I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.

Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.