I first met Alice when I was eight or nine years old, in the pages of a library book. She was curious, brave and a little lost, finding her way through a world where nothing made sense, and I liked that; she didn’t have all the answers. Re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll as a teen, I saw a darker story, a surreal, nightmarish adventure that disturbed and unsettled. I was intrigued.
I struggled to make sense of my teen years… like Alice, I hadn’t a clue what was going on. It felt like life had turned upside-down, like I’d tumbled down the rabbit hole into a world where everyone knew the rules but me.
Painfully shy and woefully unsuited to following the crowd, my half-hearted attempts to fit in failed. Like Alice, at times I seemed to be huge, hulking, awkward… at others I would shrink away to nothing, the original Invisible Girl. Adolescence was not so much a Wonderland as a nightmare for me.
Eventually, I worked out that being of the edge of things was a pretty cool place to be; you got to see everything, and that was a good thing for someone who loved to draw and write as a way of making sense of the world.
I also decided that being invisible wasn’t working. I gave up on trying to fit in and decided to be me, even if that involved dodgy hairstyles and strange dresses made of 1950s curtains.
Yes, people stared and sometimes laughed…but I didn’t care anymore, because the stress of trying to be something I wasn’t had lifted away. I was just me, happy, hopeless, eccentric and ready to spread my wings and fly. I think Alice would have approved.
I was hooked on Alice’s style from the very start. Those Tenniel illustrations entranced; I wanted to be Alice, in that cool sticky-out dress and hooped tights, the little-girl shoes and the wavy hair.
By the time I dredged up the courage to do my own thing in life, I wasn’t a little girl any longer, but so what? I bought sticky-out dresses from jumble sales and crimped my hair and wore black canvas Chinese slippers. I went to Liverpool to be an art student, and I loved it. Nobody cares how you dress at art college. I got teased occasionally. “Who d’you think you are, Alice in Wonderland?” one bloke yelled at me. I grinned wider than the Cheshire Cat at that.
These days, I am a middle-aged children’s author who should know better than to crimp her hair and wear sticky out dresses. My look could be said to channel Grayson Perry just as much as Alice, now, but who cares? In a world that makes less sense to me than ever, hanging on to that “inner child” innocence matters. Wonderland… it’s still there, if you look hard enough.
Cathy Cassidy’s latest book Looking Glass Girl (a modern day re-telling of Alice in Wonderland) is available at the Guardian bookshop.
