Page 54 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 47
it, get out’ or something. And we just looked at each other, the three
of us, and we had absolutely nowhere to go and we just said: ‘let’s do
it’. And it was like we’d finally ...I mean, I’m not saying we weren’t
stroppy teenagers because we probably were, you know, [. . .] And so
we just got up and left at that stage. And then over the years, we kind of
drifted back at times, but that was it. We were off.
(Interview 22)

At certain points, there was no clear distinction between Sally’s stories
and her sisters. For instance, it is notable how in the following extract the
protagonist in the narrative shifts, without need for explanation, from Sally
to her sister:

Yes, so school ...I think I was quite good in primary school in terms
of...it was really small and I was really happy there, and I used to quite
get into it. [. . .] ...I just really loved going. My little sister used to run
away out the garden to get to the village school. My mum . . . sometimes
she’d go out and Susie would be gone, and then Susie would be found
at the school, or the school would ’phone and say: ‘she’s fine, she can
sit at the back of the class’, and that was because she was bored without
us two.
(Interview 22)

This accords with what has been identified as a ‘female’ form of narrative
by Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame: 5
the men consider the life they have lived as their own as a series of self-
conscious acts, with well-defined goals; and in telling their story they use
the active ‘I’, assuming themselves as the subject of their actions through
their very forms of speech. Women, by contrast talk of their lives typi-
cally in terms of relationships, including parts of other life stories in
their own.
(quoted in Thompson 1988: 155–6)

Sally’s narrative swung between these ‘male’ and ‘female’ forms, which
marks in some ways a desire to stress a growing difference and independence
from her sisters. Sally talked of ‘taking on a different role’ to her sisters in
her childhood and described how they now have very different outlooks on
life. In the following description, Sally gave herself and her sisters distinct
subject positions and subjectivities. She was also suggesting that, as well as
now living under different material conditions (Sally did not have the re-
sources to do the travelling they do or send her children to private school),
she and her sisters had different identifications with normative discourses of
‘race’, class, heteronormativity and gender: