Another Planet

by Tracey Thorn

  I’m still so stuck in the past that I can’t help thinking, ‘A cappuccino! In Brookmans Park!’ so I text my sister to tell her. When it arrives, the waitress brings me a Lyle’s golden syrup tin containing white sugar lumps, and a small china bowl containing nine Smarties. Oh Brookmans Park, I think. Don’t ever change. Don’t ever get as sophisticated as you think you are. Then I eat the Smarties.

  I have a look at the Brookmans newsletter, to bring myself up to date with current concerns. The topics included are: Missing Cat. Trampoline 12 foot. Human excrement in Bulls Lane area. Exploring prayer and healing at Brookmans Park United Reform Church. Two attempted burglaries in The Grove. Spare Lego?

  I’d been wondering whether or not modern connectedness, via the internet, might change what it means to grow up in suburbia, making it easier for everyone to experience the same things, at the same time. Maybe today, when kids grow up in a communal, virtual environment, there isn’t that same profound sense of detachment, of living far from the centre of things, missing out on what’s new and happening? I imagine myself, alone in my bedroom, yet able to connect with other angsty teenage music fans via the internet, even to express myself anonymously, share concerns, access information, and I think how much I would have loved it, how it would have provided a window on to the wider world.

  I think of this when people complain about how the internet has made islands of us all, or bemoan the fact that families don’t share things any more, each individual member being wedded to a separate screen. So many of the things I share with my kids come to us via the internet, and so I can see how it brings us together just as much as it isolates us. On the rare occasions when we watch telly together, the kids have their phones with them, conducting a Snapchat while viewing. But then, I might be on Twitter too, so who am I to talk? We’re the archetypal modern addicted family. It’s a cliché, that image of no one talking, everyone locked into a personal screen, and we’re supposed to be cross about it, or find it depressing.

  But much of the time I find our use of the internet is sociable, usually based on everyone seeking out jokes, and then sharing the jokes. I’ve lost count of how many Vines and gifs I’ve had to peer at on a teenager’s phone. Sometimes I get the joke and can honestly LOL, sometimes I don’t and they have to explain it to me. But whatever else I shared with parents, I don’t remember sharing this many laughs.

  And I like the way the sharing goes both ways, the traffic between us moving in both directions. When we gather around my laptop at the end of dinner, so we can all watch the latest Cassetteboy video on YouTube, or clips of Tom Hiddleston dancing on a chat show, or one of them lines up the current Top 10 on a phone for us all to listen to and judge, it feels like the old and the new styles of family life exist side by side. We eat together, we laugh together, we are amazed together. It connects us. So I can only imagine that it would have improved my experience of growing up in suburbia.

  Yet here on the newsletter, one of the things being complained about is internet connection, and there is much discussion about the difficulty of cable being laid to the village. Rural broadband access is notoriously bad, a problem that has scuppered many a home-worker’s attempt to relocate somewhere scenic, only to confront an endlessly spinning wheel on a screen while trying to work. Yet this is not Cumbria, or the heart of Cornwall – we are only thirty minutes from London here, surely access to the internet should be a given? (Fast-forward to 2017, and a high speed FTTP installation has taken place, although on the newsletter page, debate continues on the topic of village broadband and high-speed optic fibre, still not everyone being covered.)

  Good God, I think, perhaps then the experience is even worse. Imagine living in a place that feels physically cut off, and which is also excluded from the non-stop ongoing worldwide conversation taking place online. You’d feel even more uniquely isolated – separate and alone, while out there in the world at large, and just up the road, everyone else was connected, and communicating, and sharing.

  A question keeps returning to me though, and it’s this – if the suburbs are meant to be a refuge, why aren’t they more relaxed? If they’re meant to represent safety, why do they teem with anxiety? It’s as if the desire for security in itself fosters an increased tendency to worry, a kind of watchful wariness. It’s the only way I can explain the sense of fearfulness, the background hum of tension, with which I grew up. That generalised anxiety I shared with Mum now feels inseparable from the place in which we lived, as if all the utopian myths, all the aspirational striving, and the self-sufficiency and the isolation, set up an attitude of distrust towards the world outside, and life in general.

  I was a fretful child, afraid of everything, and afraid to say so. I was scared of food, so I walked home every lunchtime, but even the hundred-yard walk from primary school frightened me, and I’d scuttle home as fast as possible. We’d been shown a Public Information film about ‘stranger danger’ that ended with an abducted girl, cowering against a wall as a dark male shadow loomed over her. I was sure that I’d be kidnapped on my five-minute walk from school, but too panicked to stay and encounter a meal I didn’t like.

  I’m still the same, and I realise that what separates laid-back people from those like me who are permanently on edge is our response to stimulation. I envy calm people for their apparent immunity to over-excitement or over-reaction. They seem to have a thicker skin than me, impervious to the minor fluctuations of everyday life. It takes something really up tempo to get their hearts racing, so they seek out rollercoasters and fast cars and cocaine – properly adventurous or risky experiences, needing that buzz to feel alive. In contrast, I creep through life on tiptoes, trying not to set off alarms, avoiding stimulants which would tip me over the edge, the inside of my brain and body operating at rollercoaster speed much of the time, even when nothing is happening. My heart races at the slightest provocation, needing no recreational drugs to pump it up, and I’m more likely to get addicted to beta blockers than coke.

  Some of my hair fell out when I was about five years old, which was put down to nerves. I developed a twitch, a blinking habit, for which I was teased. I counted the squares on the pavement, having to step on lines with left foot then right, left then right, in an even sequence. I was like a little bird on the bird feeder, forever looking over my shoulder expecting a predator, never settling.

  And growing up a girl, these anxieties coalesced around the fear of sexual violence. Then, as now, you were held personally responsible for avoiding attack, and there were rules to be obeyed, clear instructions about how to ‘do the right thing’, which would keep you safe. There was a footpath that ran alongside the railway line from Brookmans Park to Potters Bar, but I heard tales of women being flashed at or molested. Mum said, ‘Don’t walk the line path, it’s not safe.’ There were ‘funny men’ there. My friend Liz had a story about walking in Peplins Wood with her mum and seeing a man who exposed himself. Without knowing the right words for it, she told me that he was masturbating. There was, she said, ‘loads of white stuff pumping out of him’. I pictured it as a torrent, a pulsing flow, like shaving foam, or whipped cream from a canister.

  The railway station was slightly apart from the village, isolated down a hill, dark and lonely at night, and walking home alone from the station after dusk was forbidden. Mum said, ‘Don’t get off the train alone at night,’ so my boyfriend would walk me home, and we’d kiss on the railway bridge, and I’d arrive home flustered, lipstick-less, stubble-scratched. But I got the message – even the tiny mile or so of green between us and the next town, even the few steps of darkness from the station, were filled with dangers. As for the fields and woods around us, who knew what might be lurking there.

  We’d fled the city only to find that the countryside was equally unsafe. It was hard to know where to turn. The suburb was meant to be a life raft to cling to. But in my teens suburbia developed its own new terrors, when the factionalism of the late ’70s meant there were endless fights between rival tr
ibes, skinheads and other thugs, who beat up everyone I knew at some point or other, either at a party, or on the street, or at the 2-Tone gigs at Hatfield Poly. I wrote about such events in a song called ‘Hatfield 1980’, specifically about a friend getting stabbed, and it’s true that these were aggressive times, but the point is, the suburbs were no safer than the city, perhaps less so, in that you stood out more and were easily picked off by rivals. My parents must have felt at this point that they’d been hoodwinked, and that the suburban dream had not materialised.

  Far worse than the scuffles and knife fights I witnessed during my teenage years however, was the fact that in 1986, five years after I’d left the place, and when I was living back in London, and after all the warnings and alarmist scenarios which had been impressed upon me as a teen, a young woman was murdered in Brookmans Park, after dark, beside the railway station. Her name was Anne Lock, and she fell victim to two serial rapists and killers, who were later found guilty of a series of crimes. She was twenty-nine years old and worked for a TV company. She’d just got back from her honeymoon in the Seychelles, when she went to work one day, on May the 18th, leaving her bicycle in the shed at the station. When she got back there late in the evening, it is thought that the two men were waiting for her somewhere in the station car park.

  Her body was found two months later, in undergrowth, in a field a little way along the railway track.

  Such things can happen anywhere, of course. I think about those theories of dirt being ‘matter out of place’ explored by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger. She describes those ‘rejected bits and pieces’ which are ‘recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away’, and I wonder whether something similar applies to our attitude towards crime. Maybe we’re more shocked when violence happens in a place we think it shouldn’t. Maybe the lower crime rates of suburbia lull us into a false sense of security, which is nothing more than a daydream; the idea that as long as we lead nice, respectable lives, and are good and obey the rules, we’ll be ok. Murder seems out of place in the suburbs and so we simply brush the idea away, reassuring ourselves that danger lurks only in the city, where everyone is rubbing along too close to each other, going out after dark, it’s their own fault. But of course it’s sheer bad luck, bad timing, to encounter such malevolence, such evil. Suburbia is a risk-averse place to live, its inhabitants hoping that they are somehow magically protected, but it’s not true, and dreams of utopia are just that, dreams. Nowhere is immune to tragedy. We always knew that.

  1980

  I was becoming exhausted by the efforts involved in all this repression. The place briefly turned me into a drama queen. I craved excitement and change. I picked fights, longed for love and looked for trouble. I was restless, intensely passionately solipsistic. Felt utterly trapped and thwarted and beat my wings irritably against the bars of the cage. Everything was pent up inside me, literally it seemed. The night I first told a boy I loved him, my eardrum burst. I was in agony all night with earache, and bleeding by the morning, having suffered a perforation. After I’d seen the doctor and got some penicillin, I went to bed and watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  Another night, I went to a party at a girl’s house in Harpenden, a ‘big house’ I wrote in my diary. It provoked me in some way, stirred up something – Envy? A sense of inadequacy? – and so I dismissed it, rather than think about what this meant, ‘v musical evening, everyone playing pianos and guitars all over the place. Rather sedate sort of party though – no recklessness. Dullsville.’ Desperate for something to happen, I kept splitting up with my boyfriend and getting back together two days later, seeking some kind of buzz. ‘I told him it was time we had a good argument but he didn’t understand. How can I fight him when he always submits?’

  We didn’t have AS-Levels, so my lower sixth was a layabout year, and with no college websites to look at, I relied on the few prospectuses lying around at school. My parents, as was the norm, left all the choosing and visiting up to me, and were not there to witness my half-hearted mooch around the windswept Hull campus, or my miserable failure of an interview at UEA. I vaguely remember filling in an UCCA form, trying to think of a better reason for wanting to go to a particular university than the hope that they might possibly have me, and then running into real difficulty with the interests and hobbies section.

  For despite the fact that my late adolescence was a strange and vivid time to me, it looked bleak and empty when I tried to put it into words. I had no list of achievements to impress an admissions department – I wasn’t head girl or a prefect, a Girl Guide or a Duke of Edinburgh award winner. I’d given up piano lessons, didn’t play chess, or netball, or any sports at all. Wasn’t in the choir or the drama society. My work experience was a paper round and a Saturday job in a toy shop.

  Instead, the things that absorbed every second of my waking life were the writing of diaries, and songs, often heartfelt accounts of momentous events involving boys, inspired by my repeated playing of the same few records I owned. As for sport, well I spent a lot of time loitering at bus stops, waiting for a bus, hoping for an idea of somewhere to go. Skulking around the streets of St Albans, we covered lamp posts with stickers for the Marine Girls, the band I’d formed with other girls from school, in a sort of polite, suburban form of graffiti tagging. I recorded some songs and played some gigs, but above all, I dreamed – about the future and the things that might happen. I dreamed and I wondered. When would I find out who I was? Would I be good at anything? Would anyone love me?

  None of this was the kind of stuff that worked on a form. Full of doubt, struggling to define myself, I tried to present myself as a fully realised person with relevant interests, clear goals, coherent ambitions. As if any of us are that. The dreaming had led me to books, so I listed all the ones I’d read, some of which had already been chosen to impress an older boy. Camus and Sartre, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Kerouac’s On the Road. Fine books all, but a slightly erratic combination, more reflective of teenage angst than of the literary canon. They said something about me, but perhaps not what I meant them to.

  On February the 9th I stormed out of my job at the supermarket. I’d arrived at work that morning dressed in black trousers, red socks and black pumps, and the new manager said, ‘ D’you think you could pop home and change into something presentable. Said he’d worked in shops for 5 years and he’d never seen anyone turn up for work looking like that.’ Throwing my overall at him, I stormed out, refusing to ever go back. Meanwhile, my own internal violence was reflected back at me by the aggression we encountered everywhere on the streets.

  6 June – On the way home from a gig, ‘Saw awful fight – skins/mods – on tube. Really scary. Horrible evening.’

  9 June – ‘L went up to the Marquee last night to see the Merton Parkas with a few mod friends and they got beaten up by skins. YUK.’

  But the culmination of my awful behaviour as a girlfriend must be the holiday I went on with Debbie, to Jersey, in July. The day before I left I wrote of The Boyfriend that ‘I’ll miss him a lot though. This is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him for ages.’ The next night, in Jersey, I was at a disco dancing with four blokes from Loughborough. The following day, Debbie and I were asked out by two waiters from the hotel, and went with them to a disco called ‘Blimpers’, followed by a walk along the front. That night I stayed in The Waiter’s room. Next evening we went to a disco called the ‘Kon Tiki’, danced to Dexy’s, and I spent the night with The Waiter again. The following day we went to the Lido with the boys from Loughborough, which infuriated The Waiter, so we had a huge row, ‘think that’s all over now’. Instead, we went to the ‘Skyline disco, where I danced with Terry, then went to the Ritz’, walked along the beach and got off with Terry. ‘Naughty, naughty . . .’

  Next morning we visited the German military hospital, then went to the Skyline disco, and I met a boy called Jerry. By the end of THAT evening, ‘I�
��m in love with Jerry.’ Suddenly it was our last day, I gave my address and phone number to The Waiter, and flew back home to The Boyfriend. ‘Feel a bit guilty now about all the fun I’ve had.’ Well, quite. I had myself become an expert at duplicity. The Waiter phoned me, then a letter arrived from him. ‘He misses me a lot and said he’s in love with me. In the afternoon he phoned and asked me to go over – I said I had no money and he said he’d send it to me – I said no so he asked me to go on holiday with him – I said no again so eventually he said – Well how about coming over here and getting married! My first proposal. How exciting.’ Dear God, I sound like a Jane Austen character. He phoned a couple more times, then a week later a HUGE bunch of flowers arrived. In my diary I wrote ‘I was horrified.’ Mum narrowed her eyes at me. ‘What have you been DOING?’ She meant, ‘Who have you been sleeping with? How far have you been going?’

  You’d think all this action would have cheered me up, but no.

  10 September – ‘I feel in a mood of absolute deep despair.’

  Looking back, it’s hard to see exactly what was wrong. I just felt stuck. Some people had gone off to university, and there was a sense of the old gang breaking up. I’d started the Marine Girls by now, but still, there were endless, endless evenings of the same crowd of people sitting in the same few pubs. Without The Boyfriend, ‘I went to party in Wormley with Debbie, her Secret Boyfriend and Davina. It was in a marquee in a car park. I got off with a bloke called Alan from Muswell Hill. Gave me his phone number.’ And occasionally The Boyfriend would now do the same to me too, ‘Went over to Suzanne’s. Boyfriend was supposed to come but he rang about 10 to say he was at Finsbury Park with M and God knows who else, having fun. Little bastard. I hung up on him.’