Early in my uni days, when I was struggling to settle into city ways as much as general homesickness, my mother, paraphrasing Dolly Parton, told me, that I am a country girl. Which means I can do anything; I can drive tractors or sit in fancy cocktail bars. City girls can’t. It was said to give me conviction, confidence. Strength.
I still think of that at times, when I have found new circumstances challenging or slightly beyond me, it has consoled me.
By the time I started uni I had years of drinking under my belt. I had been served in rural pubs from 15, in full school uniform no less. That was before bar staff might be convicted of fined for serving underage drinkers.
I remember in a city bar full of masculine men, I was playing the part of bored, dutiful girl friend, when I was challenged to a doubles pool game. No one wanted to be on my team, including the boyfriend. The astonishment at my adeptness far outweighed my skill and the then boyfriend even appeared to take pride in my ability, like it somehow reflected well on him. I had honestly claimed I didn’t know pool, having never played the game before. I had however played snooker for years. My brother and I had played on a damp table in a huge disused shed in the farm yard at home. Whole Sundays, hours and hours, relentlessly, never tiring, we played game after game. The table (or possibly the shed) was pitched at an angle, so in play one had to counteract the slope of the table. We both mastered using the puckers and raised mounds of moss and damp in the table felt, to advance our shots. Every match we fought for the better queue, a fight I invariable lost, and I mastered the scoring system and rules as I was always elected score keeper, being the youngest. I have no doubt I was a superior player for all the disadvantages of our stolen, gleaned and faulty equipment. I was 16 when I retired, or, more likely, when the shed was dismantled and the table finally burned.
The same was true of darts and shooting.
A later boyfriend and his friends were disturbing my university study in his trailer, by firing a rifle from the doorstep at a target. It went on and on and I couldn’t concentrate. Eventually I came out to watch. How can you keep doing it? I asked. There’s no challenge, doesn’t it get boring? I was immediately handed the gun with jeers and jokes that I might not accident shoot one of them in my ignorance. I had asked sincerely, I genuinely could see no fun or challenge in their game, the target was too close and unobstructed. It consisted of little cut out metal shapes with weights, so that when one was hit accurately it lay down out of sight. A row of metal duck shapes in the forefront, 2 pigs in the middle, and in the shadowy recesses of the contraption, the little silhouette of a man.
I hadn’t held a rifle for as much as 7 years (I was now 21). When I had last played with a gun, I had lain in the mud on my belly beside my brother and his friends, always treated like an equal despite a 6 year age gap, shooting at tin cans or (if there was no wind) plastic bottles from behind a feed trough, as though to protect ourselves from enemy fire. The barrel of the gun was slightly bent, so you had to check you target a touch to the right to take a clean hit. The boys or myself would run as the cans went down, rearrange them at different places and distances and then dart away for the next assault (though in truth reloading took time). For this reason the targets were never fixed, unlike this joyless (no doubt expensive) device I was now faced with. Needless to say, I hit all the ducks, pigs and man; never missing a single aim. I repeated my previous questions as their smiles faded and as I walked back inside to my study. Their raucous fun dyed away quite rapidly after this and they soon left, one by one in their embarrassingly oversized Mitsubishi Warriors; beer cans and spaniels sliding around helplessly in the pickup beds.
These bragging, work-shy men, the sons of land owners disguised as farmers. My brother’s friends; estate kids, and us the ‘free school meal’ grandchildren of tenant farmers.
In some circumstances it’s ok to be smug.
