by Tracey Thorn
She flicked through the one from 1980. ‘Oh God, here’s the final row, the one where I called Mum and Dad Nazis,’ she said. She read the page out to me. It was pretty explosive, ending with the words, ‘I will never ever forgive them for this, as long as I live.’ And we rolled our eyes and laughed, remembering what had happened to inspire this fury, and what had happened afterwards.
She did forgive them, of course, and after she was married, they became close neighbours, spending every Christmas and several holidays together, Mum and Dad playing a huge role in the lives of her growing sons. In later years, she ended up living in the same building, in a flat on the floor above them, looking after both of them in their old age. A lot of forgiving and forgetting went on, as in so many families. We didn’t want to be furious forever, and nor did they, so we moved on, all of us willing to sacrifice that boiling rage, and that desire to be right, for the greater good of family unity.
The day of the walk dawned, misty and drizzly, and we took the train up to Brookmans Park. Debbie hadn’t been back for years. I had a map printed out, which traced a five-mile route around the village, taking in fields and woods and views. We assumed it would take us an hour and a half, and planned to be back in the village for lunch. Starting from the station, it led us down a lane, the route then doubling back on itself to take us onto a footpath running parallel to the railway track.
It was a good start to the walk. Trees arched over the path from either side, forming a long green tunnel that stretched away in front of us, almost resembling a holloway, that most rural of lanes, and making me think of Robert Macfarlane’s book, The Old Ways, in which he describes walking ancient paths and undiscovered tracks. ‘Maybe we’re going to discover a kind of wilderness,’ I thought, before noticing that already we had stumbled upon the remnants of what was clearly a popular meeting point for local teenagers. Litter clogged the hedgerow and under a tree lay scattered Coke cans, crisp packets, sandwich wrappers and a small, empty vodka bottle.
I sighed, and we carried on, coming out onto an open path, the damp grass soaking our trainers, blackberries ripening on the brambles at the side. A bridge crossed a small, dried-up brook, a continuation of Ray Brook which flows down from Gobions Wood, and off to our right was the veterinary college; a few sheep, and a couple of alpacas with early ’80s haircuts, all shaved sides and floppy fringes, stared at us and stamped their front feet until we moved on.
Crossing a bridge over the railway, we walked back towards Brookmans Park, down the side of a ploughed field the colour of pencil lead. The soil was speckled with white, and covered in gulls. I remembered that I had always said there was no farming, but here I was being contradicted straight away. Debbie said she thought there was a farm nearby, up on Hawkshead Road. So I suppose I have to adjust my view and say, there was SOME farming.
Through the outskirts of the village again and then on to a narrow, nettley path which gave the impression of being rarely taken, and very much the road less travelled. Progress was slow and despite treading down as many nettles as we could, we got stung and scratched, and were grateful to reach the point where it opened out into Gobions Wood.
The walking here was beautiful – soft and dry underfoot, a woodland carpet of twigs, leaves and acorns, giving a slight crackle with every step. We came across a small, engraved metal plaque attached to a post, informing us that trees had been planted here in 1991 by children from our old primary school. Further on, two more plaques were dedicated to the memory of people who had loved these woods, and, looking closer, we realised we recognised the name of one of the families. ‘In one of those diaries I was looking at last night,’ said Debbie, ‘I was planning to go to a party given by their son, but then something happened, and I never got there.’ It all felt very familiar, as if nothing had changed since we lived there, thirty-something years ago, and as if all the same neighbours were still present.
Lulled into a sense of security, we then made our fatal mistake and took a wrong turn. Misreading our directions, and mistrusting our instincts, we went one way and then turned back, feeling that our initial choice had been wrong. Heading off into another section of the wood, which suddenly seemed to be much bigger than we remembered, we both realised we’d never been in this part before, never even knew it was here. Twenty years we’d lived in the village, and here we were, in completely new territory. And we were hopelessly lost.
Tracing circles, we would follow a path only to have it fork in two, choosing one direction, then returning to choose the other. Reaching the edge of the trees, we would find no way out, just a field bordered with barbed wire, and so we’d head back in. We passed a dried-up riverbed, which had been dammed up with thick black tree trunks; a mysterious brick tunnel leading who knows where; plank bridges over rivulets and streams. The day had warmed up and the air was heavy and humid, the ground lightly steaming. The woodland felt ancient, primeval, the opposite of suburban. And we were getting hungry.
Finally, after maybe an hour of fruitless wandering, we spotted a red jacket in the distance and sped towards it, calling out ‘Hallo? Excuse me?’ feeling very like Withnail coming across the farmer, and in panicky voice asking: ‘Are you the farmer? We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’ Being set on the right track, we yet managed to go wrong one more time, until finally the path led us back to the spot where we’d made our first mistake, over an hour ago.
It was the weirdest feeling, to have been so lost in a place so close to our old home and yet so unknown to us. Within ten minutes of finding our way out of the wood, we were on the Great North Road – once the main road to the north of England, and a known turnpike or toll road for several hundred years – with the familiar tower of the transmitting station looming above us. And five minutes after that we were in the Cock of the North pub, where Mum and Dad used to go for their annual wedding anniversary dinner and at no other time during the year.
We were chastened. Honestly, if we couldn’t even find our way around here, what chance would we have navigating the Pennine Way or crossing Dartmoor? What did it say about us and our skills, that we were so hopeless in even this suburban version of the natural world? Because, in truth, the walk never had felt like real countryside. There were almost always houses in view, or roads within earshot. Trains hurtling past somewhere in the distance. The woods had defeated us, and momentarily seemed wild, but that was more down to our stupidity and map-reading failure than anything else.
We walked back down into the village, and went for a final restorative cup of tea in the hotel. Sitting in the bar area, we looked around and realised it was a new conversion of the old function room, the very space where the disco used to be held. As we sat there with our tea, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up’ came on in the background. ‘I used to go out to parties / And stand around / Cause I was too nervous / To really get down’.
And suddenly we were fifteen and seventeen again, up in our bedrooms listening to Greg Edwards on Capital Radio, getting ready to go out to a party or a disco on a Saturday night. ‘But my body yearned to be free / I got up on the floor and thought / Somebody could choose me.’ We’d have been fired up, excited, dancing and running back-and-forth between our two bedrooms. Swapping lip gloss. ‘Can I borrow your white loafers?’ Sharing our Anais Anais perfume. Trying on a belt. Calling out, ‘Where’s my nail polish remover?’ Spraying our hair, and, oh dear no, not country girls at all. Not at all.
By 1943 the population of Brookmans Park was 2,300, and developers still had aspirations for a population of 7,500 when urban planners finally began to commit to the idea of the Green Belt. It had been a long time coming, and the notion of preserving a ring of open greenery around London, preventing urban sprawl by restricting building and development, had been around since about 1890. A ‘Development Plan for Greater London’ was proposed by the London Society in 1919, arguing for a two-mile-wide buffer zone. It wasn’t until the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 that the plans for a Green Belt became formalised, in
an attempt to stop London expanding outwards, securing a band of countryside around it.
But how did this affect somewhere like Brookmans Park? As a suburb, it wasn’t sprawling out from the city, instead it had sprung up in an apparently empty green space, within easy reach of London. Its qualities were to do with the combination of these two factors – rural beauty along with accessibility to urban jobs. The idea of the Green Belt would protect the rural space between it and the city, but also acted as a brake on the development of the place itself, which still was only half built.
The 1943 Greater London Plan (which included Hertfordshire) looked at Brookmans Park and drew the following damning conclusions – ‘The development here consists of an entirely unfinished dormitory estate based upon the railway station, with a small shopping centre at the station . . . That any growth whatsoever should have occurred here is to be most strongly deplored . . . The houses that have been erected should have been built at Potters Bar itself where they could have been welded and blended into the existing town life. Further expansion at Brookmans Park should be most rigidly controlled.’
In other words, Brookmans Park should never have happened at all. The district council objected and development continued, another 200 houses getting approval in 1946, but the end was in sight, and government opposition was building. In 1946 approval for some development was revoked because it infringed on the Green Belt, and a small factory proposal met with objections and was prevented. In 1950 the primary school was built, opening in autumn 1951 with 110 children, and in 1959 another 100 houses were approved, but other plans were rejected.
What this meant was that the growth of Brookmans Park suddenly stopped, preserving it in aspic – a place with no history and no future. There was nothing very old (the earliest houses were from 1927) and nothing very new (building stopped completely in 1959). To this day, there is still debate in and around Brookmans Park about new housing proposals. There is a desire to stop Brookmans Park itself expanding, and filling in the green space between it and London, but the Green Belt also aims to stop towns and villages merging into each other. In effect, a place like Brookmans Park has a little Green Belt around itself. It’s a castle, surrounded by a moat, shutting out the rest of the world, the barbarian hordes.
I’ve always loved London. It seemed far, far away, and yet now I realise that Brookmans Park was locked into a symbiotic relationship with it. The village only existed because of the city, was built solely for commuters, and so they were inextricably linked. I lived on what was effectively one of Planet London’s moons, and each exerted a gravitational pull on the other, although for me, the force emanating from the city was much stronger, magnetically drawing me towards it.
I remember a school trip, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, and we came on a coach up to the British Museum. It was a sunny day, towards the end of the summer term, and though I don’t recall the museum at all, I do remember driving into the city, and the streets getting busier, and the green of Regents Park, and then parking somewhere and walking along the pavement, sun filtering through the plane trees, the air dusty and hot, fragrant with exhaust fumes, and loving everything about being there, the feel of the place, the smell of it, and thinking ‘I WILL LIVE HERE.’
In the mid nineteenth century, my rural ancestors, Job and Miriam Bush, upped sticks and moved, with several of their children, from a Norfolk village to St Pancras in London. There they carried on in the market garden business, working at Covent Garden, and driving produce around the city. By 1891 their son Frederick and his family were living in Litcham Street in Kentish Town, which, by the end of the century had become one of the worst of the slum streets in the area; much of it was demolished in the 1920s. Another of their sons, James, married and settled in the Old Kent Road, before moving to Kentish Town, where he had a son, also named James, who was my great-grandfather. In 1899, this particular James married Edith Bell, at St Pancras Parish Church on Euston Road, as I never fail to point out to whoever I am with whenever I pass it. He was my mum’s grandfather, and she remembered him as a good sportsman, a runner and a boxer, who used to drive pairs of horses from Whitestone Pond in Hampstead into central London for a bet.
On Dad’s side, my great-great-grandfather William Julius Thorn was in Chelsea in the 1870s, working as a commercial clerk, and later as a domestic gardener. They too moved to north London, and later my dad’s mother would be born in another street in Kentish Town, St Leonards Square, only yards away from the streets – Marsden Street, Rhyl Street, Weedington Road – where all my mother’s family lived. In a very small area of London, I can point out to you – on every corner – churches where ancestors of mine were wed, streets where they were born. And yet my parents left, meaning that my childhood happened elsewhere, and although I moved back as soon as I could, in the 1980s, it makes me feel that London is both in my blood and not. I am of the place, and not of it, and I feel or imagine sentimental connections at every twist and turn. I have a great-great-grandfather who was baptised at St Pancras Old Church, which is now used for live music, and where I have sat in the audience and watched Ben perform a gig, imagining all the time that I could feel some ancient connection with the very walls, the air we were breathing, the stones beneath.
A few years ago I went on a walking tour of Aldgate, the tour guide being someone I was in a band with aged seventeen. He loves London as much as I do, which confirms my belief that growing up just outside predisposes you to overlook its faults and dwell forever on its beauty and allure. So if you love the place, you will find beauty in, for instance, the contemplation of the spot where a plague pit was dug behind the church of St Botolph without Aldgate. The small group of us on the tour stood there on a Saturday afternoon, as the traffic roared by, lost in the past, surrounded by ghosts, suffused with the feeling that everyone who has ever lived in this city is somehow still here. That feeling continued, grew stronger even, as we moved on to Wilton’s Music Hall, dating from the 1850s (did any of my ancestors go there, I wondered?) and to Cable Street, where we swelled with undeserved pride, basking in the memory of the locals who stopped fascists in their tracks. Then in Altab Ali Park, named after a young Bangladeshi clothing worker who was murdered in 1978 on his way home from work, our spirits fell a little, and we realised that maybe the fascists weren’t stopped after all. Maybe they never are, not completely.
Outside the Whitechapel Gallery, which for the last hundred years has housed exhibitions from Picasso to Pollock, our guide quoted John Ruskin at us – ‘Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality’ – and on that stirring note, with all the stories of the afternoon ringing in our ears, we retired to the Halal Restaurant, which was established in 1939 and so is the oldest Indian eatery in east London, and finally to the Oliver Conquest, a pub which was once the bar of the original Garrick Theatre, and which now offers more than 160 varieties of gin. We sampled too many of them of course, and paid the price next day. The bathtub gin did me in, and the night ended in slightly more Hogarthian style than we might have intended, but really, what could be more London? God love and preserve the place. When I got home, I wrote a song called ‘Smoke’, in which I tried to sum up all the complicated feelings I have about this city, few of them wholly rational, all of them suffused with a sense of longing and belonging.
London you’re in my blood
And you’ve been there for so long
London you’re in my blood
But I feel you going wrong.
1977
A blue Collins diary, with four days to two pages, allowing five or six sentences per day. I was fourteen, and nothing much had changed yet. I ate 1970s food, ‘Got up about 10.30 and had a lovely fried breakfast. Had roast beef for dinner. Got a Creme egg in the afternoon yummee’, and then I went on a 1970s health kick . . .
6 February 1977 – ‘Liz and I have decided to go healthy – doing exercises, going for walks, drinking PLJ. Went to bed early at 9.30.’ Next day Liz was ill and
off school, but I carried on regardless . . .
8 February – ‘Took dog for a walk and did loads more exercises.’
13 February – ‘I went for THREE walks.’ It fizzled out after a while, as I got distracted by other interests. By May the actual exercise – ‘Rode down to Liz’s at 7.30, and we went jogging in the fields at the end of her road. It was really lovely down there.’ – gave way to this kind of thing: ‘Went jogging with Liz again. On the way down there 2 gorgeous blokes followed me in their car and said hello, whistled etc’, ‘on the way to school the 2 blokes with the blue Saab who live above Taylors were waving and shouting to me’.
The days were still filled with school and telly. I watched The Goodies, Porridge, Are You Being Served? and The Six Million Dollar Man . . . Doctor on the Go, TOTP, Tom O’Connor and Mike Yarwood . . . The Muppet Show, Happy Days, Roots, Jesus of Nazareth and Rising Damp . . . The Streets of San Francisco, Planet of the Apes, The Rockford Files, Rhoda and Van Der Valk. All of us still watching together and watching the same programmes as our neighbours. Far off in the future, unimaginable to us then, lay the world we now live in, where parents and children view separately and privately, so that, for instance on the night my husband Ben and I sat down to watch the first episode of a new series of House of Cards, which opened in a prison cell, with a character we’d met before on a top bunk talking to himself, no, wait, reciting some kind of porn scenario, and the camera panned down to the bunk below, where his cell mate was furiously masturbating, and I do mean FURIOUSLY, so that Ben and I both glanced anxiously at the sitting-room door, hoping no kids were about to walk through it, on a night like this I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Thank God we hardly ever watch telly as a family any more.’ And we counted our blessings that current parents and teens have been spared the gritted-teeth communal viewing of TV sex scenes, all staring resolutely ahead, wishing for the ground to open up.
