Chess Game

This week we are very sad to tell you all that the talented poet and author Jill Gardiner passed away recently. Jill was a prolific writer, a meticulous researcher and a generous friend. She will be missed by all. In her honour, we are reposting one of her remarkable poems. 

Jill once explained what inspired today's poem: 'Early on in our relationship, when we could not wait to get our hands on each other, we also used to play a lot of chess. My partner, a past contestant in London chess tournaments, would almost always win, but I still enjoyed the challenge. As the game is so often viewed as a mainly male preserve, this autobiographical story also appealed to me as a metaphor for seduction.'

 

Chess Game

Shall we play chess or go to bed?

We can’t make up our minds

so you get the chess set,

I fetch the wine, and we both

slip out of our clothes.

This bed is big enough for all of us:

you, propped up on a pillow

too far away to reach:

between us, queens and kings,

their armies of retainers.

A clock ticks.  Your pawns advance.

My knight prepares to pounce.

The curve of your hip.  Two moves

and I’ll have you in check.  Too late.

What is your bishop doing down there?

You tell me I’m beautiful: this is not 

the time, now you’ve swiped my pawn, 

gone up a piece.  Oh your skin

and you so at ease in it

as if you went naked everywhere.

I must concentrate, this is serious.

Your breath so close, your body

out of reach.  I could stretch...

You must be joking.  Not my queen.

Your breasts.  I resign, I concede.

This poem appears in With Some Wild Woman – Poems 1989-2019 (Tollington Press), described by Rosie Bailey as ‘a real page-turner’ and by Jackie Wills as ‘starting with bosoms, bras and crushes, it explores all aspects of lesbian love’.

Jill Gardiner was also a social historian, author of From the Closet to the Screen – Women at the Gateways Club 1945-85 (Pandora Press). A former Chair of Brighton Poets, her poems were published in various journals, including Artemis, and commended in competitions, including by Jackie Kay in the Cardiff International.

The Gateways Club

The Gateways Club, just off Chelsea’s Kings Road in London, was the longest surviving lesbian club of the 20th century, open from 1931 to 1985. It also became the most famous, when it featured in the 1968 Hollywood movie, The Killing of Sister George, where real life club members came out on screen, dancing cheek to cheek in front of millions, before gay liberation ever hit the headlines.

In her book, From the Closet to the Screen - Women at the Gateways Club 1945-85, Jill Gardiner shares the stories of 80 women who went there. They include the author, Maureen Duffy, whose best-selling 1966 novel The Microcosm, immortalised the club, and grew out of interviews with its members; Maggi Hambling, the artist, who arrived on New Year's Eve, dressed as Bonnie, then changed her costume to Clyde at midnight; sociologist Mary McIntosh, who wrote 'The Homosexual Role', and Pat Arrowsmith, the peace campaigner, who listed the Gateways as her club in Who’s Who.

But how did anyone ever find the Gateways in the early days when clubs didn’t advertise and many a young woman grew up thinking she was the only one in the world who felt this way?

It was 1963. I hadn’t identified myself as a lesbian. I persuaded my boyfriend to go to this weird pub in Soho full of drag queens. There was this woman sitting opposite me with her boyfriend. A couple of drinks later, I suddenly found myself asking her if she had ever wanted to go to a queer club. She said, ‘Funnily enough, yeah.’ Our boyfriends looked pretty gob-smacked. The next week, she and I went back to Soho and found the Huntsman in Berwick Street. It was an eye-opener to me, full of people boasting how much they’d nicked that day. At about 3am an axe came through the door. There was some sort of gang conflict going on. It was mayhem, and the police arrived, at which point all the same-sex partners dancing switched to the opposite sex. I found myself dancing with a bloke called Bobby.   -  Marion

Through her visit to the Huntsman, Marion found the Gateways.

That was my introduction to the gay world, and although it was exciting I knew I wasn’t going to meet anyone like me. A lot of the women in the Huntsman said they’d been in children’s homes and were living off the streets. The femmes were often on the game and one of the aspirations of the younger butchy types was to become a pimp.

The Huntsman during the day became an ordinary cafe called the Coffee Pot. After we’d had a big raving session one night, I was still there in the morning, having a pot of coffee when this young woman came in, Sasha, and she knew some of the people I was with. She was gay: I couldn’t believe it. She was setting up her own business as a couturier and had been to a material shop nearby, and she knew some of the people I was with. She had lots of eye make-up and bouffanted dark hair and was dressed very trendily.

Sasha introduced me to the Gateways. I remember Gina [one of the owners] sitting at the bottom of the stairs, in a black dress, and I was impressed that she looked very sophisticated. There was a man in a suit behind the bar, and Greta said, ‘That’s Ted, that’s Gina’s husband’, and I just couldn’t work it out. Smithy [often assumed to be Gina’s lover] was there too, a woman with fair cropped hair, polishing glasses.

I was excited that there must be lots of people like myself around who had ordinary jobs. I was struck by the ordinariness of everybody - they just looked like a cross section of women you would see walking around the streets. I identified as a hippy at the time. I had long hair, jeans and purple boots with Cuban heels: slightly more ‘unisex’ than most people there.

Someone came up to me and said that blonde Archie had sent her over. Archie was  very good-looking but a bit frightening. She’d sent over to find out if I was butch or femme. I said I didn’t know and I got a message back saying, that I ought to make my mind up soon or I might find myself in a bit of trouble.   -  Marion 

© Jill Gardiner

From the Closet to the Screen is available at:

Gay’s the Word bookshop in London (who deliver almost anywhere worldwide)

City Books in Hove   

BFI Shop