Have you ever felt that the identity and name you’ve carried around with you all your life, no longer fits the person you now feel your are, the person you have developed into?
That happened to me back in 1987, but I did nothing about it, just pushed the ‘other’, who longed to emerge, into the background, suppressed my more creative, flamboyant alter ego, telling myself that I was Pamela Bradley, school teacher and textbook writer, and that was it. Sure I could have reinvented myself as I had been doing all my life and kept my given name of Pamela, but I sensed I was on the verge of a massive transformation and needed some symbolic way of acknowledging it, a name change would go some way to achieving that. But still I did nothing.
That ‘other’ had travelled with me since I was a child.
If our first conscious desire is to know ourselves then my earliest memory of being aware of myself was in a small child’s mirror with a pink plastic frame and handle, part of a set given to me by my aunt for my fourth birthday. I’d sit for long periods of time absorbed in my reflection, but it was not the fine sprinkling of freckles beginning to appear on my nose and cheeks that I saw, nor the dimple on the right side of my mouth. It was my eyes. I was convinced there was someone lurking behind them and that if I stared hard enough and long enough I would catch a glimpse of ‘her’.
Occasionally when no one was around, I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom, climb on the padded chair in front of the dressing table, lift Mum’s crystal mirror, hold it close––barely a few centimetres from my nose––and move it from eye to eye in turn. Sometimes, I removed the lid of her cut glass jewel box, take out her long string of satiny pearls and wrap them around my head letting them dangle in a knot on my forehead. Then I stared into my eyes again, hoping to catch a glimpse of that ‘other’, who I intuitively knew was there.
Early on, I experimented with name changes, depending on what I was particularly interested in at the time. First it was Solveig, the middle name of a new girl at school who had stolen the spotlight from me. Then it was Mimi, the half-Tahitian girl in the film Pagan Love Song that starred Esther Williams. That was in my ‘I want to be an actress’ phase. I harped until Mum bought me a flowered swimming cap. I practised swimming backstroke, bringing my arms up close to my head then curling my palms as I dipped them into the water and I practised diving and emerging from the water with arms spread wide and a smile on my face. I would only answer to my friends when they called me Mimi. But that phase didn’t last long because nobody would co-operate.
Then I adopted the name Pen, made my own postcards with cardboard and coloured pencils and wrote little messages to a make-believe aunt named Elizabeth about the places she visited: Zanzibar and Tanganyika, Vladivostock and Samarkand, Mandalay and Rio de Janeiro, any unusual names in my regulation Commonwealth school atlas, the one with the British Empire marked in pink.
I tried out one last name before I left primary school: Esme. She was a beautiful Hungarian girl with olive skin and the thickest plait I had ever seen hanging down her back. She spent six months at our school. I think I was in love with her, and in my mind I became Esme. It sounded so romantic. Es-me, the beloved daughter of the king, Es-me living in a castle, Es-me riding on the back of a huge bird or a unicorn, Es-me and the handsome prince.
When I was twelve, I no longer had any need to fantasize or ‘steal’ unusual names. ‘We’ve decided to call you Frecks,’ said the leader of the ‘swimming gang’ in my first week at high school. The name was thrust on me and, whether I liked it or not, it soon became the epithet by which I was known by all students and teachers.
Had they called me ‘Freckles’ I would have retaliated with ‘Four Eyes’, ‘Big Bum’ and ‘Giraffe Neck’. But Frecks was kind of acceptable, although I had never thought that my freckles might become the source of a name that would follow me throughout high school. So I became Frecks Carlson. It was actually a good choice for a mischief maker and class clown. It resonated with those rebellious girls in The Belles of St Trinians, and the ones I read about in the penny dreadfuls, the ones who went to boarding school, had midnight feasts and hated the English teacher. And it distinguished me from the rest of my peers, and reflected my outer adolescent persona, the not-so-sweet teenager. It suited my natural bossiness and slightly nasty competitive streak and it was perfect for the captain of this and that sporting team, the one doing the choosing, not one of those waiting to be chosen.
But Frecks disappeared when I went to University and Pamela Bradley became my name from the moment I married in 1963 until a day at Varuna, the heritage-listed Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains in 2004.
I had wandered off to explore its gardens and was engrossed in the activities of its resident bowerbird when I heard the scrunch of gravel. A woman introduced herself as Helen and when I told her my name was Pam, she said it didn't suit me, it was too ordinary. 'You should be something that starts with a Z,' she said. 'P is a closed letter, Z is open and has a certain flourish about it. It’s more flamboyant.’ We tried out several names like Zahra, Zoe and Zora until she said, ‘I’ve got it! . . . Zelda. Yes you are definitely a Zelda.’
I liked the fact that it sounded a bit like Zelda the wicked witch of the west, or Madame Zelda, fortune-teller. And Scott Fitzgerald’s wife was a Zelda, an interesting character. I think she was probably a better writer than him.
I wondered what the name meant, but it really didn’t matter, because I intuitively knew Zelda was perfect for my alter ego at that stage of my life. I agreed to try it for the next five days to see how it 'felt'.
But it was a long time before more than the six participants at Viruna called me Zelda. I had a name but she still hadn’t ‘come out’.
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