Another Planet

by Tracey Thorn

  Up at Hull University, living with Ben and feeling the cold chill of disapproval from home, I had something of a mini-breakdown. Panic attacks, anxiety, an overwhelming sense of dread that settled on me from the moment I woke in the morning and followed me like a cloud from lecture to seminar to library and then back home again, where I’d cry for no reason and have nightmares about giant spiders falling on me from the ceiling. True to form I dealt with this by not mentioning it, suppressing everything, at least in conversation. Although maybe it DID come out, in the songs I wrote, or the tone of my singing. Something about that undercurrent of melancholy, that very obvious vulnerability, sounds to me now like a cry for help, or an articulation of emotions I couldn’t put into words. I didn’t understand until many years later, that I had probably been depressed during this period, and that the achieving of my independence – which I had longed for – came at great personal cost.

  In the early ’90s my parents finally left Brookmans Park, but it was a huge wrench for Mum, and the thinking about leaving went on forever, too long for Dad. I sat in the car with him one day, getting a lift back to somewhere, and he was at his wit’s end. ‘We keep going to look at houses, and one minute she likes one, and then the next day she’s changed her mind again.’ They thought about relocating to the seaside, a change of lifestyle for their retirement, but for Mum, leaving the home where we’d all grown up was terrifying, marking as it did the complete end of that part of her life. Eventually they moved to be near Debbie, on a new-build estate on the outskirts of Newbury, into – Oh joy of joys! – a detached house.

  Mum was thrilled. There were extra bedrooms upstairs, for grandchildren to sleep in, and though they rarely did and mostly just needed extra hoovering, her pleasure in the house was undiminished. It was the prize, finally won, after all the suburban dreaming.

  But the distance that had grown up between me and my parents in my teens never quite closed up, and it was due in part to my increased education and change of lifestyle. Like so many similar parents, they’d wanted me to do well at school and then go to university, to take those chances they’d never had. Then when I did, it turned me into someone they thought they couldn’t understand. Later on they’d be proud of my musical success, but perhaps more because it was success, and therefore respectable, than because it was artistically interesting to them. They liked the music when it was more mainstream, and they liked the gigs at the Albert Hall because they were tangible proof of achievement and status, and they enjoyed the sense of pride and reflected glory at the backstage party, and all of this was soothing and reassuring to them because it took away some of the fear that they had lost me to rock and roll.

  As Ben has written, we never know our parents as we are growing up, only getting to understand them once we are ourselves standing in their old, discarded shoes, and perhaps it can’t be any other way. You hear people talk about ‘the family drama’, and if there is such a thing then it often feels like the characters in it are sketchily drawn and two-dimensional. And the role of parent, which seems so demanding while you’re playing it, requires mostly that you under-act. That you don’t commandeer too much of the spotlight, or step out of character, or ad-lib, or ask what your motivation is. But if we don’t know our parents, I do also wonder whether they ever know us.

  In later years, after my break to have children, when I went back to music and recorded an album called Out of the Woods in 2007, I sent them a copy, expecting a phone call or something a day or two later. Hoping for parental praise, as you always do, as you still do even when you’re a grown-up and a success and a mother. It never came. They never mentioned it, or said anything about the record. Debbie told me later they’d found it hard to understand, and I was never sure what exactly was hard to understand. The music? Or the reason for making a record? The need? Perhaps that.

  Later still, when I wrote Bedsit Disco Queen, my dad’s only comment to Debbie was, ‘I never knew Tracey was so into music.’ Which still makes me laugh till I cry for all it says about how much we can remain a complete and utter mystery to those who should know us the best.

  And then again, in even later years, he would say to Debbie, in reference to something or other I had done, some inexplicable action, some bizarre life choice – and this, remember, when I was a middle-aged, middle-class woman, married to the man I’d been with for over thirty years, with three children, living a respectable middle-class life in a respectable middle-class enclave of north London – he would say, ‘Oh, Tracey. She’s from another planet.’

  Another planet.

  2016

  This is the place I live

  Where is everyone? Are we the only ones?

  This is the place I live

  And so does everyone, and so does everyone

  (Hatfield, 1980)

  After that I start to walk up Brookmans Avenue, past the bigger detached houses, away from the village, and into the posh bit of Brookmans Park, where Mum always longed to live. Some houses have been rebuilt in more modern style, the faux Tudorbethan replaced by granite and steel, prison-like edifices. 2009 is carved into the stone of one, and there’s a building site where another is being rebuilt, just a gaping hole for the foundations. And then I notice that there’s no proper pavement up here. Lawns run right down to the road, and are broken up by gravel and pebbles that extend out from driveways. It would be a nightmare to negotiate with a pushchair or wheelchair, and even as a pedestrian it feels awkward and unwelcoming. You are meant to be in your car. There is no path for you. Why are you here? Who are you and where are you going?

  It is silent up at the top end of the village, apart from birdsong. The playing fields of Chancellor’s School look idyllic in the spring sunshine – kids playing football, lounging about. But this far from the shops, and from where I grew up, I feel less at home, stranded in the smart bit. I realise how different the two sides of town are, though town is the wrong word. How can such a small, homogenous village have such a clear sense of a wrong and right side of the tracks? And I am struck with the feeling that where we lived, in the bustle of the village, was actually the best bit. From our house you could hear the primary school playground, and we were near enough to watch the fireworks on Bonfire Night from our bedroom window. The houses are smaller and closer together, but there’s a sense of community. Up at the top end it is more exclusive, but quieter, creepier and deader. Apart from me, there is hardly anyone around, just the occasional car passing. There are builders up on scaffolding working on refurbishments. A man in a blue shirt with a white collar gets out of his Range Rover on his gravel drive. Two teenagers pass me going towards the school, one an unhappy-looking boy with glasses and a man-bun.

  There’s something claustrophobic about the smallness of these suburban roads, you can’t even call them streets, with their low-rise buildings and half-size trees, something cramped and Toytown, which contrasts with the grandeur you can find in both rural and urban scenery. I sit at the top of our house, here at the top of a hill in north London, and look out over a wide spreading landscape, full of buildings, but with highs and lows, peaks and troughs, towers, blocks, cranes, a skyline like a mountain range or a series of cliffs and away in the distance, the hills out beyond the south-west of London. And yet the suburban smallness bred in me a fear of true wildness, a dislike of extreme landscape. I’m not comfortable in actual mountains, or near the edges of actual cliffs, or too far out at sea. I don’t like isolation, or distance from other people. I need lights dotted across the hills at night, others nearby to call on for help.

  My family were rural, then urban, and then suburban, a pattern repeated in countless other families, and reflecting the changes that have taken place in the way most people live. But my ancestors left me a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods that led me back to London, where I have always had a greater sense of freedom, taken a greater breath of fresh air. When I travel back into town, I relax at the first sight of Trellick Tower, or Centrepoint, or St Pancras, but
today a different part of me relaxed at the sight of the village green and the low-rise, fake-Tudor-beamed shops and the bungalows and the front gardens.

  And for all my musical melancholy, the slightly laconic miserabilism of some of my lyrics, I have also inherited an awful lot of Can-Do cheerfulness from my parents. When our youngest had his thirteenth birthday, I got a wonderful text from my dad saying, ‘All I remember about turning thirteen is being allowed to smoke in the bomb shelter.’ It made me laugh out loud, but then I suddenly stopped, and for the first time ever pictured my dad, a thirteen-year-old little man, huddled in some underground bunker in Finsbury Park sucking on a fag, while planes flew overhead trying to kill him. My heart turned over a bit, with empathy and guilt, as I imagined anyone trying to do that to MY thirteen-year-old little man, and recognised how blasé I had always been about the things that happened to both my dad and my mum.

  I’d grown up hearing their war stories without ever finding them very frightening, or shocking, or real. They simply were. The war was long over, and – far from growing up in its dark shadow – I lived with a cosy version of it, played out via Dad’s Army, and my brother’s Airfix models of Spitfires, and the boys in the playground shouting, ‘You be the Nazis,’ as an alternative to ‘You be the Indians.’ And my parents were of that generation brought up to make light of things and put on a brave face, so they made little effort to convey to us the terror hidden in their anecdotes. Wary of frightening us, they made their adventures sound funny and exciting. So Mum told us, ‘I was a bit of a bolshy teenager and one night I was just too stroppy to go down into the shelter, so I stayed in my bed, and as I lay there a bomb fell and I watched as my bedroom wall split open in front of my eyes so I could see the street outside.’ While Dad said, ‘My brother and I had to share a bed and this bomb dropped so close that Tony was blown clean out of bed and across the room, HAHAHA.’ It was all as real to me as an Ealing comedy, and no more alarming.

  They were an irrepressible generation, at least on the surface, and while that burying of trouble caused them as much, if not more, trouble than it saved them, it also brought with it a kind of resilience, a refusal to be defeated. A sense of obligation towards keeping one’s own, and other people’s pecker up, which can be socially supportive and sustaining. And so I feel like I’m breaking the code completely and utterly by talking about myself so much here (and I can only do it, in all honesty, now they are both gone).

  I walk back down the hill to the station, head over to the platform to wait for my train, and I think about homesickness and what it means. In their book Edgelands, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts talk about the idea that humans have a kind of longing for a return to nature. ‘Welsh poets use the word “hiraeth”, which describes an anguished sense of separation from home ground, from the land you know and love. It is much deeper than “homesickness”, but it is a kind of sickness. And the only cure, we’re told, is to go back. Back home, back to the forests and mountains, press your nose to the ground and know that this is where you came from.’

  But what if you didn’t come from forests and mountains? What if you’d have to press your nose to the crazy paving of the driveway to know that this is where you came from? What does it mean to feel that homesickness for suburbia? Because the truth is, I do feel it. So many of us live in some version of suburbia, the majority of us I suspect, yet we heap scorn upon the place, and what does that do, I wonder, to our sense of self. My relationship with Brookmans Park is complicated, and always will be. I feel terribly at home here, and terribly out of place.

  At the end of this day trip into the past, I sit down on the station platform bench and think about my suburban bones. A stream of memory running like a film in my head. I once met a boy on this very platform, dressed in a drape jacket and brothel creepers, and he looked Italian or Middle Eastern and told me his name was Akis. We flirted, and I wondered where he’d come from, and I made up a whole scenario about him in my head but never saw him again. The minutes tick by and four fast trains hurtle through, one heading north, three on their way to London. ‘The next train will not be stopping, please stand back from the platform edge.’ I’ve sat here so many times, thought so many thoughts. The trains used to have separate compartments and tweed seat covers, and you’d get a ticket made of thick cardboard. To Potters Bar, or to Welwyn Garden City, or better still, to Highbury & Islington. I wasn’t allowed to come here after dark, and I never did. I dreamed of leaving and doubted if I ever would. No, that’s not true, I knew I would. At the age of eighteen when I went to Paris, I packed a suitcase full of books, which I then had to haul one step at a time up over the footbridge, Mum laughing at me and asking, ‘What on EARTH have you got in there?’ Everything was a ticket out of here, everything was a possibility; the days couldn’t come fast enough. Now I have all the time in the world, and I’m waiting for a slower, stopping train. From the bench I am looking directly at the car park and I wonder, does anyone remember what happened there? Are commuters haunted by it, or has it faded into the distant past? A schoolgirl comes down the steps to the platform and she’s got headphones on and she’s laughing at her phone and she doesn’t notice me at all. A phone would have made life difficult for me, I think. All those lies about missed coaches and broken phone boxes. It would have been even harder to live my double life. It would have thwarted my secrets and lies. I look up and the girl has vanished, perhaps I imagined her? Was she some ghost version of me? Did I summon her up out of an alternate universe where I lived here forever and nothing ever happened and the bus never came and the phone never rang and the library was shut and I couldn’t get a jumper or a skirt?

  When the slow train finally arrives, no one except me gets on or off. I look back once over my shoulder before I step on. And the doors close behind me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book started life as a long essay called ‘Green Belt’, which told the story of my growing up in suburban England. Over time, the essay began to grow, swallowing up some other recent pieces of writing – reviews, and articles, and columns. These writings were mostly reflections on the things that helped me escape from the confines of 1970s suburbia – music, and art, and time. What this means is that a few short sections of Another Planet have appeared previously (in the New Statesman, the Spectator, on Radio Three and in a Virago collection), although here they are chopped up, rearranged, in some cases rewritten, and take their place within the story as it unfolds.

  The North Mymms History Project website was a valuable source of local information, particularly the following: A Modern History of Brookmans Park 1700–1950 by Peter Kingsford, A History of Brookmans Park Transmitting Station by Lilian Caras, Brookmans Park: Population and Housing by Richard Potter.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my sister Debbie, and my brother Keith, for letting me write about the place and family we share.

  Thanks to my agent Kirsty McLachlan, for being the first to read this as a work in progress, and for seeing potential in the idea.

  Thanks to Francis Bickmore at Canongate, for being open-minded about what a book can be, for believing in my writing and being ambitious on my behalf.

  Thanks to Octavia Reeve and Vicki Rutherford for attention to detail.

  Thanks to Kate Mossman and Tom Gatti at the New Statesman, for things I’ve learned about editing.

  Thanks to Ben for support and encouragement and love.

  And thanks to Alfie and Jean and Blake, for being great.

  PERMISSION CREDITS

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  Excerpt from ‘Bittersweet’, Words and Music by Tracey Thorn © 1985 Cherry Red Music Ltd. Complete Music Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Hal
Leonard Europe Limited.

  Excerpt from ‘Come On Home’, Words and Music by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn © 1986. Reproduced by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd, London W1F 9LD.

  Excerpt from ‘Frost And Fire’, Words and Music by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn © 1985 Cherry Red Music Ltd. Complete Music Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

  Excerpt from ‘Hatfield 1980’, Words and Music by Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt © 1999. Reproduced by permission of SM Publishing UK Limited, London W1F 9LD.

  Excerpt from ‘Oxford Street’, Words and Music by Tracey Thorn © 1988. Reproduced by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Limited, London W1F 9LD.

  Excerpt from ‘Smoke’, Words and Music by Tracey Thorn © 2018. Reproduced by permission of SM Publishing UK Limited, London W1F 9LD.

  Excerpts from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Church Going’ and ‘Talking in Bed’ from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Excerpt from ‘Transmission’, Words and Music by Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris & Bernard Sumner © Copyright 1979 Universal Music Publishing Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited

  Excerpt from ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James’, Words & Music by John Shakespeare & Geoffrey Stephens © Copyright 1966 Carter-Lewis Music Publishing Co. Limited. Peermusic (UK) Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.