Another Planet

by Tracey Thorn

  It was intended to be utopian. Although when twentieth-century critic Ian Douglas Nairn coined the term ‘subtopia’, he was very much sneering at everything he felt had gone wrong with England’s architecture and design, suburban style having, in his opinion, encroached upon and ruined the landscape. Yoking together the words suburban and utopia, you end up with a description of something that is clearly sub-standard. Very much less than utopian. A suburban dystopia.

  But then, even the word ‘suburb’ itself has a kind of negative connotation, coming from the Latin suburbium, which is a joining together of the words sub (under) and urbs (city). We use it to mean, more or less, the outskirts of the city, or the residential areas that surround a city, being within easy reach of the urban workplace. And yet we must sense within the word itself the implication that the suburb is ranked below the city, is inferior in some way. Or even that it is literally below the city, located underneath it – subterranean, hidden. Like a crypt. Is it where all the bodies are buried? It’s certainly where all the secrets are hidden.

  American cinema often uses suburbia as the dystopian location for shocking or deviant behaviour. David Lynch, for instance, specialises in that queasy juxtaposition of the apparently idyllic with its exact opposite. The opening of Blue Velvet is dazzling – a too-white picket fence, a blindingly vivid blue sky, roses the colour of arterial blood, the husband happily watering the lawn, smiling children safely crossing the road. But within minutes the scene descends into nightmare after a freakish accident, and then the camera pans down through the grass, into the soil below, where insects writhe in the mud. ‘Look what’s REALLY going on,’ it seems to say. ‘All this is here, all the time, you just won’t see it.’ The suburban dream suddenly seems creepy, as if its relentless NICEness is only pretend, and can’t survive without repressive conformity and wilful blindness.

  Brookmans Park was the epitome of that type of suburban aspiration and idealism. An exclusive enclave, it was posher than nearby Welham Green and Hatfield, which were more mixed and had council houses, many of them lived in by my school friends. But there was a divide between the two sections of the village, an actual hill to be climbed, and an aspirational one. We lived at the bottom of that hill, and the house I grew up in was by no means luxurious. Two-and-a-half beds upstairs plus bathroom, kitchen, lounge and dining room downstairs, it housed the five of us. My sister and I shared a bedroom, while Keith had a tiny boxroom, and Mum and Dad the larger bedroom at the front. There was no central heating, and we would take a paraffin heater into the bathroom if having a bath, snuggling up with hot water bottles at night.

  When I was five or six we had an extension built, which added two more bedrooms, bringing us more into line with Brookmans Park’s high standards. At the same time we ‘knocked through’ downstairs, and got a downstairs loo and a shower, and a bigger kitchen, all of which meant we ended up with a comfortable amount of space for a family of five. I moved into the new small bedroom. The other small bedroom became a ‘study’, which meant it housed a collection of encyclopaedias, and Dad’s wine-making equipment.

  But there was no getting away from it – we were in a semi-detached house, which we had stretched as far as it would go, and Mum never overcame her jealousy of anyone in a detached. It was her great goal in life. Why did she so set her heart on this? I think it was the place itself that did it to her, the proximity of houses that were sold as dream homes. And she didn’t invent the dream, it was invented for her, and marketed to her. It was implicit in the very design and concept of the suburban garden village, and there from the moment when economic depression of the 1930s made the houses harder to sell, forcing the developers to advertise. Seductive brochures were created, describing all the attractions of the location and the houses. ‘Brookmans Park, a real country home within 35 minutes of Town,’ one such read. ‘The opportunity of living in a house with all modern conveniences, on one of the great ancestral estates of England, absolutely unchanged and undisturbed in its essential character, that is what Brookmans Park offers you. The plan of the estate is absolutely to avoid crowding any portion of it with brickwork. Every house will be built well back from the roadway, giving dignity and seclusion, and leaving the original spaciousness of the avenues unspoilt. You will be able – not merely this year but always – to glance out of your windows at some of the loveliest scenery in England, at hills and valleys, rugged old trees and wide meadows. A few minutes walk will take you to one of the three delightful lakes, to Gobions Wood, the Italian sunken garden with its lavender and water lilies surrounded with lawns and giant cedars.’

  The brochures drew attention to the excellent transport links, especially the trains during the ‘rush hours’. ‘The latest Theatre Train leaves King’s Cross at 12.15 a.m.’ Prices were reasonable, a three-month season ticket to Kings Cross costing £4 8s. And ‘a fleet of single decker pneumatic tyred buses run through the estate’.

  A building company called Phillips Brothers issued their own brochure: ‘Houses erected on the Brookmans Park Estate are attractive and arresting. To the wife because their appearance is pleasing and they are planned to save as much time and trouble as possible; to the husband because the call on his pocket is so reasonable for houses of this type . . . The Kitchen, a joy to the housewife, is tiled . . .’

  My mum was this housewife. The whole thing might as well have had her name on it. She’d grown up in Kentish Town and Dad in Finsbury Park, and both had been bombed, and of course anyone who’d been through that might want to get out of London, and might think the suburbs looked like heaven. If the brochure seemed idyllic in the 1930s, how much more so after the war? My parents moved first to a flat in Barnet, and then in 1956 bought our 1930s house in Brookmans Park. The road was still unfinished and full of potholes, into which they would empty the ashes from the coal fire.

  It was all about escape. How could I not see that? Everyone wanted to leave; everyone wanted something better. Mum’s parents moved to Radlett, and then to the sea at Broadstairs. Two of her brothers moved out to Surrey (gallingly, into detached houses in proper stockbroker-belt territory). The other brother emigrated to Canada. As for my dad’s brother, he too moved to Brookmans Park, first living in the same road as us, and on the ‘wrong’ side, which backed onto the railway line, before – oh woe! – moving up to a detached house in Moffatts Lane. Leaving us as the only family members stuck in a little semi, which was NOT so little, of course, but the symbolism was strong.

  This was one of the anxieties about suburbia in the ’60s and ’70s – a fear that the urban working class had been broken up and thus disempowered by moving out of the city. The term used to describe the subsequent attempt to become more middle class was ‘embourgeoisement’, which really just means social climbing, though it contains within it a strong sense of disapproval. Left-wing social commentators thought that it was dangerous for working people to lose their solidarity and sense of unity as a class, realising that once they were broken up into self-contained, individualistic, semi-detached home owners, they would be likely to vote Conservative. And this was clearly true, Mum and Dad being textbook examples.

  In Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, narrator Karim says, ‘the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling. It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at the people beneath them.’ I think of my parents, both originally from working-class families, each of their fathers starting out as train drivers, calling other people ‘common’. And then the irony of the fact that they themselves, and people like them, ended up being looked down on by both sides: not properly of the middle class in that they were not educated or cultured, they could then also be sneered at from the left, for being too privatised in their thinking, too keen on improving their own personal lot, too keen on buying things. Nice things, even. Although, when I think about that, I always think of the quote from Lucky Jim: ‘There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.’

  They ha
d chosen green outdoor space instead of dirty old brick, clean fresh air instead of pea soup fog, newness instead of dereliction, fields instead of bomb sites. Inevitably, they saw the suburbs, even after the war had ended, as a place of greater safety, representing security along with comfort, and freedom from anxiety. Brookmans Park itself had experienced a good war, being far enough from London to mostly escape. A couple of bombs had fallen – possibly aimed at the BBC transmitting station; there were ambulances stationed at the golf club, and a warden’s first aid post, and a local Home Guard, which was run by the village GP Dr Dwyer, who was still the GP when my parents first moved there. By the end of the war though, the village had come through unscathed, and still looked as good as new.

  It’s taken me many years, but I understand what drew them here. I now live in what is derisively called a metropolitan bubble, where all my friends share my liberal values and echo back at me my instinctive response to the world. Yet there’s another level of instinct in me, perhaps deeper and buried, the voices of my parents and my childhood neighbours, which also informs my thinking. I don’t always agree with those voices, any more than I did in my teens, but they provide a counterbalance, and still something to kick against. I like to think I’m London, but in fact, like many people, I have suburban bones.

  1980

  A W.H. Smith pocket diary with a black cover, one page per day. The usual tube map, bank holidays, metric conversion tables – and then lots of little folded-up pieces of paper tucked inside the opening pages, all bearing boys’ phone numbers. Alan, Steve, Frank, Terry, Colin. I was seventeen years old. I had stopped mentioning what was on the telly. Instead, I read Testament of Youth, and watched Rebel Without a Cause, Badlands, Klute, Dark Victory (sharing a love of Bette Davis with my mum), Annie Hall, Manhattan, Gaslight and The Misfits.

  I was in a relationship now, but I was a terrible girlfriend – and I’m really very sorry. I was self-obsessed, melodramatic, disloyal, inconsistent, unpredictable and argumentative. Conflicted, repressed, driven, shy, self-conscious, romantic, young and curious. I dreamed of being in love more than I actually was in love with anyone. I had no idea what I wanted and was obsessed by my own feelings while careless of those around me. ‘This is all getting a bit deep,’ I wrote one day, when my boyfriend was unhappy. One day I’d like him, the next day not. ‘Basically I just can’t cope with going out with someone – I go on and off him about every 10 minutes. It’s just so confusing.’ I was desperate for and terrified of sex, having had the horror of its negative outcomes and implications drummed into me from such an early age. Fear of pregnancy meant that I didn’t fully trust any form of contraception, and my awareness of parental disapproval was overwhelming.

  Everything was conflict and secrecy, and both seemed part of the very fabric of suburbia. I recently found a notebook of mine, in which I had written quotes from books I liked. I’d copied out this from Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall: ‘When I was at home, in my parents’ home, I felt all the time afraid that any word of mine, any movement, my mere existence, might shatter them all into fragments. As a small child, not yet knowing why, I practised concealment, deviously reconstructing my every thought for them, knowing that if they could see me as I truly was they might never recover from the shock.’

  Although, maybe it’s inevitable that teenagers lie, wherever they live, however they’re brought up. I said to someone recently, as my only piece of advice on the parenting of teenagers, ‘Be prepared for them to lie to you.’ I thought I had lied because I had to – because I didn’t want to confront my parents, and because the rules were too strict. But I’ve been more liberal with my kids, and we’ve always been more open with each other. I said to them, ‘I don’t mind much what you do, just don’t lie to me. I like to know where you are.’ And one by one, at various times, for various reasons, they have all lied to me. Sometimes for good, or understandable reasons: to protect me, to stop me worrying about something they knew was ok. Sometimes just not to have to talk about something. In other words, it makes me think, teenagers NEED to lie. It doesn’t mean that parenting has failed. It’s part of the process of breaking away, and forging a separate identity. Having private information is their version of the blank page.

  It’s possible too, that the blank page in my diary I mentioned earlier sounds more dramatic than it actually is. For what had happened on that day was not an unspeakable crime, or a trauma that left me wordless, it was a fairly commonplace teenage experience, more mortifying than anything else. The blank page represents embarrassment and secrecy, an unwillingness to describe and also a desire to keep a secret from my mum.

  But it’s something else too, I now realise; it’s about power and control, in the way that writing always is. I’m still not going to tell you what was on that page, and I am still the one deciding how much of myself I reveal. All this quoting from my diary looks confessional, looks exposing, but there are pages I’m not showing you. The blank page shows that process happening even while I was writing the diary. However subconsciously, I was shaping a narrative, choosing what to put in and what to leave out.

  I was interviewed after writing Bedsit Disco Queen by a journalist who made the point that, for such an apparently private person, wasn’t it surprising that I had made the decision to write a revealing and intimate book, giving away details about myself and my life that you might imagine I’d prefer to keep under wraps. It gave me pause for thought, especially as I was at that moment about to embark on writing a fortnightly column for the New Statesman, in which I was bound to draw on personal experiences, and tell stories about things that happened to me. In other words, invading my own privacy.

  The answer I gave in the interview, though, was to say that writing about yourself is very different to being written about. When you write a memoir, or a column in a magazine, you are the one in control. The ‘secrets’ you give away are only those you are comfortable with, and many more remain hidden from view, just as they should. You may be shining a light on to your own life, but you are the one holding the lamp, and can angle it in whichever direction you choose. Even in your most honest moments, you will probably lean towards showing yourself in a good light, or as good as possible, opting for words that are at least, as Larkin put it, ‘not untrue, and not unkind’.

  This point was made brilliantly by Chris Heath in his recent book Reveal, about the life and career of Robbie Williams. Talking about the singer’s propensity for self-exposure, for sharing more than most people do, Heath writes: ‘Most people try to protect themselves by clutching their secrets close, but there is another way. If you reveal your secrets, share your stories, before anyone else can discover them, then they’re so much harder to use against you.

  And also, this way, even as you share them, they remain yours.’

  I think that’s very true – that controlling what you tell and when means that you retain ownership of the details of your life. Being interviewed, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing, and in many ways a much scarier prospect. I have many journalist friends, and it never fails to amaze them when I inform them that we – and by this I mean anyone who’s ever been interviewed – are often afraid of them. We don’t know what to expect when they turn up, whether they want us to be garrulous or mysterious, live up to our image or confound it, be starry or down to earth. Different interviewers want different things, and it’s not always obvious until afterwards, when you read the piece they’ve written. And this is the source of the fear – a conversation takes place between two people in a room, but only one of them gets to tell what happened. One half of the encounter determines whether the other half is funny or dull, clever or stupid, nice or nasty. Paradoxically, reading an interview with yourself you can feel strangely silenced. You may recognise the words you said, but they may seem jumbled, or out of context, and most important, your impressions of what happened, or what the interviewer was like – whether they were funny or dull, clever or stupid, nice or nasty – go completely u
nrecorded, your version of events goes unheard. An interview is an apparently informal, relaxed chat, at the end of which YOU WILL BE JUDGED. In print.

  Compared to that, when you write about yourself, you hold all the cards, and that’s liberating. I look again at that blank page in the diary, and I’m quite proud of it, of what it represents. I understood, even then, that writing things down was risky, that words were powerful, that there was strength in the unsaid. Nothing – no memoir, no song – is ever completely confessional, and writing is always about knowing who’s in charge.

  And in my diary, I think it was a way of wresting back some power without having to be confrontational. Both my sister and I had boyfriends we were forbidden to see, who we saw in secret. I would sneak out of school, and spend afternoons in the park, and it was almost more exciting than just going out with him. But the grown-ups had a pact of solidarity, and my mum had a network of spies. Someone told her they’d seen me in town with my boyfriend.

  15 January – ‘One of Mum’s darling golfing friends told her she saw me down town last week and mum accused me of playing truant. Old bat.’ Then someone else phoned to tell her about Debbie and her forbidden boyfriend. The lines were drawn so narrowly that it was easy to cross them, but hard to get away with. Our secrets and lies were undone by snoopers and spies.