Article
Wanna be in my gang?
Julie Myerson is a grown-up mum, but in the playground, she still feels like a child
The school playground, a grey Monday morning in March. I discover that our usual partners - the ones we always team up with - are going on holiday.
I go straight over and ask B if we can join up with her. She says sorry, but they've already got their table organised. (And, though she'd never say it, I know that one of the people on her table really doesn't like me.)
So I get up courage to go and ask F. I don't know her all that well but really like her - I'd like to be her friend.
But, oh dear, F says that they'd have loved to team up with us, but they've already got someone else. Do I know them, R and T? I don't think so, I say - making a point of smiling brightly, so it doesn't look like I mind.
"Don't worry," chips in V, who is a churchgoer and always keen to help. "I'll ask around and see if there's anybody left without a partner."
I thank her, but secretly think: "Oh God save us, now we'll be stuck with someone awful - someone like S or W or M." I tell V: "Thanks, but it's OK; we'll sort it."
In case you're wondering, this isn't the playground at my junior mixed infants circa 1968, and I'm not eight years old and smelly. No, it's 2001, I'm forty-and-a-half, and I'm flailing around before the morning bell at my children's school, trying to find another couple for the quiz night.
But I feel eight, loitering weedily by the sandpit, trying to find someone who'll play. I tell myself things have changed, I'm a big girl now. OK, it's true that I never used to be picked at netball - standing, pink with embarrassment and dread, my back to the crumbly sandstone wall. But these days, I don't generally have any trouble getting picked for the things I want to get picked for.
Still, even though we're all grown up now, even though those ancient horrors (PE kits, blue-veined outdoor thighs, sick-smelling school dinners) are safely in the past, it doesn't take much to bring back the nervy eight-year-old. Our badges of grown-upness - own clothes, funky jobs, man, kids - are but a thin skin.
Plonk us back here on the asphalt, peel away that veneer of adulthood, and you'll see that the crucial dynamic has not really shifted since 1968.
You recognise the types: the shy, overweight one who's learned to be (emphatically!) outgoing; the skinny one who meant to, but never quite pulled it off; the popular one in the extrovert clothes (then, lots of ragged black; now, as many acid colours as possible). Over there is the fearless, sporty one in fleece, chaining up her bicycle. You just know that, 30 years ago, she'd have been the upside-down one, all knickers and navel, on the climbing frame.
And, of course, there's the bully - grimly confident, radar already out, seeking a victim. These days, equipped with fake empathy and superficial social graces, she's an even more sinister figure.
She may not steal your lunch money or put your head down the toilet. But when she tells you, with concern in her eyes, that she thought you might want to know what her child has told her about what yours did, you just know the power game is still being played.
And though we'd all say we're friendly and mature, that we'd talk to anyone, go out of our way to make an effort with the new girls and boys, do we really?
Don't we still all huddle in our various cliques, staying close to the people who make us feel safe and wanted? Standing there chatting and laughing at a quarter to nine, as if life's so gloriously delightful, aren't we all still doing exactly what we did back then: desperately trying to look like we belong, like we know the rules?
On Monday night, I complain to J that I've utterly failed to find us partners for the quiz night.
"Well sod it," he says, "We've booked the babysitter, why don't we just bunk off and go out to dinner?"
I gasp. "But we can't . . ."
"Oh, come on, who'll notice?"
I think about it. It's the big school fundraiser. People have put in Effort. He's a Governor, I'm a Governor's Partner. We can't let them down.
"We haven't been out alone for ages," he adds.
"But we shouldn't . . ."
But I already know we will. Is that it, then - the difference between eight and 40: knowing that no one's going to tell you off? Or is it that - oh joy! - you no longer have to wait, shame-faced, back to a wall, to be picked? If you haven't got a partner, then - what the hell, go eat dinner in town.