by Tracey Thorn
This is progress, isn’t it, pure and simple. Back in 1979 such things were shrouded in darkness, and if by any chance you were forced to confront them, the correct response was to make a joke of it all and revert to the safety of comedy.
2 April – ‘B moaned about her illnesses all day. Scandal – K had a party on Saturday at which S ended up having it off with P’s bloke in the potting shed. P’s really upset. General hysteria etc. Nasty atmosphere at school. Saw Kenny Everett.’
1979
The stories you tell about your past try to impose some kind of order upon it, force it to make sense, and fit you into other narratives of the time. I’ve looked at these diaries before, and written some of this story before, and part of what I did was to try to make it sound cool. Like all there was to do was form a band, and so that was all I did. Tidying, tidying. Editing, editing. There’s so much else that didn’t fit, so many jarring juxtapositions; the yoking together of the mundane and the exciting, the urban and suburban, the naff and the cool. My life now was such a mixture of smooth and spiky, of convention and rejection of convention.
13 January – ‘Bought Elvis Costello’s “ Armed Forces” and Subway Sect’s “Ambition”. Mum and dad got me a cassette case with their Green Shield stamps.’
5 March – ‘Woke up about 9. Gave Mum a plant for Mother’s Day. Weather was really lovely today. Deb went to choir practice. In the afternoon we went jogging. Played our TRB tapes – they’re brilliant. Taped Sham 69 and Devo. Really great. Did some English and history homework. Did my room. Washed hair. Me, Mum and Dad played cards for a while in the evening. Heard XTC “ All Along The Watchtower”. I love that record it’s fantastic.’
It’s true that I was going to gigs and trying to be cool, but I was also still going to discos in suburban cricket clubs. Because of this, I began to be anxious and acutely self-aware. There are diary entries that scornfully describe scenes straight out of Abigail’s Party.
28 January – ‘We had to go up to the L’s at 12 for lunchtime drinks, god how pretentious.’
23 June – ‘Mum and Dad went up to the golf club in the evening for a Caribbean evening.’ (I don’t even want to think about that one.)
21 July – ‘In the evening the C’s came for a fondue party with Mum and Dad.’
Meanwhile I tried to turn myself into the opposite of all this – an intellectual, an artist, a non-conformist. Books, art and politics were the tools.
6 April – ‘Huw gave me 3 Albert Camus books cos we both like him.’
12 April – ‘Went over to the Campus West library. I got 4 books, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and 2 George Orwell.’
13 April – ‘ Read Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It’s a really brilliant book. Now I’m reading Sartre’s Nausea.’
19 April – ‘Went to Welwyn. Bought a calculator and a couple of books – Jean-Paul Sartre and George Orwell.’
4 June – ‘Bought a couple of George Orwell books, and Sartre’s The Reprieve.’
It strikes me now that the books I was reading weren’t necessarily the most helpful. They were gloomy and abstruse, and much of the time I was out of my depth. And there are so many obvious gaps. At school I was reading Bleak House, and Emma, King Lear and Measure for Measure, The Collected Poetry of Robert Browning; but when I got home, I would turn to these works, indulging my currently bleak outlook on life, using them to create an impressive persona more than anything else. Most obviously, I now notice the absence of any women writers on my list. I hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird or The Diary of Anne Frank. I hadn’t read Little Women or The Bell Jar. I hadn’t read Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Equally, I wasn’t reading Judy Blume, or Jackie Collins. I hadn’t yet discovered feminism and so I read Sartre, but, shamefully, not de Beauvoir. Given some of the struggles I was having, I could come up with a reading list now that would have been a lot more help to me. Still, on I went, engaged in the pursuit of art and revolution.
13 June – ‘Bought a kettle to use for my art exam. Had to batter it up though. Smashed it about with a brick and left it outside in the rain.’
30 June – ‘Went to party in Hatfield. All the young Conservatives standing around and sipping Pomagne. I got absolutely smashed and started insulting everyone.’
I really did think I was quite the thing now, the height of sophistication.
30 March – At a party, ‘Wore straight skirt, shirt, belt and stilettos. Had a Long Cool Screw!! Southern Comfort, gin and orange. LOVELY.’ It aged me overnight, as the next day at a pub I met boys I didn’t like, and wrote, ‘God they’re so immature, they really bore me.’ Of course they did, with my mature and varied drinking tastes: ‘I had a glass of wine before we went, then three Cinzanos and two Long Cool Screws. God I was absolutely pissed.’
Debbie had left school and started work, where she met new people and went out to different places. In July I wrote: ‘They went to loads of places up in London, very posh eh?’ London was exciting to me, and yet also threatening (‘posh’), and I knew nothing about it, so would make errors that would mark me out as a true suburbanite: ‘Deb went up to town. They went to Dean Street to a place called Pizzaland Express or something.’
But in my ignorance, I didn’t notice my errors, and continued to believe that I had risen above those around me.
9 June – ‘Went to Village Day after work. The part time punks were down there all tarted up in their latest trendy gear, bondage and berets. They amuse me cos they’re so out of date.’
Although some days it was as if I simply couldn’t make up my mind about myself.
15 April – ‘Easter holds none of the excitement it used to for me. I must be getting old and cynical. Only 16 and no fun any more.’
16 April – ‘ Deb and I went to see Superman. It was really brilliant (perhaps I’m not so old and cynical after all).’
Some of my fury was politically motivated and directed. Election fever was building up, and Mum had volunteered to help out the local Conservative Association, much to my dismay. There were party political broadcasts every night on telly, and the far right were very present and very scary, as they had been for some time.
18 April – ‘Saw a Liberal election broadcast. That’s all we hear now 24 hours a day – election election election. Saw the National Front on TV too. God they’re so EVIL, they really are.’
19 May – At a party, ‘I ended up having intense political discussions with D for an hour. I was rather pissed and so I got a bit irate with all these prats who are a right bunch of Nazis. Music was chronic. Party was ok-ish.’ And of course I wasn’t just angry with strangers at parties, I was angry with my parents.
Debbie and I had recently decided we were Labour supporters, an act of rebellion as much as anything, which had more to do with buying punk records and straightening our jeans than actual politics. Labour vs Tory felt to me like a natural extension of Punks vs Squares. A girl at school wore a Vote Labour badge on election day and was told to take it off. (Imagine being told off for knowing there was an election happening. Nowadays you’d be made head girl.) When my daughters voted for the first time, in the London mayoral election of 2016, we were all in complete agreement about our politics. I’d been on at them to register as soon as they turned eighteen, then chased up their registration to get polling cards, then nagged them on the day to make sure they’d go. No cynical teenage ignoring of an election in this house. I may even have said, ‘People died so you could vote.’ You get the picture.
But come the day, both were quite excited – off they went to school, and then followed an afternoon of texts.
‘Where’s the polling station?’
‘At the primary school.’
‘But I can see a sign to another one?’
‘Yes there are several.’
‘I’ve forgotten my polling card!’
‘You don’t need it.’
‘Do you do a tick or an X?’
‘An X.’
‘So I should take
my ID right?’
‘No you don’t need any ID. Just tell them your name and address.’
‘Hang on, I need my ID to buy a drink but not to vote? But I could be anyone.’
‘Um, yes.’
‘Should I take a pen?’
‘No, there’s a little pencil on a string.’
‘Wait, what? I vote in PENCIL?’
‘Um, yes.’
They’d got me worried by now. It did all seem a bit laid-back, a bit village hall. But by the time they got home, they felt empowered and adult, not least because they’d hit the target with their first shot. As the news came through that Sadiq Khan had won, and won decisively, they took it in their stride, taking for granted that your vote counts and that you have power.
Back in 1979, I’d had the opposite experience. I stayed up till 1.30 a.m. watching the results trickle in, and wrote in my diary next day, ‘Most people at school were depressed. So – our first woman PM (pity it had to be Milk-Snatcher).’ That gloom was to stay with me through several more elections, as was the sense of political distance between me and my parents. It was not easy to discuss politics with them, Dad especially, and so it became something of a no-go area. The day before the election I’d written, ‘ Debbie has decided to vote Labour tomorrow and that really annoyed Dad. He gave one of his sermons and really went on and on being snide, patronising, v TORY. Annoyed me intensely – I just sat there fuming. Saw Coronation St and did some art.’
I realise looking back that Dad had barely appeared in my diaries before this moment. I never thought to mention him while things were ok. A quiet, homely family man, we had got on well when I was a child, and he had taken us swimming, or to walk the dog in the woods. He didn’t talk much, but I didn’t mind when I was young, as it meant I could do all the talking. He had always been gentle and supportive, good humoured and calm, although something of a background figure, particularly to me. But he didn’t react well to me and my sister growing into our teens, and becoming opinionated, assertive and challenging. He had no experience of – and therefore no way of dealing with – modern young women, and so his response to us was simply old-fashioned and unnecessarily confrontational.
This was partly just a result of the generation gap being wider then than it is now, but also, I can see in retrospect, down to his personal circumstances. He’d lost his beloved mother as a child, and then been brought up by a cold and distant stepmother, so I imagine he learned very early on to hide his feelings. Later, he would live through the London Blitz and then train as an RAF navigator. Those who survived the war, being offered no help or counselling afterwards, were a traumatised generation, burying their own wounds and then being irritated by youngsters who must have seemed to them to be spoilt and self-centred. My outbursts were the loud and direct opposite of all the lessons he’d learned about self-denial and self-repression, and must have felt like a rejection of his values.
And so, confronted with this difficulty, and unsure how to resolve it, his tactic was to dominate the conversation and try to shut us down. Arguments were not meant to be savoured, they were meant to be WON and ENDED. Perhaps because he didn’t talk much, he couldn’t quite see the point, and didn’t enjoy the concept of debate. Silence was the aim. Talking about ideas, or accepting differing points of view, was to be avoided at all costs. Politics was a minefield, and although we tiptoed through it, explosions were common, causing injuries on both sides.
2017
Just before Christmas I booked a short holiday in Tenerife with my sister and her husband, our only worry being whether or not Dad would be ok while we were away. He’d had a couple of trips in and out of hospital, and ended up in a care home – frail, muddled, obviously declining. Much of his confusion had a kind of logic to it, rooted in denial of where he was. So he mistook the care home for the flat he used to live in, believing that my sister, who lived in the flat above, must have just popped downstairs each time she came to visit. Or he thought he was in a hotel and the carers were all staff; he would speak of popping down to reception, and of needing to pay his bills. This happened in hospital too. When he was leaving after his first stay of two weeks he became agitated about the cost, and we had to remind him of the existence of the NHS. It might have been partly that he remembered life before it, but was also a rejection of the idea that he was in hospital at all. He had strange, vivid hallucinations at night, when his oxygen levels dropped, telling me several times that all the beds were wheeled out of the ward each night and down to a huge underground room, possibly so they could clean the ward, he thought. Another time he told me that he had got a cab into town and spent the night on the top floor of the department store, Camp Hopson, where they had, quite unexpectedly, a kind of overnight drop-in shelter.
He never said any of the things you’d think someone in his situation might say. He never said, ‘Oh God I miss Mum,’ though he did more than anything. He never said, ‘I just want to die,’ as I know many old people do, and that was a relief. He did say, ‘When am I coming home?’ and ‘When can we go out for dinner somewhere?’, though he wouldn’t have been able to cope with either of those things, being too weak, too deaf, too short of breath. Too bloody old, damn it.
One day we borrowed a wheelchair and wheeled him round the garden, but it was icy November, and even in a thick coat and hat and gloves he shrank down in the chair and was soon too cold. We looked at the glowing white silver birches and remarked how nice the bird feeders would be in spring, and then retreated back to the warmth of indoors.
I sat with Debbie while he played Scrabble with three other residents, one of them helped by a carer. The speed with which they chose their words astonished us. No need for an egg timer here to hurry things along, they slammed the letters down and moved the game on, pushing it forwards, impatient even while they were playing it. If it was only to pass the time, I got the feeling that they’d have liked it to pass quicker. I thought of those lines from Waiting for Godot.
Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
When he died, it was the middle of the night. I got the call at 3 a.m., halfway through a bout of food poisoning. I’d vomited, and then lain groaning on the bathroom floor, clammy and grey faced, before staggering back to bed, where I lay shivering. My mobile rang and seeing it was my sister I knew at once what had happened.
Next day Debbie went to empty his room at the care home, which meant collecting the brand new, unworn, soft fluffy blue bathrobe I had bought him for Christmas, and which he had apparently regarded with utter disdain. She gathered up his other clothes, and a few ornaments and pictures, and looked for his mobile phone, before remembering that he’d thrown it in the bin a month or so earlier. ‘It stopped working, bloody thing.’ We assume he simply hadn’t recharged it. ‘Bloody phones,’ he had said.
We’d cleared his flat out a few months earlier, when he moved into the care home. On that day, Debbie, Keith and I found ourselves standing in his empty flat, which already felt cold and deserted, faced with the task of dismantling his life. In the hallway the smoke detector, impossible to silence, emitted a shrill beep every ten seconds, as we set to work going through boxes and drawers and cupboards, sorting his belongings into separate piles – Keep, Donate, Throw Away. To add to the fun, it was Remembrance Sunday.
We found things which made us roll our eyes and laugh – an enormous box marked FRAGILE proved to be full of nothing but packing straw, and though we picked through it carefully, half expecting to find a tortoise at the bottom, it was empty and mysterious. Other finds made us catch our breath – a sixtieth wedding anniversary card to Dad from our late mother, and in a small box, her engagement ring. The photo albums were piled up on the top wardrobe shelf, and for an hour we were distracted, drawn into this concertinaed version of our family history suddenly laid out before us. The earliest pictures showed our parents after the war but before the children. The wedd
ing looked a bit demob austere but later, on Bournemouth beach, Mum was as slim and glamorous as Wallis Simpson, elegant in a summer dress, earrings and necklace, while Dad looked sporty in tennis whites. Still at the beach, our grandfather was in a full three-piece suit, resembling Jimmy Cagney.
Then came the ’50s, and my brother was a toddler posing with a telephone, then my sister Debbie and I appeared, two years apart in age, and often dressed identically. There we were in our highly flammable nylon dressing gowns, in our side-by-side single beds. I could almost smell the Karvol on those rosebud printed pillowcases. Yes, Rosebud. I know. Everyone looked their best in the ’60s, but that decade of chic was followed by ’70s flounce – too much hair and trouser and collar, too many smocks and ponchos. And in the ’80s photos we all looked older and frumpier than we do now – pie-crust collars, perms, pearls. Before you know it, our own children appeared, carbon copies of ourselves a few pages earlier.
Then, after the sweet diversion of all this reminiscing, we found a tiny suitcase tucked in the bottom of the wardrobe. I clicked it open, and took out a thickly stuffed envelope, musty and fragile. Inside was Dad’s RAF log book, and the complete record of his entry into the Air Force and training. A passport-sized photo showed him aged eighteen. My daughters were eighteen at the time, and safely studying science and art. He was studying navigation and bombing. I grew up knowing that Dad never fought in the war, because it ended just in time. But looking at the date on these papers, 1944, I realised that of course he was training while the war was still in full flow, in the clear expectation that he would be fighting. And knowing what that meant, in terms of survival rates for young pilots and navigators.
