by Tracey Thorn
On September the 26th I turned eighteen. Finally legal in pubs, after all those forbidden years. ‘Got a wonderful music centre and Vic Goddard LP and Durutti Column LP. Music centre = really nice. In the evening we went over to MJ’s. Got drunk and went up the college to see The Tea Set (who were crap).’
It’s supposed to be a milestone, isn’t it, turning eighteen? I don’t sound like an adult, and I didn’t feel like one, and looking back from my now so-very-adult perspective – me in my mid-fifties, a wife, a parent, facing the empty nest myself – I can’t quite get to grips with the level of boredom and misery that seemed to engulf me. Would I like to go back there, be eighteen again? And if I could go back in time now, stand face to face with my eighteen-year-old self, what on earth would I say? Who even is that person? I don’t think I know her.
Fast-forward thirty-five years and my own daughters would be turning eighteen, a fact which seems no more likely just because I’m looking at it written down. Adults. My babies as adults. It still won’t sink in. On their birthday I would keep remembering the Christmas just before they were born, when we cancelled all travel plans in order to be within hospital range, and I stayed at home, struggling through the backache of the day, clutching on to furniture like a drunk, falling asleep in front of Vertigo, until finally, each evening I’d lie gratefully in the bath, with the dome of my belly rising above the water like a cartoon desert island.
When New Year came, time sped up, and the problems became an emergency, and the babies arrived six weeks early. Tiny scraps of nothing, each weighing less than four pounds, they lay scrawny and helpless in their incubators, one bright red and the other ghostly white. Curled, gently furred like a leaf. I thought I’d die of love for them. I still think that. For the next few years I’d be queen of their little universe, omniscient, omnipotent, until gradually and so subtly I didn’t see it happening, my superpowers slipped away, and they stood level with me, and then began to creep ahead. Until I was full of doubt about the idea of offering words of wisdom or advice to them, so that when they turned eighteen I would simply offer a few thank yous:
‘Thanks for all the things you taught me. I taught you to talk, and then you taught me to text. Remember when I got a phone, and for the first year didn’t realise people were sending me messages on it? Oh, how we laughed. Oh, how I needed your help. And after that, thanks for teaching me what all the acronyms stand for, and also the latest slang words. (Though I do suspect you make some of them up, and laugh at me for believing you.) And though I taught you the Facts of Life (perhaps), thanks for teaching me the new ones, so that I was ahead of the game that year when everyone starting flinging around non-binary and gender-fluid and I knew what they were talking about.
‘Thank you for being brilliant sisters to your younger brother. Remember when he was really little and said indignantly on holiday one year, “God, this song is so SEXIST”? And that day when he came home from school and told me that he had taken issue with one of his mates for saying “That’s so GAY” about something or other. How thrilled we were, and proud of him.
‘And above all, even though you’re officially adults now, thanks for still being teenagers. I know it’s hard, with all the exams and pressure and endless endless STUFF, but nothing makes me happier than seeing your pleasure in being allowed to pierce your ears, or chop your hair off, or dye it peroxide blonde, or pink, or any of the other things I wasn’t allowed to do.
‘So do I have any advice for you at all? Not really. Except that, like all young people (or come to that, even old people these days), I know you worry sometimes about being cool. But don’t. Who cares really? Cool’s overrated. Warm is better.’
And I wish someone had said that to me at eighteen, and that I might have believed them.
I realise of course, that much of the time I was just being a cliché, and that it is very much teenagers who hate suburbia, which is why there are so many pop song lyrics about it. It’s for squares, for drones, worst of all, for PARENTS, who love it for the quality of life it offers. Young people don’t care about such things as comfort and cleanliness – they want culture, and night life, and energy.
There are no clubs or pavement cafés in suburbia. You can’t explore it at night, as – say – Dickens walked the streets of London. Who walks around suburbia at night? It would be spooky and weird. You can’t be a suburban flâneur. Suburbia is for those who want a quiet life, with no alarms and no surprises. It goes to bed early, and after dark, when a teenager comes alive, the streets are silent.
Over and over again, you find examples of teenage disdain for all this. Hanif Kureishi (another product of Bromley) captures this in The Buddha of Suburbia, where teenage Karim is suitably sarcastic: ‘In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness.’ Like many such teens, he can’t understand why his parents have inflicted this life on him: ‘I often wondered why he’d condemned his own son to a dreary suburb of London of which it was said that when people drowned they saw not their lives but their double-glazing flashing before them.’
Children often enjoy what suburbia has to offer – I think back to my own happy childhood here – so perhaps the teenager is rejecting not just parents, but childhood. It seems like a marker of growing up to start hating it, to feel that the place itself is childish, that its cosiness has an infantilising effect. Teenagers rage at suburbia, which equals their parents, screaming, ‘You don’t UNDERSTAND me! You never let me do ANYTHING! Stop babying me! You’re so square! I HATE you!’
In song lyrics of the ’60s and ’70s, there’s a high-minded, anti-materialistic strand to the objections. In The Monkees’ ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, suburbia is simply ‘status symbol land’, built on ideals that are meaningless to the young – ‘And the kids just don’t understand / Creature comfort goals, they only numb my soul’. There’s often a sense that suburbia is an emasculated environment, maybe because it represents a life entirely domesticated, and set up for the needs of the family. In ‘Semi-detached Suburban Mr James’ by Manfred Mann, there are lots of lyrics like, ‘Do you think you will be happy, buttering the toast’ and ‘So you think you will be happy, taking doggie for a walk’. The song is aimed at a woman who has scorned the writer to marry someone else, dooming herself to a sexless life of routine and drudgery: ‘I can see you in the morning time / Washing day, the weather’s fine / Hanging things upon the line / And as your life slips away . . .’ What it comes down to is that the new suburban lover ‘can’t love you the way I can, so please don’t you forget it’, which makes me think there is often something more going on than just liberal rejection of convention, and that what might have felt like sticking it to ‘The Man’, was actually, more often than not, a case of sticking it to the woman. A woman who might have been a stand-in for the writer’s mum.
Suburbia – so cosy, so domestic – is a feminised place, and this seems to be the source of some of rock’s scorn and contempt. Again, in ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, the women are apparently blind to how comfy and privileged their lives are, actually having the audacity to find life looking after a teenager quite difficult: ‘Mothers complain about how hard life is.’ The teenager, of course, being far too evolved to get any pleasure from the creature comforts that numb his soul.
In other songs, the plight of suburban woman is explicitly recognised. ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, written by Shel Silverstein in the mid-’70s, takes place ‘In a white suburban bedroom / In a white suburban town’, where Lucy comes to the realisation that ‘she’d never ride / Through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair’, and is instead doomed to ‘clean the house for hours’, until she either cracks up or commits suicide, depending on how you read the ending of the song. By 1978, in ‘Suburban Relapse’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees, which I listened to endlessly in my bedroom, the breakdown had become explicit:
I’m sorry that I hit you
&n
bsp; But my string snapped
I’m sorry I disturbed your cat-nap
But whilst finishing a chore
I asked myself ‘what for’
Then something snapped
I had a relapse . . . A Suburban relapse.
I was washing up the dishes
Minding my own business
When my string snapped
I had a relapse . . . A Suburban relapse.
This is definitely a woman speaking, a housewife and mother by the sound of it, at the end of her tether. Siouxsie, part of the Bromley punk contingent, grew up in Chislehurst and the rejection of the suburban housewife role was strong in her. We’d grown up, partly watching our mothers swallowed up by what looked to us like stultifying lives, and partly seeing negative examples of such women on the telly. In dramas and sitcoms, the suburban housewife was sex-starved and frustrated, or desperately aspirational and bullying towards the hen-pecked menfolk. Thelma in The Likely Lads was always trying to better herself and spoil the fun, Margo in The Good Life was humourless and snobbish. Yootha Joyce’s character in George and Mildred, a sitcom about a couple who left their council flat for a more upmarket housing estate, much to the dismay of their toffee-nosed neighbour, was also trying to climb the social ladder, but was constantly thwarted by George, who was lazy and feckless.
Beverley in Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party was the epitome of this suburban nightmare housewife – lacking in culture, self-awareness or tact, she was socially crass and yet seething with a thwarted energy, spitting at her husband that ‘Just because a picture happens to be erotic, does not make it pornographic.’ Lusting after Demis Roussos, desperate for something, ANYTHING to happen, she was mocked by the play, but Alison Steadman’s performance is what everyone remembers, it was her energy and pent-up urges that drove the piece along. Even at the time, some people could see that there was something sneering about this portrayal – Dennis Potter wrote of the play that it was ‘a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower-middle classes’.
But all these showed us a type of behaviour for which women were particularly disliked. It was the women who were to blame, seemingly – leading the men astray, emasculating them, curtailing their natural freedoms, forcing them into domesticity and acquisitiveness. No wonder as teenagers we were so afraid of ending up like that, of turning into our mothers. No wonder we looked at suburbia and wanted to burn it down.
1981
Eighteen years old. A Collins, black pocket diary, page to a day. There are no phone numbers tucked inside, but instead a long quote from Kerouac’s On the Road: ‘the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old’. I still love that line, the forlorn rags of growing old.
There are also quotes from ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’, ‘Until the Real Thing Comes Along’, ‘My Man’ and ‘I Cover the Waterfront’, all down to my Billie Holiday obsession. And written on the inside back page, a list of my all-time favourite films – Badlands, Manhattan, The Misfits and The Graduate . . . Annie Hall, Love and Death, Being There, Gaslight and Camille . . . Paths to Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, It Always Rains on Sundays and Casablanca . . . Women in Love, Cabaret, Brief Encounter, Gregory’s Girl and A Matter of Life and Death. If I made a list today it wouldn’t be much different, which makes me think, have I changed at all since that year? And had I seen all the films I would ever love by the age of nineteen?
As the year began, I finally completely split up with The Boyfriend, and declared ‘I’m in love with Orange Juice!’ And the diary starts with a declaration:
1 January – ‘New year marks a definite attempt to make this diary a bit more interesting. Less trivia etc.’
Of course in retrospect, it’s the trivia that’s interesting, and not all the declarations of despair and boredom, but this is the eighteen-year-old me speaking. I was aware that it was becoming repetitive. What the resolution meant, though, was that I did actually start trying to talk about my feelings. At a party, I had a long, deep discussion with a boy: ‘We talked about how we both used to act being cynical but really we’re both hopeful about life. It really was a good conversation.’ This might have been the first time I used an encounter with a boy at a party to have a conversation.
My diary entries in general reveal less drama, but a sort of undercurrent of yearning, for love and for maturity.
26 February – ‘Heard “Ceremony” by New Order. Best thing I’ve heard in ages. It’s wonderful. A favourite single of all time already.’
6 April – ‘I’ve taken up yoga.’
16 April – ‘The Cure were on Top of the Pops. I’m in love with Robert Smith.’
My A-Levels began on Tuesday, June the 2nd, with a history exam described in my diary as ‘about as bad as expected’. But the run up to this had hardly seen me sweating non-stop over a textbook. I’d spent the Saturday night at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, where I ‘saw a really good band called Maximum Joy, and Pigbag, who were wonderful. Danced my legs off.’ On the Sunday, instead of fretting about the upcoming exam, I was wondering whether we ought to record a single. Finally, on the day before A-Levels started, I did some ‘last minute work’, although to balance that, in the evening I ‘ saw an Elizabeth Taylor film, Butterfield 8’.
So maybe it was no surprise the first exam didn’t go brilliantly. I went to another gig that night, to see a local band featuring ‘2 guitars, bass, vocals and bongos. Brilliant.’ Then another one on the Friday. A brief moment of studiousness kicked in on Wednesday, June the 3rd, when I actually turned a gig down – ‘Mark, TV Personalities drummer, phoned to say he got us a gig at the Moonlight club on June 18th. Day before my English exam, can’t really do it. Damnation.’
The following Monday, June the 8th, was my first economics exam, which was apparently ‘ok’, but more importantly we got confirmation from Rough Trade that they wanted fifty copies of our cassette. Next day I had a Shakespeare paper, which was ‘ appalling’, followed two days later by a history exam – ‘ pretty foul’ – although this was leavened by the news that Rough Trade were going to send twenty-five copies of our cassette to America. ‘ They said they love us!’
Saturday night I went to a party, where I got off with a boy who ‘likes jazz, blues and Paris, and sings in a band’, then had an English exam on the Monday, and bought ‘Back to My Roots’ by Odyssey. Tuesday was my final economics paper, about which I tersely record ‘no comment’. On Friday, June the 19th I sat my Chaucer paper, and with a nonchalant ‘A LEVELS OVER’ I headed up to London to sell some tapes to Rough Trade. Friday, June the 26th was my official school leaving day. The night before I’d been at the Lyceum to see The Birthday Party, supported by Vic Godard and Subway Sect. At school I ‘got £4 book token prize for English and History’. Later the same day Gina from the Marine Girls rang, ‘ and read me a review of Beach Party – really over the top. Said I had a voice with a future – rich, controlled and soulful! hahaha.’
That ‘hahaha’ says it all. In retrospect, all this looks like the beginning of a career, the opening scenes of a biopic even, but in truth I wasn’t taking music seriously, in the sense of worrying about whether I had a voice with a future, and nor was I taking school seriously, in the sense of worrying about my academic future. I was living entirely in the moment, caught up in the whirl of exciting things like gigs and music, skating across the surface of boring things like school. My results came in:
15 August – ‘ I got A for English, C for history, E for economics. Will it be good enough . . .?’ It was a bit late to start wondering.
‘Life goes on tediously, nothing happens for months, and then one day everything, and I mean everything, goes fucking wild and berserk.’
> – Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Things didn’t quite go berserk for me, but they changed, and changed utterly, from the day I left home, on October the 3rd.
I went up to Hull, and Mum and Dad took off for Canada, taking the train across the Rockies, and finally visiting the wild brave relations who had moved there all those years ago, and who now, according to Mum, lived up a mountain, with their five children and countless grandchildren, in a real life version of The Waltons. As far from suburbia as could be, their life was wide open, full of the great outdoors, expansive and rugged. Photos of my parents on the ranch show Mum in a stetson, and Dad with a holster belted around his hips, carrying a rifle. They were transported up and down the steep track in a truck which they feared had no brakes, driven round hairpin bends at breakneck speed, by strapping young Canadians who were somehow our flesh and blood, though as far removed from us as could be imagined.
When they got back home to Brookmans Park, Mum learned to drive, and though she never went any further than the golf club, or occasionally to Welwyn Garden City, it must have represented some attempt on her part to re-invent herself, to try something new. Meanwhile I met Ben, and then moved in with him, and my parents’ tolerance for something new was stretched to the limit and then broke, their judgement falling on me like icy rain. Because of the falling out which ensued, I never properly went back home to live in the suburbs. I spent a couple of weeks there over the first Christmas, but by the following summer I was completely gone and would never return. They must have cleared out my room at some point, and thrown away lots of stuff, without ever checking with me. God knows what they would have found in the back of my cupboards. They never said. For a while we weren’t saying a lot to each other. I’d spent much of my teens wanting to break free and shake them off, but when the breach came it shook me in a way I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t even recognise for what it was at the time.