Can't believe these women who want to sue undercover policemen for sleeping with them. Are we all going to start suing every man who ever lied to us to get into our knickers? Goodness me - read Mrs Jackson Rides Out and weep! Several men must be shaking in their shoes and I could be a rich woman!
All this retrospective justice is wrong. You cannot go back in time, examine people's motives and actions and apply today's standards of behaviour to them. And as for the Jimmy Savile Groping Scandal - where I come from (born 1941) groping came as standard, it was part of growing up and learning what the world was about. I was only small, about eight years old, when I exited the family sitting room to go to the toilet. When I came out, all was dark. I did not scream for Mum (fat lot of good that would have done, we were tough in those days), I probably assumed a bulb had gone. I did not know my 'not all there' Uncle had turned out the light and was waiting at the end of the passage to grab and grope me. I extricated myself - silently - ran back in the warm room with its roaring fire and thought no more about it - except to steer even clearer of Uncle Jack, whom I did not like in the first place. I never even remembered this incident until, writing my 'novel' Four Geminis and a Jacuzzi , I wrote this:
"He brought me in the health centre - I thought I was safe anyway, the place was full of workmen. There was that Roy, and Kevin, and some others. He says, 'go in there and see that sunbed that's just come,' - in that little room opposite here, you know," she explained, "then when I was inside wondering what I was supposed to look at, he came in after me and shut the door.
"It was all dark and I was frightened, wondering what he was gonna do. All I could see was this little red light where his cigar was. He kept laughing and grabbing at me. I tried to stop him. I said, 'come on now, Mr Pinchbeck, a joke's a joke, let me out,'" - she sounds frightened even now, thought Sally, a poor frightened child with the friendly uncle who turns into a monster in the dark - "
This stopped me in my tracks, astonished. "Now where did that come from?" I asked myself, and then the memory was there. That's what's so fascinating about writing, isn't it - you learn so much!
As for Savile, it appears he groped the girls (which could never be right, given their ages and his) and met with no resistance - except in the one case we have heard, where he never went near the girl again. In his simplistic (or warped) mind, if they had not objected, he could do it again and even go further, as we hear he did in some cases. One has to ask also, since the girls were not of an age where they could understand or deal with what was going on, where were their mothers? I would not have been allowed such freedom at fourteen, even fifteen.
It's never going to be right, it isn't right, but to drag poor old Gary Glitter into it again (hasn't he suffered enough, and I always had the feeling he had been fit up in the first place and then hounded ever after) and the surely harmless Freddy Starr, oh dear. What is going on? One explation is Saturn in Scorpio - the Grim Reaper come to question us about our sexual conduct. It's just the latest version of the Witch Hunt, and I for one would like to see a total amnesty and an End to It All.
All this retrospective justice is wrong. You cannot go back in time, examine people's motives and actions and apply today's standards of behaviour to them. And as for the Jimmy Savile Groping Scandal - where I come from (born 1941) groping came as standard, it was part of growing up and learning what the world was about. I was only small, about eight years old, when I exited the family sitting room to go to the toilet. When I came out, all was dark. I did not scream for Mum (fat lot of good that would have done, we were tough in those days), I probably assumed a bulb had gone. I did not know my 'not all there' Uncle had turned out the light and was waiting at the end of the passage to grab and grope me. I extricated myself - silently - ran back in the warm room with its roaring fire and thought no more about it - except to steer even clearer of Uncle Jack, whom I did not like in the first place. I never even remembered this incident until, writing my 'novel' Four Geminis and a Jacuzzi , I wrote this:
"He brought me in the health centre - I thought I was safe anyway, the place was full of workmen. There was that Roy, and Kevin, and some others. He says, 'go in there and see that sunbed that's just come,' - in that little room opposite here, you know," she explained, "then when I was inside wondering what I was supposed to look at, he came in after me and shut the door.
"It was all dark and I was frightened, wondering what he was gonna do. All I could see was this little red light where his cigar was. He kept laughing and grabbing at me. I tried to stop him. I said, 'come on now, Mr Pinchbeck, a joke's a joke, let me out,'" - she sounds frightened even now, thought Sally, a poor frightened child with the friendly uncle who turns into a monster in the dark - "
This stopped me in my tracks, astonished. "Now where did that come from?" I asked myself, and then the memory was there. That's what's so fascinating about writing, isn't it - you learn so much!
As for Savile, it appears he groped the girls (which could never be right, given their ages and his) and met with no resistance - except in the one case we have heard, where he never went near the girl again. In his simplistic (or warped) mind, if they had not objected, he could do it again and even go further, as we hear he did in some cases. One has to ask also, since the girls were not of an age where they could understand or deal with what was going on, where were their mothers? I would not have been allowed such freedom at fourteen, even fifteen.
It's never going to be right, it isn't right, but to drag poor old Gary Glitter into it again (hasn't he suffered enough, and I always had the feeling he had been fit up in the first place and then hounded ever after) and the surely harmless Freddy Starr, oh dear. What is going on? One explation is Saturn in Scorpio - the Grim Reaper come to question us about our sexual conduct. It's just the latest version of the Witch Hunt, and I for one would like to see a total amnesty and an End to It All.
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