by Tracey Thorn
It was a formative and scarring experience for anyone my age, even though the scenes involved were tamer than the one described above. If I say ‘Bouquet of Barbed Wire’, most people in their fifties will know exactly what I mean, and I’m sure everyone has their own personal example. I remember one Christmas my granddad striding over to the telly to turn it off with the vigour of a man twenty years younger, because of snogging in the film Love Story. Not actual sex, just snogging. Separate tellies, laptops and the internet have saved us from this. ‘Times have changed, Lord Grantham,’ one of my kids said to Ben recently, when he was complaining about something, and of course we’re not the prudes our grandparents, or even parents, were. I can talk to my kids about sex (if I have to), but I’m still glad I didn’t have to watch that opening House of Cards scene with them next to me on the sofa.
Back in 1977 I bought records by Archie Bell and the Drells, the Three Degrees, and Deniece Williams; I ‘ got some sheet music from Delmars, Say a Little Prayer, and Yellow Brick Road’; I read Love Story, Carrie, The Day of the Locust, The Sting and The Great Gatsby (‘it’s great’). Also Jackie magazine, Pink and Oh Boy, and I started working a Saturday job in the post office, earning £1.75 on my first morning.
I’d stopped going to the disco, and so experienced something of a boy drought at the beginning of the year, but then the house parties started, where instead of complete strangers, and policemen with their own cars, I got off with boys I knew, who were more my own age. First one boy from the posher end of Brookmans Park, then a boy from up the road. In May there was a disco in Welham Green: ‘It wasn’t bad I suppose, if you LIKE half empty discos with no booze.’ And in June, a party in Cuffley: ‘it was more like a mass brawl/orgy. Party got a bit (??) out of control.’ In August, we went on holiday to Wales, taking my friend Liz along, and at a disco I got off with a boy called Jay, meeting up with him the following night. ‘Jay’s really called Jean Paul, he’s half French, and in the army. Got off with him again. Walked me home.’ I was still only fourteen, and he was in the army, what was it about men in uniform with me? The next evening he got off with someone else at the disco, and I was upset. When we returned home from the holiday, I wrote, ‘ Seems strange that I’ll never see Jay again, and I miss him a bit. Still it was horrible of him to arrange to meet me and then turn up with another girl!! Oh well it was nice while it lasted, now I’d better just forget him . . . ’ The arc of a love affair, concertinaed into four days.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, glimpses of punk, like little flickers of light, pulsing on and off in the gloom, barely noticed at first, not bright enough to fully catch my eye. At a disco in St Albans in June, ‘ Not bad records, Supertramp, Stranglers, Sex Pistols, Jacksons, Alessi’, and in July, ‘Liz came over in the afternoon and we wandered about a bit . . . Mum and Dad went to a tennis club dance in Welham Green. Listened to an interview with Johnny Rotten.’ By the end of the month I was buying singles by Dr Feelgood and The Jam, and coincidentally, or perhaps not, I began to notice for the first time that my life was dull and limited.
27 August – ‘This diary’s getting very boring, something better happen soon.’
28 August – ‘Nothing really happened today. Well, nothing concerning blokes. Wish someone would have a party, I feel like going out. I’m getting fed up with sitting around all the time!! Where’s all the night life gone?’
I’d go to any party or disco that popped up, but never seemed to meet anyone new. We would all get off with each other in rotation, but none of it ever led anywhere. Stuck, and with limited options, I got fixated on one boy after another, banking everything on them being the one to change things, make something happen.
2 September – ‘ If I don’t get off with him soon I’ll go MAD, LOONY, ROUND THE BEND . . . Shouldn’t think I ever will though, so loony bin, here I come . . . ’
This couldn’t last; it was hopelessly passive of me. I started a Saturday job in the supermarket, ‘priced things, packed shelves, they even let me work the till. Got £3.60.’ And with that money I started buying lots and lots of records. The boredom was beginning to act as a catalyst; new friends were emerging, new interests, and I was leaving behind the crowd of people from Brookmans Park. By the end of 1977 I had turned fifteen, built up a head full of frustration and a head full of steam, and amid the boredom I was beginning to be excited. There are lots of diary entries about records I’ve bought, and who I’ve seen on the telly.
And luckily I wasn’t too cool or too much of a punk to enjoy something as conventional as Christmas Day. ‘Yahoo, Xmas Day. Got LOADS of really great presents – £25, Rats LP, Jam LP, Boots token, record token, diary, ring, earrings, necklace, toilet bag set, legwarmers. Ate and drank all day. Saw Funny Girl. Had a really lovely day. Went to bed about 1 o’clock.’
There are moments in my teenage diaries where I barely recognise the person who wrote them, and other times when she seems completely and utterly the person I am now. At this particular moment, I feel I could look in the mirror and see myself reflected, younger but still the same, and I could say to this 1977 version of myself: ‘Tracey, you’re fifteen now, and you’re growing up and you’re changing, but you’re never going to change that much. You’re never going to stop loving Christmas Day. You will one day write a song with a sarky Christmas reference, “Come on Home”, in which you’ll sing, “Every day’s like Christmas Day without you / It’s cold and there’s nothing to do” – which will lead to near-ostracism from your Christmas-loving family. “Oh no, Tracey hasn’t got her tree up yet, she HATES Christmas,” they’ll say, arms folded and looking at you, as you weakly protest, for several years, that it was meant as a joke. But then when your kids come along something inside you will click back to an automatic pre-programmed setting, and you’ll set about recreating in intricate detail the Christmases of childhood, which went like clockwork, set in motion by Mum, and ran to a schedule as precise as a Swiss railway timetable. Reliable, repetitive, reassuring – everything that children love life to be – they consisted of the same events happening in exactly the same order every year, so that you could set your watch by the delivery of special drinks (Advocaat, Tizer), the appearance of a box of Eat Me dates, the arrival of Grandad in a three-piece suit, penknife poised and ready to take the peel off an apple in one single strip. And you’d eat a Chocolate Orange on Christmas afternoon, and Matchmakers in the evening, and NEVER THE OTHER WAY ROUND. That’s how it was. You won’t forget.’
Brookmans Park was designed to be self-sufficient, but so successful was this that it created a feeling of isolation, even though it was not far from anywhere, turning it into an island floating in a sea of fields. I live in north London now, and Brookmans Park seems miles and miles away. It is fifty minutes on the train. Yet the sense of distance is overwhelming, lost in space and time, psychologically distant. In truth, it feels faintly fictional to me. There is a gulf between now and the past, just as there is a gulf between town and country. Between me now, and me then.
During the brief period when I was a driver, about twenty-five years ago, I drove to Brookmans Park a few times, but despite having often made the journey as a passenger, I always got hopelessly lost. Each time I drove right past it and had to turn back to take the correct exit off the A road. A Freudian might read something into this.
As a child, I had no sense at all that London was nearby. But the village didn’t just feel far from London, it also felt far from other places that were actually close by. Knebworth was only two stops past Welwyn Garden City on the train, and yet going there for the festival, I remember it now as a trip into the deep wilds of the countryside, like Glastonbury or Woodstock. Perhaps the reason that we felt cut off even from nearby villages was that Brookmans Park itself had everything you could need, in a way that was both wonderful and awful. Clustered around the village green were the shops, walkable from our house. There was a petrol station and garage for repairs. A GP and a dentist, a church, a primary school AND a secondary schoo
l, the Brookmans Park Hotel, with its bar and off-licence, and six rooms for guests.
All this for a population of just over 3,000 people. There wasn’t much choice, but there was one of EVERYTHING you needed. And there is the downside. Being so self-contained makes a place insular and claustrophobic. The village gave the impression of not needing anyone else, or anything else; incurious about the world, it gradually became dismissive, and disapproving of the world. There is a sneery description of suburbia that defines it as a place devoid of higher education and devoid of culture. Brookmans Park could defend itself against the first charge by stating that it at least had a respected veterinary college, but the second accusation is impossible to refute: there was no cinema, no theatre, no music venue and – perhaps worse than that – no sense that such things were important.
So what were we to do? For teenagers, there was the village green, where local tough kids sat smoking. It was a vaguely transgressive spot, despite being in the centre of the village, in full view of everyone. I longed to go and smoke there, hanging around with the kind of kids who gave off an intangible air of delinquency, shouting and shoving each other, but it was absolutely forbidden. The only other diversions on offer were the non-arty, supposedly healthy pursuits of tennis and golf. There was a tennis club at the end of a wooded lane at the top end of the village, a dusty clubhouse where you could help yourself to an orange squash, and an annual tournament where the singles cup would be contested by the local alpha girls with ponytails and pristine whites.
And there was the golf club, where the village’s insularity was expressed in a nastier way. The feeling of being separate and not having to keep pace with the times meant that you could defy progress and end up on the wrong side of historical arguments. This was the situation at the golf club, membership of which was aspirational. Acceptance meant not just the freedom to play a round of golf, but admission into a social group, and in order for it to be exclusive it had to exclude. I remember being told that our beloved village GP, who was Jewish, could not join and had to drive to Potters Bar to play. The club there had been founded in 1923 by a successful fur merchant, William Ponikwer, who loved golf but, being Jewish too, could not find a club he was allowed to join within easy reach of London. But that was the 1920s. How could such a situation still be tolerated forty or fifty years later? It was glossed over, but struck me – a teenager who was learning about racism, and by 1978 marching against the National Front – as monstrous, unforgivable.
I was forever running into those kinds of brick walls, making too much of a fuss about things that no one else seemed bothered by. I took things too seriously, in a way that didn’t fit. In my house, we weren’t a religious family, but as children we all attended Sunday School, and we’d sometimes go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Then, as a teenager, it was suggested that I join the social group called the Table Fellowship, which involved Sunday church-going.
I was resistant. A 1978 diary entry reads, ‘Mum keeps going on at me to join the Table Fellowship, but I don’t want to and it’s beginning to get on my nerves now.’ I suspect this was more because I thought church was uncool than anything else, but I certainly dug my heels in. The vicar came round to our house to talk to me, but I hid upstairs. Meanwhile, down in the lounge he patiently explained to my mum that you didn’t have to be religious; you could just play table tennis. But I took the moral high ground, claiming to find it hypocritical in the way that only teenagers can find things hypocritical.
It held no allure for me, offered no spiritual significance, and I was yearning for significance, looking everywhere for it. The laid-back approach of the vicar was almost designed to put me off. I wanted passion and commitment. If he’d said, ‘You have to believe all of this with every fibre of your being, and sign HERE and HERE, in BLOOD’, I might have been more interested, but instead he offered youth club evenings, modern hymns accompanied by tambourines, a pantomime at Christmas. The nondescript post-war building was not designed to attract the poetically minded, having no ancient stones, no tower, no ancestral family pews, no brass plates commemorating the gallant dead of the First World War. Perhaps most significantly, there was, and still is, no churchyard. No one is buried there. No gravestones to gather moss or summon the grieving. The burials happened at North Mymms instead, in the 700-year-old churchyard. Out of sight, out of mind.
I think of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Churchgoing’, in which he ponders the meaning and importance of churches to an increasingly secular society. In the end he concludes that churches will never become completely obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
But what if no dead lie round? What if they’ve all been taken somewhere else, and you’re being told you don’t have to believe in anything very much to join the church group, and no one seems to be interested in the arts, and everyone votes Tory and the golf club is racist, what then?
In 1986, the villagers of Brookmans Park took part in something called the ‘Domesday Project’. Published by the BBC, to mark 900 years since William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, it was an attempt to document everyday life, to collect stories about ‘the ordinary rather than the extraordinary’ and preserve them for future generations. In order to come up with this record, the UK was divided up into 23,000 separate areas, each measuring 4 × 3 kilometres, called Domesday Squares, or ‘D-Blocks’. One of those D-Blocks was Brookmans Park, and it was the children of the primary school who went to work, gathering information via questionnaires, and submitting their written reports, which are a charming mixture of fact and impression, objective truth and somewhat naive opinion.
For me, it’s a fascinating snapshot of what life was like in the village just a few years after I’d left, proving that, still, almost nothing had changed: I could have written most of the descriptions myself apart from a few rare occasions of novelty which leap out at me.
The children begin by describing how they had gone about their task: ‘We did not have as much time as we would have liked as we went to Paris on a school trip in June and a lot of this term was spent doing work on that.’ (Paris on a school trip! In my day, we went to Swanage.) ‘We did several questionnaires which we sent out to people in the village. We were surprised at how few people bothered to return them. It was just over half of those we sent out.’ Of course, just over half sounds like a reasonable turnout to me, but seeing the children’s obvious enthusiasm run aground on typical adult indifference is a bit heartbreaking.
Overall, they paint a picture of life in the 1980s being lived more or less as it had been in the 1960s. A village policeman still rode around on his bicycle; a familiar figure, known to all. ‘He helps to run the Youth Centre and takes part in any pantomimes or musicals that are put on in the village,’ presumably when he’s taking a break from dealing with the rare, but quite unexpectedly exciting crimes: ‘In June 1985 a petrol filling station on the A1000 was robbed and the attendant was driven away as a hostage. Two months earlier a newsagent was robbed by two youths who escaped in a car.’
The children describe the scheme whereby residents are asked to keep an eye on each other’s houses as ‘the local neighbourly watch campaign’, and they also find out about the village politics which swirl around issues of planning permission and building: ‘There is a Green Belt Society which watches demands for planning very carefully. It costs £1 a year to belong and at the meetings they decide what action needs taking to stop development. There was a meeting in July 1985 when it was learned that a property developer had applied for permission to build over a hundred houses on green land near the village. The local rate payers’ association took up the fight and there are plans to collect money to buy the land for the village so that it would be impossible to build on it.’
I ca
n picture that kind of meeting. Voices raised, the hissing of local outrage. On the one hand, there’s something admirably collectivist about them banding together to buy the land, but on the other hand you can’t help wondering what they might have then done with it. Perhaps put up a fence, or a wall, and lots of Keep Out signs? That devotion to the Green Belt ideal can be a bit Little Englander, a bit Nimby. To some it is a sacrilegious idea, but I can’t help wondering whether those fields should be built on. Brookmans Park is so well placed, with good roads and transport links, and shops that were designed for a larger population – would a hundred houses on green land have ruined it? Wouldn’t there still be plenty of woods and fields nearby, for those who needed a glimpse of a view, or a Sunday walk? Perhaps the opposition wasn’t unconnected to the fact that increased housing stock might bring down the inflated local house prices.
Whatever the motivation, the villagers were planning to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves from the threat of incoming developers, perhaps because they had got used to feeling that the place belonged to them, and that it both was their right and duty to defend it against incomers bringing change. Even in 1986, ‘many of the roads in the village are private and are repaired by the people who live there’. They were used to doing things themselves, and not liking the way outsiders did them.
Then the children visited a local farm. I know. I said there weren’t any farms, didn’t I? And then Debbie pointed one out to me on our walk. It strikes me that I’m talking about an imaginary place as much as a real one. If memory skews our perception, then the village I recall is semi-fictional, and I have to accept that my account isn’t neutral, or wholly truthful; it’s one-sided and irrational, constructed out of my experiences and my reaction, sometimes over-reaction, to them. And this farm they visited, which I had edited out of my memory, having no interest in it, consisted of 200 acres of oats, wheat and barley, 150 cows and a bull, four tractors, a combine harvester and a slurry tank. The children noted that ‘Mr Morgan, the farmer, has been farming here for forty years and complains that even though he uses his land to the full he finds it difficult to make a reasonable profit. In this last year he made £4,000 less than the previous year.’
