A long chapter in which you get to know Virginia through her past and upbringing

At the beginning of 2016, New Year’s Day, in fact, Virginia had closed down her Facebook. She had known all her ‘friends’ would be voting the opposite way in the referendum and she couldn’t bear the thought of the six months of feeble arguments made by vaguely left wing know nothings, who until yesterday had not cared anything about how the EU Parliament operated, or what any of the supposed benefits of Britain’s membership were. She had not been reunited with any of her old school friends in the flesh, so she still imagined them as they were in their teens, all highlights and ‘Lady Di’ hairstyles. And this perhaps helped. If she’d seen them, grey, getting wrinkly and thick round the middle, she might have been tempted to think their arguments worth considering. As it was their drivel had the disadvantage of coming out of the childish mouths of more than thirty years ago, in her imagination, teenage mouths, which might at any moment break into a mindless song by Madonna or Lionel Ritchie.

Virginia knew she was a pompous and insufferable old bag, but she regarded this as a positive characteristic, rather than a flaw. When she was 14 her English teacher had told her that she was a harridan. When Virginia had told her mother, her mother had agreed.

Virginia was not against ignorant prejudice per se, Burke had regarded it as an important part of the democratic process, and Roger Scruton had explained this positive view of prejudice clearly and turned it into something admirable and virtuous. But the trouble was that the sort of irritating vaguely left, woolly minded women Virginia was acquainted with rejected the idea of natural prejudice as a sort of herd instinct which ensured safety, so why should Virginia allow them to make use of it? They believed their own prejudices were ‘reason’ and ‘enlightened thinking’ and ‘working things out in a sensible, rational way’. So they would attempt to make arguments, and these would be moronic and irritating. She would miss one or two other people she had somehow got to know through Facebook, without having ever met them in real life. But it was easier to imagine you liked people you had never met, than it was to imagine that people you had met long ago and had never really liked had turned into likeable people, with the passage of time.

The process of downloading all her data and photographs from Facebook had taken a while and given Virginia food for thought, so much had been recorded, seemingly in perpetuity, her every thought, her every typo. All those arguments with lefties, all the poems she’d written as a way to try to be different from her ‘friends’, who posted about their dull and boring lives, complete with selfies. So many versions of herself. That was the odd thing. The person she had pretended to be, in order to disguise the reality of who she was. The same old schoolgirl way of hiding her strange ideas and habits from her peers.

Of course Virginia had selfies too, hundreds of the damned things, all of which she had hated at the time and had wondered why she’d hated a few months later. But social media had made her anxious and obsessed with her appearance, she’d started starving herself the moment she opened her account, her blood pressure had become ridiculously low and her migraines more frequent. Still, selfies didn’t give the game away, nobody could see her political convictions or the malign intent in her face. Her thoughts had grown self-obsessive, but also she had started fixating on how much she disliked many of her ‘friends’ and fantasising about how she would disrupt their real lives, rather than just deleting them from her list of contacts.

And the fantasies had grown into mischief making, of the sort she had not properly indulged since her marriage. Virginia considered herself to be a witch, as her mother had, one of a long line of women with that gift, who had lived at Kineburn. And her mischief making had started to produce some small results, though nothing too serious, well only one incident, which might not have been Virginia after all.

But the end of the obsession with Facebook had not resulted in the end of compulsive obsessive behaviour with regard to the internet. Virginia had opened a Disqus account and ever since she had been carrying on lengthy political arguments in the comments sections under articles in the conservative press. But at least these were with people who wished to think about the political future, not just to cling to the idea of a benevolent bureaucracy, because they imagined their children might, at some point, like to go and work in Europe. Virginia liked these online communities, consisting of intelligent people she didn’t have to care about. Though she was rather too quick to curse politicians and other public figures in her posts, if these were also somehow kept in perpetuity as it seemed every key stroke could be, there must be nothing to link any funny business involving the unexpected demise of those unfortunate targets of Virginia’s ire, to her wishes expressed online.

Sometimes though Virginia liked to make a comment as part of a general conversation in the more popular editions, just to see how she fared among her fellow men and if her opinions were within the ‘normal range’ as it were. Often these occasions passed without incident, as Virginia was a fairly old fashioned conservative in most ways, but one day Virginia had discovered hers to be the most downvoted comment in the online edition of the Mail. It took Virginia days to get over this event, since she had not been actively trolling, far from it. She had merely recounted a true story, underneath a rather sad one about kangaroos. The story had featured a kangaroo husband, as it were, grieving over his kangaroo wife who had been killed in an RTA. Virginia had merely mentioned that only the previous week she had eaten kangaroo steaks for the first time, which she had bought at Lidl. She had described them briefly and explained how tender they had been and expressed sorrow at having broken the kangaroo-free habit of a lifetime so recently and vowed she would never have done it if she’d known kangaroo husbands grieved over their kangaroo wives. It was quite astonishing how mad several thousand people seemed to be about it.

Virginia had made a rookie error on the occasion of the Kangaroo steaks comment: she tried to justify her original remark, to explain it, to say her sorrow was heartfelt and genuine. This is what conservatives often did when progressives accused them of thought crimes. But Virginia was a beginner at this stage though she knew one must learn from one’s mistakes. After failing miserably to justify her remark by trying to explain her years of veganism, she realised it was all pointless. There was no defence, whatever the intention behind anyone’s remark was, that intention was irrelevant, communication had become not the responsibility of the communicator, but the responsibility of the communicatee, as it were. Once your remark had escaped your mouth or flown from your fingers, it no longer belonged to you. You could be made to own it as a mark of shame, you could be downvoted and insulted and held in contempt by the world for having made it, but you didn’t possess it in the sense that you could clarify it, the world owned what it meant. And if the world decided that what you had meant by your expression of sorrow over having eaten a kangaroo steak, was actually an expression of callous laughter at a male kangaroo grieving over his dead wife, then that is what you had intended to express. Let’s face it, in confessing to having tried a kangaroo steak once, you had, to all intents and purposes, pleaded guilty to having run the kangaroo over yourself.

The trouble with this new way of going on was that it did not lead to a ‘kinder gentler politics’ which was the supposed aim of the lefty liberal progressives, it led to people like Virginia taking entrenched positions and doubling down. Virginia had no intention of opening a kangaroo steak bar which served stir fried baby Koala and Eucalyptus leaves as a starter, and gave away pints of Castlemaine 4X with every meal, but were she to experience the same reaction to her unfortunate comment again, this would now be her reply.

Virginia had followed politics all her life. She remembered her mother shouting at the transistor radio, tuned to radio 4, in the kitchen of their cold, Elizabethan house, Kineburn, when she was three or four years old. Radio 4 had figured so

much in her early childhood, that one of the larger knots in one of the floorboards of the playroom had been named Pauline Bushnell, after the woman who read the news. Virginia could not remember her ‘reason’ for having named the knots in the floorboards. But with hindsight she recognised that her child-self had understood the power of naming things.

Virginia could remember her mother explaining what the coal strike was about in the early seventies, and why they were cold as a result, also about why there was no sugar as a consequence of secondary picketing, so that a cup of hot, sweet tea would not make up for the lack of heat being emitted from the Rayburn, currently burning damp sticks from the beech woods. These days Virginia assumed the real reason behind the lack of sugar was that her parents were often both skint and disorganised. But she recognised the determination in her mother, who’d been a teacher, to turn every chance conversation into an educational opportunity and means of inculcating political thought in her children.

As a child Virginia couldn’t really understand why her mother settled for merely cursing out loud the politicians on the radio. Her mother had long known her power to curse more effectively than that.

Virginia also remembered the first referendum on Common Market membership. The reason it had stuck in her head all this time, though she was only 5 when it took place, was because she associated it with her mother having a row with a real person, not just the radio. She didn’t care a fig for the real person, a writer, amateur musician, literary critic and historian, a friend of her father’s. But she cared for his dog, Toddy.

Toddy had been the first dog in Virginia’s life, cats had been around from the beginning, carted about under her arm, like bags, or chased on the orange Space Hopper. There had been the occasional toad, too, and frogs in abundance, gathered in buckets during the mating ‘piggy-back’ season. There had been mice, occasionally, mostly flea ridden and reluctant to play at ‘Hunca Munca’ in the dolls’ house, and at one time a Jackdaw, Jackie. But never a dog of her own. Not until her early teens, when Freddy had started to appear at about the same time as the onset of her migraines and Virginia had begun to wonder if she had inherited her mother’s gift.

Although Toddy came only a few times a year to visit, his visits were wonderful. Virginia realised dogs were going to feel as necessary to her well-being and self-confidence, as other creatures seemed. Toddy was a black and white collie and a completely marvellous dog. His ability to leap gracefully over the high, dry stone walls to retrieve his rubber ball from a patch of nettles on the other side, without a care in the world, and bring it back to Virginia’s feet to be thrown again, never ceased to satisfy. Whatever happened, this man, who loved the Common Market and was going to vote ‘yes’, must not be driven away by her mother’s ranting in favour of sovereignty, the nation state and trade with Australia and New Zealand.

Virginia, seated on the low stone wall at the edge of the York stone path, beside a large fern, sprouting in it, examined the crusty pale grey lichen and Toddy’s blue-green ball, the colour of the spine of the Ladybird book ‘Rumplestiltskin’, and prayed, most earnestly, for the return of her father. Only with his return would the row end and her mother go back to peeling potatoes, apparently calmly, for the shepherd’s pie. Virginia’s mother often sat, thus, as her antecedent, Alison Carter, Kineburn’s housekeeper in the early 17th century probably had, in the same spot, escaping from the damp and cold that seeped through the flags of the north facing kitchen. Here one was warmed up again, on the ancient wooden bench beside the ‘Japonica’, in the thin sunshine where it fell on the central section of the south facing front of the house, under the transomed and mullioned windows. Sometimes Virginia’s mother was flushed with the heat of the sun, today she was pink with political anger.

It was as much to honour her late mother that Virginia had taken up the ‘Brexit’ cause so enthusiastically. The arguments she would make were the ones she imagined her mother would have approved.

Her mother had been a great supporter of Mrs Thatcher, and this of course was a tricky problem, since Britain owed its entry into Europe, partly to Maggie’s campaigning. But Maggie, the same age as Virginia’s mother, had also grown Eurosceptic pretty quickly and had fought for the rights of the country, putting it first and winning the rebate which had made Britain’s membership at least a little less onerous during those years of high unemployment and recession. Still, Maggie’s early enthusiasm for the Common Market was always dragged up by the more knowledgeable commentators with whom Virginia spent the day bickering online. So far, she had not indulged herself by using any of her powers on her Disqus opponents. Their arguing helped shape her own political arguments and without anyone to counter one’s ideas one could grow lazy. Besides which so many of these people used false names, she could not get a handle on them.

This business of Maggie having been so much in favour of the Common Market, and the way Virginia had to deal with this painful fact, caused her to realise that she was having to make her own ideas jump through hoops and twist and turn until they came out satisfactorily. She did not like admitting this, even to herself, because she knew it was what smug left wing types did, when faced with the contradictions in their own, woolly thinking, particularly with regard to the Labour Party’s long, principled opposition to the Common Market, EEC and so on. The realisation that she was going through the same cognitive motions as feeble minded ‘progressives’ sat uneasily with Virginia’s version of herself as a thinker with a more honest, straightforward and generally superior mind than these complicated, deluded ‘liberals’.

Virginia knew she was an old bag, but she liked to believe she was an honest old bag, on the whole. She believed her political opinions were based on her experiences and upbringing and bound up with the people she knew and part of her character. She could not believe that so many of her old friends, brought up in relative luxury, in the wealthiest houses and neighbourhoods, in the upmarket town where they’d gone to school, had become such rampant socialists out of any other instinct than contrariness. But then perhaps contrariness had been just the first step. The great difference between Conservatives and Liberals was the old ‘man, in general, not men in particular’ thing. Socialist ideology was always somehow beneficial for man in general, the great one size fits all, elastic waisted cor-blimey trousers ideology (though it didn’t live in a council flat so often, these days) but barely ever men, in particular. Except for the grasping, the crooked, the ones prepared to game whatever system had been imposed by the state in pursuit of one of these ideological goals. And this was true of the remain/leave divide too. Remainers were idealists, and yet at the same time they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Leavers knew all the practical faults with the EU and that the ideal of undivided Sovereignty was more important than all the airy-fairy ideals of the EU, which did not work. Virginia knew all the clichés too. But that was as much in the nature of being a conservative as being a cynic, a hypocrite and a woolly-minded idealist was in the nature of being a lefty.

All through the eighties Virginia had been a fan of Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t care about the high level of unemployment, or the end of nationalised industry, as her friends pretended to. She couldn’t be bothered with the problem of the riots, her existence was rural, it did not encompass ‘inner city’ living at any level. She regarded Socialists as being as silly as Rick from ‘The Young Ones’ and found it odd they did not regard themselves as a joke. How had being like that fictional, infantile, political caricature become the way that so many people had decided it was necessary to be, in real life?

Virginia had had a black friend at school, a huge girl from the children’s home, Shaz. Virginia wondered, with hindsight if she had been a lesbian. She had taken on the role of Virginia’s chief defender against the nasty girls in the lower streams in the years above. She had taken Virginia to her bus stop and had promised to ‘smack’ all the girls who had made Virginia’s school life miserable. Virginia had only been at the start of her journey of discovery into the extra-natural powers she had inherited, at this point. She was not yet capable of defending herself.

This one girl was the only example of a black person Virginia had to draw on, in her teens, and she didn’t imagine every member of her race was quite as marvellous as Shaz. Virginia closed her mind to the politics of the race riots for the most part, therefore, and the inner city, and did not allow them to influence her view of Conservative thinking.

Virginia met another, very beautiful black girl, in her early twenties. Virginia wondered with hindsight if she herself were perhaps a lesbian, so taken was she with this young woman, who was learning to type and ‘word process’ on the same course as Virginia. She was originally from the British Virgin Islands, which of course had a ‘nominative’ appeal. The woman, Rochelle, was married to a chap who was serving two, consecutive life sentences in a Florida prison for aggravated burglary with an Oozy automatic. Rochelle had two children and did not believe in keeping their father’s whereabouts a secret from them, despite the fact they were only three and four years old. Rochelle lived with her mother on a very rough council estate in Leeds, but on the morning after Mrs T was forced out of office, she came into the common room of the building where the typing course took place in tears and announced “I will never be able to put my little cross for Maggie, again.” Virginia knew then she had been right not to bother considering race, in relation to politics. People were just people and political opinions were not connected to levels of melatonin.

Virginia had found the other women on her typing course interesting too, though she considered them to be common. Virginia still made full use of the word common. It had been replaced with ‘chav’, and the Guardian had taken up the American term ‘poor, white trash’. Virginia hated both of these. They didn’t encompass any of the subtlety of ‘common’. It was possible to be poor and not common. Common did not denote poor. Virginia had also noticed that being common was not a result of upbringing, since some of the most common women one saw in the supermarkets, their tattooed flesh spilling out of too tight clothes, sometimes had graceful, sweet, good mannered children. One could be rich and common, like footballers and their wives, too. And of course, women like Virginia were not supposed to use the word anymore, it was bigoted and snobbish - yes of course it was, that was the point. Yet somehow it was acceptable for one’s political opponents to use these new, much worse words and phrases. Virginia, therefore put the word to good use in all her online trolling. Virginia considered one of the female MPs campaigning to be party leader, after Cameron’s resignation, to be ‘common’. She was certainly not a ‘chav’, or ‘poor, white trash’, but every English woman of Virginia’s age and background knew she was a little bit common: had she been a bit more common, they would have regarded her as ‘a breath of fresh air’.

None of the very common women on Virginia’s typing course, as far as she could recall, had been as fond of Maggie as Rochelle had been, but they were very funny and straightforward and sensible. Though some of the things they described were dreadful. Despite Virginia’s familiarity with some of the darker aspects of mischief making, and some of the things she had witnessed in dreams, she was still shocked. One of the women had claimed to have seen a snuff movie and another to have been to a sex show on the Costa del Sol, where a woman had inserted a whole bottle of Newcastle Brown into her vagina. Virginia did not dare to ask if the bottle had been empty, so she had had the horrid sensation of imagining the jagged, zig zag edge of the lid, tearing the internal flesh, which had caused her to cross her legs and moan out loud, making the other, cruder, older women laugh. Another of the women had been an agent for Anne Summers and brought her catalogue and sometimes her wares into the college as if they were Tupperware. Virginia realised she was both a puritan and a prude, but also felt there was something rather wonderful about these women who were not. She remembered the lessons she had learned about people in general, by talking to these particular women on her course, for many decades after she had forgotten whatever it was she had learned about ‘word processing’.

In her teens, Virginia had hated Scargill and the miners, feeling no sympathy for them, for they all had new cars. Her father had had to make his living as an artist and one of the things Virginia had often been bullied over was the ancient Rover 3.5 litre Coupé, which her father had driven. There had been times when they were relatively hard up, and he had needed to supplement his income by dealing in antiques. There had been one period, about the same time as the miner’s strike, or perhaps a little earlier, when things had been quite bad and some of the good furniture that had been a constant part of their lives, as long as Virginia could remember, had had to be sold. Often there had been a Volvo, belonging to an antique dealer outside Kineburn when Virginia returned home from school. She had started to dread the sight of a Volvo with a roof rack, knowing it probably signified the end of some lovely 18th century piece she had not known she had loved, until it was about to be taken away. When Virginia had first read ‘I Capture the Castle’ she had thought Dodie must have spied on her family, using their goings on as material and inspiration: their freezing cold, Elizabethan house, with the washing strung up between the beams in the undercroft kitchen, and their once famous father now finding it hard to make ends meet and selling their belongings. Still, at least antiques had been valued in those days, unlike at the present time.

With hindsight Virginia wasn’t sure about the way the Tories had dealt with heavy industry and mining, in her teens. As an adult she had moved from the cold, damp, miserable climate of North Yorkshire to a former mining country. And on reading the introduction to the Yorkshire editions of Arthur Mee’s ‘The King’s England’, the precursor to Pevsner, during her local history obsession, she had felt suddenly dreadfully sad at the thought of the huge loss of industry and productivity in the north, which had come about as a result of Thatcher’s reforms. Of course, the Labour Party had shut down more pits than the Tories, but if they had acted badly it was, Virginia felt, only to be expected. She wanted her own side’s behaviour to be exemplary and felt annoyed when there were things she could not defend.

Former mines were now golf courses, which seemed dreadfully insulting to the former miners; these days it wasn’t even tossers in Pringle jumpers and pale coloured trousers who strolled in bi-coloured brogues over what had been the place of honest, dreadful, life threatening toil for several generations of fathers. It was just tossers in hideous, modern sportswear. Virginia wasn’t sentimental, she’d read ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, but it almost seemed as if this ‘leisure industry’ which appeared to have taken over where the pits had been, by chance, or ‘market forces’ was actually planned, and a peculiar kind of cocking a snook, by ‘her side’ at the generations of men who’d voted Labour.

Many of the other mines were just shopping centres. Where the miners’ strike had begun at Cortonwood, there was the usual, drab out of town collection of mediocre stores, selling middle of the range and cheap clothing, DIY materials and groceries and so on. The big wages which the miners had received in recompense for their filthy jobs had been replaced with low ones for their daughters and granddaughters, who were now employed selling Asian made clothes, and Chinese made tools, which they didn’t really need, to each other, at lowish prices. At Castleford the mine had become a ski slope with all-year-round indoor snow. King Coal who had kept the north warm for several centuries had been drummed out of town and the Snow Queen and, ironically, all the energy that was required to keep her in existence had taken his place. That seemed the biggest insult of all. Every child knew the Snow Queen was no good and that old King Coal was a merry old soul. Who cared about spelling on such occasions? How many times in her own life had King Coal called Virginia to his glowing side to cheer her along and keep her muscles warm as she struggled through some bit of Bach partita, which required one to sound like fiddlers three?

Virginia decided this nastiness by ‘her’ political side must have had something to do with Ken Clarke. She would have liked to blame it on Michael Hessletine, too since both those men were the ‘Remainer’ enemy now, but she knew that Tarzan had done a bit of good with regard to northern areas and had at least tried to repair a little of the damage or perhaps make amends for it and she wouldn’t get away with blaming all the old crap on him. Whenever possible Virginia just asserted as a ‘well known fact’ that it was Ken Clarke, who’d been partly responsible, in her online bickering, until it started to be accepted and she saw others repeating it.

This business with what the Tories had got wrong in the eighties gave Virginia more serious pause for thought. If she had been wrong to wholly endorse the Tory’s approach to industry, when it was happening, what if she were wrong to wholly endorse Brexit? What if the bastards on the other side had a point, should they be spared the fate she was planning for them? But Brexit, she decided was in a different category, for her sort it was not about economics, besides, prevarication and shades of grey were not the order of the day.

Perhaps after Brexit people would start to value old, well made, cabinet furniture again, as symbolic of the nation’s history and what we had done well. Virginia had been a collector all her adult life, starting in her teens at jumble sales and car boot sales and progressing to odd chairs at the auction houses. This was another reason to champion the Brexit cause, she had regarded all her possessions as ‘investments’ as a justification for indulging her hobby, just as her father had. During the Blair years, the ‘Cool Britannia’ idiocy had resulted in a fashion for modern, poorly made, but expensive rubbish and Cameron as the ‘heir to Blair’ had done nothing to encourage the real ‘conservative’ values which might have led to a growth in interest in traditional things. What a useless man Cameron had been. She had not been seriously tempted to make mischief, though. One couldn’t just indulge oneself willy-nilly with everyone whom one despised. He had suffered enough with his disabled son. Virginia’s son had sculpted two models of Cameron’s face in ‘Plastiroc’, as the basis for a latex mask he was making. The resemblance had been marvellous, her boy having inherited her father’s artistic skill. She could have made use of it for a little ‘voodoo’ of her own but resisted the temptation.

And without Cameron there would have been no referendum and no opportunity to correct the mess of the last forty years. No chance to try and put things right for Mummy.

Virginia knew one must try and see the good in everyone, but she had found it increasingly hard to see the good in certain politicians over the last three years and her thoughts about what should become of them often resembled the thoughts she’d had about her Facebook ‘friends’. The difference was that Virginia knew she could never really carry her fantasies about her old ‘friends’ to extremes, only cause a little pain and disruption. Something about who they’d been in their teens, when they were funny and full of hope prevented her from taking her murderous ideas any further. But she did not feel the same about the politicians, whom she had not known and could not imagine as ever having been anything but utter shits. Of course, some of them may have had children, who would be distraught at the suffering of their parents, but that, she could convince herself, was a price worth paying. Collateral. She was beginning to seem like a cold, hard Communist, even to herself.