Women of Iron

When I was a child – in Glossop and district – no one supposed that women over 50 were invisible. On the contrary, they blacked out the sky. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder like penalty walls, solid inside corsets that encased them from neck to thigh, so there was no getting past them: if you’d rushed them and butted them with your head, you’d have careened off, sobbing. They stood in bus queues muttering dark threats against the driver. They stood in line in the butcher’s shop, bloodied sawdust clogging their bootees, and amid the loops of sausages and the tripes they talked about My Operation – they boasted of their surgical crises, as Coriolanus boasted about the wounds he got for his mother country. Almost every one of these women was called Nellie, and the others were called Cissie. Why these names are synonymous with effeminate weakness I cannot imagine.