by Tracey Thorn
The villagers, with their insistence on ownership and privacy, and determination to keep up the high standards, didn’t have much time for those who couldn’t keep up. So what would happen to someone who was struggling? Here is the brutal reality: ‘There is really nobody without work here as all the people in the village have very expensive houses and run expensive cars. We did a survey and found that most of the people work in London . . . If people do lose their jobs they do not stay here but move away.’
They move away. The candour of that last statement reveals that it could only have been written by a child. It paints a picture of a place which could only be a home, a safe haven, as long as you could afford it. Entirely uniform in its social make-up, with a high degree of homogeneity, it had no place for anyone who slipped. It’s the great problem that had existed since the village was first built, with so little in the way of affordable housing, so little variety, so little inclusiveness.
This isn’t healthy for a society, is it? It’s not good for a place and its inhabitants to be so unvarying, to be so impervious to change. For what shines out from the children’s portrait of the village is its apparent immutability. ‘We interviewed several people who live in or near Brookmans Park and the interesting thing was that we were told the same by all of them. The village and its surroundings have not changed a lot since they have lived here.’ Indeed.
One final section describes a typical day in the life of one of the children, and reads like a page from my diaries:
‘On Monday morning it’s hard to get me up and get ready for school. I wash, dress and have toast for breakfast. After putting my coat and shoes on, my mum drives me to school in her blue Mini Metro. It’s not very far to walk but I never have enough time to walk. After the whistle goes in the playground we all line up for assembly. The whole school goes into the hall. We usually have a story and a hymn. Then we go back to our class for lessons. We have maths first and after morning break English. Sometimes we do Science or topic when we can write about anything we like. At lunchtime we have a school meal. Most people have it but some bring a packed lunch. After school is over I go home, have tea and watch television. My favourite programme is The A Team.’
It sounds perfect. And after all, children never really change. This is just a child’s life being described. No surprise that it sounds mundane and conventional, routine and cosy. I was equally content as a child. I wonder what a teenager would have said. Would there have been the same howl of anguish as is soon to come in my teenage diaries? The same discontent? And would there still be today?
2016
I walk down to Peplins Way, to the house I was born in, (front bedroom, 1962), and grew up in – like all children taking my home for granted, thinking it permanent, and as old as the hills. Even though there weren’t any hills. Not much change from when I left, though the house next door looks in need of care and attention. I carry on down the road and past the huge playing field of the primary school, hedged by hawthorn and dog rose. There’s the concrete where we French skipped and chalked out hopscotch, and where I was bullied one day and bullied someone else on another. Where we chanted our way through clapping games. A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see. I ell oh vee ee love you, I kay eye double ess kiss you, I ell oh vee ee, kay eye double ess, will you marry me? Still standing in the playground is the high wall where older boys used to sit and dangle their legs. I thought health and safety might have knocked it down, it was always an accident waiting to happen. I walk around the block to the front of the school, and count twenty-one cars in the car park. I don’t remember there ever being any.
On the village green, four teenage girls are sitting on the bench in over-the-knee socks and school blazers. They might have been there for forty years. They seem like ghosts. They might be me and my sister. Me and my cousin. Older girls who sat there before us. But they’re not ghosts, and the atmosphere in the village isn’t ghostly, it’s bustly – shoppers shopping, scaffolding going up on a house, tree surgeons pruning a willow. I look at the North Mymms Parish Council noticeboard, which has a Neighbourhood Watch poster, and a photo of the MP for Welwyn Hatfield, the Right Honourable Grant Shapps, with his email address in case you want to contact or troll him. There are dates and agendas of forthcoming parish council meetings, names of councillors – all the Brookmans Park members being Conservatives. (Later on I check the Brexit voting result, and in the referendum the borough voted Leave by 31,060 votes to Remain’s 27,550. In contrast, the borough of Camden, where I live now, voted Remain by 71,295 votes, to Leave’s 23,838.)
As I walk away from the green, I notice the lack of large, established trees. It seems deliberate, the planting of small species. Prunus, crab apples, small silver birches. The houses are all two storeys high, and few trees stand any higher than the rooftops, and everything, compared to London, is so low that it’s as if there’s a lid on it. Nothing anywhere seems to reach up to the sky, and there’s a smallness, and a feeling of newness, even now, after 80 years. A lack of history, of anything grown in or embedded – of maturity? When I walk up the hill towards Gobions Wood, I see two big horse chestnuts and, at last, two proper huge oaks, and the shade they cast, the overhang of leaves and branches, is comforting and protective. There’s finally a sense of stature, an unapologetic grandeur, an acceptance of nature being bigger than us, towering over us.
1978
A Letts diary with a blue cover, still only pocket-sized, but a page a day now giving room for at least ten sentences per entry. I’m fifteen years old. Something had happened to my general outlook and attitude, perhaps a heady mix of punk and hormones, and it had infected my sensibility to the point where more or less everything was described as ‘boring’. Although, despite this, I was still watching, and enjoying, the same old programmes on the telly, and I was a huge fan of Coronation Street.
9 January 1978 – ‘ Saw Coronation Street, tres exciting, Ernest Bishop got shot! WOW!!’
11 January – ‘ Saw Coronation Street, Ernest Bishop died!! God, it was so exciting!!’
Current events rarely intruded into my little world, as I was a typically solipsistic teenager, and even when they did, my reaction was only to note the personal effect on me and my boring life. This was a time of economic and industrial turmoil. I know now that the company my dad worked for was in trouble, and in order not to lose his job I think he took a pay cut, which affected our lifestyle, and my parents’ ability to continue their aspirational rise. So for instance, we had few holidays and life was pretty spartan. But on the other hand, strikes and power cuts were great fun.
8 February – ‘FANTASTIC NEWS – because of the oil strike there’s no heating at school now so we haven’t got to go in again until at least Tuesday, hooray.’
24 February – ‘The oil was delivered today BOO HISS so school’s back to normal on Monday (damn).’
12 February – ‘ Saw The London Weekend Show. It was all about kids who burn down their schools, hahaha. Had chicken for lunch. Deb went to choir. Had a biccy for supper. Went to bed about 10 and listened to Luxy for a while.’
If it had been written yet, I could have walked around all day singing that Del Amitri song ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. But I can see now that the boredom was inspirational as well as dispiriting, and that there was a generational element to my predicament, mine being one of the last for whom there was such a limited amount of entertainment on offer that we had to resort to the cliché of making our own, which of course may have been a good thing in the long run. Nothing amuses my children more than hearing me recite a list of all the things we had to do without. No recording of TV programmes you missed. No films on DVD to watch when you chose. No internet, or computer, or phone, obviously, but also no TV channels beyond ITV, and no TV AT ALL after closedown each night. The very idea of closedown! Of being said good night to, reminded to turn your telly off, and then played the national anthem and sent to bed. It all sounds to them like one long punishment, as if fo
r the whole of the ’70s we were all essentially grounded (a word we never used).
Our access to clothes was equally limited, so when it came to looking punky, I couldn’t just go up to Top Shop and buy the outfit. Urban clothes shops like Sex or Seditionaries were scary and expensive for a girl like me, so we had to make the outfits ourselves out of whatever we could get our hands on. When I went to see XTC at St Albans City Hall in February, ‘I wore straight jeans, long shirt, jacket, tie, badges, sunglasses’ – which sounds as if I probably looked a bit like Captain Sensible. In March I ‘ bought Jennie Waters’ blazer for £5’. Later that month, ‘Katrina lent me her Lou Reed album. We all tried to think up mad outfits to wear for tomorrow night. I’m wearing track suit trousers, Dad’s shirt, plimsolls, tie, jacket.’
It’s easy to forget how DIY and makeshift our style was. My kids can go out and buy more or less anything that’s in fashion, either new and cheap, or vintage and cheap. Everything is easy to source, and for a price you can have whatever you want, right away. Currently, on fashion website Net-a-Porter, you can buy a Sonic Youth T-shirt for £250.
We’d be thwarted by lack of transport too, and oh, the effort we made to get anywhere. We’d go up to London on the bus for the day, using Red Rover tickets, and a simple night out could turn into an adventure, an excursion, an act of creativity and determination involving timetables and cancellations, missed trains and buses, the endless searching for someone who could provide a lift. In March, I wrote all week long about a party on the Saturday night, what I was going to wear, who’d be there, only for Saturday to finally come around and ‘Didn’t go to the party cos we couldn’t get there or back.’ In a moment of supreme bathos, ‘ Saw The Professionals. It was really good.’
My diary is a bit cagey about it, but at this point, in desperation, I started going once a week or so to Rangers meetings, hanging out with a group of boys who were Venture Scouts. We played darts and table tennis, did yoga one week, and had a talk from a probation officer. I learned how to put up a tent, and change the wheel on a car, and later in the summer we went canoeing. I was writing about the Sex Pistols all the time, but also learning how to tie knots. On May the 1st, the day after attending the big Anti-Nazi League rally in Victoria Park, I went to a disco at the British Legion in Potters Bar.
It was also very unpunk of me, but I was forever sunbathing that summer, and commenting on how brown I was. I should have been aiming for a pasty pallor, but instead, I very much liked having a tan. This had somewhat naff connotations, maybe still does. I think of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley with their Club Tropicana tans, and think it shows something quite defiantly anti-cool and suburban about them. I didn’t know it at the time, but my love of a tan was revealing about me and where I came from, as were many of my conventional values and judgements.
27 May – ‘ Weather was gorgeous today, I was really annoyed at having to go to work. Sunbathed for a while when I got home though. In the evening Deb, Hannah, Gill and Tim went out for a meal, I didn’t go cos I don’t like Greek food. Saw Kojak.’
In August, we went on holiday to Spain for a fortnight, flying from the archetypally suburban Luton airport. It was only my second time ever abroad, and after a seventeen-hour delay caused by a strike, we flew off to a villa with a small, not particularly picturesque swimming pool, over-looking a scrubby dry landscape. I sunbathed myself to a crisp, and ate English food every single day, making sure to record the unvarying menu – ‘steak and chips . . . chicken and chips . . . ice cream and chocolate sauce . . . fried breakfast as usual . . . steak and chips . . . chicken and chips . . . fish and chips . . . pork chops . . . ice cream . . . chicken and chips . . . turkey steaks . . . fish and chips . . .’ When we got back home, we had fish and chips for dinner, to celebrate.
17 August – ‘Everyone at the shops said how brown we look!’ but next day, ‘Saw Huw. He was rude about my tan.’ Someone knew what the rules were.
What most excited me was music and boys, ideally at the same time. On May the 29th, I went to see Ian Dury at Hemel Hempstead Pavilion. He had broken his leg, and couldn’t play, so the support bands played, and the gig was rescheduled. ‘Met a bloke called Steve. He bought me a drink, then we had a natter, went and sat down in the balcony, and I got off with him. He’s really gorgeous.’
30 May – ‘I still keep thinking about Steve. He lives in Harpenden, wears plastic trousers, doesn’t like TRB (Tom Robinson Band), has got short brown curly hair, is quite tall and skinny. I sunbathed quite a lot today. Getting really brown. Steve was pretty brown too. There I go again.’
I was fifteen years old now, and in common with all my friends I knew something and nothing about sex. The pamphlet Mum gave me at home was followed up by some rudimentary lessons at school.
8 March – ‘Double biology was quite interesting today – human reproduction!!’
20 March – ‘Mrs Thomas was being crude in biology again – going on about her personal experiences!!’ And one week our PE teacher stood in to take the biology lesson, talking about sex and ending the lesson with, ‘Next week I’ll tell you what it FEELS like!’ before swishing out of the room, leaving behind a silence in the air which had frozen around our astonished, gaping little faces. Other than these lessons, we had nowhere to go for information, no one to ask, except each other, and we were hardly reliable.
There is nothing nowadays to compare with this level of ignorance, and most teens get proper education at school, at home and online, sharing facts and knowledge, googling anything they may need to know. Our beliefs were informed by reading the Cathy and Claire page in Jackie magazine, and our contraceptive experience was limited to condoms, which we called Durex or Rubber Johnnies, and only a couple of girls were on the pill. We had a sense of utter doom about pregnancy, it being so dreaded and taboo that we had somehow absorbed the message that condoms ALWAYS broke, and we were filled with the conviction that pregnancy was the inevitable consequence of any sexual contact at all.
Between ourselves we tried to come up with a way of talking about something we didn’t understand and had almost no experience of.
12 June – ‘We have got a code to measure how far you go with people. Base 1 = French kiss. 1½ = Outside upstairs. Base 2 = Inside upstairs. 2½ = Outside (clothes, that is) downstairs. Base 3 = Inside downstairs. 3½ = 69 etc. Base 4 = All the way. I got to about Base 2½ with Steve.’
I love the idea that we included ‘69’ in our list, as if that was the kind of sex any of us were having. And I’m almost impressed at myself for having got anywhere at all in the balcony at a gig.
On June the 13th I was talking on the phone to a friend. ‘We discussed BASES. B has got to Base 3½ I think. I’ve only got to Base 3! Ah well. A has got to 3 too. Saw Rhoda and went to bed at 10.’
15 June – the date of the rescheduled Ian Dury gig: ‘Steve was there. I spoke to him for a while but J got off with him. Got loads of badges and a poster. It was just like a big party really.’
16 June – ‘J is going out with Steve, I think. I wasn’t REALLY that annoyed when she got off with him last nite cos I find him a bit conceited and chauvinistic. I LOVE THE BLOCKHEADS.’
This was an outright lie: I was gutted about not getting off with Steve again, but too proud to admit it, even to my supposedly private diary. Honestly, I sometimes think this diary was no friend to me at all. I couldn’t tell it anything. I was briefly bullied at school around this time. Classic girl-bullying; nothing physical, no pushing or shoving, just whispers, a comment passed here and there. I didn’t quite catch it, and then I did, presumably because I was meant to. And it was viciously personal, leaving me with a specific physical anxiety that haunted me for years. But in my diary? Nothing. Not a word. I was the most unreliable narrator of all time. I’ve said before that there is an element of control involved in this, and that’s true, but there’s also denial. An attempt to make events vanish or unhappen by not writing about them, which is a kind of magical thinking, and perhaps le
ss helpful. Years later a therapist would have to do all the detective work of uncovering the words I hadn’t said, which I had hoped I had forgotten, but which instead wrote themselves on my brain instead of the page.
I didn’t dare, I just didn’t dare. Writing things down was terrifying, made them real. Instead, I retreated into books and records. I read The Exorcist, and Catch 22: ‘a brilliant book, really funny’.
23 June – ‘Mum and Dad played golf in the evening and Deb played tennis. Me, I just played records.’
9 July – ‘ Saw The London Weekend Show – it was absolutely fantastic, an interview with Bowie, clips of him onstage, chats with the fans etc. Bowie looked gorgeous. He was brilliant onstage. Listened to Annie Nightingale. I taped Bruce Springsteen “Racing in the Streets” last night so I’ve been listening to that all day. I love it.’
I’d made friends with an older boy called Huw, who had a fanzine called the Weekly Bugle.
17 July – ‘ Borrowed Heroes album. It’s really good. Wrote a letter to the Weekly Bugle about the general lack of entertainment in Hertfordshire.’
