Another Planet

by Tracey Thorn

  He never showed any of this to us; indeed, never made much of having been in the Air Force, never understood those who wanted to keep remembering. I don’t think he was particularly proud of it; he’d simply had no choice. Had he been frightened? He never said. But still, he kept all these documents.

  In the kitchen we went through the cupboards, which told a more recent history. The fridge spoke of neglect – sell-by dates ignored in a manner so cavalier as to be life-threatening. A freezer full of recently ordered ready meals he hadn’t had time to eat. A tin of pease pudding that expired seven years ago. Flour we didn’t dare open. In a cupboard was the caster sugar, still kept in the same shaker we used as children to dust pancakes, and in the drawer, a tiny paring knife we all remembered using to cut apples. Fifty years ago.

  It was a sad thing to have to be doing but was made easier by doing it together. Afterwards, we all went to visit Dad. In the sitting room of the home was a large poppy display, and we asked him if there’d been any kind of Remembrance Day commemoration that morning. He said not, but then again, he might have just not remembered. Or not wanted to.

  Debbie had visited him on the afternoon before he died. He was poorly, and in his bed; uncomfortable, and showing signs of a possible returning infection. But he said in a serious tone, ‘Sit down, I want to say something.’ ‘What’s this?’ she wondered anxiously. ‘I need to book a summer holiday. If I don’t do it soon it’ll be too late. I’m thinking a cruise. They can look after me, three meals a day, I won’t have to walk far. Bring me in some brochures. Even if I don’t go, they’ll be something to look at.’ When she told me, we laughed, at his irrepressible spirit, his defiance, his enduring love of a holiday. And I thought, this is life isn’t it: imagining a future, planning, dreaming, choosing?

  And so, after he’d died, and with the shock and the funeral out of the way, we decided we had to come on this planned trip to the Canary Islands, it’s literally what he would have wanted, and yet it is not the holiday we expected, being infused not with worry, but with a strange mix of relief and regret, not least because the last time we were in this place, Dad was here too.

  That was about five years before. He had been on good form, having rallied better than any of us had expected after Mum’s death, and he had rented a mobility scooter, on which he’d bomb up and down the prom, stopping off at cafés along the way to have a Spanish brandy. He enjoyed doing nothing much at all on holiday. Eating, drinking, ‘watching the world go by’, as he used to say, and as I walk along the prom now with my sister, I realise that, as in most seaside places, there is lots of world-going-by to watch here.

  The narrow flat stretch between the barren hills and the sea, into which the hotels and apartments are crammed, has nothing picturesque or classy about it, but a resolute cheerfulness pervades – the simple enjoyment of the sun, of daytime booze, of no work to go to. The holiday makers are either professional sunbathers with skin like a tan leather sofa, or those whose legs have never seen the light of day and are, as my youngest used to say, ‘as white as a sheep’.

  There are lots of walkers, like me and my sister, and lots of users of mobility scooters and wheelchairs who’ve found, like Dad, that the flat surface is ideal. I’d been more or less the youngest person on the plane out here, and over the tannoy the steward announced the safety info in a slow and sing-song voice, as if she was addressing a meeting of the Memory Club at the Eventide Rest Home. At the hotel there’s a section of the breakfast buffet which Debbie calls ‘Menopause Corner’ – bee pollen, soy milk, almond milk, chia seeds, linseeds and beer yeast. Food for the hormonal older lady. But a room upgrade at the hotel gains you access to the brand new rooftop pool and sundeck, with a bar where all day long the drinks are free. Club Tropicana, in other words. I’m not sure they’ve reckoned on how much Brits on holiday will drink at a bar where all day long the drinks are free.

  Along the prom the older holiday makers, of whom there are plenty, are interspersed with local hippies – a bunch of dreadlocked white boys with acoustic guitars, one singing a supper club version of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, and another sprawled in a shopping trolley with his fully plastered broken leg resting on the handles. A singing busker sets up every day in the underpass where the reverb flatters his voice. Further along, a row of empty café premises have been taken over by squatters – Kasa del Pirata is sprayed on one window, and a few lanky young men kick a football half-heartedly.

  The area is touristy, and the sandwich boards outside the cafés advertise paella, fajitas and mojitos, and ‘lasagne of the house’, but then you round a headland and hit upon a stretch of black rocky beach and a sea full of surfers, and the scent of salty air replaces the smell of salty chips. I remember that when we were here with Dad, he decided that he wanted to buy a pair of shoes, the same as the ones he was wearing, which he’d bought here a few years before. And so we had set off into the streets back from the beach, the only thing approaching an ‘old town’, and searched for the exact lightweight, beige or grey leather shoes he liked to wear. Which apparently could only be found in Tenerife.

  This single-mindedness was pretty typical. The other memory that now comes to me is that during that same trip I’d had a full-scale teenage blazing row with him one night over after-dinner drinks – something to do with the NHS? Or the miners’ strike? – which resulted in me storming up to my bedroom, shouting ‘Good NIGHT’ over my shoulder as I went. I was almost fifty years old at the time, and he could still make me feel sixteen and infuriate me like no one else.

  But the immediate aftermath of his death had been all bureaucracy. Debbie had to speak to the GP, who had to speak to the coroner, who had to speak to the registrar. Then, as executors of his will, all three of us gathered at the solicitor’s, with anti money-laundering proof of identity and residence, after a morning spent searching for something with my address on. The meeting with the funeral director took two hours and involved endless questions. Burial or cremation? Did we want him wearing anything in particular? Was anyone coming to view him at the undertaker’s? Did he have a pacemaker? YES. It had to be removed before cremation, by a specialist. What kind of ceremony? What kind of coffin? What kind of flowers? How many cars?

  We were calm and collected. Dad was ninety-one, his death not unexpected. How do you answer these questions when you are dazed with grief? We looked at the catalogue and flicked quickly past the pages of child-sized coffins. How on earth do you cope with that?

  Humanist funerals are lovely, but pose more of a problem in terms of readings – without prayers and hymns you have to write proper eulogies, and find poems, so I spend an evening hunting through books, but everything seems too melodramatically sad, or too declamatory, or too mawkish, or trying too hard to be funny. Choosing the music is easier – Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ as we walk in, and then Nat King Cole singing ‘Stardust’, which was Dad’s favourite song. He had an irreplaceable old 78 record, which he got down from the loft once to play to my brother, who promptly knelt on it and cracked it clean in two. Ella Fitzgerald will sing ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ to buoy us up on our way out.

  And it’s the songs that make us weep, as ever. I’m set off as soon as I walk in, listening to Glen Miller, thinking of the war. Everyone else is gone during ‘Stardust’. ‘But that’s what music is for,’ I say to someone later, who seems to worry that we all cried too much. We weep with relatives we haven’t seen for years, who know things about us no one else does, and yet who hardly know us at all in our current everyday incarnation. And funerals are where we construct a narrative of someone’s life. The memories we recollect, or choose to recollect, are subjective and selective. They are the fragments we shore up against our ruin. We try to make some sense of it, and we leave out the bad bits, or at least the difficult bits.

  Later, at home, I pour a massive gin and tonic and think how nothing would have made him happier. He did, oh how euphemistic, like a drink. When we cleared out his flat, we found
in one cupboard INDUSTRIAL quantities of tonic – bought on special offer? Nuclear bunker-style quantities. The gin, obviously, bought on a weekly basis. A rack full of Spanish red wine. And Scotch, here there and everywhere.

  I am reading Keggie Carew’s Dadland, in which she recounts the story of her father’s wartime exploits as a member of the Special Operations Executive forces, set against the backdrop of his declining memory. It’s a fantastic book – hilarious, gripping, full of incident – and her larger-than-life father drives the narrative along, but it can’t help but remind me of Dad. He was not such a spectacular character, nor did he have as spectacular a war – but something about that generation was unstoppable, uncomplaining, eternally bright-side looking. She speaks of her elderly father, muddled by dementia, saying of someone fifty years his junior, ‘He’s a bit younger than me, I think,’ and she reasons it out thus: ‘Dad has always seen himself as the brightest and freshest, and consequently, I suppose, by some curious deduction, the youngest in the room.’ And that reminds me of our dad, complaining in the care home where he lived out his last few months that it was full of ‘old people’, defiantly making plans for lunches he wasn’t well enough to attend, drinks he wasn’t supposed to be drinking, and asking, the day before he died, for the cruise brochures.

  On the front page of his funeral order of service we printed a photo of him in his RAF uniform, aged nineteen, the way he looked the day my mum met him. They’d been introduced as penpals via an uncle – my mum and her friend had written to this lonely young man, who was training in Jordan, and had each sent a photo. He chose Mum, and kept that very photo in his wallet for the rest of his life. They had exchanged letters and, when he was back in the UK, arranged to meet. He arrived, in his RAF blues, gliding up the escalator at Holborn tube, where she waited at the top. And I think of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. David Niven in that uniform, and the staircase to heaven. Wartime romance. Does anything tug the heart more strongly?

  Back at home after the funeral, I put that photo of him up on Twitter. It’s the most popular thing I’ve ever tweeted. He’d have been proud. Well, he’d have said, ‘What the hell’s Twitter?’ and rolled his eyes, and we would have had a row about it. But still.

  1979

  After I’d finished my O-Levels, Dad took us all on a three-day trip to Paris. The company he worked for in London was French-owned and so he went there occasionally for work, little elements of French style creeping into his suburban Englishness: a love of cheese, red wine and Gauloises, which he smoked throughout my teens. Paris was thrilling to me, not surprisingly given all the Camus and Sartre I’d been reading, and one evening ‘We went up to Montmartre, ate outside. Watched all the artists at work. They’re brilliant. Lovely atmosphere there, students, musicians etc.’ A dream of how life could be.

  Back at home I had moaned my way through my O-Levels.

  28 June – The day they ended, ‘Deb and I went up to London. Bought a Hawaiian shirt in the King’s Road. Also some records – Toots and the Maytals, Echo and the Bunnymen, Evelyn Champagne King.’ Then came an induction into the VI form at school, which – inevitably – was boring.

  2 July – ‘First day as a VI former WOW tres dull. Got lectured all day about not wearing frayed jeans etc blah blah. Mum and Dad bought me some gorgeous trousers – pink with zips at the bottom.’

  But something was stirring in me, some inkling of how to escape this rut. It suddenly occurred to me that the only way out was to create something, to MAKE something happen. Up till now I had been waiting for it to land in my lap, been waiting for a boy to make my life start, shake things up, satisfy and fulfil me. The turning point, on which it all hinged, was buying a guitar.

  3 August – ‘ I’ve decided to buy a guitar so I’ve been searching through all the Melody Maker ads and I think I’ve found one I want in Hackney.’

  It had to come from London. An urban guitar, dragging the city into my bedroom. I’m sure I could have found one at the music shop in Potters Bar. Or the record shop in Hatfield. A small ad in the back of the local paper. But this was about trying to become less suburban, to escape from who and where I was.

  7 August – ‘Met A at Potters Bar and we went up to Liverpool St. Got a train to London Fields and then managed to find this bloke’s house. The guitar was really lovely – a black Les Paul copy. I bought it for £60 complete with hard case. Good bargain. Then we came home again. I played it nearly all evening – I’m really in love with it.’

  A good bargain. I knew nothing. I would have bought it even if it were broken.

  It changed everything though, for better and worse. Already fed up with school, I became increasingly distracted. My O-Level results were about to come in, yet far from being stressed and anxious I was miles away, in a way that was considered quite normal at the time. A few years ago, when my daughters sat their GCSEs, they knew the exact moment of the exact day when their results would be available online, and sat in front of their screens from 8 a.m., clicking and clicking, loading and re-loading, until the email finally pinged into their inbox, which was followed by several hours of texting all their friends. They are a different generation, somehow they’ve been programmed to care about results. And my youngest, revising for his GCSEs as I write this, asked me one day, ‘What did you get for your O-Levels, Mum?’ and I had to tell him that I did well, but I couldn’t remember exactly. ‘My diary for 1979’s right here though,’ I said. ‘I can have a look and find the day when I got my results.’ So I flicked through, July, August, ‘Ah, here we are. Thursday, August the 23rd. Right, what does it say?’ I read it quickly to myself, and then edited it for his ears. For it was even more distracted than I could have imagined.

  23 August – ‘Got my O-level results. I passed them all. Debbie phoned, she’s going out with P tomorrow. Phoned G – he’s probably going to the Civic on Sat. Huw phoned – he’s trying to get on the guest list on Sat. C’s parents came home, found out people had been round and hit the roof! They even searched the dustbin for cigarette ends!! Then they found one of D’s roll ups and accused us of smoking pot!! They caused a real scene. Can’t wait to go home.’ I had been staying with a friend while her parents were away, and indeed, although I sound outraged at the accusation, we had had a party, despite being forbidden to do so. A gang of boys had stayed the night, there was booze and cigarettes and sex, and yes, probably pot, even though I was so affronted by her parents’ suspicions. The parent in me is now entirely on their side. And I still can’t quite remember what my O-Level results were. I hadn’t thought to write them down. Too boring.

  The guitar was my best friend now, and I was energised by it. Pretty soon I would start to write songs, and some of what was going into the diaries would go into lyrics. I didn’t quite know it yet, but this would be an escape route, a catalyst for all that followed. But for now, the guitar simply added a new dimension to my moping.

  7 September – ‘Didn’t do much at school today. Had English and Economics. Heard The Jam on the radio. Came home, played guitar, talked to Debbie, played records, went for walk, had bath, washed hair. Routine. Dull. But I don’t care cos I’m in love and I’m still only 16 (not for long).

  My sister had started at Pitman’s secretarial college, and I too had started typing lessons at school. Mum had been a secretary, and this was the most normal and obvious career path for a girl. Nothing in me thought this was unusual or rebelled against the implied expectations. It was talked about as ‘something to fall back on’.

  Instead, I rebelled against the passing of time, and life in general.

  25 September – ‘ Watched Rickie Lee Jones on OGWT [Old Grey Whistle Test]. She was great. God, I’m 17 tomorrow. Wish I could be 16 forever. I’m not going to school though. Me and Deb are gonna go up to London shopping.’

  26 September – ‘Not 16 any more / sad birthday.’

  A week later I joined a band, and carried on hating school.

  5 November – ‘I’ve
got an economics test tomorrow and I’m just not doing any work at school. All I wanna do is play guitar all the time and write songs. Oh I hate being at school. Now I feel really miserable.’

  12 November –‘Don’t think I’ll come to school tomorrow cos I’ve got to give in a history essay that I haven’t done and I’ve got an English test – can’t face it.’

  13 November – ‘ Didn’t go to school today. Got up about 12. Had a bath. Taped the Specials LP. Watched The Love Boat. Mum had another go at me about my clothes / my hair / the band / The Boyfriend and his skinhead haircut (haha) / etc etc BORING. Watched Not the Nine O’Clock News. It was really funny.’

  The parent rows had started in earnest. Some were provoked by my boyfriend’s appearance more than anything – he looked like a punk, with a very short, suedehead haircut.

  15 December – ‘Mum in foul mood – nasty about The Boyfriend – said I can’t go to rehearsal tomorrow. He came round about 8 and she didn’t speak to him.’

  16 December – ‘Mum was really obnoxious all day. I was miserable cos I couldn’t go over to The Boyfriend’s. God, she’s such an old bat. I really hate her sometimes.’

  18 December – ‘Got home from school – Mum said she wanted to talk to me and she broke down and cried all over me, apologising and saying that she’d made a mistake etc. She’s realised she was stupid to judge The Boyfriend by the length of his hair and I can see him whenever I want to. I was amazed.’

  My mum and I were standing on opposite sides of a canyon now, shouting at each other, not hearing, not understanding. I’d behaved worse than this in the past, and they hadn’t objected, so was this conflict linked to my growing creative life? Did they sense something in me breaking away, turning my back on them? Youth culture, tribalism, music, creativity, all of this was a kind of modern, urban misbehaviour, and more alarming to them than pubs, snogging older boys, or cars on country lanes. I told them I wanted to marry a poet and live in London. I wanted to get out. I couldn’t understand why they had ever moved here in the first place. Why would anyone want to? Who would choose suburbia?