Brownies

In the early new Thatcher era of 1981, I recall being fitted up for a Brownie uniform and quickly despatched like a Vulcan air striker to the league of 'do-good girl society' by a morally defunct mother, eager and keen to have her offspring be adopted by the 'Brownies' I naively understood to be in-the-ring junior-olympains! Of course, it didn't help that I had listened to Boney M and their terrific 'Nightflight to Venus' album a few years before.Was I a brown girl in the ring in 1981 despite being of nordic texture?  I had no idea what being a 'Brownie' was only that it meant to be important, somewhat center-field selected for some kind of merited brilliance that still fuzzes my notion now of what that might have been exactly?.  I was very good at pinching frozen food out of the freezer when there was no grub for breakfast or tea and astonishingly very good at stealing things from shops to help feed my starving brother. Being a Brownie was horrid and should never have happened.  I was definitely hoopa-looped into being bullied and tormented by somewhat unfriendly girls that led to my eventual and long -term perpetual fear and dislike of them growing up.  I so wanted and yearned to be a brown girl in the ring, just not in the way I was led to believe.