Blush Pink Overalls
Reaching my full adult height of five feet four inches at age eleven was murderous for my backbone. Years of compression and contortion followed as I hunched, desperately attempting to shrink to the size of my classmates. I also acted smaller; tough situations sent me scuttling to the outskirts, blanched and self-conscious, abdicating agency and responsibility to those now much bigger and braver classmates. I must live with the past shame of being too frightened to stand up to a racist thug who was verbally thrashing the clerk at the late-night service station and of being too embarrassed to help the tramp who was in the laundrette having soiled himself. Only my future acts can offer any hope of salvation.
Nearly five decades later, I’ve re-evaluated my thinking around the settings on the bravery Richter Scale. What makes a person brave? Perhaps only a tiny minority can be the person who, to the blessed relief of others, galvanises themselves at the first hint of trouble and heroically saves the day. I’ve learned that the nuances of bravery are deeply personal and not immediately obvious. The catalyst for these insights spring from my repatriation from tropical Singapore to gritty Manchester, the city of my birth, where I’m experiencing a reckoning four decades later. Leaving the grim north when I was eighteen with barely a backward glance, my stints in London, Oxford and Singapore gifted me a softer, more harmonious existence, where being brave was an easier prospect. Over the years, Manchester and I have grown, changed and reinvented, and now we are reunited, our ‘do-over’ a tentative step towards a brave reconciliation.
Where is my beleaguered backbone in all of this? A hard landing followed by a stint of merciless torture in the form of daily exposure to bad chairs, scant exercise, and bruising cold brought forth howls of protest. My much heralded, brave new beginning is in danger of manifesting as fretful, carb-dulled indolence. Cheeringly, like the Manchester weather, clouds do eventually lift. Not with a grand flourish, but imperceptibly, until one day you realise the sun is finally shining.
Action is the facilitator of bravery. We can congratulate ourselves on our forensic decision-making, but we often owe success to simple acts like putting on a coat and going outside. Being curious and turning up can change a life. I learnt the meaning of bravery in a scrubby field behind our house. Running past one day, I noticed that a coffee hut had appeared. Obeying the ‘Fancy a brew?’ sign, I presented myself, and the young woman who directed operations from her wooden window on our local world urged me to join an outdoor Pilates class. I left that field three hours later and have subsequently been away for the weekend wild-swimming with one of the women, attended a barrister’s book launch under a makeshift awning, and am now ensconced in several WhatsApp friendship groups. But the bravest person in that field by a huge margin was the recent widow, whose daughter had anxiously urged her to leave the house and join that class, her first solo outing since her husband died. I had capitalised on an opportunity, but she had put her entire heart on the line with astonishing bravery.
One surprising revelation about bravery is that if you are older and have the good fortune to have some freedom, you can have gat fun doing things that earlier in life would have resulted in your death by mortification. Noting that the redesigned Ancoats former warehouse area of Manchester has been decided/dubbed “the twentieth coolest place in the world,” I resolved to eject myself from my safe suburban nest and book a desk at one of the ‘breath-taking’ co-working spaces with their exposed beams and crittal windows. As it was packed with creatives on my first day, I wore a pair of high fashion magazine blush pink overalls. I wasn’t eleven years old, subject to the overbearing whims and snipes of others; I was able to pull my shoulders back, recapture my brio and place my foot on the first step of the bravery stairwell. Threading my way past the hammock and pool table to my desk, I opened the welcome box and crunched my way through a stack of Belgium chocolate honeycomb dips while making an evening reservation for one of the hot lists of dining options said to rival any capital city. My backbone purred contentedly in the suitably ergonomic chair, and my brave Manchester ‘do-over’ began. Oh, and the overalls were an enormous hit!