The Christmas I was nine, what I really wanted was a sparkly rainbow My Little Pony and a corset. I didn’t like My Little Pony – I have always regarded large animals with trepidation and was immune to all horsiness, real and imagined – but I was being bullied at my school in northern England and had observed a correlation between social status and the possession of garish plastic horses. The bullying was all between girls, no violence but months of ostracism. If anyone spoke to me, the ringleaders punished her. If anyone accidentally touched me or my possessions, she ran around wiping off the “Sarah-germs”. If I spoke in class, they mocked, but mostly they pretended I wasn’t there. I soon learned not to speak at all, not to make eye-contact, to stay quiet and hunched. Everyone was happier if I didn’t exist. At all times I carried a book, several books to get me through the day, and I spent every possible moment in those paper worlds.
I read so much and so fast I couldn’t be choosy, ranging from the Chalet School to Wuthering Heights, finding particular comfort in the exotic domesticity of Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie but also foraging a secondhand education for myself: Anne Shirley quoted Keats, so I read Keats; Keats wrote about Shakespeare, so I read Shakespeare. I could go on my own to the suburban library, there were some books at home, jumble-sale novels were pocket-money prices. Worlds beyond worlds opened, as long as I didn’t look up.
