporaries. ... I think my sister, she gave up her very promising career, she got her Ph.D. before me, she joint wrote a standard textbook for zoology, for schools, and then she, you know, gave it up to be with her husband, and had these brilliant boys. I: Can I ask you another thing about these articles, which I think are very fascinating, including your comparison with boys’ schools. R: Yes. I: It’s something rather unusual, isn’t it, to draw on your own memories, as an anthropologist? R: Yes. Yes. Mmm. Yeah. Mmm. I know. Well, that was why that book, Anthropology and Autobiography. I'm so amused because it's called a classic now. I: Was this your own idea, or were you influenced by somebody? R: Well, it all goes back to, ironically - it depends what time in your career you say this, but I've recently published, 2009, an article called, "Written Out and Written In". When I graduated, I got a terrible degree, because I'm no good at unseen exams. We had to do all our exams in six days, and I also had an illness. Our politics don in St. Hilda's, was Sybil Crowe, who was the daughter of Sir Eyre Crowe, who wrote the Zinoviev Letter. I don't know if you know that, do you? I: I know about the Zinoviev Letter, yes. R: Yeah, well, he wrote it. I: Yes, I see. R: It was in order to make sure that the Labour Government didn't get in. So she was extremely Right-wing. Half the essays which I had to write were not even on the syllabus, and the year after me, everybody doing PPE got a Third, so they realised that something was wrong. So I got a very very bad degree. I found that the course, the PPE course, was pathetic. But I had an amazing group of contemporaries, many of whom have become professors, and all over they're big shot names. I've got a wonderful picture of me with Bob Rowthorne, Sheila Rowbotham, and Gareth Steadman-Jones, who was my boyfriend when I was an undergrad., and Angus Hone, who recently died, and there's going to be a memoriam in his honour, we were all on the Left, and we would have the most amazing discussions. We were reading Marcuse. We were reading all these books that weren't on the syllabus. So, anyway, I graduated with a Third Class Degree. I was viva'd for a 2:1, because in those days, there was no 2:1, 2:2, it was 1, 2, 3 or 4. And I arrived late for my best paper. I'm giving you the background, it's obviously rambling but tell me if it's off the point. I: Well, I was hoping you were going to talk about using your own memories. R: Well, it's that I came out with a very very bad degree, which I think was total injustice. When I had the viva, I'm very proud of what I said in the viva, and this dreadful man, Pilchinski, he sniggered through my answers. I realise, retrospectively, I was actually doing a Paul Willis Learning to Labour, before that book had been written, but I was sent away, and my career was ruined, because I wanted to be an academic. But my then boyfriend, in my last year, was this man called Hugh Brody, and he got a fairly mediocre PPE Degree as well, but he was marked as "gifted", and they gave him - that was when the SSRC was just starting - so they gave him an SSRC grant, and he decided to look at the theme of demoralisation in the West of Ireland. But we had one year living in Upper Heyford, in Oxford - and this is where I - starting, that I began to move beyond my social class, including meeting Mr. Busby. Hugh had a wonderful way of getting to know people beyond his class, and I'm sure it's something to do with him being an outsider. He was Jewish, one side of his ancestors were Austrian and disappeared in the camps and whatever, and then I went, with him, to the West of Ireland, as his wife - with a Belfast Woolworths wedding ring - and I learnt about fieldwork. I was just doing part-time teaching at the College of FE at Banbury Tech. and whatever, and then I did a Certificate in Education at Garnett College, and then we broke up. Then I learnt about other cultures. This was the time of the Swinging Sixties, and yet we were going to the West of Ireland, living with the most amazing people who just lived off potatoes and an egg a day or something, and when I did my anthropology course, Leach had a whole course on Malinowski - there were only five of us, because they didn't have a proper post-grad thing, it was all undergrads, but there were just five of us doing a Conversion Course - and I thought, "I know about fieldwork". I also had learnt, instinctively, that your gender and your ethnicity - because Hugh was Jewish, called "Brody", but they all relabelled him "Brady", they thought he must have Irish ancestry, he never revealed that. His supervisor, Brian Wilson, absolutely bonkers, told him, "You mustn't go with anybody else", because he knew we lived together. "You've got to be a bachelor, and you've got to say you're Catholic". Well, how can you say somebody who has been brought up as an Orthodox Jew, to pretend to be Catholic and go to Confession? It's absolutely bonkers. So I had that sort of scepticism. You can't pretend to be Catholic if you're Jewish, and then go through the parade of going to Confession! You'd be found out as a fraud! So there were all these things. And the final twist was, I'd left Hugh, ... he wrote up this book, Inishkillane, and I didn't feature in at all. So this is the thing about what is actually going on in the field? I went there with my Belfast wedding ring, in a Catholic community. You couldn't say, "Look, you know, we're living together. We've been together for two years", and "Can we have a double room?" sort of thing. We were greeted, and they would say, "When did you get married?" and all that sort of thing. We had to invent a date and all that, and what shocked me - I think this must have been the trigger - was to read this book. He came and gave me a copy, we met up in a pub in London. I was, by then, employed on the Gypsy Project at Regent's Park, and he put the book down on the table, and he said, "You're going to be very angry when you read this". I was just fascinated - and I've written it all up in this article - that I didn't feature! And it actually starts in the first person, "When I arrived at Kate Neagh's place." Because we got to know Kate Neagh, because another person in Lower Heyford, Maud Kennedy, an artist, she painted this [picture] of Mr. Busby, Maud told us to meet Kate Neagh, because Maud had lived - and that's some of her paintings up there. Maud, brilliant, brilliant artist - she told us to contact Kate Neagh because Maud had during the War, disappeared to the West of Ireland, with her children, to escape bombing or whatever. She, herself, wasn't Catholic or Irish, and Kate was her neighbour. So when we turned up at that place, we just said, "Look, we're friends of Maud". And Kate said, "Oh, me darlings!" you know! And Hugh's book starts out with, "Oh, me darlings! And then we had tea." So I was written out! I: Obviously your presence was crucial, but did you actually do some of the research for him? R: Well, I was easing [it for him], as John Blacking - who was Professor of Anthropology at Belfast, he's since died - I told him about it, and he said, "You eased it, because the bachelor from Britain is, they're dodgy! There are plenty of bachelors in rural Ireland, but who is this stranger? Whereas if you come with a wife, you're a normal couple". And he said, Blacking said, "You eased the way for him". He was human. And also, of course, I would report to Hugh any women's conversations. Sometimes there were young women that were mesmerised that I'd lived in London, Swinging London, you know! They thought, "Oh, God! Let's hear about it!" I wore a mini skirt. So they would invite me to tea, and then I would come back to Hugh and tell him some of the things I witnessed. I worked behind the bar, I helped bring in the turf on my back. Hugh had a brilliant way, but I learnt about fieldwork. I also was shocked that he thanked everybody, you know, "Thank you, Alison Sorkiss for helping me with the index". Thanks somebody for pointing out this literature. It was all written in the first person! Then there was a review in the International Socialist Review or whatever, and it said, I've said there that, to them, this was extraordinary that somebody should be living in rural Ireland. I remember when I met up with Robin Blackburn, who I used to know, when Hugh and I moved to a cottage in Upper Heyford, I bumped into Robin, because I knew him through Gareth, and he said, "What are you doing living out in the country?" You know, "What are you doing for the working class?" When Hugh's book came out in 1973/4, it was considered amazing that a Lefty should go and live with peasants in the outer boom docks! And in the review it said how brilliant it was using an autobiographical style. It was all bullshit! I: Oh, you mean the presentation. R: Yes! That he said, "I did this", and "I did that". And it said, "What a brilliant style, that he used the autobiographical style", and I'd been there! And then his interpretation of some of the events - I: So you’re saying this put you on the track of doing it properly yourself? R: Well, it put me on to thinking all these monographs I'd been reading, how did they do it? There's no description of the fieldwork. Of course, Clifford and Marcus have the famous arrival scenes, they're very clever in their book, Riding Culture. They say that anthropologists said, "We're true scientists. We're not literary people. We're not travelogues". I think it was Mary Louise Pratt said, "They've used the literary trope, which is the arrival scene, and that is straight out of literature". So I began to look, unpick the texts, and I was frustrated in that course because there was nothing about how you did fieldwork, or how people did fieldwork. That was when Malinowski's diary was published - in '67 it had been published - and I was fascinated, and Leach said, "It should never have been published". And I since wrote an article on it. I actually wrote it before Gertz or anybody else. Of course, because it was in Jasso (?? - 121.06), it didn't get the same publicity. I: Isn’t that the one that’s in - R: The Self and Scientism. Yes, yes, I reprinted it, yes. But it was considered, you know, it's now considered pioneering. But Gertz, you know, everybody was arguing, but I'm saying that I think it was, because even in the seventies, when I was writing up my Ph.D., I started writing drafts of this of this article. Yeah, I started writing, like, "How could he say that this guy was trying to commit suicide?" or something, and I've argued that I have a different take on it. But Hugh's interpretation I didn't agree with. And also, the key thing was that his whole thing was that the West of Ireland was decaying and demoralised, and I saw stamina, ingenuity, persistence. I admired these people. And women were invisible in his text! So I began to look at gender and what was the construction of a monograph? Because I knew that there was a monograph that was fake. I mean, not all fake, but he'd written me out. And he'd been praised for being this lone man who'd broken through the jungle of the boom docks of West of Ireland, and actually gone and talked to peasants! I: Well, I can see how that draws your interest in autobiography, but what about Anthropology and Autobiography? Isn’t that slightly different? R: Well, again, I've written in an article in honour of Shirley Ardener, it was a whole festchrift - it was Shirley who came up to me, she always had these brilliant ideas! She first told me to write, and asked me to give a paper on gypsy women, and I'd never thought of it. I thought, "Well, I'm a Feminist", I thought it was Feminist just to go to university, and I hadn't problematised women. I wrote that article. And there was this wonderful supportive seminar. And then, out of the blue, she said, "Why don't you give us a paper on your boarding school, because you're always talking about it". I didn't even know I was always talking about it, probably because I thought every single step I had was a triumph, that I had gone to university - and she asked me to write the article. It had not occurred to me! I started writing it in '78, I think it was - no, I remember I gave the first presentation, it was absolutely bizarre, the day before my viva for my Ph.D., so it was '77/'78, the viva was January '78, and I remember, I gave this in Queen Elizabeth House, and there was honestly, about 60 people - it was a well attended seminar in those days! And there were women in the audience, crying, came up to me, and they said, "You've brought it all back for us". You know, "You've … we had to fight to go to university". But there were several people came up to me and said, "My God, what a performance!" So it was thanks to Shirley. But, in preparing to write it, I sat in my study - I had a house in Islington then, with my partner, Jim - and I went through terrible depressions, just days of fighting back despair, just bringing back those memories. It wasn't a fun thing to do, but I felt propelled to do it. But before that, I had thought I'd buried it, but obviously Shirley said I was talking about it so much that she asked me to write, to do a presentation, you know. I: And you cite David Pocock as somebody who was supportive. R: Yes! Yeah, well, that was the wonderful thing. Because dear Paul Barker, he would send me all these anthropology books to review for New Society. He was utterly amazing. I mean, it's such a tragedy that that journal stopped. And I was asked to review a book by Pocock, and there was the notion of a personal anthropology. But before that, you had to have a sort of patent. You had to have a rationale, because when I proposed this with Helen, it was a huge uproar. I was in Essex at the time, and I'd come back from my trips in Normandy. I'd been in France, I was English, it was very specific. They loved the fact that I was Anglaise in Normandy, because the English had helped with the Normandy Landings, so I was feted wherever I went! The Mayor lifted up the wine and drank to this Anglaise! (LAUGHS) I was swept off! So I suddenly thought, "God, you know, my identity as Anglaise facilitated everything!" So I came back, and I suddenly thought, there's an ASA, and you have to put a proposal two years in advance, and I rang up the Director, and they said, "You have to have a hundred copies of your proposal on the very first day in" - was it in Ipswich? Yes, was it Ipswich or no, it was Norwich. Norwich. And I, literally, rang around friends, saying, "Would you do a joint proposal with me?" One friend wasn't in, and I rang up this wonderful Helen Callaway, and she was all into literary theory, and she said, "Okay". I scribbled the proposal, I took it into lovely Carol, the typist in Essex, that morning - because I couldn't type in those days - and she typed it, and I took 100 photocopies, and I took the train to Norwich - I had to be there by two - and I proposed it. But Tim Ingold, he had thought his proposal was all wrapped up, and he'd gathered two other rivals so they could do a huge thing on "Man and Nature" I think it was, and he hadn't even bothered to turn up! Marilyn Strathern was delegated, because she was professor at Manchester, to do the proposal. So you had to stand up in a huge conference meeting at the end of the week, and speak for your proposal, and then there'd be a vote, open, hands up - you know, there was 200 people there! Marilyn had to speak for Tim Ingold. Before I'd spoken, the rumblings were, "This is a Feminist plot. It's Narcissism", and Tony Cohen, who was later to be my colleague in Edinburgh, he shouted out, "California-speak! There are loads and loads of Narcissistic books, navel-gazing crap. We don't want another one like that". Anyway, I'm very proud of myself, because I was so nervous, I was absolutely hyperventilating, and I actually went to the corridor - the loo wasn't there, and I took my top off, and then my vest! And if anybody had seen me, I was half naked! (LAUGHS) Anyway, the vote came, and the dinosaurs - Leach and Raymond Firth, and Edmund - they all put their hands up for me! And we had an overwhelming vote! But it was considered "California-speak Narcissism". And it was actually a brilliant conference. I: Yes, I’ve seen the volume. R: And I don't get a bean from it because all the royalties go to the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial, because it's an ASA Monograph. But I was so amused when I met a literary person at Brookes, she was Indian, and she said, "It's an honour to be in the room with Judith Okely , having written this classic". I said, "A classic? Do you know the controversy about it?" (LAUGHS) I: Do you think this might be a good moment to break? R: Yes. Yes, I'm sure. Yes. Right. I hope we can walk to this place. R: Well, I was invited to give the Phyllis Karberry Lecture, in 1989, which was part of the Gender Centre. Every year there's a lecture, commemorative, in honour of different anthropologists, and I decided to celebrate individuals who didn't fit in. It's called "Defiant Moments". And I devoted half the lecture to Madame Gregoire - the Frenchwoman who taught me how to hand milk cows, and really changed the direction of my research - and Mr. Busby, absolutely wonderful man! Hugh and I met him through Maud [Kennedy], the painter. He lived round the corner - there he is as a young man, I got all these photos - he was a deserter from the First World War, and this was amazing, because in those days, as he said, the Conscientious Objectors were middle-class … He was a lad who'd left school at 12 or something, and he knew that you couldn't say, "I'm not going to fight" for the First World War, but he didn't agree with it, but he said, "You had to enlist, because you bring shame on the village". He lived in a village north of [Oxford], he lived in Kiddington at the time. In the end, he said, "I was a Communist and an atheist". Anyway, it's all there. We would go and sit at his feet and listen to his stories. Then when Hugh and I broke up, I lost contact - I always called him "Mr. Busby" - but when I got my post-grad. grant, I'd done my main research, but I got one at Oxford, I just drove off like a homing pigeon, back to Lower Heyford where he had a bungalow. I hadn't seen him for about five or six years, and I just came through the door and I said, "Hello, do you know who I am?" He said, "It's my Judith!" And then I tape-recorded him - his stories. I've been in touch with Ian Hislop because he did stories of First World War deserters and Conscientious Objectors. He's unique, because this is a working-class lad. And he escaped, he got a ticket to go to, he thought, to Guyana. But anyway, it's all in the story. And he wrote a poem about it, and he dictated it to me. So I thought, "I will, in Oxford, in the Taylorian Institute, I will reinstate you", like your community studies, "I will put, in profile, a brilliant hero who lived only 15 miles from there". And, in fact, a very upper class anthropologist came up to me after, and said, "Oh Judith, how did you ever meet him?" (LAUGHS) And somebody else said to me, "How could you not have met him if you lived in that village!" But this upper class guy, who's done work in an exotic part of the world, he wouldn't dream of talking to the villagers! And Maud really captured him in that beautiful picture. So he was an inspiration to me. I taped him reminiscing, and I'm going to give the cassettes to the Imperial War Museum - I must, soon, before the house is burnt or whatever, and the cassettes destroyed. So there's an example of oral history. I: Before the words “Oral History.” R: Yes. I recorded him in 1973. I: But the picture is 1960s. R: Yeah, yeah, that's it. That was painted before I ever met him. But when Maud died I was allowed to choose some of her pictures, and also I've got some of his pictures, because he was self-taught. I've got a lovely watercolour down there somewhere. So that's just an inspiration, that man. I: Good! Now, we’ve gone through your education, through the schools, and then you go to the Sorbonne. R: (LAUGHS) Yes! I: I’ve got a feeling, you haven’t said quite enough about your time in the Sorbonne! R: (LAUGHS) Well, first of all, my mother thought the right thing to do was put me with a family, and I knew she had very little money, and at huge expense I was put in the Rue Clichy, which is up in the North, near the Red Light District. But we found out, through the British Council, there were these families who were willing to have an English - and I was absolutely horrified, because when I arrived there, at huge expense, there were two other English girls staying there. They weren't interested, they weren't going to the Sorbonne, this was their like gap year, and they talked English all the time. Fortunately, another Iranian [Mariam], she was already at the Sorbonne, she'd escaped the dreaded School, she escaped at 16 and studied at the Sorbonne, and I looked her up, and she was at the Cercle Concordia, ironically, run by the mother of the future Mitterand - the President. We didn't know that! I announced to my mother that I wanted a room in the Cercle Concordia, because I said I hadn't come to France to sit with two English girls at meals, who weren't interested in French culture. Of course, the family were livid, and they charged my mother for the next three months, even though I had left. But the Concordia was very cheap, and it was a room of my own - you know, the Virginia Woolf thing! I could read, I went to those lectures, and I was an intellectual, I could celebrate being an intellectual, for the first time. Incidentally, a key book when I was about 16 or 17, was Colin Wilson's, The Outsider, and apparently it appealed to a lot of people of my generation because he introduced me to Kanu, to Dostoyevsky, to Tolstoy. I've T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom up there, I read, and the outside of that was what I was. But I just absolutely soaked up everything, and I read from dawn till dusk. I didn't have a mad sex life or anything, I thought that I was - Mariam, she influenced me a lot, because all these men were making passes at me. It was a mixed nationality at the Sorbonne, they weren't Frenchmen, and that's when you discover that the Parisians are not open. They hate foreigners. It was quite different in Normandy, you know, I was so welcome. But they're very self-contained. And Marianne was very influential. And she had this notion of a unique love, that one day you'll meet a unique love and all that sort of thing, and so I thought I would meet somebody at one point. But I was very devoted, and I'd go to the Louvre every week, and all these art galleries, and these wonderful little tiny cinemas where every two hours there was a new programme, and you could go in the afternoon, and I'd watch French films, because as I said, we didn't go to the cinema at school, and it was just a cultural paradise. That's when I took the Entrance after the first year. I then came back, I had Mr. Skidelski for a few lessons, and I took the Entrance Exam to Oxford, and then I went back to the Sorbonne, because you learn you get in in about January, and then I went back to the Sorbonne, and I did the courses that I hadn't done before. I: So what were the courses? Mainly literature was it? R: Well no. Actually, I mean, I've even got the textbooks upstairs - Castecs Issuar (?? - sp. 10.36) - I've even got them if you want me to bring them down, do you want me to? I: No. No, no. R: No, no, no. Actually, it was all based on the French Baccalaureat. I went to French politics, Maurice Duverger who was a big name, I mean, later doing PPE we read his books. Somebody on literature. Geography, history, language. We had a special guy who taught you how to make the right pronunciation, and he could tell what nationality you were, and say, "You have to go eee - eee. Vous etes Anglo-Saxon!" Whereas the English 'A' Level, you read Keats, Shelley, one Shakespeare play and one Jane Austen in two years - that's what you read. In the French thing, these books are wonderful. They would have the historical context, a mini biography of the writer, and then you'd have extracts, and you swept through from the mediaeval times, right up to Proust. So in a year, you know, I did all that. I was reading Balzac, I was reading Rimbaud, I was reading Verlaine, Baudelaire, ancient French literature, and there was this whole panoramic view, and the panorama of the history. The English empiricism is concentrate on half a volume of Keats - you never knew any of the context, nothing. So I really embraced the French learning that way. I: I’ve made a note that you mentioned a friend called, is it Hubert? R: Oh gosh, you've been doing your homework! (LAUGHS) Oh God! (LAUGHS) Oh my God! Well, I went on a one or two week skiing holiday through the university thing, and I went off to Austria, and it was all for students, and then I met up all these French students - I was the only English person there. And I met up with this guy I called "Hubert", who was at the L'Ecole Normale Superieure, which is where Sartre and de Beauvoir went, and that was literally down the road from my hostel. Funnily enough, I think I was drawn to him because, I found him totally unattractive, but he was an intellectual. Then he and I, and two other guys at the L'Ecole Normale, they said, "Let's drive to the Mediterranean". So we all went off there, and we stayed in separate rooms, although the other two guys kept thinking that Hubert and I were a couple, we weren't. And they locked us in a bedroom once at one point, and of course, they thought I couldn't understand French properly, and they would refer to me as "la bête" - "the fool". And then Hubert wanted to go to La Rochelle or something, Hubert wanted to take the boat over to the island, and I said I didn't want to go, because that was when we hitch-hiked to Normandy or Brittany, or something. It's all lost in time, but I remember him insisting that I had to go to the island off La Rochelle, and I said I didn't want to go, and then I said, "La bête" - "The fool has learnt to say no". And he was quite shocked, he said, "God, you know you were called 'la bête?'" In the end, I don't know how it was, I got to know this young woman in a hostel or something, a French woman, and we hitch-hiked back together to Paris. But he didn't feature much, I just thought I was going to, one day, meet my soul mate. I: It wasn’t him, then! R: No, no. I said he wasn't my soul mate, but I was in awe of him, because they knew everything, you know. Mind you, they didn't know anything about modern life, they just knew they could quote mediaeval poetry and this, that, and the other. I: Okay. So then you come back to England, and do you go straight to Oxford? R: Yeah. Well, you know, I stayed in the Concordia, ironically, that second time round, an English girl came to my door and she said that the Directress had advised that she meet me, because she was going to Cambridge and I was going to Oxford. We hitch-hiked together all round France in those days, and I'm Godmother to her son. Years later, when I was doing the Cambridge Conversion Course, she was going out with an anthropologist taught by Edmund Leach, and I didn't know, and this was now Johnnie Parry, who's Professor at the LSE, and he's one of the people I've interviewed for my book. So I've kept up with Margaret ever since. But I was in awe of her, because her father was a professor at Bristol, in Economics. I: So you start at Oxford, and I’m not quite sure what year. R: October, '61. I left school in '59. I left school and then I went to the Sorbonne and I had a year, then I came back the next autumn to do my Entrance to Oxford, so '59-'60, '60-'61, so the autumn of '61 I go to Oxford. I: Yes. Okay. Intellectually, how did you find being in Oxford? R: Well, I started doing French and Latin. And, of course, the other thing is, I realised that I've struggled all the way, because they said they would accept me for the French, but because I'd been taught Latin so badly at my school, that they said, informally, on the phone, they offered me a place to Oxford, but they said if I'm only doing one modern language, one language, I had to do Latin up to Prelims.. But they said I would have - informally, not in writing - that I would have to do a test in Latin before going up to St. Hilda's. So between being given a place in January, I then did a Wolsley Correspondence Course in Latin, and then they said they'd give me a test, and I was so honest - Margaret, who was fluent in Latin, they sent the test in about June/July, and Margaret, on my mother's kitchen table, invigilated and timed it, and then we posted it off. I mean, we could have cheated! And then Margaret and I went off hitch-hiking, we went to Spain and goodness knows, and when I came back in about September, whatever, my mother greeted me with the message that there was a letter from St. Hilda's saying that they'd rejected my place because I'd failed the Latin. And again, she said, "You've got to be a secretary". I'm saying, "I am a rebel. I don't take no". I found the letter from St. Hilda's, it said, "We are pleased to award you a place to read Modern Languages". I rang up Mrs. Gerard-Davies at St. Hilda's, and I said, "You've turned me down", and I said, "It's too late for me to apply to any other university, and you tell me this in September". She said, "Well, we've given your place to somebody else now. It's too late, anyway". And I said, "But the letter says I've been given a place. It doesn't say, 'provided you pass the Latin'". So I was an internal lawyer. And even my mother hadn't seen through that. She said, "Will you promise you'll be good at Latin?" and I said, "I promise". She rang me back an hour later, and she said, "We'll find you a place". But I could have lost it. But as Margaret said, she said, "I could've written that test for you. We could have cheated. Or you could have spent six hours over it!" Anyway, so when I come back up, the Latin is a nightmare, because you're not allowed just to do French, but you had to do Latin up to Prelims., and the fear was that I was going to fail Latin again. I failed it at Prelims. Meanwhile I was getting a reputation of somebody on the Left, and I was active in the Labour Club. One guy said, "Oh, we've got to" - he was on the Left, and he said, "Oh, Gerry", there was a guy who taught Classics at Exeter or Wadham, called Gerry [Fowler], he later became an MP, and apparently the male students went to him and said, "There's a good woman on the Left, would you prepare her for Latin?" And so he gave me tutorials in Latin, and I had to sit it again. And I remember, I got totally drunk on cider, and I went to the Schools to re-take the Latin, thinking, "I'm finished", and I actually passed it! I: What, while you were drunk? R: Yes! But by this time, I'd decided to changed to PPE. Because - this is going back to your question - I was absolutely shocked at the teaching of French. All the literary commentaries were written by English people. I had learnt to write essays in French. You wrote all your essays in English here, and also people were proud to speak French with an English accent! And then you read something on Sartre that said, "He doesn't look at the empirical something," and again, it was back to, for Prelims. you just read half of Baudelaire and one Balzac novel. It was back to all this limited stuff, compared to the panoramic view. And, of course, I was very political, because in France I became a Socialist and an atheist. I: Ah! Due to what? R: I was already incipient critique, because I said I got up in the Civics class and complained about the Suez thing, and I also complained about Cyprus. My mother's cousin was Acting Governor of Cyprus as it happened! (LAUGHS) I became atheist/agnostic - again, it was an anthropological moment, because I would go, every week, originally with those two English girls, to the Anglican church in the centre of Paris, the elite faubourg something or other, and I went in, and I was ready to take Communion after the ordinary mass and everything, and it was a St. Paul's moment on the road to Damascus, because there was this English clergyman talking probably about warm beer and cricket, like John Major, and I thought, "We're in the middle of Paris, and we're talking as if this little island is in England, and we're talking about cricket and class. What am I doing?" I said to my English friend, "I literally, I've come in to take Communion", and I said, "I'm not staying for Communion". I was still a Christian, and I walked out of that church, and then I bought a Bible in French, because I still believed in the King James Bible. And gradually, it was just another story. So that was it. I: Yes. But I’m still not quite clear, did you say you became a Socialist at that point? R: Well, I was already open to radicalism, but I think, through the influence of my friend Marianne, and also it was the time of the Algerian conflict. I: Oh. So did you become an activist? R: Well, no, not as an Englishwoman, no. But we were there actually during the great putsch when the White French tried to overthrow de Gaulle and take everything. And I was reading Le Canard enchaine, which was the radical paper, and it was long before '68 or anything like that, but there were demonstrations for the Freedom of Algeria. I: Yes. So would you be reading Marx by this point, or not? R: No. When did I start reading Marx? I think when I was an undergrad. But I was reading de Beauvoir, that was the great book - The Second Sex - which was not on the syllabus or anything, I just discovered it. But I think that the people I mixed with were, but there was no place for a foreigner to be an activist. I mean, you hardly met French people because that's how Parisians survive, they switched off from foreigners. I: Yes. Yes. So really, it was while you were in Oxford that you started reading these Socialist texts? R: I think so, yes. I mean, I've got Karl Marx's Kapital there, and Marcuse. I don't remember the great moment, but I joined up to the Labour Club and I was already sympathetic with CND. I went to CND meetings in my first term, and so I mixed with a whole group - that's how I got to know Bob Rowthorne and then later Gareth Stedman-Jones. I think I got it into my head even before I went to Oxford, I said, "I'm going to get women into the Union", because women were not allowed to be members of the Oxford Union. I: Yes. Tell me the story about that. R: Funnily enough, because I'm on the Gender Centre, you know, sometimes Union people say, "We want a Feminist", and about three years ago I went to speak, and the President hadn't a clue. They don't know about Feminism now, the younger males, and I sat there - it was a sort of panel - and there were all these Freshers, because it was the first/second week of term, and they wanted to come to this famous place, and I said, "Do you know, when I came, we women had to be up in the balcony, like in a mosque or a synagogue, looking down at our male undergraduate contemporaries debating. We had to look down at them". I befriended a very very clever guy called Roderick Floud, who's now Sir Roderick Floud, who became professor and all that, and he was a very very good organiser, and we formed a committee, and there was Roderick, there was me, later Michael Beloff joined the bandwagon, later Jonathan Aitken, so we had Liberal, Tory, Labour, all on a committee. I've since been told by students at the Union, that you can no longer lobby, but what Roderick did, because his father was to be an MP, he said, "You go round to all the Colleges, lobbying, finding out the members, male members, 'Are you in favour of women joining the Union?' and if they are, then you put a tick, and then on the day" - And then we proposed it, not "we", but others, and then there was a vote, and we lobbied for 24 hours before, and it was my duty, like others, to go round all the Colleges, like with the Labour Party, "You said you would vote. Have you voted yet?" We lost it the first time, and we joked, because John Sparrow, who was Head of All Souls, there was a huge letter in The Times saying, "All life members, please come, wherever you are, and vote against accepting women in the Union". So there was a huge group of people, they all came in coaches or something, and they probably died on the way back! So Roderick was so clever, he said, "Let's have a vote the next term, very quickly", and we said, "Half these octogenarians had died on their way home", and we won the vote the next time. And Roderick was an ace. As the vote was announced, he said, "Judith, go out to the corridor, there's a list up there where you put down your name, wanting to be a member". He knew the strategy, and I put my name there, and I got world publicity! I mean, people even wrote to me from Australia, saying, you know, "You must be our relative because you spell your name" - O K E L Y. It was announced, I've got photo cuttings of me, you know, front page of the Daily Express, "The first woman member of the Oxford Union". But it was symbolic. I: Did you speak immediately? R: No, because I had never really learnt to speak, you know. And funny enough, the John Thane, the then husband of Pat Thane - you know her? She's a historian. We met up, because she asked me to help launch that book last March. After the first vote, John Thane and an Indian guy, they both spoke against women joining the Union, because they said, "There's some women who are " - because I got huge media attention, even before the vote, because I had my long hair and my leather jacket and my contemporaries all had short cropped hair and I was a hippy/Bohemian. John Thane said, "Some people are exploiting it just to get their name in the media", and I knew I wasn't going to stand for office unless I was a good speaker, and I was totally inexperienced, so I didn't. I never stood as a speaker, or for office. It was a symbolic gesture, that was all. I spoke once in a follow-up debate, but I wasn't interested in high office. I: Interesting. You didn’t, I think, tell me whether you had any really significant tutors or lecturers. R: I know! (LAUGHS) Nobody in French. Then I said I switched to PPE. We had Miss Crowe, who was Right-wing. The lectures by Alasdair McIntyre, the philosopher, and Lord Hart, who gave some sensational lectures on the absurdity of sexual regulations in American law - because the other thing was, the lectures were nothing to do with the syllabus - that's the Oxford system! You know, it was somebody giving lectures on their forthcoming book. But Alasdair McIntyre was great, and Lord Hart, A.L. Hart. I once told a woman reader up in African Studies, or Law, or something, in Edinburgh, and she said, "My God, you went to his lectures! Oh!" So those two were fascinating. And then I was lucky because Gareth, he'd graduated the year before me, with a stunning First, and he got a place in Nuffield, and he knew Stephen Lukes. This was the first year they introduced sociological theory. You had two options, it was the first year they introduced sociology, and also political theory you could choose, so Gareth asked Stephen if he would be willing to supervise me to do the course, one-to-one. I did political theory, that was it, with him, and I did sociological theory with Brian Wilson - the one who later became Hugh's supervisor. And it was quite funny because Stephen rang me up about two years ago (LAUGHS), he said, "This is Stephen Lukes". I said, "No! Stephen!" He'd got my phone number, he was at a conference in Budapest, and he wanted me to review a book on gypsies. We reminisced, and then I said, "Do you know, Stephen, I thanked you in the preface to my gypsy book". I said, "You threw me a landline". Because at the end of my essay on Marx, he sat there, and he said, "That is the best essay I've ever heard on Marx", so I'd read the stuff. And I jokingly said it to him on the phone two years ago, and he said, "I can't remember that!" (LAUGHS) I: I remember, it was in the book! (LAUGHS) R: (LAUGHS) But Stephen gave me hope. And then I wanted to go on and do an MA in Sociology at the LSE, and I had to get references - that was before the Finals - and Miss Crowe rang up Stephen Lukes and said, "You are apparently putting your name down as a referee for Judith Okely . What on earth are you doing with that?" And he said, "She's brilliant! She's going to get a First". And Miss Crowe said, "No, she's going to get a Third". (LAUGHS) And she was right! I: Oh yes, of course! R: But just to carry on about this, that was the only person that gave me any hope. Because that was the other thing, you had women tutors who were often very bitter and angry. They all said they lost fiancés in the War, just like the women at my boarding school, and they weren't adventurous. And I said, "Miss Crowe made me [for] three successive tutorials, write essays on administrative law", and I was talking to my male colleagues and they said, "It's not even on the syllabus". They weren't on the Examination Boards. When I later emerged, having done that research job at the Centre for Environmental Studies, and then I registered for a D.Phil., at my own expense originally, until I was lucky to get an ESRC grant, I was talking to somebody, at some event - he was at Nuffield - and I met up with him later, and he said, "Judith, the mention of your name to Miss Crowe, has shortened her life by five years at least. She couldn't stop going on, 'What a disgrace to the University that that woman is registered for a D.Phil., and she wasted her time in the Union and in the Labour Club'". And I went to a party that Stephen was giving then, and I was in tears, and I told him that, and he said, "Judith, she's a disgrace to the University". So, we talk about mentoring, where is the mentoring? No. I: No. So you had to find your own way. R: Yes. I: And what about the social life in Oxford? R: Well, I had a mad social life, you know, because there was one woman for every nine men, and I just had a wild life. But I thought I met the love of my life, my first term, and ironically I went back to the very building where I first met him at a CND meeting, and he walked out and pursued me. Then he organised a CND march, and the police were very clever with their loud hailers in St. Giles, said, "Could we speak to the organisers of this march?" We were going to march to Brize Norton or something, and these people came, including this guy, and a very devout Quaker who was in his fifties, and the police promptly arrested them, and they were accused of organising an illegal demonstration. And then he went to prison... So I really picked this guy. He dumped me after ten days, having asked me to marry him. I: Did you find anyone better after that, then? R: Well, then the idea of unique love just was total rubbish, it was bullshit. You think you're going to have a life partner who actually says, "I'm madly in love with you", and we wrote letters to each other when he was in prison, I visited him every week in prison, and to have, then, somebody say, "Don't come near me", and, "Don't touch me", and "I don't want to have anything more to do with you." I went, as a day patient, to the Warneford, and I was on antidepressants and everything. So then, what was the point? So I just had casual relationships with anybody I liked. Then I met up with Gareth, and that was probably one of the best relationships I've had, because there was no real jealousy or envy or anger, that was a lovely set up, and then we drifted apart. And then I met up with Hugh. But I had many many lovers. And I was raped by a famous radical. Yep! Well, you know, I could just say a few - I see him on telly now. I won't say who it is, but I just think of that guy, and he parades as a radical now, and I think, "You raped me! How dare you go and defend the guy with Wikkileaks. You see him on television. I think, "No wonder you're defending him because you know what it's like to rape". I: But on the whole it sounds like a rather positive time of life. R: Oh yeah, yes. Of course, I didn't work with my nose to the - I had been in a segregated school where you never met any men, and I had met some absolutely wonderful people who I'm absolutely - it was really good. If I'd just sat down and read PPE and followed Miss Crowe, I would - and I went to a Reunion ten years ago at St. Hilda's, and a lot of the women said, "God, Judith, you were an inspiration." Because at St. Hilda's, you had to sign a contract to say you wouldn't marry, and that was when abortion was illegal, birth control for unmarried people was illegal. There's a Reunion picture. I refused to join the school photo of first years because I thought, "This is just like boarding school", but I was sent it the other week from St. Hilda's because they desperately want money, and there's going to be another Reunion. And there, very poignantly, is one girl, she was found in bed with her boyfriend during visiting hours, and she was expelled. And Miss Major, the Principal, wrote to every university she applied to, and to her grant authority, saying she was unfit for education. I: No! R: And her life was ruined. I: That’s appalling! R: And I wrote, recently, to the Principal of St. Hilda's, and I said, "You have the audacity to name the library after Miss Major". And then another woman, she got pregnant, she secretly married. She very naively told her history tutor that she was suffering from early morning sickness so her essay would be late. The woman rushed to the Principal, and this girl was banished to Reading. She was not allowed any lectures, tutorials or library, and she was allowed back to Oxford to take the Finals, eight months pregnant, and she wept throughout and got a Fourth. I: So the College, in some ways, was as bad as the School. R: It was boarding school. And when that woman was sent down by Miss Major, some of us had a petition. And then there was another woman who had a counter-petition. She married A.N. Wilson, and she was set for a job, she's got a lectureship here, and she wrote a counter-petition saying, "We support Miss Major, and we support her against girls that bring St. Hilda's into disrepute". And so the women at this Reunion, they said, "Judith", and I said, "Do you know about the petition?" "No". They were so embarrassed. And one who became editor of Prospect, Rosalind Miles, she said, "Judith, you were a figurehead for us. You were a figurehead, but we didn't realise it much at the time". I: So when we’re talking about “at the time”, that would be up to ’64? R: Well, I took an extra year. Because they thought I was going to fail the Latin, I was allowed to switch to PPE and then was told I'd do Prelims. in PPE. But I actually had four years. And again, the Local Authority said, "We'll stop paying for you", and then again I wrote a letter saying "I need a fourth year", and they paid, you know! (LAUGHS) And my mother, who was a social worker, didn't - I managed to get another year's payment in order to do PPE! I: Yes. Yes. R: So, you know, but I got the terrible degree, and, of course, I suffered, for years, for years with that. Absolute years. You're probably fading, are you? I: No, no, it’s not that. R: Do you want some tea or coffee? I: I think that’s a good idea, but I need to change the flash card! (LAUGHS) I: So there seems to be a gap between leaving Oxford in ’65 and starting the fieldwork for gypsies in ’71. I was wondering what you were doing during those years. R: Well, I said I was devastated when I got the Third, you see. You had to go to the School's building, and you looked at the list, and I was behind a queue of people, and I couldn't see myself First or Second, and I remember going to the Parks and just lying on the grass and weeping, weeping. Anyway, I was with Hugh at the time, so he got the grant, but we both went off to Greece, by the way, on holiday. It was then his brother, who was married to a Greek woman, suddenly got a phone call saying, "Tell Hugh Brody to come back to Oxford". Those were the days where - it was the founding of the [SSRC] Michael Young started that, didn't he? And he was given, he scraped a 2:1, well, a Second, but he was a "Golden Boy". And that makes me angry, because at Trinity, where he was, they had special tutorials to give them mock questions, in the last term, and it turned out to be so good that lots of men from other Colleges would go. But us women couldn't go because they'd know we weren't members of Trinity. So they were rehearsed. They were told what questions were going to come up, and " These are the best answers!" Anyway, so [Hugh] got an award, and then we went to live in this cottage in Upper Heyford. He would go to lectures in Oxford, and I was just the lowest of the low, and I got - and this is actually crucial for research purposes, this was another learning thing - I can't remember which came first, but I had two part-time jobs, one was working with Henri Tajfel, the famous psychologist. It's funny, there was a whole radio programme on him, talking about "group mentality", he'd done some research on that, and again, there they were praising him and blah, blah, on the radio. My interview consisted of me going to Wellington Square, to his room, and him touching me up all the way through the interview - running his hand up and down my arm, trying to grab my breast. I mean, you know, the audacity of it! And I couldn't protest because I wanted the job! And it was to interview primary school children about their attitudes to race. And I told Hugh afterwards that I'd been touched up by this guy, and Hugh was livid, and he told Stephen Lukes, who then said, ... "You just have to get used to it". So, you know, there was Feminism of a sort, but nobody had looked at sexual exploitation or power/abuse. Anyway, I never saw the man again, Tajfel, because I was doing work for Nick Somebody. So you sat in a primary school in Headington, and there was a little board, with "Like very much" and "Don't like", and you read a story to a primary school kid, and in some cases they named the nationality, I think a German or an English kid, a hero or heroine. It was quite clever because he was testing whether they didn't like the hero because they were labelled "German". But I never saw the results. And this guy Nick, who I was working for, he then wrote an article in New Society, and I was trying to look it up the other day, but again, this was the shock, that he met me in a very embarrassed way, because he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mention you in the article". I did most of the research, and he published it under his name. So that was an insight into power abuse into research. And then the next one was most helpful. I learnt so much. There was a guy at Nuffield - again it was a part-time job, two or three days a week - and he had loads of money to look at a Shopping Centre in Cowley. And there's the famous Shopping Centre, which name I always forget because it's got a sort of mediaeval name, but there's one in Between Towns Road. But there were all these business people wanting to find out whether it was worth building a Shopping Centre. So he had all this money to do his Ph.D., and he recruited me and the American wife of an academic, as usual - there were lots of intelligent women around who didn't have jobs. She and I were both recruited to conduct questionnaire surveys around Cowley. It was terribly informative to me, because (a) I didn't know Cowley - it was white working-class, Morris Motors and Cowley Motors then, it was full employment. And you had to go to every third house, and you had this questionnaire of about three or four pages, and it was all about shopping habits, and you had "Yes", "No", "Don't know" - they were pre-ordained answers. And then there was, right at the end, there was two inches, "Any other comments". And that was one of the most important lessons for me later, to learn about the limitations of questionnaire, because you would knock on the door and there would be an elderly woman who was desperate for company, and "Come in and have a cup of tea". And then you'd say, "Do you buy your Sunday joint on a Friday or a Saturday?" And she'd say, "Look at me. I live alone. Do you think I'm going to have a Sunday joint? Do you think I can even afford it? I go to the butchers when it's closing, and I might get a chop at a discount". There wasn't room for those answers. And then I would keep filling up the later paragraph, you see. So that was the most useful practical lesson in scepticism, with pre-ordained questions. Then, every other day, we'd have to report to this guy in Nuffield, and he'd ask us what we'd done and everything. I later discovered, through reading articles elsewhere, that often, when they gave the work to men, they would sit in cafés and they would forge the answers, so they could never understand why these patterns of voting didn't seem to fit. It's like the famous one with Truman, wasn't it, where they did a telephone call and, of course, half the population didn't have phones, so they thought Truman was going to win the election, and all he was doing was checking up that we'd done it. This American, she was a graduate, and we both said how utterly dumb the questions were. So that was bloody useful. I: Do you think it’s true that people were making them up, sitting in cafés making them up? R: Oh, there was writing about it. There was writing, later, about particularly young men, that they would forge the answers, and they would just sit in a café and make it up. And they couldn't understand, that it was in the public domain, but not at that time. So then I realised, and then I asked him if he did the questionnaires. And I said, "It's all probably written up. The force of that is in this fieldwork up the M1." I: Well, “Fieldwork up the M1”. R: Yes. That's where I critique questionnaires. Yes, there was a smaller article, "Home counties", that's reproduced in Own or Other Culture. That appeared in Anthropology Today, it was a much smaller article, more populist. I: Oh, I see. I thought it might be the same one. R: No. And this one, this "Fieldwork up the M1", which was much more, it was part of a Conference - Anthropology at Home. I: I see that. Yes, I’ve got that written down here. R: And ironically, and thank goodness, Anthony Jackson - I later joined him as a colleague at Edinburgh - and he told me that the reader wanted to reject my article. He said, "He's no friend of yours". I think it was Ralph Grillo in Sussex, and Anthony Jackson said he overrode the reader, and insisted, to the publisher, that my article be published. And it just said this was anecdotal, why didn't I mention that a lot of supervision was done in a pub? Oh! I: Well, that’s quite true, but that’s of a different kind. There’s a lot of supervision in a pub here in Oxford, actually. R: Yeah, well, there was. I know! I got alcoholic poisoning! (LAUGHS) But I said, "This is macho". But anyway, years and years throughout, I've met people who have said, "Judith, that article was an inspiration, because I was doing fieldwork in Europe, I was doing fieldwork at home, and you gave me confidence". And it was thanks to Anthony Jackson who insisted, he said he had to argue with the publisher that that article go in. I: And do you think Ralph Grillo had any personal feeling against you? R: I don't know. I mean, there's plenty of that in the future. My God, I've made enemies! I've been stopped for Chairs, promotion, everything. My next book is a campus novel! I: Oh, that book? R: Blue Stocking Laddered - that's the title, or The Laddered Blue Stocking! (LAUGHS) That's when I'll give up reading all the high theory, and not have to point to the latest debates. I'm going to go back to Dickens and Balzac! I: Yes! Well, where did we break off from? You were talking about this article, weren’t you. You were going to say something in relation to that. R: Yes. I said that in that I talked about the difference between questionnaires that often, I think it's in that one, that you have - and it may be in this one - that I was actually shocked. Do you remember there was a repeat of Family and Kinship, Young and Willmott did a re-run of The Family and Kinship thing? The Symmetrical Family. I: Willmott and Young did several different ones, because there was the Dagenham one. R: Yes. I know. Yeah, I remember that one, yes. I: And then there was Anthea Holme, I think it was, did something rather like a re-run, and then there was this most recent one with Gf Dench. R: Oh. No, it wasn't Gf Dench, because he and I got on quite well, we'd meet on the circuit. But there was one called The Asymmetrical Family and it was being done at the Centre for Environmental Studies, and what made me - and I think it's in that article I've referred to - but, as it were, there's the lumpen proletariat who walk the street getting the information, and then the people write it up. And in The Symmetrical Family- which Ann Oakley critiqued brilliantly, because they said that men now have equal roles in housework and all that - and there was a whole page where they actually listed all the people who did the questionnaires, and I said, "Well, at least they did mention the names, but that we were - what was it? Cash croppers?" I remember a wonderful American woman at a conference, years later, saying, "French anthropologists who do work in Europe, treat researchers like cash croppers - that you provide the material which then they write up". And anyway, all that influenced me to realise that the questionnaire was crap. But I think, again, there was this subterranean enthusiasm of my mother. I read Education and the Working Class, by the way, when I graduated, when I was sitting in Upper Heyford, and I was speechless when I came to Essex and there was Dennis Marsden! I just couldn't believe it, that there was a mentor, because that book was brilliant. And I've always said, by the way, that the strength of that book was actually it drew on autobiography, because they'd both been working-class grammar school boys made good, and they drew on their autobiography, almost unknowingly, to make sense of the material. I didn't realise fully that at the time. So I'm saying that those are my two jobs. And then the third term, I got a job teaching, again once or twice a week - how I found it - in a secondary modern in Banbury, a Catholic secondary modern, twice a week, it's just laughable! I was the only graduate, they'd all done teachers' training, and they were all heavy Catholics, and Mr. Grims, it's not Mr. Gradgrind, but it sounded like Mr. Gumption, or something like that, he was Headmaster, and he'd done a correspondence degree from Africa, by correspondence, and he was Headmaster - Mr. Grimshaw - and he said, "You come to my class, and I'll teach you how to teach, and then you'll know how to teach, because you've never taught before". There was a book with, you know, "Bread is brown. Bread is white. Bread is something", and they had to choose the right word, and they'd put up their hands, and he'd say, "Who said 'bread is brown?'" And the hands went up. "That's wrong, because it's also white! So that's a wrong answer!" And then he said, "Who said that bread is spongy?" - because there was this choice of words - "Bread isn't spongy, because that's a different - bread isn't sponge", so no hands. And then he said, "There's only one thing that bread is, and that is wholesome!" (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) Very good! R: (LAUGHS) So I learnt to teach like that! But anyway, it taught me how not to teach. Then the next year Hugh - you see, those were the days! One year as a post-grad., he got a lectureship, permanent, in Belfast, at Queen's University, in Philosophy. I: So you went with him? R: No. I commuted, because there, the influence of my mother - "You've got to have a qualification". My mother, funny enough, had been going to evening class at Garnett College, and I'd met somebody who was a friend of a friend from Oxford, I was staying in Stevenage, and this was the great Left-wing thing to do was teach Liberal Studies in Colleges of Further Education. I didn't realise it was a whole Lefty pattern - you taught the working class. And apprentices had a one-day release, and they'd have to do engineering or something, but they had one or two hours of Liberal Studies, and I attended one of these guys classes at Stevenage, and that inspired me, so I registered at Garnett - because, then, you could get a full grant, again. I couldn't get a grant to do an MA at the LSE, but I could get a full grant to go to Garnett. And then I flew to Belfast - those were the days, standby, £25 return, from Heathrow - and I would spend the weekend in Queen's, Belfast.... I: But you stuck with him quite a long time. R: Two and a half years, that's all.... I: So, and then it was while he was in Belfast, that Hugh started on the Inishkillane work? R: Yes, yes, because he oved from a one-year ESRC thing - SSRC. Then he got a full-time lectureship. Then by the end of the year, he decided he loathed it, so he was able to come back to Oxford and pick up his grant again. But meanwhile, in the vacations, summer vacations, Easter vacations, whatever, we went round to the West of Ireland, to Connemara and everything, and then when we broke up, he then moved to London. We got a beautiful cottage that we'd all prepared, I mean, it was beautiful. We'd helped renovate it and everything, and it was peppercorn rent - it was somebody we'd befriended up the road. I couldn't even drive a car. He and I broke up, but he continued to return, and then he wrote it up in the next two years. ... By that time, you see by that time, I got a job teaching at Banbury Tech, because I had the one year at Garnett, and then I got a job. I: Which gave you a qualification? R: Yes, yes, I got a Certificate. And then I got a job at Banbury Tech because he decided that he was giving up his job and he was moving back to Oxford. I got a job teaching Further Education day-release at Banbury Tech. ... [After we broke up] I came back to Oxford, and was totally devastated, and by absolute chance, about three weeks before, some people had come to visit me in our cottage, some of them were from Ireland, and they'd got word that Hugh was with this person, and they came as a sort of consolation delegation, not knowing whether I knew, but they liked me. Somebody gave a philosopher a lift, and this was this person, I didn't know who he was, I didn't even think he was English, he didn't say anything, he looked Polish to me, and anyway, the day I came back on the train, two days later, I bumped into this same guy in Oxford, and we went off for a cup of tea or something. We spent quite a lot of time together, and he was married with two children, and nothing happened, but this was somebody - I could just think about somebody else…. [Then when Hugh wanted to reconcile] I held my ground. And this guy, I'm afraid, enormous tragedy, left his wife and children, and I was with him for 17 years. I: This is the one that you were talking about a moment ago, you mean? I’m getting slightly muddled! R: I know! I'm sure you are! (LAUGHS) This was the philosopher that that came to the cottage, and I didn't know who he was, but we bumped into each other within 24 hours of my being told by Hugh that he loved somebody else. I: So then you had 17 years with him. And what was his name, then? R: He's called Jim Hopkins. ... But the irony was that he was very very supportive of me doing anthropology, and I wasn't competing. I: So you had that idea, partly from your experience with Hugh, by this point, you had the idea of doing anthropology yourself? R: Yeah. After I broke up with Hugh, I'd got the taste of fieldwork, and neither of us had read anthropology, and that's the other trick I don't like, is in his CV, on the back of his books, it says, "Hugh Brody lectured in anthropology at Belfast". He was registered for a degree in Sociology, and he was lecturing in the Philosophy Department. I don't think he'd read a single anthropology book at the time! But that's the only permanent job he's ever had! Yes! A one-year lectureship at Belfast! I: Oh, I’m amazed! I thought he was at the Scott Polar Unit. R: Yeah, well, he's able to worm his way in and get grants, but it's not a job that you get appointed to. I mean, the year that we broke up, he then - I said he wrote those books - and then he went off to look at Native Americans in Canada. [There's] a terrific book, which one of my students has nicked - it's a shame really - but it's Life on Skid Row, and it was very very funny, because David Sibley, a geographer, he's written a book called, Urban Outsiders, and there's one whole chapter devoted to my work, and one whole chapter devoted to Hugh, because then Hugh went off to look at the Inuit. I said, "Isn't it funny that we both went to look at nomads", and I said, "You didn't realise that we once lived together". It was very very funny. But anyway, I got the taste, and so I thought, "Anthropology is me". And my mother, again, she had books by Mead lying around, and the other twist is that when I was at St. Hilda's, my mother said, "Margaret Mead is coming to give a lecture at London" - she was reading Growing up in New Guinea and Samoa, I've still got her books - and she said, "Well, you know, we could go to a lecture". And in those days, in Oxford, you had to get permission to leave Oxford overnight, and I think the lecture was on a Friday evening or a Saturday morning, and I went, in all decency, to the Principal, and asked if I could go to a lecture by Margaret Mead, and she said, "No. You are in loco parentis". I couldn't even go to a lecture by - and then the woman had the cheek to say, "If you were going to say farewell to your fiancé, who was flying to Australia, we would allow you the day off". You know, a fictitious fiancé! Well, I spoke at Warwick on Thursday - I was invited to talk about Feminism - and the students' mouths were opening when I was telling them - "This is what we had to experience, as undergraduates". Men were allowed to marry. It was just amazing! Jackie Lukes, who I got to know well, she said she was at Somerville, and she said the Principal called her and said there was one young woman, whose name I will not mention, who she was worried might get pregnant or something, and would Jackie look after her to make sure she didn't get pregnant! (LAUGHS) I: But you’re in Banbury still, I think, at this point? R: Yes. Sorry! Yes, I was in Banbury. I was at Banbury Tech. Hugh, I said, "That's it". And he moved to London. I: And you wanted to be an anthropologist. R: I think I was still just desperately trying to find my way, because we had agreed that we would share the grant and, you know, I was penniless! I had to give up the place where we were going to be living for a peppercorn rent - that's a long story! I couldn't drive, I couldn't live there any more, and so I moved to a bed-sit at the bottom of St. Clement's. But a while before that, I got a job, ironically, rent-free, being a babysitter for Professor Hart's child called Jake, Jakie, and Joanna. I: That’s the philosopher, is it? R: Yes. And he's the Philosopher of Law. And his wife, whose name I can't remember, but they had a daughter called Joanna, and the child was brain-damaged at birth. So she interviewed me, saying that she needed two nights a week. They totally indulged the child, you know. You had to lie on a single bed next to him until he went to sleep, and I had a free room in exchange for that. But in the end it was hopeless, because he was totally undisciplined. It was sort of the late sixties ideal about let a child do whatever they want. Well, that child wanted boundaries. So he would pretend to be asleep, and just as I was going out at midnight, he would wake up. And then he came into my room, and he threw all my possessions about. So in the end I couldn't take it, so I then moved to this cheap place in St. Clement's. Jim was in the process of breaking up his marriage, and then I decided I was going to do anthropology. But Jim, by then he'd moved from Oxford to be a Fellow at King's, Cambridge, and so I was interviewed at Cambridge to do a "Certificate", they didn't have a Diploma then. And as I was going off to get the train, he announced that he wasn't going to move to Cambridge, because he needed his psychoanalyst here! (LAUGHS) But those were the luxury days. You have a Research Fellowship, you don't even have to be there! He had a five-year Research Fellowship at King's, Cambridge. He had the top degree in philosophy, he'd come from Harvard, and he was a contemporary of Roger Scruton - it was through Roger Scruton that I met him - and he was considered one of the most gifted philosophers. But in the end, I borrowed, I begged, I stole - funny enough, those are the corrupt days! Somebody was on a Foundation for the Deaf or the something or other, and he said that they would lend me the money, interest-free. So I borrowed money, because I had to prove that I had money in the bank, and I cashed in what money my father had left me, which I got when I was 21, and I financed myself, and I did the course in Cambridge. But I had no idea about gypsies or anything. I: So you were living in Cambridge? R: Yes. I moved to Cambridge because I'd been registered for that course, because I thought Jim was going to be there, and he said, "No, I'm staying in Oxford". And I was too late to apply., I rang up Oxford. I rang up Godfrey [Leinhart] as it happened, on the phone, and said, "Is it too late to apply?" And he said, "What class of degree did you get?" And I said, "A Third". He said, "We only take serious people here", and put the phone down. But I was interviewed at Cambridge, by Meyer Fortes. I had to show, with my bank account, and because I'd got this bad degree, they couldn't give me the one Studentship that they had, and they gave it to a total hippy who was utterly not interested, but he got the award. Anyway, I said Leach was my inspiration. I: Oh, so this is the point where Leach comes in? R: Yes, because we had two hours a week with Leach, just five of us, and the whole course, that was the only course for post-grads. Otherwise we had to do all the courses, select courses that were given to undergrads, like "Religion and Ritual", or "Economics and whatever". Now, there were the mentors - I've just realised. I: Who were they? R: Stanley Tambiah. Absolutely brilliant! He's written Leach's biography. He is Sri Lankan. And he gave the most brilliant lectures, the beginning of the week it was on politics and economics, and at the end of the week it was on religion and ritual. To me, that was wonderful also, to somebody who had a Marxist perspective, that you could study religion and ritual and you could look at politics and economics, and they were ordered, they were beautifully presented. These young Czechs who arranged for me to have that, they've interviewed me, and it's going to appear in a Czech journal, and they said, "You were taught by some of the most famous anthropologists. Can you tell us what they were like?" And I said, "I'm afraid dear old Meyer Fortes, he'd say, 'Now, there are three main points' and he'd never get to the second point!" (LAUGHS) I: Was he interesting, then? R: He was an appalling lecturer, but passionate, and again, I said it was all that that saved me. By the way, a friend of mine has inherited all his papers, she went and worked in Ghana - of course, it's a millstone round her neck, because what used to be this obligation - but anyway, he gave a mid-term sherry party in his rooms in King's, and I was already in this odd position where I'd been a lecturer at the College of FE here, and at Banbury Tech, because it was after Banbury Tech I then went to the College of FE. In those days, you could live off three days a week. So you'd walk past a staff room, and you'd think, "Hey! I'm not a member of staff!" And there were all these brilliant third year students who knew everything about anthropology, and you were only starting, and two of them are major professors now - they're big names. I: Who are those, then? R: Tim Ingold, and somebody else - I can't remember their names now, but Tim Ingold. When Fortes had a weekly seminar, there was a big mahogany table, and [the man] I called Chris, whatever his name is - it'll come back later - he did work later in South India, and Tim, I called them "Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee". Because one always sat to Fortes' right, and the other sat to Fortes' left, and you never dared take their chairs! Fortes would look after them, and ground them, and, of course, they got grants, they were the chosen golden boys! And anyway, at this sort of third year/postgrad drinks, Fortes suddenly went like this (CLINKS ON SIDE OF GLASS WITH SPOON) "Silence everybody. Now, you see that young lady over there, Judith Okely , she is determined to do anthropology, and nothing will stop her. Okay. That's all I want to say!" (LAUGHS) I: That’s quite positive, isn’t it! R: I know! And how did he pick it up? Probably because he saw I'd borrowed, begged and stole money, you know! But Tambiah was brilliant, and I thanked him in a footnote in my book. Leach was inspirational. I: What was he like, though, as a person? R: Well, I didn't know really. I: Just the lectures were inspirational? R: Well, each week you had to do a presentation, and he was quite arrogant, and I got to know him a bit better, because then finally Jim did move to King's, and I was living on gypsy sites, and I would come every two weeks and stay at King's, Cambridge, and I would meet Leach, because Jim was quite friendly with his wife, and with artists and residents. Michael Craig-Martin, who was later to teach the great Damian Hurst, Michael was Artist in Residence, and his wife was very very friendly with Celia Leach, so we would sometimes sort of have these group get-togethers. Leach, at some point, found out - he didn't remember me from Adam, because when I was doing that course, I was head down, I was so nervous, "I've got a third". There was one woman who worked for CUP, and she was ingratiating, and if Leach was giving a public lecture, she'd suddenly disappear and come back with a glass of water and give it to him, and she was shameless. I was just this stigmatised woman. I have never worked so hard in my life. I had a garden shed in the digs, it was heated, it had got a gas fire and electricity, and maybe a basin, I don't know, and I have never read and worked - I read everything in anthropology that year. Jim would come at weekends. I: So was Jack Goody among your teachers? R: Yes. Yes. I: What was he like? R: Chaotic! (LAUGHS) Again, I've said this - he's still alive today, but he would wander around the board, and then he'd get very hot, and he'd take his sweater off, and his hair would all be chaotic, and he'd scribble something up there, and then he'd walk, and then he'd scribble up something there. I said, in this interview, which they're going to translate, I said it was like a Jackson Pollock painting at the end! But there was enthusiasm. You do want a certain direction. You don't want to be spoon-fed, but you picked up his enthusiasm. But Tambiah, I even went to the South-East Asian seminars - I wasn't doing that as a course - but there were just a few people. Ironically, this Johnnie Parry, who I didn't know was going out with my friend Margaret, who I'd met at the Sorbonne, I mean, there were about six people, and I was just in awe, but I said that was the most intellectually inspiring year. I've read everything. I go up to my attic, and I think, "My God! What I didn't read!" I: So would you say, because you’ve experienced both Oxford and Cambridge, that really, Cambridge, for you, was much richer, intellectually, more inspiring? R: It is. And ironically, I was attached to Newnham, and you see, there again, you know, wherever I go, I seem to arouse hatred. I went, very very nervously, to the first - for new post-grads, there was an event at Newnham - I was terribly nervous, I was coming, I'd crept back to academia. I had to have a huge loan. I'd worked my arse off. You know, I'd economised, I hadn't bought clothes for two years - nothing. And there were these new post-grads., and I've since heard from my friend Susan - the one who inherited Fortes's papers - she said, "Judith, that woman was mad" - the Principal of Newnham. I didn't know at the time. And we all sat, after dinner, around on the floor, round her in her big room, and she said, "Any questions?" I don't know what it was, I asked a perfectly genuine question, but there's something about my boarding school accent that arouses hatred, because people think I'm privileged, and she just tore into me. I was devastated! And I went off to the Ladies later, and I just sobbed and sobbed, and there were two lovely Indian/Asian post-grads., and they said, they couldn't understand how that woman had treated me that way. I hadn't imagined it. They said it was just incomprehensible. I don't know what the question was, I asked. I was so upset, I left my handbag in the lodge, on the pavement, I cycled off back home. I had to ask one of the tenants if I could have a spare key to get in, and then I think I rang up Newnham, and they had my bag, a porter had my bag, but I never set foot in Newnham again. I just seem to arouse hatred. But anyway, they ring up, Onora O'Neill, do you remember her at Essex? I: Yes. R: She then became Head of Newnham, and she was very clever in organising alumni, and I got some phone calls a couple of years ago, you know, these young women, and I told the story. I just said, "I was devastated. I was paying them money. I never entered the place again. And I went away sobbing". And, of course, they were all very sweet, and in the end they persuaded me to give some money. I: (LAUGHS) I was thinking, that might have been the main reason for contacting you! R: I know! Exactly! And then in January this year, I think it was, there was a special event to open Archival Centre, because they've got some famous novelists - A.S. Byatt, and goodness knows what - and there was going to be the launch of this Archive, and I e-mailed people, and I said I would like to give my field notes to the Archive - handwritten field notes of my gypsy work - and they were very sweet and lovely, but they didn't - I just said I would be coming, and that you're supposed to e-mail somebody, and then they found out that there were so many people that I hadn't been registered, and so I didn't go to the event. But the archivist says, "Thank you for your great generous gift, and we'll be looking forward to seeing it", so I will, at some point. And I said to these people on the phone, I said, "I am going to celebrate Newnham because it was thanks to the Cambridge Anthropology that I owe everything to Leach and Tambiah". So I've now decided I will never give another bean to St. Hilda's, for other reasons I won't go into. But I thought I would do it to celebrate. And of course, you know, I should be grateful, and I feel ashamed that I didn't fully credit Esther Goody, the first or second wife of Jack Goody. Second, yes. Because he's on to a third. I had a most hopeless tutor for the first term at Newnham - because you had the right for tutors, I won't say who he is - and in the end I went to Esther Goody and I said, "Please could I have you as my tutor?" And then I told her about doing work in the West of Ireland, and then she asked me if I'd read that famous book, you mentioned it. I: Family and Community in the West of Ireland. R: Yes. Arensberg and Kimball. I hadn't read it, you know. Then she switched off and said, she obviously thought I was rubbish, so she said she couldn't possibly. And fortunately, there was one of my CND Labour contemporaries, by this time Assistant Curator at Cambridge - Malcolm McLeod - and I begged if he would tutor me, and he did, and he was brilliant. Now, he was somebody, he just said, "Judith, your essays are fantastic!" You know, "You've got to go on with anthropology. These are brilliant!" That was another who was my contemporary. I've since interviewed him for my book, and we got to know each other again when he came up to be Curator in Glasgow, the Hunterian Museum, and he wrote references for me. I: How did Michael Banton come into the story, because you mentioned him? R: Well, for my examination, my Ph.D., years later. I: Oh, I see. He was later. So he’s not - R: No. No. I didn't meet him. But anyway, Fortes said, "You had a Third Class Degree, we can only give you an SSRC Grant if you get a Distinction in your exams". And again, it was exams only. And Malcolm marked one of my exams, and he said they were just absolutely outstanding. I did a re-analysis of the Cooler (?? - sp. 61.46) but, of course, Leach didn't like it. There was no dissertation, you see. Now, with all these degrees, you have dissertations, it gives you a chance. I said Malcolm was wonderful, and he said, "Judith, you've got to go on with anthropology", and I said, "Yes, I have". And I knew I wouldn't get a Distinction, I just stressed out. I can't think quickly. Little did I know I had an underactive thyroid - it wasn't discovered till I went to Hull years later, and the guy said, "You were diagnosed with an underactive thyroid 20 years ago, and it says you refused to take the medicine". I said, "Absolute rubbish!" I said, "I could have written six more books!" (LAUGHS) Thank goodness the Hull guy, he read through my medical records. I said, "Well, it's the first time I knew that!" Anyway, just to end the story, is that I knew this was my subject - and this is where my mother comes in again. I was sitting in her study. She was a regular, she took New Society, and that was 1970, maybe August/September, and I said, "Mum, this is my subject. I've done French, I've done literature, I've done politics." I said, "This is me! I've got to go on". And I was flipping through New Society, I mean, talk about serendipity and if you believe in God, there was an advert at the back, "Wanted, a researcher to look at gypsies and government policy. Centre for Environmental Studies, London". It was one of those QUANGOS that Heseltine later closed. And when I think of it, I hand wrote my application on lined paper! (LAUGHS) And dozens and dozens of people applied for the job. This is the other twist, this is the other bizarre twist - and I tell this to students in Brunel, because they ask me why did I get in gypsies, and how did I get the job and all that - I went to the Oxford public library, which is now mainly the Town Hall, a beautiful place, and I realised, in the job description, that this woman had been responsible for the first census for gypsies, and there it was on the shelves. I've used that in a letter to Keith Mitchell, saying, "This changed my life". I read the Report - the Ministry for Housing and Local Government, published in 1968/69. I went for the interview, and there were two things that helped me. One was I was the only person who'd actually read the Report, so I showed curiosity, and literally, you know, I applied for the job and I was interviewed two weeks later. And then a friend of my sister's, a philosopher who Elaine was at Trinity with, he got a brilliant First in philosophy, and he'd done work with Irish travellers, but his degree was in philosophy, and he didn't get the job. Anyway, when, at the end of the project, after two and a half years, this woman, Barbara Adams, a civil servant seconded from the Department to work for the Centre on this project, she said, "Would you like to throw out these files, and your references, and your application?" And I hadn't used Stephen Lukes, I'd used Brian Wilson who'd taught me sociological theory, who was terrified of women. I mean, he'd have me in his room and take my coat off, and hang it up, and he was terrified! Gentlemanly, you know. He was closet gay actually. And I couldn't believe the reference. It was utterly mediocre. "She works hard, and she's well-meaning", and, "She's not going to set the" - he didn't put it that way, but it was devastating. As you and I know, a reference like that would never get anybody a job, because you read between the lines, and the last line was, "And she's a very charming young lady". And my civil servant said, "I chose you (a) because you'd read that Census; (b) you were a social scientist", she was terrified of a philosopher, " and (c) - what's the word they used for David Kelly, it's a negative word about academics. It'll come back to me. You see, with this age, you forget words! But the implication was that I wouldn't be a challenge to her, and that I would do as I was told. I wasn't a boffin, that's right! "You weren't a boffin". Actually, I told this woman, Sarah, this, and she said, "God, that woman got you! She didn't know who she was going to get!" (LAUGHS) So it was the mediocrity. If I had Stephen Lukes saying, "She wrote the best essay I've ever heard on Marx", and "she was brilliant", and "she could have got a First", I wouldn't have got the job! So it was the mediocrity of Brian Wilson that got me the job. I: That’s amazing! R: Yes. So that's it. I: You had got to the point when you explained how you got the job. R: Yes. Yes. I: I was hoping you could now talk about doing the fieldwork. R: Yes, yes. I've written a few notes. Yes. Well, this is where - I was thinking through it last night, that I was appointed, really, she said because I was a social scientist. I said, a friend of my sister's who had a First Class Degree in Literature, and he was Irish, really he might have had a better chance in terms of classification, but I realised, slowly, that she appointed me because she was secure with a social scientist. PPE, it didn't matter what class of degree - although I said in my revision to you, that would now be a II:ii, because they had I, II, III, IV, and then they divided, and I was borderline. Anyway, the viva ruined me. But she also, I realised, thought, "Anthropology deals with the exotic, so it's useful to have somebody who knows about the exotic". But then she didn't know or think through how I wanted to do this research. I've written about it quite a lot, it's in the book Thinking Through Fieldwork, and I'm terribly proud because part of it's reproduced in an Open University primer, Doing Social Research. It's terribly interesting with Open University, they ask you questions, they ask the reader question, "Why did Judith Okely do this?" Or "do that?" Anyway, I was seated in this shared office, in a wonderful Regency building in Regent's Park - Nash Terrace - and I was just given this pile of local reports on gypsies. That's fair enough, you would think, as it were, get the literature. But she was the main author of The First Census, which the Ministry had tried to stop publishing because it was seen as sympathetic, too sympathetic, and that's why she seconded herself from the Ministry of Housing to do research at the Centre for Environmental Studies, with David Donnison as the Head. They were good buddies, he was into housing. I began to read this stuff, and, of course, I was very quickly realising I was reading about stereotypes. You know, they're the real gypsies, they're the half-blooded. Half-blooded, I thought we got over this in the 18th century! And then there were the pikies and the diddicoys, and then there were the Irish tinkers, and they had this whole gamut. You know, there's 20% Romanies, and they're polite, they pick up their rubbish, and they're nice, and they've got brown eyes. Then the Irish tinkers, who are right at the bottom, and they leave rubbish, and they steal, and they're criminals. Which, by the way, has had a new revival after that film, The Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. And then she thought I was understanding the truth. I say I should be very very grateful to her, because the woman did learn. She had contacts around the country, and then she said - I think it was October - oh no, it was perhaps a month after being appointed - she said, "Well, I can give you an introduction. Go to Hertfordshire." By the way, I never published [the name of] that County, it's in my Ph.D., which was banned for 30 years, and nobody's realised now it can be read. But I've never mentioned the place in any publications because people might work it out. But it makes people vulnerable. And she said, "There's Don Byrne." Again, I'm very grateful to him - he was a very liberal-minded Local Authority guy, employee, who had tried much more liberal policies towards gypsies, and that was when the 1969 Act was about to be enforced, but it wasn't going to be made law until about '71, and he had allowed a temporary site to be kept open near St. Alban's. I do have a wonderful photograph of that site. You know the book Writing Culture, Clifford and Marcus, there's several articles where they say, "The anthropologist gains authority by saying, 'I was there'". The use of "I" is not really autobiographical, it means, "When I was doing this", it gives authority. So I, invariably, in many many lectures, both introduction to first year, and I gave one in Bristol about six weeks ago, to the Archaeology Department, and there's this photograph. I managed to get it a year afterwards, Barbara Adams - that was my boss - her husband was an amateur photographer, and we went round taking photographs, and we posed right up on a hill overlooking the roundabout - it's actually in my book, and there is the long distant view of this. That was the second site where I lived, that's the second site, but anyway, there's my caravan, and I can say, "That's where I lived". It really takes the wind out of people when they say, "You don't know who these thieves and animals are". But anyway, it was another site, I realised, it was "Cotlands Wick", I put that down for the record. I: That’s in Hertfordshire as well, is it? R: Yes, yes, that was only two miles away from the other one. It was all - because Don was in charge of Hertfordshire - and the one I lived on, I can't remember which is which, but I think it's the County had the obligation to provide the sites. If I've got it right - it might be one way or the other - but the gypsies had landed on this triangular patch between dual carriageways, which nobody would want, and the City Council sued the County Council for allowing an illegal site. Don Byrne took it through the courts, and they won the case, because they said, "We need these temporary sites until we have the duty to provide permanent sites", and then they said, "You can have the site if you have a resident warden on it". So anyway, Barbara said, "Go up to Hertfordshire, and there's a voluntary worker". Actually, she was teaching part-time and paid partly by the Council - Penny Vinson, and I mean, it's a momentous trip! I took a train from St. Pancras Station, arrived I think it was at St. Alban's. Penny met me, and she, of course, was aware of all these things, she just sat down with me in the car, her little Mini - they always joked about her with her Mini - and she said, "We've got to appear to be friends. It's no good me saying you're a researcher. How old are you? How many sisters/brothers do you have?" You know, "Tell me a bit more about your private life, so then I can introduce you as a friend. It's no good saying you're a researcher from the Centre for Environmental Studies". So we sat down, swapped a bit of notes, and then we drove straight off, on to this camp, and I was introduced to Norman McCabe, the Warden, because it was the obligation to be there, and he was incredibly open. Then I realised that he wanted to talk, because he had all this amazing information that he wanted to share. And he kept saying that he wanted to go back - he wanted to train as a priest, and then he dropped out, and so he said he'd just answered this advert, and that was it. It was, again, a chance for him. And he said he wanted to go back to Ireland for two weeks for a holiday. And I said, "Well, why can't I take your place?" And he said, "Hey! That's a good idea!" But meanwhile, that was later arranged, but anyway, I made such perfect contact, and then Penny drove me off to a few other sites - of course, there weren't residents wardens - and she would say, "Hello, this is my friend Judith", and then on the mini trip back, I would ask her lots of questions. And I said, the "Gorgios" - because that's the word they use for non-gypsies - they were pouring out with information. I: I’m not quite clear how Penny had all this knowledge. R: Well, because she went round supposedly teaching the kids. She was checking out whether they were going to school, and she was negotiating "Save the Children Fund". She wasn't a teacher, but I think she was paid part-time by the Local Authority, and Don Byrne had recruited her. She then, some months later, took me to a guy called Patrick, and I can't remember his surname now, because what happened when they tried to evict the gypsies before, there were a lot of good Lefties who joined the anti-eviction thing, and there was this guy called Patrick, and he's since written a book about methods. He was a lecturer in sociology at the College of FE, and he's the brother of the husband of a good anthropology friend of mine! McNeill, that's right. He's called Patrick McNeill. I: So you had this tour and then? R: Yes. There was just the one day, and I thought, "This is it!" Then I came back, and I said, "I've got this most amazing opening". Now, I can't remember whether I took Norman's place, I think I did take Norman's place without negotiating with any of the authorities. Norbert just said to his boss - I think it was Don - I don't think I'd even met him - he said, "I want to go on holiday, and I've found this person who's linked to Barbara Adams". Of course, Barbara Adams was a big name. And so I moved on to the site, supposedly for two weeks. I: And this is when you got your caravan, or not? R: Well, I moved into his caravan - the Warden's caravan, you see - that was provided by the Local Authority. Of course, I've got all my lovely handwritten field notes, and I'm going to donate them to Newnham College, and I've just got, in press, an article, it's part of a thing in celebration of a wonderful German professor - Bernard Strech (?? sp - 13.39). He's organised big research projects on gypsies throughout Europe, he was at Leipzig University, and last year, every week a different anthropologist gave a lecture. And then my choice was returning to my first few weeks of field notes, and I quoted them, and I showed how actually most things were there because I wouldn't know in advance what the significance of it was. But anyway, I moved on to that site, and I said I can't remember whether I was there for - but yes, that's right, I moved on, and then I told Barbara how good it was, so then I was allowed to rent in a B&B, for several weeks, just up the road, near St. Alban's, near Cotton's Wick, and then visit daily. Then I'd have to work out the chronology of this, it's all a blur, but at some point Don Byrne met me, and he thought I was from the Ministry. I mean I was working with a seconded Ministry person. But he was so brilliant, he said, "You can have a caravan owned by the Local Authority, on any site, and you can do whatever you like". Because he thought, in blissful innocence, that I would then write a rave report about the wonderful project. And I was very complimentary, but in this book, it's this book here, the first one. I: Gypsies and Government Policy in England. R: Yes. That was what I came up with with Barbara. That came out in 1975. That came out of that project. I: I see. Okay. R: So anyway, he gave me this total - I mean, can you imagine this now! But he was very upset with the bit I wrote about Hertfordshire. I was critical as well, because he assumed that they would all want settlement and assimilation. He was kind, but there was all this thing about, they all want wage-labour jobs - there were a few more in those days - and they want housing. Barbara Adams thought that. They all thought, and Barbara Adams was just so naïve. She just said, "Well, we can get to the women because they'll want kitchens, and they'll like washing machines. So if we can convince the women, then they'll move into housing". I mean, it's just naïve, ethnocentric - that's the word I learnt from Cambridge! So then I moved to this other site, I don't know if I can - I was going to show you the picture of the other site. I've got a copy of a book over there. I: Yes. Well, we’ll look at it afterwards. R: Yes. Then I moved, but that was the other thing. During those two weeks, you see, I had to take on the role of the Warden and collect the rent, and that's when I found it really problematic. Because then I was immediately identified as an official, and, of course, they played it! They said, "We've paid two months in advance", and "Norman knows that". And was I there to defend the Council? I wasn't even an employee! But that was when Don said to me, "You don't need to collect the rent. You don't need to be a Warden". He died, tragically, of a heart attack, I think in the eighties, and I should give him due credit. He was a Quaker. I: Yes. So then what happened? R: Then I moved, then I was allowed to stay on all these different sites, but the problem started with Barbara. After about two or three weeks, I think it was before I moved on to that second site, and when I was in the B&B up the road, she summoned me back to the office, and she said, "Right. Now, will you compose a questionnaire?" And then she kind of sighed and said, "Oh, of course, you're totally inexperienced. You wouldn't even know how to begin to compose a questionnaire". And I knew, from what I'd said last visit, that having conducted questionnaires round Cowley, how even when you're finding out about shopping habits, how inept they are. And my heart sank! I said I didn't know what to do. And then she sat down, and she composed, honestly, about 15-20 pages - you know, date of birth, experience of housing - and I used this particular question, by the way, it was not in that one, but it was in her Census, the Census question, "Why do you travel?" Do you ask nomads, "Why do you travel?" My answer, when I give lectures is, "Judith", the gypsy children would say, "Judith, what's it like living in a house?" How can I answer? I said, "It's got a ceiling, it's got walls, it's got electricity, it's got a floor". How can I tell? So how can you ask nomads, "Why do you travel?" You might be saying, "Why do I live in a house?" So, you know, anyway, this 25 page questionnaire - and I was already established rapport with some of these people. I wrote a paper, which I've never published, about the importance of people who come to you at the beginning, and it's rather like you being a hitch-hiker. I was seen as somebody transient, and there was one woman in particular, called Jean - I can give you her name now - but she had lost a child that had been run over by a Gorgio, I don't know if I said that to you before? I: Not before, no. R: No. A year before, or more, a Gorgio, yobbo, was visiting the site, and just backed, at full speed, in the middle of the site - which no gypsy would do, because there was a circle, and gypsies had a circle, and the children would play in the centre - and her lovely little two-year old was run down and killed. And she was still in desperate mourning, and I was saying that she welcomed me. It was in that first site when I was there for the two weeks. They had a caravan, but they had a old burnt out van, no wheels or anything, and they cut a hole in the roof so they could have a coal fire, or some burner, and she would invite me there, and we'd be talking till two in the morning, as she went over and over the horror of when he was taken to the hospital, and the baby was wrapped up in a sheet after he'd died, and they had to walk past the waiting people, and she said, "They treated my baby like a pillow and he was my boy". So then that was when she started telling me about fortune telling, and I've never had, before or after, any such amazing detail, which became the core of the article in Own or Other Culture, on fortune telling. She told me how she told fortunes, and that she had her little other boy, John, sit next to her, so he'd learn what to do. And I explained it to myself, and later impressed - it was actually very good psychotherapy. But the interesting thing is that the outsider is actually somebody to be welcomed by specific people. Now Barbara Adams would say, later, a year into the field, "We're not getting real gypsies. We're not getting typical gypsies. The people who talk to you most are those who've lived in a house". Now Jean, her father was a gypsy, her mother was a Gorgio, she was brought up in a council house, she didn't join the road until she was 18, when she married, and her father was a great horse dealer, and she was literate, but she said to me - and I found it in the notes - she said, "I sympathise with you, because you were making the same mistakes as I did". And that was the key thing. Barbara kept thinking, with good old positivism, that you've got to find the typical informant to find the uncontaminated culture, whereas I realised that the people that were most articulate were those who'd seen both sides, so they could express the difference. They were hybrids. The one man later, whose wife allowed me to go out alone in his lorry to the scrap yard at Waltham Cross, he'd been in the Army. He'd been in the Second World War. I think he'd been in a camp, a Holocaust camp, and he was literate, but he'd taken to the road. And so he loved talking about these things to me. So anyway, those things. But going back to the questionnaire, my heart sank. I thought, "This will ruin my relationship. I will immediately be identified as a researcher". I knew that this was all wrong. So I gave it to Penny, who agreed to do it - I wasn't there - she administered it to some of the families that she knew, and it was wonderful, because what she said was, she knew that many of the answers were lies. Like, "Have you been married before?" She knew they'd been married before. "No, no, no, gypsies marry for life". But she had to put down what they'd chosen to tell her. And then it was an own goal, because then when Barbara looked at these questionnaires, she said, "It's chaos. It can't be coded", because she could see the inconsistency. Even within the course of the interview they would contradict what they'd said at the beginning. I: But would you argue, then, that that kind of quantitative survey work is more vulnerable to false information than qualitative? R: Yes. I: So why? R: Well, I made some scribbled notes, there were various articles that I later listened to over the years. There was another book called The Official Statistics - I've got upstairs - showing (that came out the time when I was at Essex) how you could have 80% answer yes, but it's actually 80% inaccurate. So just because it's the majority said X, it doesn't mean it's true. And I remember this wonderful guy - I made notes - he was talking on the radio years ago, and he said, "The more you generalise, the more you lose the detail, and in the end you're left with banalities". And that's what I felt. But, of course, you know, I'm more sympathetic to Barbara now, retrospectively, but she kept saying, "This is a policy-oriented (the dreaded word!) policy-oriented project", and "The government will only respond to numbers". She actually said, "The ideal for this report" - which is what we thought we were going to produce - was to have tables on every page, of figures. You know, totally bogus! I began to look at that, government Census, and in the Census it talked about real Romanies and reproduced the stuff, and she had a photograph of a gypsy marriage in that Census - I've got it upstairs in my attic - and it said, "A gypsy marries for life". She just repeated what a gypsy said, which when you began to unpick it, of course - of course, my wonderful (what would I say? "weapon" is a brilliant article by Edmund Leach, which I hadn't read at the time - it was published in 1967, and I refer to it in my book. I'm sending the final thing tomorrow, by e-mail, by the way. In this book, Anthropological Practice, an utterly brilliant article called, "An anthropologist's reflections on a social survey". I've actually referred to it here in the Appendix. There it is there. I: Yes. In D. Longman’s and T. Goodkind’s Anthropologists in the Field. R: Yes. It's been reprinted. And I was asked to be a keynote speaker at some post-graduate anthropologists' two day event, about four years ago, here in Oxford, and I was a discussant as well, on the papers. I mentioned this article, and the students just clamoured, they crowded round me, they'd never heard of it. They're so clever, they said, "We can find it on Google" or whatever, and David Gellner came up afterwards - he's now a professor there, he's got Evans-Pritchard's famous chair - and he said, "Leach was ahead of everybody". The point, the crux of that article is that Leach had done over a year's fieldwork in one village called "Pul Elia" (?? - sp. 30.28), and he was looking at a report based on a survey of 52 villages. Ironically, one of the authors was a certain man called Tambiah, who was then a sociologist, and I think it was Leach's influence that transformed Tambiah later into an anthropologist, whose lectures I followed in Cambridge. And Leach showed the wonderful argument that the one intensive study shows the system, the system, and numbers and all that don't show the system. They concluded that the majority of people in these 52 villages were landless peasants, and Leach said, "I know, from studying the one village, I know the inheritance system, and the majority of those so-called landless peasants are going to inherit". So they're not landless peasants, you know. Just simple things like that. Of course, I didn't have any of that argument to defend me, I just knew instinctively, with this Barbara, that I was suddenly getting there. I was getting these insights. But I'd been inspired by Malinowski - I said that before. The anthropologist pitches his or her tent in a village. And again, always with introductory lectures, I put that photograph - the famous photograph of Malinowski's tent in the Trobriand Islands. And, incidentally, I had an e-mail, six months ago, from a woman who I taught at Essex, out of the blue - Pauline Lane. She's probably very very quiet, she was a mature student, she was a nurse. She's now a top person in the health thing. And I had this amazing meeting with her last July, and she lives near Colchester, and she went on to do a Ph.D. with Ted Benton, and she looked at indigenous patents of medicine. And she said to me - I couldn't believe it! She said, "I went to New Guinea, and I hired a helicopter to go to the Trobriand Islands" (LAUGHS), and she said, "I thought of you as I landed, because I remember your lectures on Malinowski". I thought, "You should have said, 'I thought of Malinowski'". She said, "No, no, I thought of you when I landed!" But anyway, we're in communication. It's lovely just to find these voices - you probably get that as well. I: Let me ask you, though. One of the things you say is the quantitative or survey method is inherently authoritarian, but isn’t it equally authoritarian to go as a member of an imperial country to, say, the Trobriand Islands? R: Oh, I know. There's always that argument, I know. I: Is that unfair, that argument, then? R: Oh, it's all been challenged. I address it in my book, Tala Asad, who was at Hull, not when I was there. So people would come up to me and say, "God! You were in Tala Asad's Department". Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, he edited a book on that, that made his career for life. He went straight off, snapped up by the States. But he discusses all that about it, and I can't remember all the details now, just offhand, but there was a very good article which I quoted, by Wendy James - a student of Evans-Pritchard, who's Emeritus Professor here - she did work in the Sudan, and she said that the anthropologists actually saw themselves on the side of the indigenous people, but they were naïve because they thought Colonialism was much more long-lasting, and that they were there for a barrier between the worst aspects of Colonialism and the people's beliefs. I know that one has to defend - well, not defend, no, no. I mean, Perry Anderson wrote a critique of Evans-Pritchard. It seems that Evans-Pritchard was allowed access to the Nuer because the British Colonialists were puzzled about the rise of charismatic leaders. Normally they were a flat society without hierarchies and these charismatic leaders were building pyramids, and Perry Anderson says that Evans-Pritchard just says, in a footnote, "The British blew up the pyramid". And you see all the Colonial Officers who were thanked in the Preface. But the other irony is that many of the Colonial Officers were, again, on the side of the indigenous people. We can see this now, with NGOs. People say, "NGOs are really working for the World Bank", or "international capitalism", and there's that same dilemma. But, I was honoured, I gave, just over a year ago, a Memorial Lecture for my soul sister, Obi Igwara - a Nigerian colleague at Hull - who tragically died in 2001, and there's a lecture in her honour every one or two years at the LSE, and I knew that there was a conflict about appointing me, but I had been to every single lecture, and I think they were pretty impressed that I was so loyal. Her ex-boyfriend, who hated anthropologists, they'd broken up, but he visited Obi in Hull, he was a lecturer in sociology - he refused to have dinner with me because I was an anthropologist, because I was a racist! He tried to block my selection. And sure enough, there were only three anthropologists in the lecture hall afterwards when there were questions. And there was this guy, he just read out, "Can you explain why anthropologists have colluded with Colonialism and the destruction of Africans?" He was reading it out. I: But you were in the same dilemma really, in Hertfordshire with the gypsies, weren’t you, because you’d come in through an agent and an Authority, and you wanted to do something with them, maybe on their side. R: But Barbara Adams also wanted to. She had published that Census, as a Report, HMSO, and the Ministry had actually tried to stop the publication, they said it was an internal document, and as far as she was concerned, and the Ministry, it showed a people in need, and they didn't want that. They said it was too sympathetic. They repeated Lady Plowden's dreadful remark that gypsy children are the most deprived in the country. And they're not! They're the most brilliant in the country, that's what I'd say. They showed a picture of them sort of smashing up old metal, and they said, "They've got no toys", and there were these children actually learning about steel and metal. They were brilliant. They knew - a three-year old would tell you whether it was cast iron or what! They had plenty of toys. There was a playground. And then the Save the Children people come along, and they tell them to mess up with paints. And the women, mothers, would say, "We don't want our children messing up with paints, we want our children clean". And they thought they were helping liberate these children when they were already liberated! But the point is that Barbara, seconded from the Ministry, ostensibly to look at housing, she didn't tell the Ministry that she was going to look at gypsies, because she knew they wouldn't allow her secondment. And then, when it came out that she was going to do gypsies, later - and I wished I'd photocopied that letter - she asked me to go and take it to Donnison, it was from the Ministry of Housing, saying, "We are shocked that Barbara Adams has now decided to do research on gypsies, and all research on gypsies should be done within the Ministry of Housing. If we'd known she was going to come out and do gypsies, we wouldn't have allowed her secondment". But the reason why was that the legislation - the 1967 Act - said that there was a duty to provide sites, but regardless of the population, every urban area only was allowed, or obliged, to have sites for 15 families - even though there could be 50. And then once the Local Authority provided a site, they had these vicious control powers to evict gypsies from the whole area, and they didn't even need arrest warrants, and she thought this was an injustice. It was a sting in the tail which Eric Lubbock never supported when he put through the Act. So that's why she thought, "I want to do something because the legislation has consulted the Local Authorities but they haven't consulted the gypsies". So she had a well-meaning view, but her well-meaning view was, in the end they all want to go to school, they want factory jobs, and they want housing. So my difference was that these people were not a deprived group, they were a highly dynamic, amazing, resourceful, brilliant culture - if you'd like to use the word. But I never saw myself as a spy. I: You didn’t see yourself as a spy, but some of them thought you were, didn’t they? R: Yeah, well, that's always the fate of anthropologists, because you're not using questionnaires. You're actually using the same strategies as a spy, which is to join the group. And that's a spy's strategy. I: So going back to the gypsies, how did you actually get close to them? You’ve mentioned these exceptional people, but how did you get close? R: Well, gradually, because Jean took me under her wing, and she even instructed me about clothes. I was so cold, I wore trousers, but then I was taken aside, and I was told - of course, it's all very different now - that you can only wear trousers if you have something like a Pakistani gear, you mustn't show your hips. Well, this is okay, but nothing lower, nothing tight. I said everything's changed now, they walk around like chavs - the dreadful word - or, you know, that awful woman Jordan. So she took me under her wing. I: And what about colours? They don’t mind so much about colours? R: Colours? What do you mean? I: What you’re wearing. R: Oh, they didn't mind that, no. No. I: No. So it’s the neckline and the [shape]. R: It's the shape. You mustn't show the body. You mustn't show the body. But I'm saying everything is transformed now, and that's why My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, that was a disgraceful film, disgraceful series, they just looked at all the exotic. And the voice over! I mean, the voice over, I've lost all respect for her. All the clichés! But then, you had to be modest. And never talk to a man on his own. I: And didn’t you say something about a physical pose, that you had to change your pose? R: Yeah, well, I didn't have to. In my Anthropology and Autobiography book, I reproduced this photograph - and that was taken by Barbara's husband, because we went to different locations and said to the people, "Do you mind if we take photos of you?" And I was with this woman, Beatrice, who actually lived in a tent, and I said that I unconsciously - when I looked at that photo ten years later - she had agreed to be photographed, and Diana Allen, the lawyer, facilitated the photographer. Beatrice knew me, and I said, years later, I realised that she had got the barrier pose, meaning, "I agree to be photographed because Diana Allen has helped me a lot with the legal cases, but this is a stranger". He was called Turner, he wasn't Adams, it was her pre-married name. And I'd imitated her posture of the barrier - again, I've got an article called 'Fieldwork Embodied', where I've drawn on my interviews showing how they learn with the body. Again, that was the wonderful thing about fieldwork, you escape from the desk and the library, so I acted with my body. But then the breakthrough came when I moved on to the other site, and again, the people that befriended me were sort of in between. In fact, they were half show people, and Rina, she'd run away from her husband, and she'd been married into really big circus/show people, she said they were huge bungalows in a great circle, and she'd escaped, with her child, and she was living with her mother, "Aunt Doll" and the husband, who had his own lorry, and they were literate, and show people are literate. And Aunt Doll wore glasses, which was very unusual. She said, when I first moved on the site, they said, "Oh, my God! Here's the Welfare", because she wore glasses! And then, how did it happen? I mean, I needed, I had to learn to drive. I hadn't even learnt to drive then. I took driving lessons, and then thanks to this grant, I was able to buy a vehicle, but mind you, it was cheap, I got it at an auction, it was a 15cwt van, and I said I was picking up what I'd learnt in Ireland. Actually, it was an ex-police van, so I knew it would be in perfect nick, but it looked old, and actually, they were pretty suspicious when they saw it! (LAUGHS) But I thought, "That's it! I learnt from you, which is go out to work!" So I said, I said, "I've got this van", and I said to Aunt Doll, because they were stuck, because the husband, the older man, he was - I mean, it was just a non-marriage really, he would disappear and go out all day. And I said, "I've got this van, would you like to go out calling with me?" And they all - "Oh, Judy! Oh, great!", so then I took them out. Then when we arrived back with the first load of old batteries and scrap - I: Calling to get scrap? R: Yeah, you go to doors, and, of course, they knew the areas, or they would spot them. They'd say things like - I've said it in an article - "Judith, cor, those are nice houses there!" And I was thinking, "Yeah, they've got lovely interiors", and what they meant was "nice for calling, for getting, they'll be rich people". So you'd go round amazing areas in Hertfordshire. I, of course, wanted to stand next to Aunt Doll or Rina, and watch how they performed. They were time and motion people, they said, "Judith, you're wasting time. You go over and call there, and we'll call at this door", you know, "because we'll get extra". Of course, I didn't say, "I'm an anthropologist finding out how you do it". I've lived off these jokes for years - I've got them in an article that you know about - but, it was this amazing enclave of private houses, I mean there were lots and, you know, the women - I'd try and drop my "H's" and extend my vowels, and say, "You got any old scrap, any old rags?" you know, like that, and the women would say, "Oh, what's it for?" (LAUGHS) And I looking at people like the mothers of my school friends (LAUGHS), and in the end I said, "Oh, Save the Children Fund". And then I came back to them, and they said, I said, "Do they ask you what's it for?" "No, they never ask what's it for!" "Did they ask you, then?" And I said, "Yeah!" And they said, "What did you say?" And I said, "Oh, Save the Children Fund". "Hey, Judith's on to a good one there". And then when I said, "Save the Children Fund" to one of the other places, she said, "Oh, I'm Secretary of the Local Branch"! (LAUGHS) And I gave a friend's address in Hemel Hempstead, and I told them, "I said it was the Hemel Hempstead branch and I gave Connie's address". "Judith, we always say 'Three Beech Drive. We always say that's our address'". But it was, honestly, I said it was a liberation. A liberation. But I saw however bungling, just as I've said in my chapter on participant observation, you never perfect the skills that the people have, but you learn also, crucially, you learn through your mistakes, and you learn to admire those skills. But when we came back with the van, and we unloaded things, they said, "Judith, we're gonna rip." The other gypsies were all jealous because they hadn't had the idea of using me. And then they said, "We're going to report you, because you're earning money on the side", because they still thought I was a Council employee. But I never said that. I: So what other activities did you do with them? R: I joined the potato gang, picking potatoes. And again, I've said this several times in recent lectures, that the gypsies were responsible for most of the fruit picking and agricultural seasonal work in this country, and it's because of the controls on movement, thanks to John Major, 1994, Criminal Damages Act, that the gypsies are less mobile. They daren't move. So now we have slave labour from Ukraine and wherever, who are living under plastic sheeting, at below the legal wage, doing all the fruit picking and the potato picking, and it was the gypsies work. And, you know, there's that guy, Ewan Somebody, who's on Radio 4 Today programme, with big sticky out ears, he did one programme about the "lazy, white working-class in East Anglia", and they didn't pick carrots or peas, and the Bulgarians did. I actually rang up to complain. I said did he realise that it was the gypsies who did all that work up to the nineties. But he wouldn't know, he just said that it was lazy working-class people on welfare. But it was the fact that the local officials have created a problem where the gypsies would come with their caravans and park, the farmer didn't have to provide accommodation. They came with their families. And the other thing that nobody realises is that, I think it may still be the law, technically, gypsies didn't have to go to school in the summer, because they were allowed to travel with their parents for agricultural work, so the State recognised that. I: Not only gypsies, at one stage ordinary working-class children as well. R: There! There, you see! I: But one of the things that you say is that you were treated as a gypsy by the police. R: Yes. Yes. Until I opened my mouth, you know! (LAUGHS) I: So in that situation, you mean you wouldn’t speak in your gypsy accent! R: (LAUGHS) Well, you tried to, you know! I said sometimes they would and sometimes they wouldn't. But honestly, this woman up the road, I befriended her over planning things, and she's a Conservative, she was at Oxford at the Secretarial College when I was an undergrad, and I just had to listen to this vomit about gypsies now. "They're thieves," I can't take the pressure any more, you know. But what were you saying? I'm sorry, I've lost the point. I: One of the things you talk about is letters, helping them write letters. R: Yes, yes, yes. Mmm. Yeah. I: And was that easy to get into that situation then? R: Very rarely did you need to. Because that was the other thing, is that what I was fascinated by was how literacy was not necessary in their lives. I: I see. R: I've said, somewhere, that I was visiting a woman, a family, on the side of the road, and they'd been given an order for an arrest or something else, and when they showed it to me, it was absolutely terrifying, "You will do six months in prison", or "Your children will be taken away if you continue to park here." She couldn't read it, and she screwed it up and threw it away. And I thought, "She's free!" I read it, and it was absolutely terrifying. And so I saw that to be non-literate, you were actually free of that hegemony. I only very very rarely did that sort of thing. I took the odd woman to hospital, a woman who was pregnant, and that was the amazing thing, one of them, as I drove her back - they didn't have proper scans in those days, but they said there was a possibility she was expecting twins. And I was fascinated at her saying, "I don't want twins! Oh God!", and all I could think of was Evans-Pritchard's article about twins amongst the Nuer, where they put them in the river because they say they're hippopotamuses, that they're not - this is an accident of nature, so they actually drown them, they're redefining them as hippopotamuses, and there's a famous article about twins. And so, of course, my ears are out! "Cor, she doesn't want twins!" "Does this fit with Evans-Pritchard?" (LAUGHS) And then she said, "I know that there's some people in Africa that drown their babies!" And I thought, "My God, she isn't literate, but she knows Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer!" (LAUGHS) She said, "No, no, it's the double workload", which is perfectly - anyway, it didn't turn out to be twins. But when you offer to do something like that, you would get narrative. That was it, if you were helping, then they would unfold. Like I said Jean was telling me about fortune telling which was actually therapy that she was giving to people. I was being her therapist by just listening, because the people said, "You should have forgotten about it", and "no photographs of the dead should be in the caravan", and she kept - in those days, no cameras - one tiny little photograph of this dear little blond boy with his back to the camera. All she had was his little blond back of the head, and it was on a frame, in the caravan, and the other gypsies were shocked, because you mustn't have the dead in the caravan. She said, "I know I shouldn't have that photo, because they said the dead will come back", and she said, "Well, I want to see him one more time". It was desperate. Absolutely desperate, really. I: What about learning the language, was that done just through listening. R: Well, they don't have a separate language, you see. I: Well, the words? R: I just listened, yes. Yeah. But that's where the linguists hate me. I mean, absolutely hate me, because I only listened to what was there, and I thought it was very important, socially, what words they chose to speak in the other language. "Gava" for policeman; "chavvy" for child; "mocatee" for polluted; "prasta" is to run. And then you never say the name of a rat inside a caravan, you just say "longtail". All those things were terribly - linguists like Yarron Matras (?? - 60.34 - sp) at Manchester, he's not interested in that. Forgive me if I've said it before, because I gave a speech in France, in Tours, about two weeks ago, at a Roma event - little did I know that so many pages into my book, The Traveller Gypsies, I had questioned the reduction of all customs to origin, which again I got straight from Leach and Malinowski. You don't explain people's beliefs solely in terms of origin. "Oh, they do it because 300 years ago they did that", which implied that all non-Western people don't have a sense of history or change. I said I was interested in why they used "chavvy" instead of "child" - of course, you know, the chavs have adopted that now. By the way, the word "pal", "pal" is actually a Romany word that comes from the East End of London. It's used in the East End of London, but it's a Romany word, "pal". Yeah. So I wrote these few pages. I was very friendly, at that point, with a good anthropologist who was doing work on miners in the North-East, she was at Brown University, called Jane Zurich, and she encouraged me to discuss Marxism. I was already a Marxist, but I was inspired, and I mentioned Marx in that first chapter where I say that gypsies - is it a coincidence that gypsies appeared throughout Europe with the collapse of feudalism? And therefore there were many landless peasants and serfs, and disbanded armies, thrown into the workplace or whatever, and, therefore, I didn't mean all gypsies were ex-serfs, but that language travels independently of people. That's why this Yarron Matras, the linguists, hate me. It's also, to be quite frank, because I'm not Jewish. Donald Kenrick, he is a linguist, he's approaching 80 now, he did his degree in linguistics, I think, at SOAS, or maybe he didn't have a degree, I don't know, and I admire his work in that he was speaking on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees. But he was obsessed about the Indian origin, and that they all migrated from India and then the new generation is this Israeli, Yarron Matras, who's managed to offend everybody, not just me. But I was reduced to tears when I read an article by him, that came out of a conference that I attended, and it was a book edited by Susan Tebutt, at Liverpool, and at the Conference she came up to me and said, "I just love your work, and it's wonderful". She was a literary person, and her articles are mainly about gypsies in literature, which is very interesting. But then I was sent this book to review, and there was this article by this Israeli, who's got the job in Manchester, there are some things I don't know whether to say, but in this book, he said, "Judith Okely is on a self-righteous crusade to destroy gypsy history". And I actually rang up the AUT because I thought that was libellous - that I wanted to destroy gypsy history? And then I rang up Liverpool University - the AUT said they didn't take on libel cases, and I rang up the Liverpool University Press, and I said, "I've worked most of my research life on behalf of gypsies, and you publish this defamatory thing". And they were pretty scared, but I haven't got the money. Then I rang up Susan Tebutt, and said, "You told me you admired my work, and you've edited a book saying that I'm on a self-righteous crusade to destroy gypsy history", and I was on the ROM-net, "Judith Okely is the enemy of the Roma people". I: No! R: Yes! I: That’s appalling. R: They're linguists and ironically, in that chapter, I deferred to a man called Ian Hancock, I was deferring to his expertise. He'd written an article, he was exploring the thing then, he wrote an article saying, "Is Anglo-Romany a Creole?", which is a very interesting theme. I'd taken that up, and I thought, "Yeah, people say you can trace the route by the words that they use". If there's a Turkish word, then that means they were there then. It's just nonsense, you know! I first tried that idea out before I put it in my book. That was at this big conference. I published that one. But The Traveller Gypsies, it was about 1978 I was invited to address a major conference on archaeology at Cambridge, and I was with distinguished company - one Eric Hobsbawm, and Edmund Leach. It was a two-day thing, and that was the first time I explored the idea. I used the Malinowski term which is "origin myth". It doesn't mean it's made up, but Malinowski talks about how "everybody has an origin myth", the Trobrianders thought that people came out from a rock and like Adam and Eve - I call that an "origin myth". It didn't mean it was a lie, it was just mythology. Again, you see, Yarron Matras, she says, "All gypsies make up things". The venom of two pages in that is unspeakable. But I quoted Leach later, because he was discussant, and he really loved my idea that gypsies were recruited with the collapse of feudalism, alongside people who might have brought the language, but they weren't a distinct bounded group. Because everybody said "The myths used to be, in the 19th century, they followed the sun", or, "What made them leave India?" as if there was one event. Ian Hancock is deeply embarrassed by the fact that I used that article of his, and he's now risen up as a megastar, he's Professor of Romany Studies in Texas, he has his own fiefdom, and he's ... quoted a very early amateur article of mine, gypsy - Roma language is not a Creole. Well, he presented it, and that was his first article. ... I just want to say one more thing about the view of gypsies, is that when I was employed by the Centre for Environmental Studies - and incidentally, you said the panel were impressed because I got the Census out of the library, it was only Barbara who interviewed me, there wasn't a panel. They'd got the job, but they hadn't yet got the grant for the money. The Centre was financed 50% by the Department, well it wasn't Department of Environment then, and the Ford Foundation, which is supposedly independent. It was full of people doing traffic and housing, and I met up with a certain Mike Harloe, who is later on the Appointments Committee! You know, we were undergrads. together in the Labour Club. And he was at the Centre for Environmental Studies, working with Townsend, wasn't he? I: Not with Townsend, with Ruth Glass, I think. R: No, it was Townsend, on the Swindon New Town. I: Peter Townsend? R: Yes. I: I didn’t think he was there. I don’t remember. R: He was employed by Townsend to look at the effects of Swindon New Town, originally. That was his project. I: Well, Peter had so many projects! R: I know. Well, there we are, there was another one! Anyway, but this is the way things were done. But all these wonderful radicals, including a famous geographer called Doreen Massey, they didn't go as a petition, but they went to David Donnison protesting that there was going to be their money going to be spent on gypsies. And Doreen Massey took me out to lunch, trying to find out what sort of person I was, and she said, "Well, of course, we all protested about your appointment because the gypsies are only a minority, and we want to look at majorities". This woman was, at the time, helping people, American conscripts, escape from fighting in Vietnam, and she was sheltering them in a house - now, that's a minority, an elite minority. But she said, "They were only gypsies". Now she's a megastar in geography about urban this, and minorities, and multicultural - I was just speechless when she said that. But anyway, the way things are done, David Donnison knew the top person - Head of the Rowntree Memorial Trust - he had lunch with him, and over lunch, money was given for the gypsy project, and for hypothermia amongst the aged, and it was Malcolm somebody who became a Minister later, in the Labour government - he's still an MP - Malcolm somebody - so the two of us got grants. So all the protests died down, because it was Rowntree money and it wasn't our money from the Ford Foundation. So that was one thing about the shock of the hostility, the radicals, the linguists, and then the sociologist, Thomas Acton, he was doing a Ph.D., I said in Nuffield, he's actually a Baptist preacher (LAUGHS), so I just absolutely - I don't know what I said, "I didn't pick gypsies, they picked me!" I: And you didn’t know what was going to hit you! R: No! And then, when all went quiet with that book about challenging the gypsy origin thing, until the early nineties, and then the internet rubbish started. But, incidentally, one thing I regret - you mentioned Eric Hobsbawm - he loved my presentation as well, that we can't say that they all could explain their customs because they came from India. It's all wrong, anyway, because even now, a social worker told me, a year ago, "Oh, gypsies burn their caravans because that's Hinduism". I said, "Gypsies never burn the bodies of the dead. They never cremate, and yet Hindu cremate, I'm sorry". And then the answer was, "Well, they've forgotten". You know, if it doesn't fit, "They've forgotten". So arrogant! Anyhow, I've gone off at a tangent. I: Can I ask you about something different? You were doing this fieldwork, and you said, earlier, how you were taking notes. R: Yes. I: So that was a sort of diary, is that right? R: Yes. Yes. Well, I'd just like to say, yeah, I'll say about the notes, because I've written this, again, in this article that's in press with a German journal, is that there was nothing on how to write field notes, absolutely no literature. I've got shelves upstairs, my study above here, is just lined with books on fieldwork methods [but on] writing field notes and all that, absolutely nothing. But I did write, after my first two weeks, a report on Cottons Wick site, but what I did was have headings like, "travel", "kinship", whatever, I was deciding, in advance, what to record. That was a report to Barbara to show that I was doing something, because she was worried, she thought, "Why is this woman staying there? I'm losing control of her. You've got to come back to the office". And that was when I thought, instinctively, is there any guidance about writing field notes? Nothing. There's a lovely quote there, Malcolm McLeod, that same lovely person that taught me in my third term at Cambridge, who I'd known from CND days at Oxford, and I've interviewed him for my book, and he's absolutely thrilled, he's read the draft, I said, "Malcolm, can you give me any advice?" I visited Cambridge, because my boyfriend then was at King's, Cambridge, and he just said, wickedly, "Judith, you've got to write down everything you see, you smell, you hear, and you should, ideally, fill up an exercise book for every day". And that was the best and the only advice I got. Of course I couldn't fill up a whole exercise book every day, but that was the thing where you did not decide, in advance, what was relevant - which again is consistent with my scepticism of questionnaires, because you decide, in advance. I gave a description of a woman, in the first two weeks, wearing an apron. Little did I know that an apron was crucial in terms of their pollution beliefs, and the apron was to shield the genitalia from the food. It's nothing to do with keeping your clothes clean, it was a symbolic barrier. And then I went back and I thought, "God, they've all got aprons!" So it was that minutiae that - I: That’s an interpretation, but how would you be sure that was true? R: Well, that's a good point. It's again and again, you don't fix on the one episode, you have it - I hate the word, I don't agree with the word "triangulation", because "triangulation" means you compare the qualitative and the quantitative - and what I meant was, after a while it's repeated so often. And then, of course, Jean would tell me. And after a while, you don't write everything down, because you take it for granted. I: And then when you came to analyse, you had I think it was 73 families? R: Yes. Yes. You've done your homework, honestly! God, I'm impressed! (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) Well, you’ve got this narrative diary, then you create a list of families and transfer information, is that how you did it? R: Well, that was the great thing again, Barbara was finally convinced. I mean, I must admit I was so desperate at one point, because she kept saying, "You've got to know these people, you've got to move on to another area now". You know, five weeks, "Go on. Now you've got to go to Wales. Then you've got to go to Lancashire". And I would invent excuses about - well, it was true - that new families were coming on board. So she gradually - and then she began to look at the field notes. But I'm amazed at my Machiavellian strategies - I invited people who I knew believed in fieldwork, and I invited Hugh to come to meet her at the Centre for Environmental Studies, and by this time he was looking at Native Americans in Canada. I don't know if he'd moved on to the Inuit at that point, but he came in and I briefed him. What I did was, I briefed my people beforehand (LAUGHS) and then he would talk about the importance of just picking up what was there. He was a great charmer, and she was totally charmed by him, and very impressed that he'd lived with drunken "First Nations" as they're now called in Canada, and probably about to look at the Inuit. There were other people whose names I can't remember. But then the full apparatus of the Civil Service came into operation, which I said it's been downhill ever since. There was a whole basement of typists down at the bottom of this wonderful Regent's Park building, they were all typists and they all had to type everybody's letters, including a wonderful woman called Cynthia, who's very famous now, and honestly I'll get her name later, but she was doing typing. Actually she was a major urban researcher, but she was earning money to keep her other projects going. So Barbara said, "Right. All those notes will be typed". Then somebody had given her the idea about classification, I think it was another sociologist, she was quite impressed by him. He came and talked to her, he'd done urban sociology, and he started talking about sub-classification, and then - pre-computers, pre-Amstrad - 12 photocopies were made of every single typed page with wide margins I read the one typed copy before it was photocopied, and I put comments in loops, like, "This is about kinship", and "That's about travel", and sometimes there'd be overlap. And then she employed a full-time research assistant, one of whom is a good friend still - well, we're down to Christmas cards now - but their job was, "Right, this week you're going to look at travel". So there were these copies, say she'd had five sheets of the same pages, and the date on every page, and she would cut out every time travel was mentioned, and staple it into a file - and you had to several copies because there would be overlap. Ten they did that with the family files. Every time somebody mentioned Matt Chapman or Matt Chapman was talking to me, there were family files, and I've got them probably in the garden shed out there. So there were all these families' files for whichthey answered all the questions for the questionnaire - their travelling history, their marriage, their work patterns, their literacy. Then she employed a market research man to put all this stuff on the computer for the families, and I met this guy, and he said, "My God, this material is utterly amazing!" And, of course, with bizarre naivety said, "Ninety per cent of these families are motorised! This is way beyond the national figure". And I said, "Well, they're nomads!" The other ten per cent, one lot - Beatrice's - they pushed everything in a knife grinding machine. They had their tent, they had prams, and they walked four counties. The irony is that when she did make me travel to another place, I agreed, and I went up to Hull, ironically, because that was the one area where there was still horse-drawn wagons in the Humberside. And I met up with Arthur Isaacs who was in the Education Department - we meet just fleetingly at the odd gypsy event now - and Arthur took me down to the sites, of the horse-drawn [gypsies]. Of course, there was far more tolerance. If you have a horse, the police aren't going to beat you up and throw you out. So they had far more freedom. I think Farnham Rehfisch was there already, yes, he was, in the Sociology Department, and he'd done the first ethnographic study of gypsies, as far as I know, in Europe. He'd done work in the Sudan, he'd lived with gypsies in Aberdeenshire, in a tent, and the thesis was in the School of Scottish Studies Archive, and I later discovered - and it's very revealing - that that was a failed Ph.D.. He was one of the Hull - there was a huge Hull lot who all taught in the Sudan, and then they had connections in the Sociology Department, which then became a joint Anthropology. I don't know if Farnham's book is up there. I've got all these books here because - not because I'm showing off - but because I'm supervising an MA student, who's a New Age traveller - very interesting. He's in his forties. I: You were saying about Scotland just then, did you get to know people like Hamish Henderson and so on? R: I vaguely got to know him when I went up - because when I broke up with Jim Hopkins, I was already involved with Alan Campbell, an anthropologist, and Alan was a lecturer in the Edinburgh Department, and Hamish was in the School of Scottish Studies then. I think Hamish had an added spot for Alan, because Alan's father had been a big figure in the literary circuit, so Hamish knew him. But Hamish liked young men, and Alan only discovered that rather late! (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) Yes, he liked whisky as well, didn’t he! R: But Hamish, one of the earlier times when I - I already knew Alan, but Hamish organised an event in the School of Scottish Studies, where they showed a film - it was "The Scottish Traveller Weekend" - and they showed a film of "the tent people". And again, there was the same old theme, but then it wasn't they carry Indian customs, it's that Scottish travellers carry our true Pictish Celtic culture. They are leftovers, and they are embodiment of our culture before the wicked English conquered us. So they had these windblown scenes of tents and romantic music, and then they showed them working away at a piece of metal, saying, "This is the continuing tradition of them as tinkers". I mean, they were in iron and steel, smashing up cars, but would you say this was proof of Celtic Pictish culture? Oh, it was appalling! And then they had Scottish travellers come in and sing, and I knew that they were highly literate performers on the circuit, but Hamish would [say], "This is the embodiment of true Scottish culture". And the travellers got more and more drunk, and they were singing songs, sort of Country and Western, and one of the travellers - and, of course, there were lots of Americans who were doing a course on Scottish culture, there was a special week's event, and they were taking photographs - and at one point, this drunken Scottish traveller said, "I don't know any tinky songs!" So he spoke for me really! (LAUGHS) But, you know, the scepticism! Nomads are the embodiment frozen in time, and they don't have any link with history or modern life, and that was what was being repeated in My Gypsy Wedding - the voice over saying, "The gypsies are finally confronting the 21st century, they've been isolated and secret". I thought, "I fought that in the 1970s". I mean, it's voice over crap! I: So do you think, in a way, that’s your central contribution that you see the gypsies in this much more realistic way as being partly integrated with the bigger society, rather than a pure specialised group? R: Mmm. Well, the other thing was, when I came from Cambridge, we'd been told there were two types of nomads - pasturists and hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers were the Cum (?? - 94.38) and the Australian aborigines and the pasturists were the Nuer. I must give credit to a wonderful woman, Rina Groper, an American who just wrote the odd article, later she came out with a full book - and she started hinting about their migrant goods and services, and I drew on that, and then I said they were a third type of nomad. And then later - there's this awful word, "service nomads", I don't like it, but that's the category. So my contribution was to emphasise this third type of nomad. Then ironically, with the critique of the Indian origin, after all the venom, there were young researchers all round Europe who loved my ideas, and they said, "Judith Okely was a pioneer in questioning the Indian origin". By the way, I've lost track of Hobsbawm. After that conference where Leach had supported me, I found myself on the same railway platform at Cambridge as Hobsbawm. We'd already talked over dinner, just quietly, and he said, "I was very impressed with your presentation. Would you contribute an article to the journal?" The one on history which he edited. I: Past and Present, was it? R: Yes. He said, "Would you contribute that to an article?" I was so naïve, I [thought], "Men are - I might be strategic in one way, but I had no idea about how to exploit one's career contacts". I thought, "I can't publish that in an article if I'm going to have it in the book". So I said, "Well, it's already going to be in my book". And, of course, if I had published it, I would have been far more immune from venom if I had Eric Hobsbawm supporting me in Past and Present. It would have given it a certain status. But instead, I mean, like Donald Kenrick, he said, "Every time I read your book I want to burn it". So I said, "Oh, so you believe in Nazi book burning, do you?" And that sort of got him! I: Judith, what we’ve talked about here is the days in the field, but then you went on to turn it into a Ph.D., didn’t you? R: Yes, yes. Yeah, well, that's all very fun, because I couldn't get a Distinction in the Anthropology Cambridge thing, Fortes said, "We can't give you a grant", and that was when I called them "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" - Tim Ingold and Fuller got them, and there was another guy got it, Colin somebody. Anyway, I think Fortes felt really guilty because he gave it to this other guy who went off to Africa, and then he just sent a letter, in August, saying, "I don't want the grant this year. I want another year off". And, of course, with those ESRC or SSRC things, you couldn't give them out to anybody else once the deadline was past, so actually Cambridge lost the grant. I think Fortes felt guilty, because I'd meet him several times later. But I think he may have agreed to be a referee, but anyway Malcolm did, when I was living on the gypsy camp. I can't remember whether it was the following year or not, I registered for a B.Litt. at Oxford, and Malcolm gave me a wonderful reference. I: Malcolm who? R: McLeod. But, you know, I had this albatross round my neck, of a II ii, I mean, it's actually a II ii. But the minute I got that job at the Centre for Environmental Studies, I was able to pay off the loan that I'd got - in those days things were cheap - I paid off the loan from the Cambridge event. Again, things were so bloody cheap, I asked if I could register for a B.Litt. [in Oxford], and in those days they wouldn't even accept part-timers, you had to be full-time, and they had this new professor, Maurice Freedman. He had left the LSE where there had been the '68 upheavals, and he was a compromise appointment. Rodney Needham and Barnes had both wanted the Chair, and they each said they would resign if the other one was appointed, so they had Maurice Friedman as the compromise, and he came up thinking, "These rebels, these students, they're all sixties", we were all post-grads, there was no undergraduate anthropology then, so he was extremely strict. Anyway, so I was interviewed by Edwin Ardener, to be registered for a B.Litt., and he said, "The rules are such that if you're doing even a B.Litt., you have to be resident in Oxford for the first year, and if Maurice Freedman finds out that you're not resident" - I was living on gypsy camps. I said, "But I want to be registered". And he appointed Godfrey Lienhardt as my supervisor because he knew Godfrey was completely flexible about all this horrendous paranoid stuff. The man abolished the Christmas Party, which was sherry down in the basement. He said there'd be drugs. Then he said no student could park in the Banbury Road - there were no yellow lines. He was an absolute authoritarian monster! So I registered for the B.Litt., on the following amazing understanding, which was that as Edwin said, "You must appear every fortnight at the Friday Seminar, sit in the front row and ask a question, go to the pub afterwards, then Maurice will think that you're resident in Oxford". (LAUGHS) So I would drive from the gypsy camp, in my dull clothes, and change in a lay-by to real gypsy florid long skirts and low tight tops and everything, and turn up at the seminar, sit in the front row and ask a question. Then by that time, I think Jim still had the rented cottage in Appleton, and stay there the odd night, but carry on writing night, night, day, day, you know, writing up the field notes, and drive back to the camp. And I did that for a year. I: And then you moved to Oxford? R: The amazing thing is that, again, with this dreaded albatross, that I wrote my chapters. And, by the way, I was very very angry because Barbara Adams deleted identification of authors of the chapters, because David Morgan found himself employed by the West Midlands who he'd torn apart, and he insisted that all names be removed from our individual chapters. I: No! R: Because and ironically, his first draft had been so venomous against the West Midlands, that we had altered it. And then he found he was an employee, and he was embarrassed, and it was at proof stage, so Barbara, who was a civil servant, used to anonymise things, she then deleted, from the chapters, all authorship. Then, of course, I'm not boasting, my chapters were the ones that were endlessly quoted, and she went round the country saying she was the author. I: Oh, I see. And your chapters are 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8? R: Have I named them? I: Yes. R: But going back, it was because I produced the book, then Godfrey was my full supporter. He put me forward, first for a special grant, it was a bequest that was only to study in Europe, and I was interviewed for that, but it was minimal grant, and I absolutely cocked it up, because I talked about being involved in shoplifting with a gypsy! (LAUGHS) I: Did you actually go shoplifting? R: No! No, I mean, somebody, when I was lecturing in the Czech Republic in January, they said, they said, "Marik Karminski, he went working without a Work Permit in Sweden, with the gypsies". I said, "For God's sake! He was stateless, he didn't have any money. What else could he do but sell a few carpets?" And I said, "Look, what happened was, one gypsy woman, she ran away from her husband" - they were in a Council house - he beat her up, she came and actually stayed in my caravan. Because that was the last caravan. That's how I learnt about death rituals, because it was a local official caravan, and it should have been burnt because an old lady had died in it, and so she insisted on having the windows open, the Calor gas fire on, and all the lights on, and the door open all night, to keep the ghost away. Normally, nobody visited me after dark, because they wouldn't want the ghost. But anyway, I was just a Gorgio that you could exploit, so I took her to the Welfare to get some money, because in quite truth, she said, "My husband's beat me up, I've left home". And as we were walking down the streets of St. Alban's, she went into a smart shop, and I was just waiting outside, and then she came out with a smart plastic bag, not anybody's bag, but a new one. And she just said, "Judith, you hold on to that for me, will you?" And I was standing on the pavement, holding this thing that I knew was nicked. What could I do? Go back into the shop and say, "Look this woman has just nicked it, I want to return it"? How could I? What could I do? I stood there frozen! I was thinking of that wonderful book, The Glasgow Gang Observed, famous book. Then she came out, we walked down the street, and she didn't ask for the bag for about five minutes, and then she asked for the bag, she picked it up and she tore out the tissue paper and threw it down on the pavement as we walked, and I said, "Oh, that was a nice free gift!" And she said, "What, you knew it was nicked?" I said, "Yeah, of course I knew it was nicked!" "Cor, blimey!" Then, as I said to the students in the Czech Republic, "It enhanced my CV, because it said - She goes calling for scrap. She picks potatoes. And she shoplifts!" So it was a wonderful introduction! But I recounted this in the interview with Maurice Freedman and Godfrey Lienhardt, and I thought afterwards, "But people can talk about headhunting and cannibalism in New Guinea, but, you know, but in the - " Godfrey was so amazing, he said, "You won the grant". But it was nothing. Then they put me forward for an SSRC Grant, and ironically, apparently - because it would be a Pool Award, they were Pool Awards then, as you know, because they couldn't give me one just like that - and by chance, apparently even then - and that was still under Labour - they were under pressure to show what use these research grants were. And, of course, I had a book just out, or in press, that's right, Gypsies and Government Policy. It was a gift to them. Godfrey is brilliant and he wrote absolutely brilliant references just knowing what the politics was, and I got a Pool Award in 1973. I was saved, my fees were paid for, my accommodation. I did try and go back and do more fieldwork, but I found that, again, if you just do day trips or odd things, you're a stranger again. And also things had changed. But, you know, I went back, I kept up in touch, but I was so lucky, because I rented a room in Stile Road, in Headington, because the house I was buying with Jim was being renovated. I can't remember what he was doing, because he then got a job at King's, London, and so we bought a house together. My mother sold her house in Acton, and gave my sister and I each £5,000 to put down as a deposit. Those were the days - a house in Islington for £12,000! Three storey! Imagine! The seminars, the peer group, the peer group - there was Kirstin Harstrup, Martin Thom - I notice he's somewhere in York now, Kirstin's a professor in Denmark - Graham Clark, who tragically died But they were amazed at me because I had actually done fieldwork, they were just starting their Ph.D.s.. And I met up with a wonderful young Frenchwoman in Tours the other week, and she said the same things that I've experienced over the years, is that people cannot believe that you've done work with gypsies, they think you must have a relative. But it was that that gave me the freedom, and then I could pursue all - some of those chapters in my thesis and my book, I reduced it, but all the ideas were there. Then I could elaborate on pollution beliefs, because this woman, Barbara Adams - that's another thing about working for a civil servant, is that I had to go up, even when I was writing up, after I'd lived on the gypsy camp, and it was like '72 I was writing up, I would want to go to the library, the Kensington Library, with the Gypsy Law Society Magazine/Journal, and she made me take a day out of annual leave to go to a library. If I went up to Oxford, it was a day out of my annual leave, to go to seminars. And again, Yarron Matras, who's Head of the Romany Studies, he said, "Judith Okely dismisses years of scholarship". I used my annual leave to go to the Gypsy Law Society, but Barbara Adams, again, she thought pollution beliefs are just mumbo-jumbo leftover superstition. But I was able to write that up, and I wrote a lot in that wretched little rented place in Stile Road, with the stimulus of my colleagues. I: And one thing about Godfrey, as your supervisor, intellectually did you get important ideas from him? R: No. No. I mean, again, I was swapping notes with a lovely guy in a conference in Belfast. He says he remembers me being invited to lecture to undergrads. at Cambridge years later, and he just said, you know, "We were just spellbound that somebody was doing work in Europe, in Britain." That's again, the other thing. I've since made friends with a lovely guy, Ahmed al-Shahi (?? - sp. 114.17), still links to St. Antony's, who absolutely adores Godfrey, he did work in the Sudan. He has inherited all of Godfrey's papers, and we were reminiscing about him. Ahmed absolutely worships him. Ahmed was a Turkish Kurd who got a Scholarship at the age of 18, to come to Oxford. And I said that I didn't realise that Godfrey has an Austrian father and English mother, not Austrian Jewish, and he landed up in Yorkshire, and he feigned, or had a terribly upper class accent - I think he had a Yorkshire accent at one point, but he could switch. But when I was swapping notes with Ben - the guy who I met up with at Belfast, who remembers my lecture, as an undergrad. - I said that Godfrey was just amazed that I could be living with these bizarre, weird, filthy people, just up the road! (LAUGHS) And he started reading my field notes along with his brother Peter Lienhardt, who specialised in Arab society, and one of them had to go off to the loo and vomit, because I was talking about clearing - appearing to be useful and picking up newspaper, and then I found a load of human faeces, and they went off and vomited! Godfrey was looking at my field notes at one point, and he said, "They're more violent than the Dinka!" (LAUGHS) So we all agreed, Ben and I agreed. Godfrey was so amazed that I could be doing this thing. But I am grateful to Godfrey because he totally supported me, but he was frightened of me at first, and I couldn't even get him for any supervision, anything. And originally I was paying for it! But as Edwin said, "He didn't see the money". But the Institute was sinking in alcoholism, and Godfrey was an alcoholic, he died of liver problems, so did his brother, so did Evans-Pritchard, although Evans-Pritchard part committed suicide - drank himself to death. It was just an all boys' thing where you go off to the pub and you get absolutely blootered with booze. Godfrey, he'd been given me because he didn't obey the rules, and then I came back from a pub, oh, about 2.30, and I met him in the library, and I think he smelt the alcohol on my breath, and he melted! (LAUGHS) But I've heard that the reference he wrote for me, for Durham, was absolutely over the top. Then the irony is that when I went to Edwin, because there was a huge split. There were students of Edwin Ardener, they were total disciples, and there were students of Rodney Needham, and the two men wouldn't speak to each other. Needham even blocked his students going to Shirley Ardener's seminars. I mean, it's just pathetic! My next book is going to be a campus novel. And I went to Edwin, everybody was looking for the right supervisor, "Have you got Edwin?" "Have you got Needham?" I went to Edwin, and I said, "Could I change supervisors?" I think I wanted Needham, because Needham had invited me to give - he ran his seminar - and again, I mean, they were just incredulous! There was this going on a few miles away. There was a huge Oxford male thing, which I quoted in my book about, shit and dirt and everything, and I used that as the opening to my paper for Rodney Needham, and I said, "Look, this is actually pollution beliefs there". And they just were so fascinated that they could see anthropology just up the road! Then I spoke to Edwin, and he said, "No, Godfrey's been very loyal to you, and you shouldn't abandon him". Later, I discovered that the students of each of these top men were totally in their hold, and that they had to follow their line, and a wonderful friend - I sort of caught up with her on Google the other day, she's Sierra Leonese - and she was supervised by one person, I won't say who it is, but she was so bitter - I: What’s her name? R: Philomena Steady. She was married with two lovely children, and she was doing a Ph.D. on aspects of Sierra Leone, and she wanted to write her thesis one way, and her supervisor insisted that she refer to X, Y and Z and do it his way. And in the end - there was no word limit in those days - she wrote a second volume that was her view. And I remember sitting with her, with her Ph.D., and she was so bitter, she pointed to the first footnote, which was an insistence by a supervisor that she referred to so and so, and she said when she was examined, I think by Michael Banton, and by Godfrey as the internal, Michael Banton said, "Why have you got two volumes, and why are they contradictory?" And she started explaining, and she said Godfrey interrupted her, and she said he knew immediately what it was about. He knew that she'd been dictated to, and that she wanted the freedom. And she said, "Thank goodness for Godfrey". So he had political acumen, and so I'm glad that he trusted me, he gave me the freedom, he didn't dictate, whereas I saw that others were victims, sometimes, of their supervisors, who would ban them mentioning their rivals! So I'm very grateful to Godfrey, because I said, in the preface, he gave me the confidence to go up the M1, and he couldn't believe what I was doing, it was so bizarre! I: Was there anybody, though, in Oxford - obviously you got a lot of inspiration in Cambridge, but in Oxford - who gave you intellectual inspiration? R: I know! I know! Who did? Honestly, I have to think. I mean, Shirley Ardener, I've done an article in her honour, where she was the one that ran the all women's seminar. She came up to me and said, "Judith, will you give a paper on gypsy women?" and that was when I thought, as a Feminist, I'd never really thought that I should - I thought, well, it was a Feminist act to go to university - that was sufficient - and I'd never extricated the women as a category. I've written this article in her honour, and then I gave that first version, and then it appeared later in her book, Perceiving Women, which was the first anthropology book on post-seventies Feminism. Even now she's running seminars called "Ethnicity and Identity", she's still running Edwin's seminars, as it were. I: So when we broke off, we just mentioned about the Women’s Anthropology Group in Oxford. R: Oh yes, the mentors. Yes, well, it was that there was this seminar, apparently a number of women in about 1972 said - that was like women's consciousness-raising - they said, "Let's have a seminar". One of the pioneers was Charlotte Hardman, who is a lecturer up in Newcastle now. She was a student of Edwin Ardener, and she did work in India or Nepal. So I was parachuted in, because I arrived in about 1973, and I've written about it in an article - and I said that it was like women's consciousness raising groups. In this tribute to Shirley, I said that at the end of one of the seminars, Shirley said, "That was a successful seminar", and I said, "Why?" And she said, "Because everybody spoke". That was incredible. And what we did note, time and time again, was that it wasn't a cockfight. It's true that there were more men doing anthropology in those days. I mean, social science has become feminised. Politics is - in the Hull Department of Politics, there wasn't a single woman lecturer, nothing, until they got a wife of somebody who was then given a job. And I found that inspiring. I said, for all future post-graduate seminars I ran in future, that "I didn't like cockfights", and I encouraged people to speak. When we did allow the odd man come into the seminars in Oxford, they would just take over, and they wouldn't even realise they were taking over, and what we found was, it was a sparring match. I was just watching the wonderful film, The Big Country, with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, and there's an amazing fight where they go out into the plains and they have a fight till dusk, and I thought, "Yeah, that's a macho seminar for you!" I was asked to speak on International Women's Day at Warwick, "Is Feminism still relevant?" Amazing, Students' Union with 300 students, and three of us on the stage with a mike, and I mentioned that as an example, and some of the women came up to me and said, "It's still like that now". But that was my strategy. By the way, when I first came to Essex, there was no post-graduate seminar, and I started it, and I chaired the one in Edinburgh later. But I know that some males were very confused and, indeed, the one who I was to testify against in the Tribunal, he actually set up some of his male students to mock the women. These men had a contest to see how many times they could mention one particular author - Hastrop, actually, a contemporary of mine - and who was going to win, and the woman giving the paper had no idea. And then who was going to win to get her to mention the name. I didn't know that this male lecturer was setting it up. Later, a few years later, I was utterly shocked - a friend of one of my former male students started giggling at some event, and then he wasn't at Edinburgh, and he said, "Oh, Spencer refers to your male post-grad. students as 'Judith's Eunuchs'". ... The anonymous reader said could I show something more about new forms of fieldwork? I've interviewed people who did work in the '60s in the '70s with the Pashtun in Afghanistan, down to a wonderful Franco-Senegalese woman who's done work on dance - she's a lecturer in the African Studies here. I interviewed her here. I said, "Does your little toddler, does she have toys?" And she said, "She'll find plenty". So she did find plenty. But I've interviewed all those people up to sort of 2005, but then I thought, "Hey!" you know, "I'll take advantage of this. I'll put in the titles and some publications of my former Ph.D. students". And there's one who, a eunuch? He's near 80 now. He ran a Borstal, he was head of a Borstal. They were closed down under Thatcher. He already had a degree in sociology, and self-funded, he came and did an M.A. in Anthropology at Edinburgh, and he got so - I mean, I'm diverting, but I just want it for the record - Edinburgh was suddenly classified as the AIDS city of Europe. It's only because they recorded it. And there was huge medical grants to go and study the AIDS capital of Europe. He was wandering down a shopping arcade - and I will send you a copy of my book when it comes out in October - he suddenly saw two guys in their twenties, and they said, "Mr. Clive Foster! Hey!" He'd been the Head of the Borstal, you see! And they greeted him like a friend. They were HIV positive through injections - heroin. Anyway, he did his Ph.D. on that. And that's another story about trying to get money from the Medical Council or something, in Edinburgh. They kept saying that "You don't have a control group". "What's this? Participant observation? You're mixing with these people? What is this method?" And he had no form of defence, he thought he'd embraced anthropology and this was it! Fortunately, I think this is where Cohen did put pressure - somebody did - and in the end they folded. But, do you know, they said he could only get this pittance of a grant as long as the thesis was on the carers of HIV positive people, and not the people - because the medics thought they owned these people. And these wonderful guys - again, it's methods - these wonderful lads, and, of course, some of the kids got HIV positive through childbirth. And they said, "Come on, sir, we want you to write our story, not like all these researchers all round there with their clipboards. We don't want researchers, we want you to write our story". They were all besieged with people with clipboards. There was money going out of everywhere. And he did a brilliant ethnographic study of HIV positive drug users. I: Okay. R: Anyway, there we are. So there's a eunuch for you! I: Thank you. Okay, that’s a eunuch. But going back to the Women’s Anthropology Group, I understand that the seminar was open, and everybody could join in, but would you say, though, new intellectual directions came out of that? R: Well, I mean, I said we were all post-grads., and really, it was a chance for people to explore ideas with a confident supportive atmosphere. It wasn't that we sat down and said, "Let's have this theory or that theory", I think it rescued people. And dear old Godfrey, he was very worried about Feminism, and he said to somebody, "Well, I don't know what Judith's doing with this Feminist lot, but she's brilliant anyway, so she'd get anywhere if she wasn't a Feminist." So that got back to me. But I remember a lovely young woman, I think she was sociology, she'd done work in shanty towns in South Africa, and she gave the most appalling paper. But what happened was that people didn't say, "This is rubbish": they asked her questions, and she had the answers. And there were 15 questions. She was totally articulate. She went away on a high! And she finished the thesis and she wrote a book, but the actual paper was pathetic. She had the information, but she didn't know what to do with it. But I left. I got the Durham job in 1976, and I still hadn't yet finished my thesis. It was a one-year, a nine months temporary job. My grant had come to an end. So I left it. But that Group has always suffered - I mean, Shirley's consolidated it and had the Visiting Fellows, but it's now come to a halt, because the head of Queen Elizabeth House says we can't have Visiting Fellows unless they're linked to somebody who's on a salary. I: And you later came back to Oxford and then you were Deputy Director … R: Yeah, well, I came back in 1999, and every Thursday there's been a seminar, and I started going. It's a shaky business, because they depended on Directors who were either with a husband's salary, it wasn't the sort of thing that somebody with a full-time job could take on, and often they were the wives of academics. Oxford was full of women who were highly qualified, but they couldn't get jobs. And the Deputy Director suddenly invited me out for lunch in about 2001, and then they said, the Deputy, she'd just got a tutorial job in an Oxford College, and they said, "Would you take over?" And I said, "As long as it isn't anything to do with admin. because", I said, "I left my job because I found admin. was destroying my intellect". And so they said, "Well, we need your name, and it's nice to have a professor". So I was always on the bottom of the notepaper. Every term we arranged seminars, and I've had some quite sensational seminars. I had one with Lydia Sciama. She was a post-grad. when I was a post-grad., along with Helen Calloway, but they were older than me, and they were, as usual, the wives of academics, who'd had to follow their husbands, couldn't get jobs, but then they did Ph.D.s once their children were at secondary school. She and I ran a whole seminar on the Mediterranean, and I got students to, I got Heysham (?? - sp -13.46) - unfortunately he couldn't come over, but I read his paper on the Bedouin. And last summer I had a whole seminar on "Politics and Giving Back", and that we're not just researchers who take material. "What reciprocity is there?" I had some big names. I had Johnny Parry, the one who married Margaret who I met at the Sorbonne, and he has been in a continuing problem, because his key research assistant was arrested as a terrorist about six years ago, on totally bogus charges, and he was giving a paper about how the anthropologist fights to release their own assistant. And Tony Simpson, the one who talked about HIV. I can say this, but it's still in confidence, that LMH have been open to us transferring, but we're not going to be given a room or Visiting Fellows, it's just running a seminar. I've got a wall of Feminist books upstairs, and I've offered to give them all my gender books, but, you know, I think it'll fade away, because we depended on people giving their services, and now people are sinking. So really that's it. I: Okay. Now just going back, for the last time maybe, to the the Traveller Gypsy Oxford time, I noticed you mention, in your thanks, Wendy James and David Morgan. Is it worth saying anything about either of those? R: Well, it's not the sociologist David Morgan. I: No. R: It's this David Morgan on that book - the one who was then employed by the West Midlands, and asked for our names to be deleted from the chapters, and he died before the eighties. So it's not that same David Morgan. I met him once. But Wendy James, it's quite ironic that I've only been invited once to give a Friday Seminar, and that's the big event. I gave a Friday Seminar, I came back from Durham in about 1977, and I gave a presentation. In those days, you just had photocopies, you didn't even have an overhead projector, I passed round photocopies of pictures of the gypsies which I got from the local - because that's the wonderful thing is that I went to the local archives of the local papers, and all the photographs, nearly all of them in my book, are actually of the people I knew - but most of the newspapers even agreed not to have the area name of the newspaper, so it didn't identify them. It's only one. Anyway, I was showing these pictures as I was elaborating on pollution beliefs and everything else, and Wendy James, it was thanks to her, she said, "That photograph of the graveside, why are there wreaths of chairs?" And I can show you, again, with that book. "Why chairs?" It was her perception and it's like "Eureka!" And that helped me. Part of my chapter on death rituals is reproduced in an Open University book just from last year, on death and bereavement. They've reproduced my section, because I was the first to write on death rituals in gypsies in Europe. And I suddenly thought, "Why?" And then, bingo! It was settlement. It was sedentarisation. The chair - because they didn't have chairs in their caravans, they had benches - and I suddenly thought, "It's settlement. The ghost is settled". And that's why I thanked Wendy. Just that one perceptive comment. Although, in those days, she said, "Judith, it was so good you showing photographs, because it shows they're human". It was considered sensational to show pictures of people! So that's why I thanked Wendy James. I: But I’m slightly confused, though! This Friday Seminar was in Oxford? R: Yes. Yes. I: And did she run them, then? R: No, she was just a member of staff. The Friday Seminar is a sort of mystical ritual - it's not the Thursday Queen Elizabeth House Gender thing that was in Queen Elizabeth House … and incidentally, that goes back to Maurice Freedman. The reason why it was linked to Queen Elizabeth House was that when Juliet Blair - long deceased - and Shirley and Charlotte Hardman asked if they could have an all women's seminar in the Institute, Maurice Freedman said it would be discriminatory. And yet he was at All Souls that forbade any women even to apply! So he said we couldn't have a thing that excluded men. So then, because Edwin and Shirley were linked to Queen Elizabeth house - that's why it started. But The Friday Seminar, I haven't been for some - I went two years ago, actually, because I'm always busy now. You can look up ISCA on the internet now, it's all very clever, and it's the kind of ritual where you have outside speakers. So I was invited then, in 1977. But fortunately there's a seminar run by Mohammed Kalib (?? - sp), well, he now says he's not professor, but we call him "Professor of Islamic Studies" in the Centre for Islamic Studies here, and an anthropologist, he's joint running a seminar this autumn. I've interviewed him for my book as well. What better to have a Muslim Indian who did fieldwork on stone breakers in India! He sat down here, and I interviewed him. And it was terribly moving. As he sat down, he said, "I just want to reassure you, I'm not a fundamentalist Islamist". I said, "Don't worry! Don't worry!" (LAUGHS) And I deliberately displayed this! (LAUGHS) And he looked at it, and he said, "That's from India". I said, "Yes". I: What’s it made of? R: It's from the Taj Mahal area. It's stone. I: It’s marble, is it? R: Yes, marble. And my mother, she accompanied me on that trip round India - the Fabian Tour. She said, "I'm cashing in my granny bonds, and I'm coming with you", and she did! And when we were all shown the Taj Mahal, but we were quickly whizzed off and taken to a gift shop, and my mother bought that. And I was very angry, because it was so enormous. I said, "You've been conned". And it was too big. But they sent it by mail, and I said, "It'll never arrive". It did! I punished myself, because I complained, and, of course, Mohammed Talib - he likes to be called Talib - he saw it. Anyway, he's inviting me, so at the beginning of my career, and at the end, I'm giving, on November 4th, a seminar, the Friday Seminar, on my book, which will be out by then. (LAUGHS) I: Okay. So then you say 1977 you went to Durham? R: '76. I: ’76, sorry. And when did you leave Durham, actually? R: First of all it was a nine month job, then it was extended to two years. Then it had to be re-advertised. And I was actually suspended on the dole for four months while they waited for the interviews. And then I stayed until I came to Essex, which was '81/'82. I: Oh, okay, ’81, yes. R: I applied, and I said, a personal reason was that my partner, Jim, who was bipolar as they now call it - manic depressive - we had the house in London, and I would go down there, that was before the 125, it was an eight hour train journey, and I would never miss a lecture or anything, but in order to get the permanent job at Durham after two years, I was advised that I had to pretend that I'd broken up with Jim, in order to be taken seriously. I: Amazing! R: They said I wouldn't be committed to Durham. And I said, "The deep sexism - " I: Yes, you talked about quite a lot of the incident. shall we move on to Essex? R: Yes. Yes. I: Was sexism equally bad at Essex, then? R: No, it was different. I would just like to say one thing, though, that I had to fight to have a course on gender. I want to say two extra things about Durham, which is discrimination against women, is that when I applied for Essex, I didn't put down my class of degree, and the woman, after the interview, stopped me in the passage and said, "What class of degree did you get?" I'd learnt not to put it in. But I put it down at Durham, and I was given a nine month temporary job, and in those days the CV was circulated throughout the whole Senate, and the Professor of Mathematics said, "This is a disgrace that we are giving a job to somebody with a Third Class degree". What they didn't notice was that they gave the permanent job to a man who didn't even have a degree. They didn't spot it! He went to Teddy Hall to do geography. He dropped out. He didn't lie, he just put, "Studied geography at Teddy Hall". His father was a Freemason and Head of a College, and later he drifted off to the Caribbean, and he was allowed to come back and do a Master's in Ethnology, and then he did a Ph.D., and he didn't have an undergraduate degree! But they didn't even notice. They gave him the permanent job. They didn't even interview me for that. Anyway, dear old David, my lovely colleague - the Scottish guy who did the Baktiari (?? - 26.25) - he said, he knew how to work the class, he'd got a real sort of Scottish accent, but he banged the table, and he said - his supervisor, by the way, was Peter Lienhardt, here. He said, "Gentlemen," because there was no woman in Senate, "Gentlemen, this lady was first Woman President of the Oxford Union", and he said they all melted! I said, "David, it wasn't President! I was first woman member!" And then, when I came back, two years later, I'd got my D.Phil., I'd got more publications, I'd swept through, unanimous committee, and I didn't put down my class of degree then. I'd got my D.Phil., by then, because I got it in '77. The maths Professor remembered. "Gentlemen, why should we give this permanent job to a woman who has a Third?" And the Vice-Chancellor said - and I know he was repeating David's words - "Gentlemen, this is a very powerful lady", and that shut them up! (LAUGHS) But, you know, the sort of bafflement that I had to pretend to have broken up. David said, "Judith, you'll have to pretend you've broken up with Jim, because if they know you're still commuting to London." I was taking a train at 5 o'clock at night on a Friday, and taking one at seven on a Monday, and getting there by 10! And when Jim was in the Mental Hospital, he was only allowed out of the Hospital if I was there at home, so I would come maybe on a Friday, and he'd be allowed out for the weekend, and I never missed a class, I never missed a seminar. And I said, you know, "Should I tell the professor that my partner's seriously ill?" He said, "Judith, for God's sake don't say it, you won't get the job". Then you see all these articles about "Is it possible to have a commuting relationship?" Women weren't even short-listed if they were married! The wickedness of it! So, anyway, I thought, when I came to Essex - by the way, I have a filing cabinet full of applications for jobs. every Anthropology Department south of Leeds, and Sociology Departments, so I was amazed that I could be short-listed at Essex. But it was always because I'd done work in Britain that I was not a real anthropologist. I would never have got a job at the LSE. And even now they're totally prejudiced. And I keep repeating an interview with Maurice Bloch in the introduction to my Own or Other Culture, where he said, "We shouldn't study Europe, because we know it". The arrogance of it was just unspeakable! So anyway, I got that. I was lucky. I swept into the job. And dear Lee, she - I: Leonore Davidoff? R: Yes. She met me before the actual interview, I think she welcomed me into her office. She'd never met me. Oh yes, that's right! Yes, because we'd invited her to give a talk on Feminist History in Durham, so I'd met her. That's right, that's how I'd met her. And then she invited me into the office, and she said, "Judith", she said, "You've got a very good chance here because you've published", and apparently my position there was to replace somebody who'd not been given tenure. And so that boosted my morale. So I went in. I had nothing to lose because I already had a job. But it caused uproar with Godfrey, Edwin Ardener. The anthropology world said, "You're absolutely mad!" because Essex had a radical history, and a New University, and "Why can't you stay at this wonderful Durham?" And people kept talking about the cathedral. I said, "I don't give lectures in the Cathedral". Do you know, I wasn't even allowed accommodation. I was told, because I wasn't married, they couldn't provide me with accommodation, or even membership of a College - because I wasn't married. And yet you wouldn't be short-listed if you were married. So I told you, did I, I had found this mining village out there. Did I say that? I: Don’t remember that, no. R: Yeah, well, it was just wonderful in that the University accommodation said they could not provide anything for me because I was a single woman, and they only dealt with married men. And then they said, "Go to the Students' Union for accommodation". And he said, "Since you're a privileged member of staff, we will only give you addresses 12 miles out of Durham. And I hired a taxi - he gave me an address in a mining village, Sherburn Hill - and I had a taxi, 12 miles out, to look at an end of terrace mining place. They're in those amazing villages that are just about four terraces for a pit, and they were "D villages". I got this place, and it was my saviour, because these retired miners just absolutely adopted me. I could drive, I took them to Beamish, they took me to Miners' Clubs, and I just learnt the whole other side of Durham - the mining Durham. That was my saving grace. They would invite me into their houses. And the escape from the horror of that - I never even dined in College, because I wasn't allowed in College because I was a woman. Anyway, I came to Essex, and I thought, "God, there's five women here! Thank God!" But I was disappointed because people didn't welcome me. But I give it to dear Gordon Marshall, I mean, he was so terrific, because he'd done anthropology at Stirling, he knew a bit, and the first week or whenever I arrived, or was it before I arrived? He said, "If you want accommodation, you can stay with us". Then by bizarre horror, I'd sold my terraced house in Durham - because I did buy a little terraced house, you know, as cheap as anything, though I had my place in London - the people who were selling the Dedham cottage delayed for six weeks, so I had to go to dear Gordon and, honestly, what a guy! I stayed there four nights a week for six weeks. I mean, what generosity! Just terrific! The welcome was just lovely. But I didn't find any of the women welcoming at all, except later, Alison Scott read my article on the boarding school, and she came to me in tears because she recognised her own life. And she'd done anthropology with Jimmy Littlejohn in Edinburgh, and it was very weird, because we were united by rejection of our class upbringing. I think she'd been encouraged to go to university, but she went to Edinburgh because she wanted to find her Scottish roots. She was called Alison MacEwan, and that's when she met Chris Scott. And we became very very close buddies, absolutely terrific. I: Yes. So Leonore was initially welcoming? R: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, she was just busy. She wasn't hostile. She was wonderfully welcoming, but she was just disappearing under work, but I never - she wasn't a buddy. But I wanted somebody to support me, especially as the snobby anthropologists said, "You've ruined your career. You should never have left Durham". And then Joan Busfield said, "What on earth could you teach?" And I was put into the Deviancy Course, and Ken was delightful. But this was the other thing, that I had never heard of the term "symbolic interactionism". Right towards the end of my time in Essex, I met up with Tony Woodiwiss on the train, because he commuted, and he said, "Well, of course, we didn't want you because you were a symbolic interactionist". And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, you know, you do fieldwork with people. You're a symbolic interactionist". I said, "What?" I said, "If you meet people, you're a symbolic interactionist?" And, of course, I knew there was a big debate, symbolic interactionism apparently ignored structure and politics and economics, and you looked at whether people's eyebrows went up or not. I mean, I'd never heard the term. I told Tony, "You can have Marxist anthropologists," and, of course there was this bizarre division between the Weberians and the [Marxists] - it was just bonkers to me! I looked at the economy. But they condemned me without even knowing my work. Ken was a symbolic interactionist, so it was assumed, because I was teaching on the Deviancy Course, that I was one of those that ignored political structures and power. But then I taught on the Methods Course, I taught the Qualitative Methods, there was a compulsory course. And I was shocked, because I inherited ... from David Rose, yes, he taught both quantitative and qualitative, and I asked if I could see last year's reading list, and they were very vague about it, and finally I was given a copy, and the key point about qualitative methods was, "read lots of novels". I was just incredulous. But my key text - I said I fought with Barbara Adams over qualitative stuff, and my only key texts then were [William Foote-Whyte] The Street Corner Society appendix - absolutely key. That is priceless. The theme of hanging around. And then Ulf Hanners (?? - sp. -40.11), Swedish, who'd written a book called, Soul Side, published in 1969, and I've interviewed his wife, Elena Woolf (?? Sp. - 40.24) for my book, and it was a delight meeting him years later. I said, "You don't know what a lifeline your appendix, or fieldwork chapter, was". Because he was inspired by Street Corner Society, and he went to Washington and looked at an Afro-American ghetto in Washington. He was a pioneer on that. I said "Those were lifelines", so I put those on the reading list. I: What about C. Wright-Mills? R: I've got C. Wright-Mills, I was reading him years ago, I've even got his book upstairs, whichever one it was - The White-Collar Worker. I: Not one of your first choices, obviously. R: Well, he didn't talk so much about methods, but I've got the book upstairs. I had read him, and I used him in my sociology as an undergrad.. But again, that was the question, "Where are the texts for methods?" And a key text, which I don't remember if I used in Essex then - who knows, I might have copies of my original reading lists up in the attic - the most brilliant book, was The Professional Stranger by Michael Agar, and that was published in 1980. It's a bit of a rambling book, but it was a pioneer, and I've quoted him a lot in my book. I: And what’s important about him, then? R: He'd done work, I think in India first - he was American - and then he went back to America to do qualitative research, I think in the health services or social services, and he met up with all these quantitative people, and they kept saying, "What's your hypothesis?" "What is your tool?" "What are you testing?" He said he was totally baffled because he didn't use that approach when he did anthropological fieldwork in India. I've used this - and, I mean, it's a wonderful joke. He came up with the "funnel method", which was that you're open to everything, and then you refine it. So I've made lots of jokes in lectures saying, the "funnel method" got me the ESRC Grant to do Normandy, it got me the travel grant. Because they kept saying, "Can you prove the value of ethnographic methods?" I'd say the "funnel method", and it shut them up! (LAUGHS) And I said, "It's phallic, it's hard. It also appeals! It's a tool!" (LAUGHS) I was lecturing in Nottingham about four years ago, and they said, "Thank God, Judith, we're now going to introduce the funnel method", it means being open. And there's a wonderful passage which I used to quote in lectures, I've got it in a book, "When you go into the field, you arrive with part of your life history, the latest novels, everything, you go with yourself. You go with everything. And then that is a resource". Again, talking about my lecture in the Czech Republic where I did an overrun of the book, and my main theme was quotes from the people I've interviewed, and I said, "Every one of them changed their focus when they were in the field". So you change your focus, but it's no good a grant body saying, "What hypothesis are you testing?" And the great thing is that when I was helping to fill in ESRC forms, the students would come to me - in Edinburgh - and it would say, "What hypothesis are you testing?" And they were bewildered. And I wrote to the ESRC, and I said, "This is not how anthropology works". And now they've changed it. I haven't looked at one recently, but it says, "What research questions?" That's good, "research questions," you can have these puzzlements and you may change, but a hypothesis - and, of course, I'm grateful to you for appointing me, but I also learnt the positivistic side of methods. Because I could see the students being bullied - the undergrads. - for a six week dissertation. Joan Busfield was a decent person, but she would be telling these students, "How can you operationalise this hypothesis?" I mean, it was a six week event, and that was before Agar, it must have been before Agar. I remember, I was absolutely bewildered, because I'd never been told that in Oxford - "What hypothesis are you testing when you go off the M1 and live on a camp?" But I have used it as a straw man, because it's made me realise, and I've got the whole first chapter - my friend Deborah, the one who's now got three-quarters of a million to look at mining in Africa, she's a geographer, she blew her top at my first chapter. The reader says, "Bring in all the nice examples in Chapter 1". I'm sorry, I have to get it clear, and I sent that chapter to a brilliant Maltese post-grad., and she said, "Judith, it's absolutely essential that you get rid of all this crap about we're imitating a fantasy view of what science is". That's where Stephen Rose is so brilliant. I've quoted him, and he talks about "physics envy". He says "Every discipline" - and guess what, Lord Browne, who did the Inquiry into the future of universities, his degree - he only has an MA and a first degree - is in physics, so he's cut all funding for humanities and social science, and only science is protected. And what I've argued is that anthropologists' methods are scientific - in the broadest sense of the word. So, anyway, Essex was very useful as well by being confronted with this positivism. But what great joy it was that Ted Benton and Ian Craib - and he tragically died - they were on the Research Committee for Andy Dawson, and Andy kept thinking, "You've got to have hypotheses," even though I told him not. I was away one time when they had a meeting with him, and he came to my office, absolutely thrilled, because they said, "What's all this positivistic hypothesis thing?" And what I found so lovely was that the really respectable high theoreticians like Benton and Craib, they didn't want any of this nonsense of testing and contamination. I'll tell you a story about Andy. Andy got an outstanding First Class for his dissertation. Frank Bechhofer was the External. Andy, he knows how to network. He got to know the porters, the cleaners, the security men on the Essex campus, and anybody over 55 he interviewed about their views of ageing, andwho would do that at Essex? You could be all radical and say, "Okely 's a symbolic interactionist, would you even talk to a porter? No!" And Andy came to me after the Distinction, and he said, "Judith, I've cheated! I've cheated!" I said, "What?" (LAUGHS) He said, "I not only interviewed some of those people, but I got them all together in a basement room after work hours in the evening, I gave them bottles of wine and glasses, and I got them all talking together about what it was they felt about ageing". And then he said, "I cut out the quotes and presented them as one-to-one interviews, because otherwise I would have been accused of them contaminating each other", because they were all meeting. He'd picked up the notion of contamination from the lectures. I said, "Andy, you should have been given an extra star for ingenuity and originality!" And he went away happy! But that was this positivistic notion, which I hope is dead now in sociology. But then my student, ex-student, Tony, found that four years ago in Manchester, that you shouldn't interview people you know because you've contaminated them. I: Well, there’s certainly a rather powerful group of people who still believe in that classic quantitative approach. In fact, they have most of the money don’t they? R: I know. I: They’ve done the surveys and all that. R: So, anyway, Essex was very very useful for that. I: You’ve brought out your book on the traveller gypsies when you were at Essex, and then moved on to Simone de Beauvoir. I was hoping you could say something about that. R: Yes. Well, again, it's always a matter of chance that I finished that book, and do you know, I think I wrote the preface in May Street in Durham - for that book. I: Which book? R: The gypsy book. But I finished the conclusion literally, or the proofs, the day before I moved to Essex. It was that close. I was at a loose end. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, I can't remember what plans I had, but to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and the new translation, it was 1974, so it was 30 years since the publication, that's right. Thirty years since the publication of de Beauvoir's Second Sex. There was a big event in London, and a number of us all offered papers, and that's when I gave a presentation which did use my own volume - because I'd read it in French, I didn't even know how bad the translation was. I'd read it in 1961 in Paris. And I gave a rough little thing about how ridiculous it was that I had to underline the thing saying, "Women's intelligence is equal to men". [INTERRUPTION] R: And they asked somebody else to write - Virago wanted women pioneers, because - was it Frank Commode (?? - 53.50) had got a series on great thinkers? And it was all male, except perhaps Mary Douglas. And so Ursula Owen said, "Let's have Virago pioneers". And whoever it was turned down the thing. Rosalind, she was the wife of the person who translated Gramsci's notebooks - the woman who was first offered it, and then she didn't want to go ahead with it. And then I just suddenly got an invitation to meet Ursula Owen over lunch, and that was it. But I read through all this stuff, and I had all these files, and I had originally a chapter, with notes, saying "The historical context of the publication of de Beauvoir's Second Sex, 1949," and I suddenly realised, "I'm not a historian. How can I possibly - I can't do any original research". And then I just had this eureka moment. The things I underlined were so naïve, let's compare the naivety of my thing before Women's Liberation in 1961, with post-Women's Lib. There was now a huge body of literature. There was Woman Culture in Society; Risaldo and Lampfayer (?? - 55.24 - sp), and by the way, that book, Woman Culture in Society, which was 1975, I think - Louise Lampfayer, she was not given tenure at Brown because they didn't take Feminism seriously, and there was a huge court case, and in the end Brown gave her compensation, but she'd moved to New Mexico, so you know, women's anthropology was not - and then years later, another of my interviewees - Nancy Lindisfarne, who did work with the Pashtun - she did a wonderful edited book called, The Limits of Masculinity, I think that was in the eighties, and when she was applying for promotion at SOAS, they ridiculed her and said, "This is not anthropology. This is not serious". So gender was not taken seriously. And then she finally took early retirement at 55 or something. Incidentally, that's her oil painting of her anger with the invasion, bombing of Aghanistan, after 9/11. She had a whole exhibition of anger of the blood - she knew more about it that anybody. When did they invade or bomb? It was 2002, if not 2001? And Nancy knew what was coming. She knew. So I thought about this. But I would send letters, I would phone Virago with each draft, and say, "Would you accept that it's all right to do it this way? " Then, of course, I interviewed, and I looked at other sources, and one of my Ph.D. students at Essex, who was actually from near Calcutta - I'm afraid she disappeared without trace, she never finished - she gave me - I've got her quote. It was fascinating to see that somebody Indian admired de Beauvoir, not because she was ethnocentric - which I argued - it was that "we loved it that the Western woman also had problems". That "we Indians are not the only ones" -… we're all told, you know, "You're women, and subordinate", and then they could find out that, in France, they had their debates. I: Tell me, what was the value of your re-using your earlier diary. What did you get from that? R: I don't know if I got anything, it was just something that started with the first chapter. This was the context as to why de Beauvoir's book was absolutely a hit with women, but it was torn apart by the reviewers - male. I've said that people threw it the length of cafés and said, "Now we know the contents of your vagina". De Beauvoir was humiliated, but what she said was that all through the fifties, she would get letter after letter, of young women saying, "You've inspired me". So I was joining that rank of people. It wasn't just me, as idiosyncratic me, I was an example of somebody who was inspired by that author to go against the grain. But I tried, I didn't want it to be just about me. I said I was just an example of women, in the fifties, who weren't supposed to be intellectuals or go to university. And it hit the spot in America. So I got lots of quotes, wherever possible - I interviewed students or others, so it got beyond me. But then it had its own momentum. With each chapter, I would find - and then it just came out. But how did I arrive at it? Having identified with it at first, and then re-reading it, as an anthropologist, I realised how ethnocentric it was. I still argue that the most brilliant book was Memoirs of a Young Girl - Memoires d'une jeune fille, where she talks about her struggle to escape the bourgeois destiny. Although at the same time she was special, ironically, because her father had become bankrupt, they didn't have any money for a dowry, so she needed to go to university in order to make a good marriage - or she may not make a good marriage. But they wouldn't have money for a dowry. Caroline, a historian, she's written several books about how often some of the Feminists are from downwardly mobile families. Of course, I was from a downwardly mobile family in a bizarre way. Although I'd been to boarding school, my mother was near penniless. Out in my kitchen, I've got a sideboard that's 1950s, and people say, "What on earth do you want that thing for?" That was my mother's purchase. She could afford a sideboard, and I've got some china - we used to go to Shepherd's Bush Market, and there were coloured plates, and every week she'd be able to afford to buy another plate, so I've got red, green, yellow. We used to go with her in the holidays and she'd buy a bowl or something. We were poor. So I don't know whether I gradually, but I looked back at [Simone de Beauvoir], and I thought, "She's talking about how all women belong to nature and men are culture", and I realised from my cross-cultural reading, that this was ethnocentric. But at the same time, the power of that book was that, actually, it was driven by a latent autobiography, because she was talking about her own position. Although she didn't use the word "I", she used it in her memoirs, but [not] "I" in The Second Sex. But it was the hidden autobiographical power. Just like I was saying with lovely Dennis Marsden, Education and the Working Class, that there it informs, just like when you were saying, how was I sure that the apron was this or that? After a while, you, in your bones, you know it - until somebody comes up with a better explanation. But you get the authority. As an anthropologist, you do the writing, you do the research, you're the walking archive, and that's what I love about that discipline, and that's why I've had several grants where I've had to supervise other people, and it's been a disaster, because it's not that I've been dictating, but you choose people, or they beg you to head a grant, and I've had two total disasters, they haven't done a bloody thing, and they've had huge salaries! And they did nothing! What else could I do? They were the fieldworkers. But what I love is that on the internet, there's some American professor, and he's written an absolute rave comment about my book, and how wonderful it is, you know. And I was interviewed by these Czech anthropologists, I was given these medals at Pilsen University - the Mayor gave me that. Here are my medals - did I show you them? I: Oh, lovely! Yes, you did show me. R: Yes, well, those two young anthropologists, I mean, they're brilliant. They've done work on the gypsies, and they use the word "gypsy" in Slovakia, and they found that thing on the internet about - it's an absolute rave article about my book, and it's been on reading lists and everything. And they love it, that I did this switch back and forth. But the twist is, I said, retrospectively - I remember Jim used to say to me, "My God, Judith, you are a fighter!" And he was a very emotional person, and actually tears would come to his eyes, and he'd say, "Judith, you are a fighter". I sent the manuscript to Virago, and I don't know whether it was already published or not, but anyway, they then had a deal with a top American publisher - whose name I will remember shortly - and Ursula Owen, who had agreed, at every stage, about this writing, then told me that this top American publishers would only accept to publish it in America if I cut out all autobiographical reference - because I was not a celebrity. I said, "It's nothing to do with me being a celebrity. I am just an object. I am just an example, because I wasn't alone. It was de Beauvoir who said, 'That book lived because of the enthusiasm through the fifties and the sixties" - the thousands of letters she got from powerless women. They said, "Well, Judith, you'll lose a lot of money". I mean, they'd pocketed at least £5,000 advance from this publisher - I hadn't get a bean of it. And I went, with a wonderful women friend of mine, who's a professional editor - Marcely Cameron - and she agreed to go with me to Ursula for a meeting, as back up. And I just said, "I refuse to change it. You have had chapter by chapter, and now you expect me to" - the whole point of the book, you know. And the woman kept saying, you know, "You will lose a lot of money". I said, "I don't care. I'm not in it for the money. I've done this thing, and it's taken me some years". Then she sent me the report. Again, this woman said X, Y and Z. I'd got it wrong. I looked up the French, I'd got it right. The woman claimed I'd got certain inaccuracies. I went back to the French, and it was dead right - because all these wretched Americans, they've all read it in this outrageous translation, and the translation, I may have said in my book, is a travesty. The guy was a biologist. They recruited a biologist. They thought it was a sex manual. And he cut out all references to women in history, all lesbians, women poets. He didn't understand what existentialism was or anything. Anyway, there's this new translation, and I was invited to the launch at Cambridge, and dear Sheila has written the Introduction to the English version, but that's been torn apart by Torrill Moy (?? - 68.57), because what they did, they were two Americans living in Paris, and what they've done is translated according to the idiom they thought was appropriate at the time, instead of updating it. Well, I bought it, but I haven't read the whole translation, but Sheila told me that Torrill Moy tore it apart, but then made incredible references to me, good references to me. Torill Moy was then a lecturer here, she was one of the wives of Terry Eagleton, she was giving lectures on Simone de Beauvoir, and I went up to her afterwards, and I just said, "I'm writing a book on Simone de Beauvoir". Then she wrote me an ecstatic letter about a year later, saying, "My God, you came up and said you were writing a book on Simone de Beauvoir, and it's come out now, what a fantastic book!" And I thought, "Well, if I've got her praising me, I'm fine". But again, I feel vindicated. The only good thing they did do, which was I had to summarise what the book, so I added a chapter which is a summary of the book, which is a fair point. But then they didn't have any publicity, any launch, in America, deliberately out of sheer anger, and six months later, they said, "It's hardly sold. It's going to be pulped. You are entitled to 25 free copies before they're pulped. And would you agree?" I gave my address, and the copies never arrived. And they said, "Oh, we're really sorry, we sent them to the wrong address, and so we've got none to give you". And they also insisted that the word "A Re-Reading" - the subtitle - be cut out. And then there's no money for photographs, I had to scrabble around, £500 to reproduce one photo. So I scrabbled around with dreadful choice, but I found a wonderful picture of de Beauvoir buying a newspaper from a clearly white working-class woman - a vendor - and I said, "This is one of the few occasions when de Beauvoir met somebody outside her class". Because I said she was - the only people beyond the bourgeoisie was "the peasant woman". The American publisher refused to have that picture in, because they said, "In America, we don't do class". I: Very true. R: And they cut out a reproduction of one of the pages where I'd underlined, and so they cut out those two pictures, and they had a totally mediocre thing. It's on reading lists in American courses, but it's been pulped by the American publisher so, you know, that's it. I: So the next thing was the Normandy Project. R: I know! Well, that again, is chance. Peter Riviere (?? - sp. 72.38) he was a quite high profile anthropologist on the ESRC, trying to prove anthropology is useful, in the Thatcher days, and he'd been my Internal Examiner for my Ph.D. He's the one that said, "How on earth did you meet Mr. Busby?" He rang me up, and he said, "There's a whole initiative on ageing", and they were desperate to have an anthropologist get some share of the money. But, of course, suddenly, a person who'd done work in Europe was important. So he scrambled around, he, literally, rang me in my office in Essex, and said, "Would you like to do something on ageing? There's this ageing initiative - thousands". And I said, "Well, if I could do anything on France, if I can get to France, I'll do anything". So I said, "I'll do ageing in France". And unfortunately, the Board said, this whole utility thing, it had to be useful for Britain, so I could only do a comparative thing, which was ageing in Normandy contrasted with a group in England, otherwise I wouldn't get the money. So it's six months fieldwork in Normandy, and six months in Britain. So, of course, I chose Essex, and Dedham, because I lived there, and I could spin something - I'd had access to one neighbour on one side, in her 90s, then probably her 80s. She was a graduate from Edinburgh University, 1918, honestly, the most precise, brilliant woman. I'd meet her every week, go to her house. God, the intellect! And then opposite - she was called Muriel Walker - and opposite was Connie, who left school at 12, was a maid. So I had the extremes, and I befriended Connie and Muriel, and I'm still close friends with Connie's niece, who brought up her niece as her daughter, and when Connie died - both Muriel and Connie died within six months of each other - Jan, the niece, inherited the land, which just had a little bungalow in, and she's built two enormous houses on it. So I was able to use them, and I've used them in articles. But the Normandy thing, again, it fits with my continuous argument that even if you have a brief, and I did keep studying the aged, but the directions it goes, you can't predict, and you shouldn't predict, and that's where my reading of Andre Breton, L'Amour fou in 1961, in Paris, the surrealist, brilliant writer, he talked about being "disponible", and there he used it about love. It's a brilliant book, I don't think it's ever been translated into English, but it's about wandering, going wandering. He wanders through the markets, and he was looking at objects and this, that and the other, and finally he just encountered a woman, and they fell madly in love, and that was how love should be. It was a brilliant romantic book. I transposed that - and I've got it, again, in my book. To be an anthropologist, you wander. You're a flaneur or flaneuse. But, of course … and, you know, there's a whole literature now on "flaner". Keith Tester, whose book I quote, is now a professor at Hull, in sociology - I've not met up with him. Then there's a lot of Feminist writing about the "flaneurs". The flaneur was actually the 19th century gentleman who wandered the streets, but he wasn't looking for people, he was loving the architecture and the streets and the boulevards, and I said, "We wander, but we're open to what comes our way". Another key book I discovered, thank God, in the Department library in Durham, when I was desperate - by the way, they didn't have any course on methods there. I had to teach theory, and I introduced three lectures on methods, and with my Malinowski article, and a diary, and fieldwork, I forcibly introduced methods. And I found Hortense Powdermaker, (?? - 78.30) Stranger and Friend - that again is the ambiguity about the fieldworker, you're a stranger, and you become a friend. She was a student of Malinowski, it's just amazing, an utterly brilliant book. I found it on the shelves, along with Return to Laughter, by Eleanor Smith-Bowen, who was really Laura Bohannen. It'll all be in my book. I've got these wonderful examples from my anthropologists. It's just a joy. Nancy - the one who did that picture - she said, "Judith, you had that idea in '95", and she said, "Isn't it extraordinary, nobody else has done it". Everybody else has edited books where you have an article, "My life with the Malays" or whatever, "My life with so and so". I'm the only one that has interviewed 22 anthropologists and then been the single author. I've cut and pasted hundreds of hours of tape, and cutting out the "ums" and "you knows", and it has taken all these years. As an example of my Normandy thing, I don't know why, David had always made fun of me, he talked about the "Normandy Landings", I don't know why. Because I know I was obsessed with Millet, the painting, and I'd been to a Millet exhibition. I love those painters, and I had a big poster in my Durham office, of Millet, The Gleaners. I loved, obviously, French Impressionist painting, and the wonderful thing was that the area of Normandy is where the Impressionists, Monet, Pisarro especially, Degas, they did those paintings. So I chose it because of the paintings! The landscape, because I had learned about the landscape through those artists, and also anthropologists had studied the Mediterranean, it was the nearest to the exotic, so they'd done Italy, they'd done this. And then there was some French anthropologist who had done Brittany. There was one person who'd done inheritance in Brittany or was it a bit of Normandy? But most of Normandy was completely untouched, except for one woman who wrote about witchcraft. But anyway, so I thought, "Well, I'm going to do Normandy, because this is an untouched area, and yet it's right near Paris". It is actually called "The breadbasket of Paris". They provide all the dairy products. So it's interlinked with the capital. I knew all those things. It's an hour and a half on the train to Paris, so it wasn't remote. And then, of course, Flaubert had lived in Normandy So you arrive with all those past readings. I chose an area where I knew the literature but not the people. I was at a conference, somewhere in Britain, where there was a French anthropologist, and I said, "Oh, I'm going to Normandy", and she said, "Oh! I know a professor at Caen University," he's doing village studies. If you go to him, he will place you in a village". I thought, "Well, that's quite an easy entrance". Anyway, Alan Campbell and I, we decided, in the summer, before my grant started, that we would drive through Normandy to find something, and I visited Caen. I went to this University, I asked for the professor, and the woman said, you know, "Attendez vingt minutes," - "He'll come in 20 minutes or so", and literally, my knees gave way - this is where the unconscious fits. My knees gave way, and I remembered Susan Rogers, an American who'd done work in France, I remember a paper she gave at the American - the "Triple A" that's called - the American Anthropology Association - I mean, there are 2000 anthropologists when you talk, I was in New Orleans in November, 2000 anthropologists there. It's just a dream! I go there also because you meet lots of friends and whatever. And I remember her giving a paper about French studies, and she said, "The French professors treat you" - I used it before, earlier, and you picked up that quote, that - "you researchers are share croppers, and that you provide the material, and the professor writes it up". And I remembered that. My knees gave way, and I said to the secretary, "I'm sorry. I can't come. I'll come back another time". Alan and I drove round Normandy, we'd stay in various B&Bs and places, and we would always go to the Tourist Office, just to find out, but I never said, "I'm doing research on the aged". Again, you don't. And we went into, it was Forge les Eaux, which was actually a spa town where the Parisians used to come for their watering, like Bath. It was run down then, I think it was even turned to a swimming pool. And we went into the Tourist Office, and there was this charming young woman called Natalie, and I said, "I'm taking time off from my lecturing, and I want time to write up, and I'm doing some thinking and writing, and I want to perfect my French and get to know people. And can you recommend some lodgings? And what kind of town is this?" And she gave all the spiel, "The Parisians came here", and "This hotel was the Great Spa" and whatever. Right at the end she gave me addresses where you could rent a gite, and right at the end, she said, "There's only one problem", - "Il n'y a q'une probleme. Il y a trop des vieux ici." (LAUGHS) Too many old people! (LAUGHS) Alan and I went off in euphoria! We went to celebrate in the place, the square, and the mini train came by - I've got this in my book - a mini train came by, full of grey-haired over-seventies. Of course, France has the highest, the survival rate of the French is extremely high compared to any European country. Apparently the average death rate is 89 or something, and Alan said, "Look, there are your informants!" And then I rented a gite, and Alan went back to teach, because he was at Edinburgh and I was at Essex. Then the next incident about serendipity is that, literally, I dictated - in those days, no mobile phones - you'd go to the public Post Office, and you could pay money in advance for a telephone booth, and I literally dictated the last two paragraphs of my de Beauvoir book to Virago, on the phone, and thought, "The book's behind me now." I rented my gite, which was out in the country - a beautiful barn, beautiful converted places. It was the celebration of the Armistice of the First World War, that Sunday, and I thought, "Now I'm free, I can do fieldwork". I drove, I parked in the town side street, I went to the church, and there were still, in those days, octogenarians, because France celebrates the First World War, but not the Second, because of the shame of the loss, and also the betrayal, the collaboration. I saw a woman just walking towards the church, and I said, "Excusez moi, je suis anglaise. Est ce que je peux participer a cette ceremonie dans l'eglise?". She said, "Mais, oui. Vous etes anglaise. Mais, bienven ue. Mais allez vous en, mademoiselle. Mais je suis dans le choeur, il faut dire au revoir mademoiselle". So I went into the church, sat obediently at the back, saw all this procession of these lovely 90-year olds, heavy with metal medals and the French flag. And then afterwards they processed out, and there was laying of wreaths at the memorial outside the church, and then a band started up, and then there was a procession to the Town Hall. And I stood, a bystander hanging around, and the same woman who saw me, she was in the procession! She said, "Alors, venez, mademoiselle, venez avec nous!" (LAUGHS) And then I processed with the band to the Town Hall. I mean, what a launch! And then we were in the Town Hall, and there was what they call "vin d'honneur", you have a toast, and it turned out this woman's husband was Deputy Mayor! (LAUGHS) And she said, "Vous etes anglaise", and "Tell me why you're here". And there I didn't have to hide anything - compared to the gypsies. I just said, "I've studied the aged in England, and I - "Je voudrais faire un comparison en Normandie. Et je suis la pour six mois". So she whispered it to her husband, who whispered it to the Mayor, and there were about 50 people there, and he said, "Alors, nous avons avec nous une anglaise professeur, et elle veut etudier les personnes ages dans notre petite ville. Alors, le vin d'honneur a une nglaise!" - and all these 80-year olds lifted their glasses! Then I was swept off for lunch, you know what French lunches are! We went to her sister-in-law. I was driven around the country, I was put down to my gite at midnight. Now, this is what I mean about being "disponible". My fieldwork was launched. I: Fantastic start! Now, later on, you say there was a crucial moment with, I think, a Jacqueline Gregoire? R: Oh yes, yes. I: Can you tell the story of what happened there? R: Yes. Wonderful woman. I know. I said there were urban clubs - and I've written on that - because Mitterand was giving loads of money for clubs at that point, very clever idea, of course. You imagine Cameron doing that! So everybody was setting up little clubs. The one in Forges les Eaux was totally dominated by the bourgeoisie, and a lot of the retired so-called peasants, they were brought to the Maison de Retraite, and they suddenly found themselves being dictated to by their former schoolteachers, who were telling them how to sing. But anyway, I thought, "Well, there are clubs in rural areas". And somebody, I can't remember, said, "Madame Gregoire, in this tiny village, she is Presidente of the local club". I went, drove round there, and she wasn't there, just her husband, and I said, "Est ce que je peut venir, je suis interessee dans les personnes ages". It was always good to say, "comparing with England", so you weren't just objectifying them. Then finally I arrived, and it was the afternoon, and it was a beautiful building with the old wooden panels, like Elizabethan - the old barns. There she was, she was unusual because she was six foot tall, her husband was probably about 5' 6" - and I went in, and there again, questionnaires were a mode of entry. It was useful to say, "Can I interview you?" as a strategy. And she invited me in, and she was plucking a chicken, and all the way through, she was answering me, you know, "How many people?" "What do you do?" What they loved was having coach trips to Rouen or something like that, you know - not reading groups - and she said she objected to all this singing and whatever, that these people wanted adventure, and it's absolutely right. And having plucked the chicken, and me having asked these questions, she said, "J'ai du travail a faire". I thought, "Well, bloody hell, you've been doing work all the way through!" (LAUGHS) And then she said, "Je vais traire les vaches". I said, "Est ce que je peux venir?" "Vous etes professeure - venez, venez!" Then she went into this [barn]. This was December, God it was cold! It was wonderful! And she opened the doors of this barn, and the heat of these cows just hit the air. There were maybe 13 cows in there. There were old swallows nests, it was just amazing! She started hand-milking, and I've got a picture in that book - Alan took the picture, he came back later to take pictures. And I was talking to her as she was hand-milking, and what I learnt from being with Hugh, which is, "Can I help?" This old trick! Wonderful! And I said, " Est ce que je peux faire ca?" And this eyebrow shot up again, "What is this professor doing with manual labour?" Because I met up with a French anthropologist a year later, for a big event in Paris, and I will remember her name later, she'd done work on the peasant in Brittany, but it was mainly 19th century history, and I said I was learning to milk cows, and she was just staggered! "Mais, pourquoi? Qu'est ce que vous pouvez apprendre avec ca?" So you learnt that the French didn't do manual physical work. Their fieldwork was tres intellectuel, you know. Anyway, so she said - I've repeated this, I lectured in Brunel last year, and there were a couple of French people in the audience, and they were absolutely delighted, and they loved me speaking French and I still get ecstatic e-mails from them, just from that one lecture! And she said, "Alors c'est une vache un peu en colere, il faut attendre. Il faut avoir Mere No-no" -"Mother No-no". She had names for them all! (LAUGHS) And she took me, and she said, "Mere No-no, c'est Judith", and Madame No-no turned her head round, "Il faut introduire. Judith, c'est Mere No-no". So we were introduced (LAUGHS). Then she was very worried. I've still got my Jaeger duffel coat that I bought in 1976, in Oxford, and I was wearing that, and she was terribly worried about any dirt. And then the three-legged stool. I was really angry because I had a three-legged stool in my office in Hull, and I used it for my inaugural lecture. I put it in front, and I said, "This is my anthropological chair - my milking stool", but some bastard stole it from my office. I started, and again, it's whether you can do things. Nothing came out. It's delicate. You can't just pull. And then she said, "Attendez, je reviens." And then she came back with a flash camera, and she took a photograph of me. And I said, "Isn't this wonderful, the return of the gaze". It was, you know, in those days, developed in the local chemist, and I got copies, and I use it again and again as an example that the person was so amazed that the anthropologist was doing this. It was just incredible. And that was a breakthrough. Then right at the end of the day of the milking, she had all these buckets, and a container, and she said, "Buvez!" And she got a glass, and "Alors, c'est ;pure. Il n'y a pas de concentre" - "My grass doesn't have pesticide. This is pure milk". That's when I said I was drinking the landscape. Honestly, I went back to my gite in a total buzz. I just thought, "My God, this is it, you know". I was like her adopted daughter! I: When you say it was a breakthrough, how did it change your fieldwork? R: It changed because I listened to her views about landscape. It fitted in with my ideas about Pisarro, that she had a consciousness of landscape, and I'm very pleased because I used those ideas in my inaugural lecture at Hull years later. The ESRC rubbish me because I hadn't written a monograph on that French material. I was far too ambitious. I thought, for one year, I'd do one monograph on my fieldwork, and one on Normandy. (a) I didn't have enough time - only six months - I had to come back to Dedham. I didn't have enough for a monograph, but in that research one-year, I put in for money for a camera, and I went back, with a cine camera, and I filmed her talking about the landscape, and what I was inspired by, in a funny way, was I'd started reading books on landscape, an edited book that came out about the time I came back from France, edited by Eric Hirsch (?? - sp.) who's at Brunel, and I've now co-edited a book with him, Knowing How to Know. And he did something on landscape, but the real woman behind that is a Guyanese Indian, she's absolutely brilliant that woman. She's the force. And Fabian had written a book called, Time and the Other. I: Judith, you haven’t actually said what her view of landscape was. R: Well, this is what I'm leading to, is that Fabian said that the anthropologist has privileged the visual, as opposed to all the other senses, and there was a rash of material that came out about the ethnographic taste of things, or the senses and the body, and Fabian's examples were always of team research, people going to an area, and then they, as it were, looked. I, again, remembered such a resource, thanks to Agar, a brilliant film called, Les Enfants du Paradis, with Jean-Louis Barrault in it. I don't know if you know that film? I've got the DVD, it's a brilliant film. It was done during the Occupation in the '40s. I: I think I do, actually, from long ago. R: It's a clown in it. Jean-Louis Barrault plays the clown. And he goes … and there's a woman who's on show in a circus, she's in a bubble bath, and it's Arlete (?? - 103.05), and afterwards he falls for her, and he says, "Tous le monde la regardait, mais moi etais le seul a la voire" - "Everybody looked at her, but I was the only one who saw her". And that came out of years in the unconscious, and I thought, "Madam Gregoire, when she looks at landscape, she doesn't look at it, she sees it, because she sees the apple trees which produce the cider, she sees the grass which is not one where she's thrown it with pesticide, it's something that's linked with all the senses, so when I'm told to drink that milk, I'm drinking the landscape. And her view of the landscape is, "I've worked the landscape". So it's actually the labourers' perception of the landscape is linked with their bodily work. And then, of course, Millet came out, because, of course, Millet caused a sensation that he painted peasants who worked the landscape. There was one particular man, people thought it was, they've made man look like an ape, and it was a man who'd worked in the fields. So it linked up with all that. I've actually got a DVD of my inaugural. paid somebody to film it at Hull. Unfortunately he ran out of film right at the end, so we haven't got the final conclusion - the guy bloody well hadn't got enough film. Also he lost the bit with the Vice-Chancellor. The Vice-Chancellor had done historical work on the Normandy Landings in the Second World War, so he was riveted, and he processed before me, taking the three-legged milking stool as I walked out! (LAUGHS) But I showed extracts of that, and it was in the journal, Ethnos, and it's called, "Looking and Seeing in Normandy". I: That’s the one I’ve read. R: Madame Gregoire gave me the peasant view of the landscape, so I was saying that, contrary to Fabian, he was only talking about one form of visualism, which is the landowner, and that wonderful picture that John Berger has written about in Ways of Seeing, where there's the landowners, painted by Gainsborough, with the land they own, but they don't work it. So again, it's physical labour. I've probably said this in the article, that I was welcomed. I mean, if only that bloody ESRC had allowed me a year [more] It was lost. I: And when they look at the landscape, like if they see an apple tree, they think of it partly in terms of the apples and the cider. R: Yes. Of course, they, before Friends of the Earth, they were so upset that different apples were being destroyed by the EU, and there was a group of sort of green hippy types who had an exhibition in the Town Hall of all the apple species that the EU had banned, and they said, "We should keep these. These are our local apples". You could see the devastation. When I went to Tours the other week, I flew to Paris, then it was a sort of bizarre train trip, because I'd gone from Heathrow, and the train journey was all through this agri-business plain, not a bush, not a tree, nothing. It's all wheat, wheat, wheat. And the EU paid for all these peasants to dig up their apple trees because they thought cider was the drink of the peasants, and "we want wine", and they were told to mutilate their apple trees, dig them up. You see the frightening side of the EU. And again, that conference, it's well-meaning people looking at policy towards Roma, but - oh! I: So, Judith, you were filming. What were you filming there in Normandy? R: Well, I said I was totally amateur. I'd never done any film. I rang up Anna Grimshaw the night before going, and said, "Can you give me any advice, because you're a lecturer in film?" She said, "Hold your shots". That's all she said! (LAUGHS) "Don't move, because things move before you". So I filmed the landscape, I filmed the poplar trees, and again, the other side of the view of the landscape was, ironically, that I actually had - I didn't type in those days, but I'd been handwriting that de Beauvoir book, and I had arm ache, so I wasn't going to write my field notes, and I dictated them on to a tape-recorder, and I posted them to Carol, in the Department. But I was in this beautiful gite, and there was this fantastic view which looked like Monet - of poplar trees and God knows what - and actually, you get a view of that in Essex as well, that lovely view of the poplar trees. I was thinking about the landscape while dictating, "Madame Gregoire," and I would actually say, "Oh, hang on, Carol, hey, there's a heron down there!" She would dictate it, Carol was so enthusiastic, because she'd got this build up, she said, "Judith, I can't wait for the next instalment. What's happening?" because she'd got to know these people, "Oh, it's so exciting!" I: So roughly how many people did you record, either in your notes, or with the recorder, in Normandy? R: I never recorded them speaking. I dictated the notes on to the tape, but to come with a tape-recorder, no, except right at the end when - it was before the filming, I think right at the end of my first year, because I'd come back in the holidays, I got the tape-recorder - that's when I did tape Madame Gregoire. Again, I said, "It's always good to tape people after you've known them for a while". I used that in my Phyllis Karberry lecture, and I played a bit of it with "the sound of the milk going into the bucket" I don't think I could bear to hear it now, it's too poignant, and I don't know what's happened to her. We exchange Christmas cards and whatever, but - I: So, very roughly, how many people would you think you had something to do with? R: Well in the clubs, you see, in the main Forge les Eaux club, there could be 60 people. I was known as "l'anglaise.", you know. Then I went to the two different Maisons de Retraite, the EDF, and I would sit and talk, , they all knew me. I've written an article about how you communicate non-verbally - that's in a book edited by Kirsten Harstrup and Hervik (?? - 111.50) - that how do you convey or learn knowledge through gesture and everything? And those people hardly spoke, but what they did say was terribly illuminating. Let's say six or seven that I got to know. When I said, "I'm going to England", and they'd say, "Well, you'll always be able to find us when you come back, because we'll still be here", which is terribly poignant. And then in the dreadful local authority-run place that was so grim, I got to know some people. But Madame Gregoire took me to visit her aunt, and that was when her aunt said, "C'est peut-etre un espion". They would just love it when you came in, you know, but you wouldn't have extended conversations with them. I: And did you do a parallel kind of thing in Essex, or not? R: Well, you know, I mean, I was quite ruthless because I thought, "I want to spend as much time in Normandy as possible", and I did go to a club in Dedham, in the community hall. I went there with Connie, and I went to some of those, but they were, again, appropriated by the middle-classes and bossing - it was just quite shocking really because you'd see that a few well-meaning people, the sort of people that Cameron thinks we can rest on, the good society, upper middle class volunteers, bossing these women around, not interested in their lives at all. With the upper class accent, it was far worse. And I went on a couple of bus trips with Connie, trips for the aged. We went to Ipswich. I sat next to her and she'd give me a running commentary. I went to a few fetes with her, both in Dedham and half way beyond Colchester, little outings. But I couldn't do a full-scale study because I didn't have the time. That's the problem with the final report that I wrote up for the ESRC. I was far too ambitious, because I thought, "Since I've got the money for the French research, I'll have to say I'm writing it up." So I naively said, "I will complete the book on the French fieldwork, and the methods book". Of course, I completed neither, but I wrote articles. I mean, this book I edited, in those days, it was very difficult, it all had to be scanned, and also I went through cutting out all sorts of repetition, making sure you didn't repeat, and there were two new articles and the Introduction, but the ESRC man rang me up and said that the Chairman said, "You should be given the lowest rating, because you'd done that before the grant". It was just a lie. He said I'd done it before the Fellowship. A complete lie. Also I'd been External Examiner at SOAS, and all through that first Autumn Term, I had 22 MA dissertations to mark, examine. You can't say, "Look, I'm no longer External". And so I had 22 there. And I went and filmed in Normandy, and I've done this and done that, and I'm afraid there is a very angry footnote - number 1 - in my book, saying that the ESRC man, on the phone said, "You were given the second but highest rating, because of all that you've done". I did write the report, and then they said, "The Chairman overruled it because you hadn't followed it to the letter. You hadn't completed two books, and he insisted that you send the draft of your methods book". And I said, "I do have the draft chapters, but they're all going to be changed because " - in the course of that year, I was visiting Brian Morris, who is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths. Well, he's a terrific guy. Somebody said he looks like Darwin now, with a great big silver beard! I've known him for years and years. I: I know who you mean, yes. R: Yes, right. Well, the books he's written. He finally came to give a paper at a seminar two years ago here, and David Gellner said, "When we looked him up in the Bodleian, they actually said there were two Brian Morris's because there were so many books they couldn't believe it was the same person!" (LAUGHS) But I was staying with Brian, and he was telling me about his fieldwork in Southern India amongst the hunter gatherers in the tropical forest, and he started telling me these stories, and I said, "For God's sake, have you got a tape-recorder?" He said, "Okay, I'll get one from the attic", and I literally scribbled down questions on an envelope as he got the machine ready, and four hours later we turned the tape off. And that was the start of this whole project. The material was so vivid. I'd originally said, in my original proposal, I'd look at footnotes and prefaces. They didn't have the answers. I: So that’s, in a sense, the next theme. But I think we should have a pause here. I: So you’re saying that when you do fieldwork … R: I'm repeating this wonderful lines from Agar, and when you get my book - I mean, if you like, I could e-mail you the whole lot. No, you don't want that! No, no! I don't think so! I: But I look forward to it! R: I know. Well, honestly, when I had to send it in September for the "Anonymous Reader", I had to print the bloody thing, and walk round to St. Clement's and deliver it, and my computer, for the last ten pages, I mean, it just broke down! I mean, hundreds of pages of printing! I: Yes! Yes. R: But Agar said, you know, "You take with you the last book you've read - your novels, your life experience - and seeing the film, Les Enfants du Paradis, that I saw when I was 19, in Paris, you know, "Tout le monde la regardait, mais moi etais la seule a la voire", it just comes out years later. That was 1961. In 1987, it comes out of the unconscious. And then all my love of those French paintings, because I would go to the Louvre every Sunday, because it was free, when I was at the Sorbonne. I love French painting. Also, by the way, I was good at art at school, because the art teacher said I should go to Art School, even though the Headmistress said I would be selfish to go to any university. At the end of my talk in the Czech Republic, they were a bit confused at first - the students. They said, "Well, what do we do? How are you telling us to do fieldwork?" And I said, "You have to trust yourself". I said, "I have a chapter on the specificity of the [interviewee]". I ask people the gender, the race, the ethnicity, age, personality, how did it affect who related to you? It depends. If you're a woman looking at gypsies, you're gonna spend more time with women, you can't talk with a man on his own, unless the wife permits it. I've had a struggle with Berg, because the woman that took over from the original sub-editor, I don't think she even read my contract. They are obsessed with it being a first year undergraduate manual. Well, first of all, first years don't do fieldwork. And the cover has been a struggle. I said, "It is a not a DIY manual". And at least I went through the contract later, and I highlighted all the bits which said "readership", I said, "beyond first year" - it was in the contract. But people are frightened, you know, "I need mentoring," and, of course, with the days of the e-mail - this is the other thing is, all the students expect their supervisors to respond every day by e-mail! It's ridiculous! I: So you started this book at Essex from the Normandy [project] R: Well, no. I mean, the irony is that I started thinking about it - I literally wrote some notes last night. Do you know, it was Richard Wilson, who had the job when I left - he inherited the teaching, he saw my reading list for that course on qualitative methods in the theory, and he rang me up in Edinburgh in the early nineties, and he said, "I'm on a Board for Zed Press, and I've recommended that you produce a book on fieldwork. You could do it standing on your head". So it's thanks, and I was quite ruthless, because I thought, "Well, I need a bigger circulation". And I went to another publisher - and I won't say what it is - I went to another publisher, I had a contract, they actually gave me in advance, they'd forgotten, and it was a more widely circulated one And then when I had this thing with Brian Morris giving me this brilliant interview, I then interviewed a number of people in St. Andrews. I: Like who? Which people? R: I went to Joanna Overing who was professor at St. Andrew's. She'd done work amongst the Pia Ora (?? - 5.25) in South America. I interviewed Malcolm McLeod, who was then Curator at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. I recorded Louise de la Gourjon Diere (?? - 5.41) - wonderful colleague of mine, and we're still on the phone maybe every month. She was a lecturer in Edinburgh. Then I was visiting Norway, I interviewed Signa Hal (?? - sp. 6.01), whose husband, it turned out, is the brother of McNeill, who was involved with gypsy activism - I mentioned before - who's written a book on sociological methods, and he refers to my work. I didn't know the two were brothers, for decades! So it just sort of accumulated. But I grabbed occasions. And once I got those few amazing transcripts, I knew it had to go on, but I still thought, "I'll just squeeze in a few quotes". Then the anthropologists were so brilliant that they squeezed all - because I actually had my chapters, my lectures at Essex, recorded. I remember now, I tape-recorded them, my last year. I don't know whether I was thinking of a book then, but I know Richard Wilson rang me later. I gave a paper in Belfast at the ASA last April, and the whole theme was "the interview", and I caused an uproar in some ways - the questions were incredible. I said I deliberately chose people I knew, I broke all the rules, it was no good interviewing strangers. In fact, there was one Australian woman, who I won't name - she was visiting Oxford - I took her back to my house when I lived off the Abingdon Road, and I interviewed her, and she was totally uptight, she couldn't answer a thing. And I realised it didn't work with people you didn't know - they were too nervous - even though you had an informal atmosphere. And I gave this paper where I said that I broke all the rules about interviewing, although inspired also by Ann Oakley, the wonderful article on "Interviewing Women" - I don't know if you know that one? I: I do, yes. R: Ann Oakley's, that's a classic - it really is. And people were very upset. And somebody wrote it up in the Anthropology Today saying that, "It's all very well for Judith Okely , there are people looking for jobs now." They thought that I was saying you can't teach it, so the poor young man who'd written this commentary, he was terrified (LAUGHS) when I wrote a reply! And I sent him my reading list, eight weeks course on fieldwork! He completely wrote a humble apology. (LAUGHS) But they misunderstood. They thought I meant that you must just go into the field without any ideas, and I just said, "No, no, no, you just learn that there's so many different possibilities, that you have to be open, but the irony and the brilliance of these interviews is commonalities". It's just exciting. Some people say, "Well, you know, you fix the editing". No. They all - except Louise, she had to shift a bit and she should have shifted much more - they changed their focus when in the field, and it's absolutely crucial. So again, it's an attack on preordained research topics. Also the role of chance and accident. I've got the first possibility of - this has appeared finally - "Ethnographic Practice in the Present" - I mean, they've nicked my bit, but it's an article. I have to think what's the exact title? I took a theme of Freud, and the reason why was this conference was held in Vienna, and I said - and actually, the Austrians were delighted. I was the only one that mentioned that we were in Vienna, the place where Freud lived. I said, "I went to fieldwork as free association and free passage". I said, in my talk, "I went to Freud's Museum yesterday, and to celebrate this city, I'm going to take Freud's notion of free association - how it is used in the field". I: So what you’re suggesting is that you should be open to anything that you see or hear. R: Mmm. Mmm. Yeah. And also, mis-hearings. I mean, the classic mis-hearings is that dear Malcolm McLeod, who was a student of Evans-Pritchard, he was his research assistant here. He said how a French anthropologist - and he still won't say who it is - was visiting Oxford, and as usual, they were in the pub, and Evans-Pritchard said, "Malcolm McLeod is interested in studying witchcraft in Africa, and can you suggest anything?" I mean, it was years since Evans-Pritchard's book on the Azandi (?? - sp. 12.17), absolutely celebrated classic. And this Frenchman said, "Oh, the Ashanti", which is in Ghana. So Malcolm, in those days, you had to do a B.Litt.. You didn't have to do one did you? I: No, I didn’t. R: In anthropology, you had to do a two-year B.Litt. before you even started on fieldwork. So they were funding five years, because it was also for people who hadn't got an undergraduate degree. Malcolm did two years' work, library work, on Ghana, on the Ashanti, then he went off to Ghana, and he said that, "Really, what hooked me, was the material culture - the incredible sculpture, the weaving, everything". He said, "I was just absolutely mesmerised by that, and I started doing that". And then there's wonderful stories of him. And he was there for a year or two, and then to extend his time, he had a year lecturing at the university with all these amazing exchanges. He came back, and it was at least five years since he first met the French anthropologist. The French anthropologist was back there in Oxford, and and Malcolm said, "Oh", you know, "I didn't really take to your suggestion to look at the Ashanti and witchcraft," there is some witchcraft, but he said it didn't really, "I didn't follow your advice, but I did go to the Ashanti. I concentrated on material culture and religious cults". And the guy said, "I didn't say 'The Ashanti', I said, 'The Azandi'". So there was a Freudian mis-hearing. His whole project was misinterpreted, because nobody could believe that a French anthropologist would have the audacity to say, with the world expert on Azandi, you should go and study the Azandi. You know! Fancy telling Evans-Pritchard, "Your student should go and study the Azandi like you did". So there was a wonderful mis-hearing. Malcolm became the Curator of the first Museum of Mankind. His whole thing was launched through a mis-hearing! (LAUGHS) I: (LAUGHS) They’re all anthropologists, aren’t they, for your fieldwork? R: Yes. Yes. I: How many of them did you actually interview for the book? R: Over 22. I: Twenty-two? R: Mmm. Yeah. Mmm. And there are two or three of them that I do say, I haven't quoted them, but ironically, the one - I did have a cobbled interview with Alan, when he was visiting me in Oxford, oh, I don't know, in 2004 or something, and he has a very Highland accent - which I can understand - but when I sent it to the transcriber, she said she couldn't understand a word! (LAUGHS) So it was never transcribed! She couldn't understand a word of the tutor! (LAUGHS) But I will use it in something else, but I haven't got time to listen to the whole thing and copy word for word, it's just too late now. But I sent it to her, a year or two ago, and she just said she couldn't understand a word. And she said, "If you listen, you'll see what I mean". Well I lived with the man for some years, so I should be able to know what he was saying! I mean, the secretaries in Edinburgh, when they met Alan, they said, "My God! He's a Highlander! A tutor!" They thought these guys should hide their accent! They thought, down in elite middle-class Edinburgh, that you'd never talk with a Highlander accent. They thought it was comical! But I did deliberately, in the end, choose people who were of different ethnicities, you know, or different backgrounds. Like Professor Talib. I got to know him because I was supervising this Egyptian student, still at Hull I was, and he'd just been appointed, and he was giving wonderful lectures on Islam, and so I went to his lectures and, honestly, it was a few months after 9/11, and I was totally shocked. I mean, there were four other people attending the lecture and he'd done such work. He thought he was coming to the centre of the universe and then there were four undergraduates asking inane questions at the end. He was, "Who are you?" and, you know, "Have tea with me". I said, "Well, I'm coming here because I'm supervising a student who's with the Bedouin in Sinai Desert, and he's writing a lot more on Islam". In fact, dear Heysham, I don't know whether he was Shi'ar or Sunni, but he converted to Sufism after being with the Bedouin, where you're allowed to have music. So that was how I got to know Talib. Then dear Helena, who's got a Senegalese father and a French mother, but she was brought up in France, and she was a professional dancer before she took to anthropology, she heard my lecture when I talked about free association, and the hall was packed, and they loved my jokes. She said, "You're my favourite lecturer", and she would make contact. I had lunch with her just a week ago. But she's one of those who's totally overworked, ground down. Ground down. I: So that probably, you know, completes what you want to say about that book, doesn’t it, I think? R: Yes. As I say, there's 16 nationalities. I actually counted up - 16 nationalities - all, of course, speaking to me in English. I: Could we go back to some less intellectual things. You were at Essex until 1990, I think, and then you went to Hull? R: I went to Edinburgh. I: Oh, you went to Edinburgh first? R: Yes. Cohen arranged the transfer to Edinburgh. I: Was that 1990? R: Yes. From 1990-'95. I: Oh, I see. R: That was where he made this very clever move. He discovered I had a relationship with Alan, who was lecturer at Edinburgh, so he rang me up and said that, "We could make a transfer". Because I'd been interviewed, and runner up for the Chair which he'd got, the Principal - which is what they're called in Edinburgh - was delighted to agree to my transfer, because he saw how I'd performed at the interview. But there had to be a deal, because Joan Busfield had to negotiate with Martin Harris that there would be a replacement. I went to the AUT, because Cohen was not politically sophisticated, because he said, "Just go to Martin Harris and say you want to leave". And I rang up the AUT, and they said, "That's a disaster, because they'll think you're no good. You need the Principal of Edinburgh to ring the Vice-Chancellor at Essex, saying, 'I want Okely '". And the Principal, having seen me at the interview that year, rang up Martin Harris, and then there was this incredible emergency Staff Meeting with all the sociologists, and Mary McIntosh was bewildered, because she said, "Martin Harris said that the Principal of Edinburgh says, 'I want Okely on a transfer'". There were jokes about football, and only a few months before, she'd told me I wasn't to be considered even for a senior lecturership. And she wrote me a sort of dreadful little creepy note about how sorry she was to leave me, I asked a post-grad. to read it for me, because I said, "I've no confidence in this woman". But anyway, so I went to Edinburgh, and that was when I was given a lot more opportunity to teach first year undergrads., because it was anthropology. Also eventually they had an MA in Social Science, and I was allowed to run an entire course on ethnographic methods. So I did an entire course. I: That Principal, it wasn’t Stuart Sanderson was it? R: No. No, the one who asked was before him. It was a guy who eventually came to be head of Wolfson here. He was Principal then. And then by the time I left Edinburgh, it was Sutherland - he took over in the middle. But it was another person, whose name I can't remember, but I know that he transferred to be head of Wolfson. I: And Alan and you became a couple at what point in the story? R: Yes, it was quite a time before, yes. I: Because you were a long time with Jim? It went on for 17 years, I think you said? R: Yeah. I know. I mean, you know, I don't know how personal to get, but his own psychoanalyst, who's very very famous, she published an article about him. ... But to go back to Jim, then I had my stepdaughter move into our house - aged 16 - because ... they wanted to send her to boarding school. And I said, "No stepdaughter of mine's going to a bloody boarding school". ... I was trying to write up my thesis while they would come at weekends, total chaos! But anyway, she moved into the house, and I was at Durham, and I realised, within ten days, it was a disaster. ... Well, I'm just saying that life became impossible. And the next week, I met Alan at a conference. I just said, "Laura's got to go. It's unmanageable". Life had become impossible, and I met Alan, and, you know, that was it. ... I: Yes. But anyway, it was because of Alan, partly, that you went to Edinburgh, wasn’t it? R: It was totally, yes. It was to finally stop a commuting relationship. I'd broken up with Jim in '84, I went six years later. [Alan and I] would talk on the phone every night. We'd see each other every weekend, in the holidays, and all that. And then I moved to Edinburgh because of him. ... But I'm just saying, it gave me a breakdown. [In 1981/2] I couldn't read from June until November, I couldn't even read books. I lay in bed till two in the morning. And I was on anti-depressants and everything. And it was so funny, because Mary McIntosh would come up to me and say, "Judith, you look so calm". I thought, "You don't know I'm drugged up to the eyeballs with anti-depressants!" So there we are. ... So anyway, I went up to Edinburgh. And I said I loved the teaching, I loved the first year, although, in Edinburgh, it's a four-year degree, and the first year you're not geared to one subject, so you teach a much bigger crowd. You'd go in, and there would be 300 first year, and some would do anthropology and some not, later. And it was wonderful, because with the four-year degree, it was unique, because in your third year, you disappeared from April until September, doing a dissertation, and, of course, they were mainly - I mean, one time there were eight Etonians. That was the other thing, thought, "Why am I reproducing privilege?" I was shocked by that. Terribly upper class. They could go and work for Guinness. One was an heir of Guinness. And Daddy had a coffee plantation in Kenya, "So I can go and live there and do my fieldwork". It turned out, he just went down and interviewed a couple of maids, and that was his fieldwork in Kenya! (LAUGHS) I: Why did you leave Edinburgh, then? R: Unfortunately, being in the same Department as Alan destroyed the relationship. And I've realised, over the years, that he's never - except for that one woman that Jim was involved with, and he only got involved with her because they shared digs - that he can't actually live with anybody. So I bought the flat next to him, which was amazing, because it was up for sale, so we were in adjoining flats in the High Street. But he's, in a way, a tragic figure, [who writes] brilliant stuff. I mean, he did work amongst the Wiyampi (?? - 39.17 - sp) in Brazil, absolutely classic anthropology. I: Is this the Amazon, then? R: Yes. Yes. It was believed that they had died out, and then suddenly somebody recorded that there were some Wiyampi in Brazil - there had been some on the border - and Peter Riviere (?? - sp. 39.44) was his supervisor, and Peter got a big grant for Alan to go off and do work there. And, you know, Alan was brilliant. But we had huge intellectual arguments. He was obsessed about, "We mustn't have categories. We mustn't have classification". And he was vitriolic about Levi-Strauss and vitriolic about psychoanalysis. He'd had a very very traumatic childhood - which I won't go into ... But in the end, I put my flat on the market, and I bought a house in the suburbs of Edinburgh. I: So why did you go to Hull? R: Well, Andy Dawson came up and visited me in Edinburgh, and he said, "Judith, pack your bags and come to Hull, because there's a professorship going". I said, "Look, I've just moved to a new place, and I've got a new kitchen.". "Oh, Judith, you can do it!" So that was one reason, that it was impossible being in the same Department with somebody one had a close relationship [which was ending]. ... Then the other major thing was being English in Scotland, being with a Scotsman was fine, and being up in the Highlands, they weren't anti-English. He had a beautiful little mini cottage up there, and they welcomed me and adored me. But being in Edinburgh, the hatred of English was unspeakable, and it was very very useful to understand racism. And so I had nobody to hide behind. "You fucking bitch. You get back to your fucking country", and "You fucking well voted for Thatcher". Of course, after the 1994 Election, I didn't appear in any shops speaking English accent, because the hatred, because there wasn't a single Conservative MP left in Scotland, but they returned Major. A rather impressive Australian woman, she's called Ann Fink - she did a Ph.D. in Oxford] and then she moved up to Edinburgh because her husband was a big professor of surgery or something at Edinburgh, and I rang her to say, "Look am I paranoid to think that I'm leaving Scotland because I can't stand being labelled as an English bitch?" And she said, "You're absolutely right". She'd modified her Australian accent when she'd come to Oxford, but you could still pick it up. She was very wealthy, she drove her BMW down a one-way off Princes Street, and it was the wrong way. She put down the window, and there were three Scotsmen there, and she said, "I've done a very silly thing, I've gone up a one-way the wrong way. Could you just stand there as I back out?" And they said, "That's typical, you English bitch. You fucking well bitch. You don't know how to drive". And she said, "I'm not an English bitch, I'm an Australian bitch, but you peasants wouldn't know the difference". So I said, "Ann, you've solved my problem!" (LAUGHS) I: Can you just say, rather briefly, what happened in Hull? R: I loved the fact that they were State School students. It was an inspiration. No Etonians. You were teaching first generation State School. And because it was technically sociology/anthropology, most of them had come in with 'A' Levels in sociology, but there was a wonderful scheme because you had to do the ethnographic survey, I think it was called, the first year compulsory course. Anybody doing sociology or Joint Degree had to do that course. And they all got turned on to anthropology. They'd never heard of it, you know. And they then switched to doing it - there wasn't a single Honours anthropology course, but they were absolutely thrilled. And that was the joy - teaching - and my most wonderful triumph, in a way, was … I used to say, even from Durham, I could recognise which essays were written by men and which were women. I set a discussion, "Discuss some of the challenges of studying a culture other than your own". The men would talk about clashing cosmologies and religious systems, and the women would talk about body language and eye contact, very down to earth specific. And I thought, "Could there be a combination of the two?" I've come up with a theory of that, which I won't give you, but I then taught a course I was very proud of, called "Visualism in Anthropology", which was museums, photography, film, landscape, and the body in Western art. That year, there were - again, it was feminised - there were only two men doing the course, and they hardly appeared. And it was anonymous marking, and I read these brilliant scripts, and I said to my co-marker, Peter Foster, who I adored, but tragically he died within a year of a heart attack. I said, "You know, I can't understand it, because I might as well not give lectures, because this is clearly written by a man. It's got this brilliant abstract, but then also very specific little examples". I said, "This really throws me, because it's clearly written by a male. I know these two idle boys never attended half my tutorials or anything. Anyway, when it came to the Examination Board, this same number had Firsts in everything, and then you finally reveal the name. It was a woman who [had a] Pakistani father, Irish mother, and she told me her life story. I said, "You've got to carry on with this work". She had been subject to racism in Stoke-on-Trent. She was brought up, and people would say, "Why is your skin dirty?" There were no Asians, let alone Caribbeans there! Her parents just didn't know how to handle it and said, "Put up with it". So she dropped out of school at 16. She disappeared. She took to heroin. She slept under railway bridges. What a story! One day, she was begging, and a man said, "What about you, Asian bitch", or something. She was high on heroin and she got up and hit him, and then she was taken to court, and she was found guilty of not just assault, and she was sent to prison. She didn't know you could have Legal Aid or anything. She did a year or two in prison, and then she came out and thought, "I've got to get going". And she went to evening class, she did 'A' Level sociology. And, of course, we didn't attract - we had phone ins, for people who had got low 'A' Levels, that's how we recruited students who'd been dropped out of other universities. And she said, "I couldn't believe it, Mark" - my colleague - "accepted me, and I'd only got two 'A' Levels". Then she said, "I couldn't believe it when we did anthropology. My difference was being celebrated!" We were celebrating difference. And then I said, "You didn't fit into any of my categories". She said, "Judith, that's the story of my life". So I say that Hull was inspiring for the undergrads. I: And then it finished, because they closed the Department. ... R: Of course, we got a 3A or a 3B, but, you see, in anthropology, there's only 12 Departments, there are 120 Sociology Departments, so they have to give 3Bs to some anthropology. They realised they'd made a terrible mistake, but it was too late. We lost eight tenured positions. People were snapped up. Three people were snapped up for Chairs. If we were so low - one in Melbourne, two in Sheffield - 200 applicants for a lectureship in Manchester, one of our students was snapped up there. Two deaths, two retirements and so there were three members of the Department left. Of course, the Dean knew that if he could get me to take early retirement, that would be the death knell. But I knew there was no hope. We were not going to get eight [appointments], they were reappointing criminologists and sociologists. I thought, "I'm not going to write mission statements for a Department that once had 12 and has now got three." But it was partly, again, politics, that ambition and greed overcomes. The Dean was terrified of this woman who threw a tantrum, and I was excluded from all discussion, and I could see the mistakes. And, of course, I was proven right, but I didn't want to be proven right. And she didn't get a personal chair out of it, so she went off somewhere else. I: That’s a sad story. R: I know. And Hull was a wonderful place for attracting working-class first generation students into anthropology. I: Just a couple of more general questions. One is, when you’re not working, what do you enjoy doing? R: I know, well, that's it, I don't think I ever switch off. I was interviewed by a young woman about work/life balance, and I said, "I hate this term, because I never switch off, as an intellectual my mind is going all the time". I rented a cottage in Essex last year, so I could go walking, but, unfortunately, I've now got a spinal injury so I can't walk very far. I'm hoping it'll get better, but I don't know. I like socialising. I have a wonderful set of friends here. We can go out to the theatre or whatever, so I do that. I listen to music, I watch a fair amount of television, but as I said, I socialise, and there's always things to do in Oxford, whether it's work or not. I have invitations - four years ago I was in Taiwan, I said it's work, but it's also fun. Because if you're invited to these places, you're not going as a single traveller. I have been on holiday with a lovely friend, by the way - she and I met when we were at the College - my last job before I went to Cambridge, was lecturing at the College of Further Education here, which was the High School where T.E. Lawrence studied. I lectured there. And Ros -I'm Godmother to her son - her husband is very very ill, and he can't fly, so we would go off on SAGA Holidays, because she's got problems with health, but we've been to South Africa, we went to Cuba, and we went to Namibia for two or three weeks andthat was absolutely stunning. You know you're in safe hands. It was very very moving, of course, going to South Africa. And my sister, the night before I went, sent me the addresses of where we'd lived as a child, and I actually got the coach to drive down one of the streets where I had once lived. I: So can I ask you another question? Which out of all your books, which are you most proud of? R: Well, I suppose The Traveller Gypsies is, yes. Yeah, but I didn't know it would have such a life. I mean, this is confidential - can you switch off the thing for a moment? I: Sure. Sure. R: Nothing. I: Exactly! Well, then there’s just one more question which sometimes people don’t like to answer at all, but if you look at your life as a whole, what do you think have been the worst or the best things about it? R: God, how do I think about that! The worst or the best? Oooh! Well, the worst thing was losing my father. I: Really? R: Yeah. Absolutely. And not being allowed to see him. My mother told me, some years later, that he begged to see his daughters. I don't know if I told you that? I: No, you didn’t, actually. R: He was in an iron lung, paralysed from the neck down, and he said, "Could my daughters wave at me the other side of a glass?" And, again, my mother, we were at the boarding school, she claimed that the Headmistress said no. So that's another reason for hating the Headmistress. I mean, he was about 34. I'm tormented by the way they handled death. They just said he had 'flu, and all I could think of was that "Daddy borrowed three shillings from my pig money box and he hasn't paid me back". And then when you discover he's died, the guilt! I used to think - I don't know if you know that wonderful detective series called Monk? A brilliant series. He's an obsessive - I bought the whole series on DVD - and he is obsessive, when he walks he has to touch each lamp post, but he's a brilliant person because he can spot things like Sherlock Holmes. He's brought in as a consultant. I used to think it was because I picked May - it's supposed to be unlucky to pick May when it's in blossom - and I thought, "I picked May when I was in Lincolnshire, and that's why he died". I: Well, Judith, while we’ve got space, what about the best things? R: Well, I think the best thing was discovering anthropology. And there was one thing I wanted to say, but we haven't got room, which is, just briefly, my mother had Caribbean lodgers in our house from the late fifties, after my grandmother died. She was so shocked seeing the way that Afrikaans treated Africans when she was there, and when my grandmother died, we had the middle part of the flat vacant - it was a flat, though with a shared bathroom. My mother had some Australians and they proved to be a nightmare, and then she rang up the British Council - and I said I'm very proud of her. I suppose that's it, I was lucky to have my mother. They said, in those days, they said, "Do you mind coloured people?" And she said, "I prefer them. They're so much more civilised". So we had a string of Jamaicans, Trinidadians, in our house, causing uproar in the neighbourhood - white suburban neighbourhood. Some of them worked in the Embassy, others were telephonists. So I was also brought up with a total being at ease with people from other cultures, to the shock of the neighbourhood! "My God, you even share a bathroom with them?" And other things, I think back, things like meeting Malcolm X at the Union, and I had a relationship with a famous Jamaican here. I: Oh, did you? R: Mmm. Yeah. Eric Abrahams. I walked into the Union with a friend, Trinidadian, who looked like Jimi Hendrix, and I'd already gone to hear the first New Year speakers at the Union, because the new members were allowed to sort of debate, and there was this brilliant speaker, and it was Eric, and I went up to him, and I said, "My God, you're a professional". He was a Rhodes Scholar - I didn't know any of this. And then a year later, we were at a conference in Cambridge, or maybe it was before, he said, "Do you know, I was so happy when you walked in with that guy, Ken, because I knew you weren't racist". And the idea, now, that people should think it shocking that a white woman should walk into the Union with a black guy, who was a post-graduate in philosophy - he was originally a journalist, and he thinks A.J. Ayer secretly paid for his fees, because A.J. Ayer met him in Trinidad. Ken had said he wanted to do philosophy, and suddenly there was an anonymous donation, and he was paid for to do a Ph.D. at Oxford. And I said, "Come and see the Union", and Eric said to me, you know, "I knew you weren't prejudiced". And then the irony was that it turned out later, that his two sisters went to my school! (LAUGHS) I: I think that’s a great point to stop really! R: Yes! But I looked him up, I've looked him up, if you Google, there's the famous Jamaicans, and I can't believe it, because he became Minister, and he was the first Caribbean who was employed by the BBC, and he became President of the Union - the first black guy President of the Union - and he definitely engineered Malcolm X's visit. Then Malcolm X, I met him, and then he sent word that he wanted me to meet him, and I had a meeting with him in the Randolph Hotel. He said, "You must have another woman with you". I spent three hours in his company, and that was December, and he was assassinated in February. And I've got a wonderful letter that says - to the African student that arranged him - said "Please send my best wishes to Judith, how I enjoyed talking to her, and her sense of humour". I've got that letter upstairs. I've got his signature and his address, that he wrote for me. So it's not just celebrity. But I remember I went back, I just ran down the corridor at St. Hilda's saying, you know, "Anybody join me to go to the Randolph in half an hour". Sheila wasn't there, and so and so wasn't there, and Chloe Stallybrass, who wasn't much into politics, but she was Labour, she said, "I'll come along". And we had a meeting about five years ago, where we tape-recorded our reminiscencs of what happened in that major event. I: It’s running out, I’ll just thank you very much. 
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