Gladys Reunited Read online

  Gladys Reunited

  A Personal American Journey

  SANDI TOKSVIG

  To Jesse, Meg and Ted

  Acknowledgements

  My father once wrote a book called Edited Reality. It dealt with the difficulties of covering the American presidential elections as a foreign journalist. He wrote about how tough it is ever to present an objective and factual account of a real event. Different people at the same occasion will perceive it differently. This is my edited reality of the journey I have taken. I hope that the women of the Gladys Society who took me into their homes and lives will accept that I have done my best to present a truth of what happened. Thank you to them and their families for making me so welcome.

  Once again I find I couldn’t have written a word without my mentor and friend Ursula MacKenzie, the splendid Viv Redman, who keeps me going with her eye for detail, and my agent Pat Kavanagh. Thank you as well to my travel companions Richard and Paul, my kids for letting me go, Alice for her support, the extraordinary kindness of my friends Carol and Sue and to Helena Taylor for needing something to read on her holidays.

  A Preface on a Horse

  Can I just say right at the beginning that I like America? It’s a country I feel comfortable in. I grew up in New York. I spent my formative time there: those growing years, which an advertising slogan for pap white bread in the late sixties/early seventies called The Wonderbread Years’. It is the place of my childhood. I know all about ‘America the Beautiful’. I have seen its ‘purple mountains majesty’; its ‘amber fields of grain’ and travelled from ‘sea to shining sea’. This is the story of a journey to a country I know, to seek a group of women I used to be friends with. It’s a trip that should have been a doddle, but it wasn’t. It was endlessly surprising and, at one point, very nearly fatal. I suppose journeys ought to be related in the chronology in which they occurred, but indulge me while I take one incident out of sequence. I think it reveals a lot about the English woman travelling in the colonies across the water.

  There is a quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw that says something along the lines of America and England being two nations divided by a common language. I always thought it was nonsense till I met a horse called Shirley and fell face-first into the Arizona desert.

  It was like this. I had arranged to go to an all women’s rodeo in Phoenix, Arizona, to meet up with two members of the Gladys Society. You don’t need to know who they are yet because, suffice to say, neither of them showed up. Without the women I had come to meet, I found myself wasted on the sweet desert air and on something of a fruitless mission. Ever one to turn disaster to an advantage, my business partner, Richard, with whom I make television documentaries, decided the non-appearances were a good thing. We were in the Wild West and we should make the most of it. Without strange women to clutter up our day we could concentrate on making a very fine little film about the curious world of the rodeo. I like to think I am highly professional and so I agreed. I justified travelling five thousand miles to meet two women who never came by telling Richard that he was right; that I was keen to make a defining piece of film about the American addiction to the iconography of the cowboy and how that image had impacted on societies around the world. Richard nodded and said that sounded good but actually he just wanted to meet cowboys in tight jeans and have me do something amusing with a horse. It is my own fault for choosing a gay boy as a cohort.

  We went to watch rodeo. We watched professional rodeo, where many people did quite dangerous things with huge animals; and then we watched amateur gay and lesbian rodeo, where many people did quite dangerous things with huge animals accompanied by a Barbra Streisand soundtrack. It was all looking rather jolly until the night Richard frankly had a Bloody Mary too far.

  ‘I think what we need to make this documentary really special,’ he slurred at me, ‘is to have you actually take part.’

  Now it is possible that I too had ingested a spirit or two. A tabloid paper would no doubt have said that I was ‘pissed’, but I prefer to use the show-business expression that I was somewhat ‘tired and emotional’. Anyway, I agreed and forgot about it. The next day Richard asked the organiser of the Professional Women’s Rodeo Association, ‘What would Sandi have to do in order to take part in a professional rodeo?’

  The organiser, a charming woman in surprisingly well-fitting leather, tipped back her hat and drawled, ‘Wheeell, she’d haaave to join the Prowfessional Women’s Rodeo Association.’

  One hundred and twelve dollars later and I was a member. I felt some pride at this and indeed, even now, as I venture down my local high street in England, I swagger slightly knowing I am probably the only paid-up member of the PWRA hitting that particular town. It was when the organiser passed me my membership card that I had my first misgivings.

  ‘Do you not want to know if I can ride at all?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ she said. ‘If you caaan’t riyde then basically you just gaaave a donation.’ She smiled at me and sauntered off to subdue a reasonably enraged bull.

  Card in hand, I watched the many events with renewed interest. I was absolutely dear that I did not wish to get on anything bucking and I wasn’t mad keen on any activity which involved roping together the four legs of a creature who was trying simultaneously to run away. In the end Richard and I settled on the least scary-looking event — The Barrel Race.

  Basically it works like this: the rodeo arena is about the size of half an English football pitch. It is covered in brown, dusty dirt with a large entrance gate at one end for horses and riders and chutes along one side for the less tame entrants. Three barrels (in fact old oil drums) are placed at some distance apart in a triangle. Horse and rider then compete against the clock to enter the arena, ride a cloverleaf pattern around the drums and out again. A professional barrel racer makes this look like a very straightforward procedure. The fact that they seem to be able to take a huge thoroughbred animal almost sideways round an obstacle impressed rather than deterred me. I knew that the champions could do the whole thing in about thirteen seconds but I wasn’t aiming to win, just take part. I decided my approach would be the same one I had had as a child to any running race — no point in rushing things.

  Despite the fact that I have done many curious things in the course of my career (canoed across Africa — not to be recommended. You end up with something not dissimilar to trench bottom; sailed an ancient yacht around the whole of the UK and once, bizarrely, been blown up in the waters off the Isle of Wight while trying to manoeuvre a wardrobe which had been converted into a miniature hovercraft — it’s a long story and we haven’t the time), despite my many adventures in life, I am by nature a somewhat cautious person.

  ‘I think,’ I said to Richard, ‘perhaps I ought to have, you know, at least the one riding lesson.’

  ‘I thought you could ride,’ he said.

  There was a slight pause. ‘Not as such,’ I confessed.

  Richard and I were on a very limited budget and this fact was reflected in our hotel. Les Jardins is a strange, deserted motel in downtown Phoenix. It is built round an open-air pool with much pale pink decor. I don’t think you’ll find it in any guidebook and there are reasons for this. The only pretension it has to being an upmarket hostelry is the name. Clearly the owners don’t speak French for there are no gardens of any kind for several miles around. The hotel provides few amenities but in the lobby there is a rather shabby stand made of chipped Formica which holds the ubiquitous tourist leaflets you find all over the world. Richard leafed through them.

  ‘I bet there are some riding lessons here,’ he said. ‘It’s the Wild West; people must be gagging to get on a horse.’

  ‘Are you?’ I asked. He looked at me as though I ha
d suggested he might also take up manual labour and produced a glossy slip with a flourish.

  ‘Here we are! The very thing. MacDonald’s Farm.’

  ‘MacDonald’s Farm?’ I repeated. ‘Do you think that bodes well? I mean it doesn’t sound very… western.’

  ‘Darling, it will be a triumph,’ he declared and swept off to be charming on the phone to, presumably, Old Macdonald himself.

  I was beginning to have rather serious misgivings. I like animals. I like them a lot but not so as I need to come into physical contact with them. I spend a good deal of time working for animals with the Born Free Foundation and I think animals should be free. They should be free and not made to walk under my not inconsiderable arse. The other thing that has happened as I get older is that I am much less bold than I used to be. I don’t want to risk my life any more. I am acutely aware of my own mortality and I figure the grim reaper will come calling soon enough without me sending him a route map. I phoned home.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I blubbed to my nearest and dearest. ‘I don’t want to get on a horse and now it’s all organised and I think something terrible is going to happen.’ I received many long-distance strokings and soothings but it didn’t help. I was still scared as we pulled into MacDonald’s Farm.

  The farm lay some distance from Phoenix, to the north, in a large area of desert. There is an expression in America used when someone has died. People often say ‘He bought the farm’. I don’t know where the saying originates from but MacDonald’s looked like the sort of farm you might buy if your death was to be followed by mild punishment. Attempts had been made to turn the place into some kind of tourist Mecca. A row of sheds had been given false fronts to recreate the look of a Wild West town. They were rather small and lacked only Munchkins to complete the surreal picture. I was introduced to a cowboy called Bill. Bill certainly looked the part. He wore the pointy boots, the jangling spurs, the leather chaps and a long leather trail coat. He had a fine black hat and a splendid moustache. Sadly, he was also myopic. Bill wore the thickest spectacles I have ever seen. He appeared to view the world through the base of twin whisky tumblers and I found it unnerving.

  ‘He can’t see,’ I whispered to Richard.

  ‘So what?’ he hissed. ‘What’s there to see? It’s the desert. All there is out here are cactuses and you can feel those.’

  Bill sized me up and went to select my horse; It was a girl horse. Bill led her towards me in the corral.

  ‘Here you go, Sandi. This is Shirley.’

  ‘Shirley?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘The horse is called Shirley?’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Bill wandered off leaving me with Shirl. It wasn’t what I had expected. I looked at my steed. This was it. This was me about to enter the world of the cowboy. It was a world that I had spent some time trying to prepare for.

  I live much of my life in the mistaken belief that you can ready yourself for anything if you have enough knowledge. I tend to seek my armour for daily battles in books. I had scoured book-shops in Phoenix for cowboy lore and I thought I was ready. In one of my many tomes it said, ‘All you need to be a cowboy is guts and a horse, and if you’ve got the guts you can steal the horse.’

  Well, I’d got Shirley with my Visa card and somehow it didn’t feel quite right. Bill helped me heave on to the horse and we set off. Him in his great Western garb and me in an ill-fitting pair of jeans from The Gap. I was further from ready than I have ever been in my life. We wandered out into the desert amongst the feel-able cactuses and, in a clearing of sand, began the lesson. Bill laid out the basic barrel pattern on the ground and Shirley and I began to master the cloverleaf ride. Richard filmed and everything proceeded quite sedately under the magnificent blue of the Arizona sky. I can’t say I was at one with my mount but the trembling fear began to ebb away slightly. In fact, I thought it was all going rather well, which only goes to show how out of touch a human being can be with the equine mind. On reflection I realise, of course, that we had upset Shirley’s entire world. She was not a creature destined for glory in the rodeo ring. This was an animal on a tourist ranch. An animal whose daily life consisted entirely of plodding along the same track, day after day, with her nose firmly up the bottom of the horse in front. We were making Shirley very unhappy indeed.

  After about half an hour Bill declared, ‘I think we should lope one.’

  I shrugged my shoulders nonchalantly as if I even knew what that meant.

  ‘Okay but not too fast.’

  Basically what happened is simple:

  Bill and his steed set off very fast.

  I set off very fast and…

  Shirley didn’t.

  Among the many experiences I have had in my life, being bucked off a horse had, until then, not been on the list. All I can tell you about it is that it is a surprisingly long way up before the inevitable drop down. Shirley kicked both back legs high in the air, I tipped forward, managed to stay on and then she did it again and I was gone. Up, up and away and then down, down, down into the desert. I landed with a rather satisfactory thud and lay moaning in the sand. Everything that I had feared had happened. I was in that instant consumed with terror. I thought I had broken my neck. I thought that I was paralysed and I also thought that it was terribly embarrassing. If I blame my English boarding-school education for anything (and, believe me, I have a very long list) then it is a burdensome sense of manners, which was so forcibly instilled that I cannot shake it off. I felt somehow that it must be my fault and that I had behaved badly. Bill had leapt off his horse and was by my side.

  ‘Don’t move, don’t move,’ he ordered. It was an unnecessary instruction. I couldn’t move but I was desperate to get up and show that everything was fine. He tried to roll me over and sit me up. The pain and fear were overwhelming.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Richard, finally taking the matter seriously, abandoned the camera and ran towards me. However injured I was this was too much.

  ‘Keep filming, you bastard!’ I shouted through gritted teeth. I blamed Richard for the entire event but thought we should at least get it on tape.

  Shirley snorted and went home. She knew when her day was satisfactorily done. She too was a bastard. Bill produced a brand-new sling from his inside pocket. If I had known it was something he habitually carried with him I would never have got on the horse in the first place. As I was completely unable to move my right arm, he fixed the sling around my neck and strapped my arm to my chest. Between them, he and Richard got me to my feet.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I kept repeating. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I wasn’t fine. I was terrified and in agony but I was also still sorry. We limped back to Munchkinland. The owner gave us directions to the nearest ‘medical facility’ and bizarrely we all smiled and said goodbye. I was desperate to get away from the place so I got in the car and drove us off. Richard won’t drive abroad and I steered our open Mustang up the road with one arm. I think he attempted conversation but I couldn’t hear him. I was beside myself with distress.

  The Desert Hills Medical Facility was quite some way further north. By the time we got there I could no longer do anything. I sat in the waiting room and began to sob and sob. The doctor and nurses were charming but I could no longer communicate. I was in what they charmingly described as ‘exquisite pain’ and beside myself with the fear born of an anticipated horror actually coming true. The decision was taken, not by me, to airlift me out of the desert to a larger hospital. Paramedics arrived and I was strapped to a rock-solid plastic stretcher, a neck collar was placed on me and my head was then velcroed to the board with immense severity. I could no longer move and was no longer in charge. The first I knew that the transfer was to take place by helicopter was the moment I was actually under the rotor blades of the thing.

  Now the important point in this whole story is that at no time did the paramedics, or anyone else for that matter, take on board the fact that I was actually an English tourist. The
noise from the helicopter was astonishing but the medical team were keen to assess me for the flight.

  ‘Sandi!’ yelled the young man in a white uniform, ‘what day of the week is it?’

  Well, now.’ Perfectly reasonable question but the fact was I had been travelling for some time and was still extremely jet-lagged. Nevertheless, Mrs Manners leapt to the fore and I wanted to be helpful.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ I replied. ‘Let me think.’

  ‘Patient confused,’ he yelled to the other paramedic and they rushed my stretcher into the craft. We took off at some speed while the young man at my side fitted me with a drip of unknown liquid and an oxygen mask After a few moments in the air he tried again.

  ‘Sandi, what is your date of birth?’

  This seemed like a good question and I rather perked up because I thought, ‘I know this.’ But then I remembered that the Americans do it the other way round. In Britain the date is given as day/month/year, while the Americans do month/day/year. So, ever helpful, I said, ‘I know this, but you have to give me a moment.’

  ‘Patient slow to respond,’ he yelled to the pilot, who seemed to speed up even further.

  After some considerable time we landed at the larger hospital. Immediately many people in ill-fitting green pyjamas arrived to haul me out on to a gurney. The young man removed my oxygen mask. I took the opportunity to say, I felt quite reasonably, ‘Where am I?’ meaning, Where have you taken me to?

  ‘Patient disorientated,’ he informed the many medical attendants and we all set off at a lick. Now they were running with me but with my head superglued to the board all I could see were fluorescent lights flashing above me as we made the dash to the ER. No one was speaking to me, what with me being confused, slow to respond and disorientated and I was by now convinced of the severity of my injuries.’

  The voice of a nurse rang out in the emergency room, ‘Forty-two-year-old woman, level one trauma!’