Sheltered but Independent East End Girls

Abstract

This chapter explores the talk of Pat, Jenny, Susan and Natalie, who formed a friendship group at a state school in the East End of London. This school, which was also attended by Ardiana and her friends (see Chapter 4), recruited its students mainly from the surrounding working-class areas, with about 60 per cent of Pat’s form group qualifying for free school meals. When I first started transcribing the tapes which Pat and her friends had recorded, it was immediately evident that in their talk the girls attributed a more salient role to their families and especially their mothers than the two other groups. This is evident both on a quantitative and on a qualitative level in my data and struck me as noteworthy also because school records indicated that all of the four girls lived in single-parent families.¹ The girls mention their mums on average about once every 41 seconds of transcribed conversation; by contrast Ardiana, Dilshana, Hennah and Varda only mention their mothers on average once every 11 minutes and 8 seconds and Elizabeth, Roberta, Nicky and Jane speak about their mothers once every 7 minutes.²