October 1980

October 1980 marks a turning point in Fern Woolbright’s move from aspiration to the uncomfortable realities of student life. Newly arrived in Manchester and only two weeks into her stay, she has won a place at drama school, but the month’s opening scene finds her facing an unexpected test of confidence as a life model.

Date and Narrative Placement

October 1980 is given as a chapter date for Fern’s story. It anchors the scene in the early period of her life in Manchester: she has been there for a fortnight, and the first part of her dream—getting into drama school—has come true. The date therefore holds success and dislocation together. Fern has reached the place she wanted to be, yet has not found it easy to feel at home there.

Fern’s First Weeks in Manchester

At eighteen, Fern is red-haired and pale-skinned. For the modelling session she wears an expensive oyster-satin bra and matching cami-knickers, bought months earlier at the Janet Reger lingerie boutique in Guildford. Until this evening, only her boyfriend has seen her in them. Now she is preparing to expose herself to a mixed class of twenty art students, while shivering and covered in goose-bumps.

The room offers little comfort: a battered wooden screen conceals a plastic chair and a feeble two-bar heater. The art teacher urges Fern to get on with it. When Fern does not comply, the teacher laughs at her and tells her to leave. Burning with fury and embarrassment, Fern marches out of the art faculty building into the rain. The episode turns a practical challenge into a public humiliation, sharpening the contrast between the promise of her new life and how exposed she feels within it.

Ambition, Loneliness, and Disappointment

Fern is meant to be ecstatically happy because she has secured her place at drama school, but she finds Manchester bleak and, at night, sometimes cannot sleep for loneliness and homesickness. She rehearses her audition speeches to herself, including Lady Macbeth’s speech about killing a baby; she remembers being embarrassed by the word nipple, then choosing to attack it so forcefully that she shouted the line and disrupted the speech’s rhythm.

Her audition had included a song from Sweet Charity, which she performed well, with a few restrained dance moves. She believes the character piece let her down: she was not funny enough, and the Northern accent she attempted sounded ridiculous in Manchester. October 1980 thus captures Fern at the outset of her training, with admission secured but confidence still unsettled, and with the distance between her ambitions and her experience already becoming palpable.