100 years of guiding, and its part in my downfall...and the substitute middle class parent...

I watched the hundred years of guiding today, and it made me think about the enormous impact the Girl Guides had on my life. I know this sounds a bit OTT - but it really did propel me into a journey I might not otherwise have taken.

In the first place, I had the (mis)fortune to be the younger sister and my guide captain - also a younger sister, decided that my sister, Kim, bullied me and then she determined because of her own experience, to find a way of getting rid of my sister from the guides. Well, I'm not sure it was quite this thought through - I don't think Audrey Lord, the captain, thought anything through (she was never still long enough), but she did engineer the situation for me to be at the guides on my own and exist without any other member of my family. Anyone who comes from a big (ish) family will tell you this - it is virtually impossible to be seen without the filter of one or other of them, especially if you happen to be third in line to the throne. You are always someone's sister or like your great aunt nellie or doing something that someone or other has done before you...

But with the guides, it was not like that. Well - it was not like that after an incident. The funny thing about this incident is that looking back I was not only fully involved in it, I may even have instigated it. What a hoot we thought, one Friday evening, if we shoved an old exhaust pipe that we'd found under Audrey's car so that when she left the guides that night it would be dangling down on the floor, and she would think her exhaust was broken. To add to the general mayhem we (myself, Kim, and our friends, Dawn and Alison) had also written 'crap car' and 'clean me' and so on all over the car in the dust, too.

Audrey wasn't fooled. she pulled the old exhaust out, cross that someone had tried to play that trick, and drove off. And we trudged home a bit disappointed. We weren't disappointed for long. We'd apparently shoved the old exhaust a bit too vigorously because two weeks later when Audrey was on holiday in Scotland her real exhaust fell off her car in quite spectacular fashion. And this, she concluded was our fault.

When she got back to Hull she rang my mother up. It was one of those tense moments in the kitchen when you knew that trouble was brewing. My mother said, "My children would never write such a terrible word on your car!" and she said, "My girls would never destroy your exhaust." She was pretty angry when she got off the line. "I'd better not find out that you've done that, or your feet won't touch." (This was one of a number of phrases my mother used that I didn't quite get. She used to say, "I've been shopping like a man with no arms." I still don't understand this.)

My sister and I shifted awkwardly and tried not to meet our mother's eye. Then the expletives started to fall, and then we knew we were in trouble. "You've made me look like a prize idiot" (Could idiots win prizes?) and that was a very dangerous thing to do. I took cover (my usual reaction) and Kim fronted it out (her usual reaction.)

The next Friday we went to the guides, and Kim and Alison were both asked to leave. That was after they'd be ritually stripped of their patrol leader badges, all very solemn. Just like that, banished. For good. Dawn, dramatic and daft, left with them both. And I stayed. It was at that point that Guides started to matter.

A few weeks later, Audrey made me a patrol leader. Then she encouraged me to do badges and other stuff. Then she encouraged me to do my Queen's guide (see the marvellous picture above....) It was the first time that I had followed a path that no-one else had taken, and I liked it. I liked it very much. As an aside, when I received my Queen's Guide it was a bit of an event. The newspapers came, and I had my picture in the Hull Daily Mail (squeezed in on a page with a reflective piece about the Yorkshire Ripper...making me look like one of his victims), and in the parish magazine, I had to play second fiddle behind Charles and Diana who thoughtlessly chose to get married in the same summer. Mind, the church threw a bit of a do, so I wasn't too disappointed and enjoyed my celebrity.

The Guides opened a number of doors for me and set me off on a road of over-achieving and leadership - it certainly made me realise that I could manage people, and could get things done. I was also encountering other young women, in better companies, who intended to go on to university and whilst I couldn't lay money on it, I have a fair sense that that was where I got the idea from. I never got it from school. I was a relative failure at academia with my 3 'o' levels, and never destined for the Higher education route. In that sense, the Guides very much operated as a substitute middle class parent: offering me a raft of opportunities and allowing me to rub shoulders as an equal with other young women who took sixth form, and university as their right. The Guides gave me what they called on the TV programme a 'can do attitude' and, it allowed me to be a different kind of girl. To be honest, I do remember being very awkward in a number of situations - and whilst it's easy to dismiss this as an inferiority complex, I did always feel as often the sole representative of 68th St. Matthew's Company, like the poor relation rocking up at the superior in-laws' parties and eating the centre-piece in error. The Guides is chopped into districts, and each district is made up of a number of companies, under the leadership of a district commissioner - well, it was. Our company was attached to St. Matthew's Church, then in a pretty dodgy part of Hull. There were three other companies in our district and one of them, St Nick's were posh compared to us. From where I am now, they so clearly were not posh at all - but such was the sense of not being like them, I can remember going into events and deciding I didn't like people based on the fact that they talked posh, or were looking at us funny or they were not like us. Their leaders were young professionals, and clearly very much more dynamic than Audrey (although I did really admire Aud, who died very young and I still miss her.)

I remember once taking an instant dislike to a girl, Julie, from St. Nick's. Then, we were young leaders together on a camp and from the second I met her properly, we were absolutely firm mates. She was a blast. So it taught me that not all posh people were hideous, or other. At that point, Guides was starting to open doors that would have stayed shut for me as a girl from a working class community. I went horse riding with the guides, abseiling, rock-climbing, windsurfing, camping - supervised and unsupervised by adults,  - hiking and so on. I did fundraising, church parade, singing, first aid, looked after elders, etc etc... It afforded me privileges that I would not otherwise have had. And it made a difference, it really did. If we are talking about transgression, and the possibilities that transgressing opens up - then the Guiding movement was my ticket to crossing. It was my way of stepping over the borderline between the classes. 

So, any more transgressive stories?