by Tracey Thorn
28 January – ‘Awful day. Mum had another go at me about The Boyfriend – how awful he is etc – virtually forbade me to see him. Decided I’ve had enough of it so I phoned him to suggest we give it a rest for a while.’
Two days later, instead, ‘We decided to see each other whenever we can in secret. How exciting! And so it goes on . . .’
21 February – ‘Had row with mum – same old things – she went out and I got v depressed. I’ve decided to chuck The Boyfriend. I like him but I’m getting a bit bored.’ So I dumped him, made myself cry, and got back together with him three days later.
13 May – ‘When I got home Mum confronted me with the fact that she knows I’ve been seeing The Boyfriend – but she doesn’t seem to mind and she wants me to bring him home. God, I just do not understand her. I KNEW she’d find out sooner or later though.’
I really didn’t understand her at all, and how could I. We’d been so close, and were now so far apart, and we were so alike, and now so unalike, that it was agony for both of us. She’d invented my childhood, creating my memories with the stories she told me: of Keith’s asthma attack, and the hamster biting the doctor, and Debbie sitting stoic and silent while Mum tweezered a large thorn out of her forehead. Me cheerfully rolling eggs across the kitchen floor like marbles, or adding salt to Debbie’s glass of Disprin. I stored it all up, and then added some memories of my own, moments that hinted at a possible distance between us.
The Top 40 was broadcast on Radio One at lunchtime on Tuesdays, just after Newsbeat. A molly-coddled, fussy-eater of a child, I was allowed to walk home every day for lunch, and the great benefit of this – apart from getting to have oxtail soup and a cheese roll every day, safe from any encounter with school semolina – was that I heard the freshly revealed chart every week, and the new number one single, before anyone else. This was the early 1970s, and the charts were the usual perplexing mess of ill-assorted singles, none of them sitting comfortably next to each other or making much sense as a coherent whole; and even individual records could be mystifying to a ten-year-old. Pop music might have been derided for being drivel with inane lyrics, but to an inquisitive child like me, everything was potential new knowledge – What’s a metal guru? What’s a convoy? Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ threw new words at me in every verse – What’s a chevy, Mum? What’s a levy? – and for the first, though not the last time, caused me to feel actual embarrassment about a pop song. Those lyrics, about this being the day that he’ll die, they were so serious, so heavy. They brought something looming and dark into the house and made us feel uncomfortable. And I was intrigued, and my ears pricked up, but not for the first or the last time, when encountering something dark and difficult, Mum tried to laugh it off – ‘Well, THAT’S not a very cheerful song, is it?’ before changing the subject. Something had been revealed to me about what people might write in songs, and what the response might be. We were so close, Mum and me, and then occasionally I’d get a glimpse of how far apart.
But then came my teenage years, and all the trouble and strife. I thought I was just furious with her and she was The Enemy, until one day, at university, I read The Female Eunuch and came across all sorts of sentences that clicked with me. The battles I’d had with femininity, the feeling that I wasn’t cut out to be a conventional girl, which led me to the androgyny of punk – all of that had caused me problems at home. Mum would criticise both my appearance and my behaviour for being too aggressive, too contrary, too unfeminine. I had anguished over some of this, wondering if it was me that was at fault, and so when in 1982, twenty years old and taking a Women in Literature course at Hull University, I first read Germaine Greer, she spoke to me of things I’d long thought and felt without ever having words or names for. ‘What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.’
In other words, it wasn’t me that was wrong, I wasn’t a ‘failed girl’ as I’d sometimes felt, it was the expectations that were wrong, and which had attempted to crush my natural spirit. The generation gap between me and my mother was made worse by the fact that her generation had almost entirely conformed to the conventions of the feminine ideal, and so, as Greer pointed out, they were then obliged to carry on this process, acting it out upon their daughters – ‘We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or the toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born . . . We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents’ self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude, but with confusion and guilt.’
This resonated with me, the way in which I was made to feel guilty for wanting something different from what Mum had wanted, and what she wanted for me. And so the book gave me a theoretical analysis and a language for instinctive feelings – my discomfort with gender stereotypes, the restrictions placed upon girls, and the low expectations that had set limits for me and my friends. Greer’s descriptions of the role of the conventional wife-mother are bleak and doomy – ‘mother is the dead heart of the family’, she wrote – and it’s salutary to remember how powerless women still were at the time she wrote it; the Equal Pay Act was not yet in force, women were unable to secure mortgages without the signature of a husband or father, and so on. And so she paints a brutal picture of utterly hopeless drudgery – ‘The unfortunate wife-mother finds herself anti-social . . . The home is her province, and she is lonely there. She wants her family to spend time with her for her only significance is in relation to that almost fictitious group. She struggles to hold her children to her, imposing restrictions, waiting up for them, prying into their affairs. They withdraw more and more into non-communication and thinly veiled contempt.’
This was my life right here on the page! Only just out of my teens, this read to me like a manifesto of all that could go wrong and had gone wrong, and set me on a determined course not to follow in these footsteps. I could do this by living out my life in a different pattern, and that I fully intended to do; but there was another way in which I could act upon this new and eye-opening information – I could write about it. I had been in bands since my late teens, and was writing songs, so it hit me like a thunderbolt when I read this passage:
‘The supreme irony must be when the bored housewife whiles away her duller tasks, half-consciously intoning the otherwise very forgettable words of some pulp love song. How many of them stop to assess the real consequences of the fact that “all who love are blind” or just how much they have to blame that “something here inside” for? What songs do you sing, one wonders when your heart is no longer on fire and smoke no longer mercifully blinds you to the banal realities of your situation? (But of course there are no songs for that.)’
Well, why not? I thought. And if Germaine’s right and there aren’t any songs for that, then I’d better set about writing some. Up until that point my lyrics had been mostly about relationships, and while they may have taken a more realistic look at love than the old standards quoted by Greer, they nonetheless stayed mostly within this familiar territory. Now I began to write songs about the lives of girls and women, inspired by what I had read. The lyrics to ‘Frost and Fire’ put into words the feelings I’d had about the distance between mine and my mother’s life ambitions – ‘And when you claim you wouldn’t change a day / It makes me wonder where I went astray / Happy with things that leave me tired / We’re as unalike as frost and fire.’ The song ‘Bittersweet’ was an attack on the femininity I’d had foisted upon me – ‘She’s such a sweet girl, free of the taints of this world / Think that’s a compliment, don’t be so full of sentiment / Why d’you worship sweetness? What virtue’s there in weakness? / Being pushed about is nothing much to shout about I know.’
But then I re-read The Female Eunuch recently, wondering whether it would still resona
te with me in the same way. And this time I was struck by passages in the book where Greer can be dismissive, proscriptive even, telling women how they ought to behave, what they ought to want. I’m a mother now, so I wasn’t quite so comfortable with the tone of some of the book. When I was young, I could sneeringly direct the put-downs towards the older generation, but now, when I read a sentence like this – ‘Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not’ – or this – ‘One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance’ – I have to admit that it stings, and that it feels too close for comfort to plain old woman-blaming; that idea that whatever you do as a mother, it’s bound to be wrong.
I had blamed my mother. I had thought that whatever she did it was bound to be wrong. I wrote that my mother and I were as unalike as frost and fire but almost the opposite was true. My ambitions and my education and my career, all those things drove us apart. Then years passed and I had kids, and for a while I stopped recording and touring – something that was only possible because of the career success I’d already achieved – and ironically, it brought me closer to my mother than we had been for years, perhaps since my childhood, although it still wasn’t without effort. But stopping work for a while was a luxury, and it lasted only as long as it took me to start needing once again to make things, at which point I wrote a book, and started recording again.
Then came my menopause, and I went a bit mad. Along with the night sweats and sudden mood swings, the unaccountable rages and tears and irritability, came a worsening of the anxiety from which I’d always suffered, triggering days and nights of catastrophic thinking, terror, overwhelming and inescapable thoughts of doom and disaster, illness, imprisonment, death and loss. And I remembered what Mum had been like when I was a teenager, and the fact that she would have been menopausal, having had a hysterectomy after a cancer scare, which, of course was never described to us at the time as a cancer scare, but which must have been terrifying, and which triggered an abrupt and extreme menopause.
This is the diary entry I find hardest to read now, because of what it tells me about her.
5 April 1978 – ‘ Got up about 10.30. Deb had a driving lesson. Mum went to the doctor and got some tranquillisers to calm her down a bit! Watched Crown Court.’
Look how little I cared, or understood. Well fair enough, I was only fifteen. But it hits me hard now. For she did try to talk about her complicated feelings. She did try to ask for help. She broke the code and admitted to feeling something, and she went to the doctor and she was put on Valium.
I think back now to those rows we had, her sudden anger and equally sudden tearful apologies. Classic mood swings, I now see. Her vigilance, even her snooping, which drove me to despair, was the result of fretting about me, much of it justified. I remember now how she used to fear the worst, and stories she told of waking up panicked in the middle of the night, tossing and turning with endless worry. And I would roll my eyes and laugh at her. We all did. It was a common response to anxiety, which wasn’t even given that name at the time. Nowadays, it is a widely acknowledged mental health issue, and there have been books and articles galore about panic attacks, hypochondria and generalised anxiety. As someone who waited until my fifties to confront a condition that had plagued me for much of my adult life, I’m grateful that it is becoming easier and less shameful to talk about.
And it is shameful, that’s part of its power. We’re all getting better at acknowledging the seriousness of psychological issues, but anxiety has one big problem in this respect, which is that we see it as funny. Depression isn’t funny, it’s quite literally sad, and while not always easy to own up to, it does at least nowadays have the advantage of seeming real.
Anxiety on the other hand – and I should stress again that I speak here as a sufferer, and this is how we often talk about our problem – is just silly. It’s worrying about nothing. It’s making a fuss, being a bore. It’s the opposite of cool. If the ultimate modern pose is the teenage lack of affect, then anxiety is its antithesis, and saddles you with the niggly, nagging behaviour of an over-protective mum, seeing danger everywhere, catastrophising, avoiding risk, clinging to safety like a piece of floating wreckage. It makes us do things that feel foolish even while we are doing them. Afterwards we try to laugh, to shake it off, reduce the size of its terrifying shadow and prove that we can see the joke too. I’m only just beginning to learn that while laughing is mostly a good thing, sometimes we also have to take ourselves seriously, and forgive the dumb things our brains make us do.
But that’s so easy for me to say, because I didn’t have to go through my menopausal meltdown in 1970s suburbia. Instead I was in talky middle-class north London, with money for therapy and massages, and an app on my phone for daily meditation and a group of women friends all going through the same thing, with whom I walked and talked, sharing our experiences and our fears, our nuttiness. Some of us tried HRT, but none of us got casually put on Valium as my mum did. Instead we went to our doctors, who told us about mindfulness.
Mum had always been clever but, in a family with three brothers and a Victorian father, there was no choice for her but to leave school at fifteen and work for a few years as a secretary. In later years, when I was living in a terraced house in north London, she would say to my sister, ‘I don’t know WHY Tracey lives there, honestly, she could buy a castle in Scotland for the price of that house!’ A bizarre thing to say, knowing that I loved living in London, and even more bizarre when I think that, as a young woman, she had loved it too. Growing up, she had been sociable and outgoing; slim and pretty, she loved dancing, liked a drink and a smoke, wore too much pancake make-up, which rubbed off on Dad’s collar when they were courting.
One night, while he was still in the RAF and before they were married, Dad came home unexpectedly on leave and, arriving at her house, was told by her mother that Mum had gone out dancing with someone else. Infuriated but determined, Dad turned up at the dance hall to confront her. The other man had just bought her a cherry brandy, so Dad insisted on buying her one too. I picture her there, with a cherry brandy in each hand, the two men glaring at each other, eyes locked in a duel, Mum feeling awkward and guilty but probably THOROUGHLY ENJOYING HERSELF. And I think, ‘She was game, she was a laugh. I’d have been friends with her.’
Working as a secretary in Holborn, she and the other office girls would look out of the window at the working girls on the street below, trying to figure out what was the signal the girls gave to passing men which would cause them to turn on their heels and follow them. She’d walk back home to Kentish Town through thick pea-soup fogs, and was adept at surviving as a young, single woman on public transport. Once, a man sat too close, pressing against her in an intrusive way, and she said in a loud voice, ‘Would you like to sit right ON my lap?’
This bold, London girl would have understood perfectly why I didn’t want to live in a castle in Scotland. Somewhere along the line she just forgot. I had ended up living half a mile from where she’d grown up, yet it had become completely alien and incomprehensible to her, like another planet. After marrying and becoming a mother, Mum and Dad moved out of London and she stopped work, focusing all her energy and attention on raising us children, and she was good at it, really good at it, and happy for years and years. When I picture her, it is almost always at home. In the sitting room on a glaring summer’s afternoon with the curtains tightly drawn watching Wimbledon on the TV. Or standing at the ironing board singing along with a Jack Jones record, much to the derision of Keith, who was the cool teenager in the house, and for whom she had bravely gone out one day to buy a ‘Zed Leppelin’ LP. Or sitting in her armchair after Christmas lunch, tapping open a Chocolate Orange, and hoping against hope that the TV movie wouldn’t be a war film, but a proper women’s film, preferably starring Bette Davis, or failing that, anything with Paul Newman in it. Or with Dad, doing that skilful dance that couples do around each other in the kitchen, knowing
each other’s part of the routine, as Sunday lunch was prepared – Mum producing dishes from the oven, and getting hot and flustered in the process, Dad in charge of music in the sitting room.
I was the last of those children, and so as I careered through my teens the empty nest was looming. Mum and I had been exceptionally close, bonded by years of togetherness and an essentially similar temperament, and so my teenage rebellion was especially hurtful to her, and came at a time when she had no resilience to cope with it and no language in which to talk calmly and openly about such complicated feelings. The code of secrecy, and the times, and the pressure of keeping up appearances, all worked against her, and against the pair of us.
When she died I was in my late forties, and yet she spent her last few weeks telling me off, which was the most reassuring aspect of that whole time. ‘Are you still here?’ she kept saying when she’d look up to see me at her hospital bedside. ‘Don’t cancel anything, get on with your life.’ And more or less the last thing she said to me when I sat by her the day before she died, was ‘Go on, don’t hang around here, you’ll miss your train. I’m watching that clock you know.’
Halfway through the next day, after several difficult hours, I was in the room as she took her last breath, and afterwards, as I sat there for a few minutes, all I could think of to say was, ‘Thank you.’ And then I wept for three days straight, crying till I couldn’t see, crying in the kitchen, at the front door with a friend who brought flowers, and in the shower, where the tears streamed down my body and washed away, washed away.
2016
Standing still, in the centre of the village, I see that the Brookmans Park Hotel has now been rebranded as simply BROOKMANS. It’s time for a break from my exploring, so I make my way over and inside find a very stylish bar/restaurant, where I order a cappuccino. Three mums are having coffee and talking about books, films and plays – Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Time Traveller’s Wife, We Need to Talk About Kevin – about all of which they have strong feelings. Two retirement-aged couples are having lunch with wine, while a younger couple are having lunch with beer.
