The Times Magazine 27happy.’ And he would say, ‘Happiness isn’t
important.’ He’s sort of Kantian: the most
important thing is exerting your will in the
world. I don’t really agree with him, but it was
stimulating to be constantly challenged.”
Dinner time involved rows “with me just
getting infuriated because I couldn’t argue with
him and I knew I was right. And he would be
very scathing and oppositional.” Yet it left Stock
with no fear of debate. (While her supporters
were upset that Lorraine Kelly disagreed with
her on TV, Stock herself was sanguine.)
But at school, Stock was deeply unhappy.
She was a reserved, academic child who did
little but read novels. A “swot”, a Catholic
and 6ft tall by 14, she was an easy target for
bullies. “I got kicked, spat at, my hair pulled,
punched.” When her father took a six-month
sabbatical in New Orleans – “an amazing
experience” – she returned to Montrose and
stood alone in the playground, realising she
had nobody to talk to. “I think it’s set me up
well for now,” she says drily.
But by 19, she’d made friends and found a
boyfriend, Gregor. (In small-town Montrose,
his mother was her dentist; his sister was her
sister’s friend.) Their relationship continued
even while Stock read French and philosophy
at Exeter College, Oxford. When Gregor
took a master’s in sculpture in Dundee, she
returned to Scotland, doing a master’s herself
at St Andrews, then working in Dixons. Aged
25, in front of 200 people, she married Gregor
in her mother’s wedding dress.
Did Stock realise back then she was a
lesbian? “It wasn’t at the forefront, because
otherwise I wouldn’t have got married. I was
already such an outsider in Montrose, and
I think adding being a lesbian on top of that
would have just been incomprehensible to
me. In retrospect, the clues were all there.
But I didn’t know any lesbians; never saw any
on telly. My mum and dad never talked about
them. I didn’t have any frame of reference.”
Stock then won a scholarship for a
philosophy PhD at Leeds. (She fell accidentally
into her father’s field, she says, always
preferring literature.) She and Gregor, who
later trained in IT, lived without heating in
student squalor. Then came one-year teaching
jobs, first at Lancaster, then the University of
East Anglia, before she finally achieved her
first full-time job at Sussex.
“I remember walking up that university
underpass for the very first time,” she says. “To
be in Brighton felt like I was on holiday. I just
couldn’t believe it. We lived in Kemptown,
right next to the sea. I felt very lucky. I really
loved it. And the students, because they were
all from north London, were more confident
and participatory than the lads in Leeds or
Lancaster I’d been used to. So it was easy toteach them. My colleagues were great. Bunch
of eccentrics, but really nice.”
Although Sussex had a radical history,
the philosophy department was an outlier:
relatively conservative, less prone to
fashionable thinking. Her argumentative
father had inadvertently prepared her for
“lots of rude, bolshie men who just would
sneer at you if you said something stupid”,
but who, she adds, “are still the cleverest
people I’ve ever met”. The English and
gender studies departments thought the
philosophers very dull. “We were laughed
at because we believed in things like truth
and objectivity. Philosophy at Sussex has
never been trendy. Thank God – that’s the
way I like it.”
At 32, Stock had her first son, then her
second three years later. The next few years
were a blur of combining motherhood withteaching, writing lectures, getting published
in journals. She wrote a book with the Oxford
University Press and edited another. She was
secretary of the British Society of Aesthetics.
Specialising in fiction and the imagination,
she built a reputation in the insular yet
international philosophy world. Only when
she was made head of department, then
director of teaching and learning, did she
encounter colleagues outside philosophy.
Meanwhile Stock’s marriage was falling
apart. Aged 39, she found herself single for
the first time in her adult life. She signed up
to dating sites. “And I started half-heartedly
seeing men,” says. “But my heart wasn’t in
it. I kept dating, on paper, eligible guys and
not wanting to do anything. I just thought,
‘Well, I could just change the box.’ So I ticked
‘F’ rather than ‘M’. I thought: why not, might
as well see. And that was it! I went on some‘I kept dating eligible guys and not wanting
to do anything. My heart wasn’t in it’
DAN KENNEDY. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: CAROL SULLIVAN AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS USING BARE MINERALS AND GENTS OF LONDON