My brother once told me that the Germans have a word for that feeling you get on a Sunday afternoon – they call it Sonntagangst. I thought he was joking, but held on to the joke nonetheless, as a good way of catching the mood of those suburban weekends. We were stuck in, or under, the grip of it – and I could feel that bored sadness drifting around the room, so strongly I felt that I could almost hold it. Monday sat on the front steps waiting for us, and we thought about its world of beginnings – polishing shoes and washing in the avocado green plastic bath, with its crack along the front panel. But Sunday afternoons seemed soaked in desolation, as limp as the toast and honey on the blanket-box coffee table. Alain Prost drove his nose around Brands Hatch again and again, the dust flying off the curves of the track, with a sound like someone screaming through the air.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about an atmosphere is that it’s contagious. It gets everywhere, like glitter. The atmosphere begins when two people refuse to understand each other. She, let us say, wishes to eat a bowl of cornflakes and do some work. He, perhaps, wants to hang out some laundry. She perceives his laundry hanging out to be a tacit criticism of her choice to work. He wonders why she needs four cups to be on the table simultaneously, rather than using the same one each time she makes a cup of tea. Everything about his actions of laundry-collection are perceived by her to be a kind of aural reproach. The way he is sighing quietly as he untangles a leg of her wet tights that is knotted, lumpily, around the leg of his wet jeans, and the way he hefts the lump of laundry into the basket – both are obviously directed towards her. He sees her gaze into the middle distance, not visibly working, as a sign that she has disconnected, too easily, from the family unit. He walks out of the room carrying the basket. A sock falls out of the silver drum, onto the floor, and she follows him, then feels obliged to join in. They put the smallest wet clothes on children’s hangers. He silently corrects the way she carelessly places the socks on the stand, smoothing out the creases that will delay drying time or cause mildew by doubling or tripling the damp factor. Both know they are right. The atmosphere settles in, like mist on an autumn evening. The terrifying thing about it is that atmospheres, like mist, get everywhere. There is no escape. So the two people who are trying to retain autonomy find themselves floating in the same emotional soup. They have seeped into each other. They are both pissed off. Somebody suggests a walk.
I am not a natural walker. I am not a nature person. When people tell me I’m missing out, I know they’re probably right and my mind stamps a petulant and defensive foot. My sympathies lie with another nature unlover. I don’t like mountains, W. H. Auden’s boyfriend told him, when offered a romantic minibreak in the Alps. I only like towns where there are shops. Poor Wystan. Poor Gerhart. Sometimes I meanly imagine that everybody else’s families dislike the whole walking thing as much as I do. That they’re just being dutiful. We should get some air, they say to each other. We ought to stretch our legs. It would be good to get out. I imagine that underneath it all is an unacknowledged desire to escape, if not from each other, then into a kind of fantasy involving wellington boots, Poohsticks and a sudden, uncharacteristic interest in wildlife.
Even now, I struggle with the first steps. Standing in the narrow hallway, desperately trying to find coats, hats, missing gloves. Someone complains that their wellingtons chafe around the lower calf. Someone else cannot do up their zip. Someone scratches their head, and you wonder if they might have nits again. Everybody is finally dressed. Then someone wants a snack, and someone else needs a glass of water. We stand on the flagstones, staring up at the light and the drizzle, and then we all set off.
The scenery is different, but the atmosphere persists. Nobody can go too far ahead. You can’t dive into a local pub and give up. To walk back home would be to cause a scene. Headphones are generally frowned upon, but you can possibly get away with earmuffs. In some senses, the walk offers family members a good deal less freedom. There is no shed to hide in. There are no curtains. You cannot claim exhaustion and take a nap. Everyone must exist in roughly the same geographical arena. Everyone must appear to enjoy the walk (at least moderately). There’s a reason one of the greatest novels in English begins with its heroine’s delight that there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. There’s a reason Jane Eyre appeals to teenagers. There are no window seats on family walks. And you can’t read a book while walking with your family.
Our regular weekend walk in West Finchley was always the same. Out of the front door to the road end where my brother rode his Chopper, and left through the mesh of gates with the notice that read NO HORSE RIDING. Then the muddy path with the tennis courts on our right, the wooden bridge beside the drainage pipe, turning right along the path of the river, and around the corner where the trees thinned out, leaning over the water, the smell of wild garlic overpowering. Then through the winners of the best-kept small allotment in Barnet, on the path lined with cow parsley behind netball wire. Sometimes we went across Fursby Avenue to the park with the big swings and the proper silver slide. But that park was far enough away that it never seemed to quite belong to us. Usually we turned around at the final gate and walked back down the river bend, kicking our way through the flattened chestnut branches.
When I was eight, I moved schools, and my father started to take me there on the Tube. The connection from West Finchley was a slow one, as the line divided just before it, at Mill Hill East – so you had to wait that bit longer for the train. The station was in the opposite direction to the woods, off the main road, hidden down a slope, after the Chinese takeaway and the post office and Dick’s the Grocers, and what was then a chemist but would soon become a video rental store. When my father went into Lovesay & Son to get his paper, I would look up at the pale blue lettering, wondering at the name. Lovesay. Inside, I would stand at the shelves, looking at the rows of sweets. Opal Fruits and Frazzles and Parma Violets became muddled in my mind with the idea of amorous declarations and headlines. A collection of objects hung on the opposite wall, suspended in air like my old Ladybird Key Words book. Watering can. Trowel. Funnel. Bucket.
Mr Lovesay didn’t seem to have a son. He wore a brown shop coat and walked back and forth between the rear of the shop and the counter. Whenever he sold something, he would tear off a small numbered ticket from a perforated pad. I wondered if love was something you could tear, as well as something you could say.
Every morning, I would have my small travel pass ready to show at the gate where nobody ever stood. We would walk over the latticed bridge and wait for the train, at the far end, past the wooden waiting room, looking up at the sign for NEXT TRAIN. The 1959 stock shuffled out of an invisible siding, confirming itself as via Bank or via Charing Cross, terminating at Morden. This was a world of strange words. Via. No smoking. The sliding doors would open and I would take a seat in the nearly empty carriage, feeling the prickly blue-green tartan moquette on the back of my bare legs, and looking at the lined wood floor.
The sign for Lovesay & Son is still there, its pale blue fading into white, like the veins on a porcelain wrist. Dick’s the Grocers has long gone, turned into a salon that announces its treatments in a list to the right of the door: Manicure & Pedicure, Cavitation Weight Loss, Gel & Acrylic Nails, Teeth Whitening, Eyebrow Shaping, Hair Extensions, IPL Hair Removal, Skin Rejuvenation, Microdermabrasion, Botox and Fillers, Massage, Facial, Waxing. And the Northern Line still has the same two branches going south into London that never meet. We wanted to get onto the other branch, so we always had to go too far to get to where we needed to, and go back out of town again. The first stop of the journey took just moments, a slowish grind past some shrubbery and an arched bridge, but then the train stopped again for ages at Finchley Central, a junction station that looked like a Swiss lodge, all frilled wooden panels and bottle green paintwork. Finally we sped up on our way to East Finchley (birthplace of Jerry Springer), with its deco staircases, glazed in glass tubes. Then we were flying again, past endless allotmen
ts, and the rainbow colours of electric cables and the blind backs of houses with their sheds at the bottom of the garden, through a small tunnel, and the Tube really became the Tube, with that familiar rick-rack sound, plummeting down under Highgate Hill towards Archway, Kentish Town and Tufnell Park.
The carriage got crowded around about Highgate, and then my father stood above me in his suit, holding on to one of the fibreglass globes on bendy springs, swaying until the crush of bodies in the carriage held him still. He was one of many commuters crammed into this train in the spring of 1983. They all looked the same – the million Mr Averages switching on for work. George Michael wore blue jeans rolled up at the ankle and white trainers and a black leather jacket. They wore navy mackintoshes and pinstriped suits. Looking up at the sea of grey Denby-pressed fabric, I reached out to steady myself on the wrong legs.
Camden was a crush of bodies moving this way and that through the various tunnels, taking the ‘via Bank’ people onwards to Charing Cross, allowing those who were journeying on the two branches of the northern bit of the Northern Line to swap over. But the platform to Edgware and Colindale was always quieter and the train was nearly empty. By 8 a.m. we were heading back out to the suburbs up the other branch, making what on the map looked like exactly the same journey, but backwards, and five centimetres lower down.
There were no escalators at Belsize Park. The lifts were closed with expanding iron doors, like a concertina cage, and they juddered their way up to the surface. Once the lift broke and we made our way up the steps, circling into the same grey rain and red brick of Haverstock Hill – the place where the not-suburban people lived.
Much of that journey is now, for me, not lost, but trapped in time. Just one of the ways that time tends to trap us. Everything about that journey was regularised too. There is something about the world of commuting that washes a sense of difference out of things and people. Commuters may look the same. Every day, they inhabit the same space. They follow the same timetable. They ride the same train. People, like trains, were regular beings. They did not transform, or mutate. They did not go changing.
Wishing for difference was one of my favourite childhood activities. On the way to school each day, I read on the train. I’d like to think my father did. But the rows of his books on the bookshelf at home – The Day of the Triffids, Rumpole, The Great Railway Bazaar, Homage to Catalonia – don’t look like the sort of things you’d carry on the Tube in the morning. If I strain my memory hard, perhaps he is holding a newspaper, or a last-minute sheaf of figures. As I sat there on my itchy seat, I read in envy of other people’s hair and clothes, their houses and their relatives, their food and their wallpaper. I read because other people’s halls were invariably bigger than ours. Other people’s houses had multiple floors. Other people’s mothers wore sunglasses. Other people’s families took me out for lunch to restaurants that served puddings called The Outrageous. Other people’s fathers carried mobile phones.
Even when they were doing nothing, other people’s families did it better than mine. On a Saturday afternoon, the Bakers stretched out on a chaise longue or lay on the floor reading newspapers. The Shermans faced each other across the shag pile in articulated padded loungers, drinking frozen orange juice from individual snack trays. The Greens had a swimming pool and a petting zoo. Life was an Argos catalogue of alternative possibilities, and envy was my hobby and my salvation. I was an expert in it.
Going through East Finchley, I read on – for other, better homes and better stories. Ballet Shoes on the Brompton Road. Windsor Gardens. Avonlea. Tara. Kansas. Oz. I read of The Ordinary Princess and Minnie the Minx. I read of Peter and Mollie and the Wishing-Chair with its bulbous legs and temperamental little red wings. I loved the shiny blue hardback cover, Mollie’s hairband and ponytail combo, and the spiked violet creams that did for the Ho-ho Wizard. Most of all, I loved the scene where Mollie and Peter’s mother takes a liking to their flying chair and brings it into the house. Then Mollie, pretty Mollie, who never does anything out of turn, goes for the Blyton equivalent of an ASBO. She thinks up the deliberately naughty idea of vandalising it in order to get it back, taking the sewing scissors to the cushion, spilling ink on the upholstery and kicking the legs until it is ruined.
I wanted to vandalise their chair too – not to help them, but because I wanted what they had and I couldn’t have it. Peter and Mollie had an Emergency Exit. If I were them, I could fly out of the window, out of the semi-detached world. I read on. Addicted to the kind of novels in which exceptionally ordinary children are ‘discovered’ by directors and thrust upon the stage, I stared at the man who got on the train at Kentish Town, who could have been a casting agent. If I stared hard enough, perhaps my story would transform itself into something else, something extraordinary.
There is something childlike in memory, which makes me conceive of my father as a perpetual commuter. Though the act of remembering him is sudden (it lands with violence, like a carriage lurching off the rails), the image of him is steady in my mind. And the picture that unfolds is predictable, regular, moving according to a pattern I have long established.
We are walking out of the station. He holds my schoolbag in one hand and encloses my hand in his other. His are large and blunt-fingered, with freckled backs, rough from fixing cars, but soft to touch. Over five days, he explains to me exactly how a carburettor works. I listen, with half an ear, trying to understand, but also just following the rise and fall of his voice.
When he dropped me at the gates, he handed over my satchel, and turned to smile and wave. He was an enigma to me, as he floated off to an office in a place called Elephant and Castle. I imagined it as a place of Eastern mystery, with turreted castles and elephants floating on clouds, dozens of them in diagonal lines, like wallpaper, ridden by men in suits. After he said goodbye, I looked for a moment at his long grey-legged figure walking down the road, holding the image, and then turned away. Standing there, I never thought about where he would be going next. It didn’t occur to me that to get me there he was going round in circles, heading back once more down the same line – turning again in order to go on.
Baker Street to Moorgate Street
Annette believed in the telephone
Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter
Nine years after that goodbye in New York, Kate Field came back to London, and set up a temporary home there for the next few winters. She would have needed that umbrella. The weather was predictably terrible, a pasticcio of rain, she called it, and endless fog. For two days, an enormous fall of snow brought everything to a halt. The brougham cabs refused to leave their stands, with an enterprising few hiking their fares at night to a surge rate. Field took to walking everywhere, her skirts shortened to save them from the grey slush on the pavement. The flash of black gumboot underneath mystified the boot blacks sitting on the street corners. She rode the omnibus to Baker Street, where she walked past the Smithfield poultry show, to stare at a wax model of the Nawab Gholana Hussein Khan, resplendent in his green and gold, standing next to the latest version of the Prince of Wales. She visited the Zoological Gardens and spoke at public dinners, went from St George-in-the-East to Belgravia, and from Jamroab’s Wild Beast Bazaar to Parliament itself. She sat on the earliest version of the Circle Line, yet to become a circle, making her way from Baker Street to Moorgate Street, up the Metropolitan Line.
In those days, the Underground was crawling around London like a giant caterpillar, chewing up the pavements and creating enormous piles of earth. As new stations were built, people picked their way on planks towards their houses. You can see photographs of its making – three workmen staring at the camera with their arms crossed, a rare sighting of Britain’s black Victorians. Soon, the idea of travelling in a tunnel became a fact of life. People were becoming accustomed to the sight of carriages appearing from archways, into the grubby twilight, with the silhouette of St Paul’s in the background. Used to the turnstiles and tickets and the confusion of losing
things in the hurry.
Today, the Circle Line still isn’t a real circle – invaded at all angles by the District and Metropolitan, kinked at Edgware Road. One wrong move at Earl’s Court and it can still send you round in an unwitting loop, circling back to where you began. Nowadays, the trains are sleek silver beasts, joined with grey rubber concertinas, which bend and flex with the tessellated sheets of metal as if they are alive, breathing with the train’s movement, like a big anemone. But some things are the same. At Sloane Square, a man in a red beanie hat will play the tune from The South Bank Show on his violin, then hold out a paper cup for donations – the look in his eyes not perhaps that different to those of the many hungry men, women and children who have made their way across the pavements of Praed Street over the years, players in the station game. The District and Circle commuter sways to the rhythm of the metal heartbeat, wearing his suit and anorak, just as his great-great-grandfather would have stood, carried through the same tunnels, twenty-five feet of cut and cover under the surface of London.
It is cleaner now, of course. Dirt was everywhere when Kate Field rode the Underground. The air was full of the sound of carriage doors slamming shut, draughts of air coming down the tunnels, and the acrid smoke that caught in the back of your throat and made you cough. The swaying gas-lit orbs would have given everything a smoky, ochre tone. George Gissing wrote of the black fumes, the shrill whistles, the walls of adverts that clamoured to the eye: theatres, journals, soaps, medicines, concerts, furniture, wines, prayer-meetings. Field would have looked out over the sea of workmen’s caps and tall top hats and thin umbrellas and greenish newspapers folded in a hurry. She would have covered her mouth, and made for the Moorgate Street exit.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 4