Writing ‘A Curious Child’
By Richard Walker
My first play broadcast on Radio 3 in 1981 was a monologue called Scar. It was narrated by a woman on a visit to Seville. Something happens to her as she explores the city. The way in which she tells the story means we’re never sure whether a man merely brushed her arm in the street by accident or she was sexually assaulted. The director of the play, a woman, and its main reviewer, a woman, and listeners never once asked me why I’d chosen to voice a woman’s story when I’m a man.
In the run up to the original publication of A Curious Child in 1989 the question I invariably got was: why did you choose to write about someone who had – in the language of the time – a sex change. Last week someone over lunch asked the same question in today’s language. Why did you choose to write a novel about a trans person?
The facile answer is Why Not? I’m a writer of, among other things, fiction. Shakespeare wasn’t a deranged king with three daughters, two of them evil, one of them good. But he wrote about such a king. The Irish writer Sebastian Barry wasn’t born in the nineteenth century, nor did he become a cross-dressing Irish mercenary in the US civil war but he wrote about one brilliantly in Days Without End. Neither was Samantha Harvey, last year’s Booker prize winner an astronaut but in Orbital she wrote about them. Surely, the whole premise of fiction, whether on stage, page, audio or film is to inhabit the worlds of others and, with empathy, give them a voice and identity.
I was in the process becoming a young adult in the counter culture of the 60s and 70s. The Stones, the Who, the Kinks, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Aeroplane, The Doors. We were the generation that grew up listening to, primus inter pares, David Bowie. I remember putting David’s album Hunky Dory on the deck in my rooms just up the High Street here in Oxford at the end of ‘71. It was littered with what became Bowie classics. We were entranced and when the album finished none of us spoke. We were blown away by the beautiful songs’ allusions to an ambiguous sexuality.
It was a time of experimentation with identities including gender fluidity. I hugely annoyed my father, a military man, by growing my hair long, ‘looking like a girl, he said’ and choosing to study literature not a ‘proper subject’ like law. I felt a natural affinity for those who pushed against social, political and class constructs and constraints including gender and sex stereotyping.
So my reasons for choosing to voice a trans character include both the socio-cultural or the Zeitgeist and my own unique make up or psychology.
I’m very lucky that Kit Heyam, the erudite, young literary and cultural historian who wrote Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, agreed to write the introduction to this new edition of A Curious Child. Among other things, he applauds the beauty of the writing, and is the first reader to have picked up on my debt to Virginia Woolf.
