Another Planet Read online

  Originally the plan was for a garden city, along the lines of Welwyn Garden City, the second garden city in England, which was founded in 1920 only five miles away. There would have been a town square, and a much bigger, more urban development, but the scheme was gradually scaled down. After the railway station opened in July 1926, building began. Right from the start there were disputes about the necessity of what we’d call affordable housing, but which were then referred to as ‘workmen’s cottages’. In 1928 the only subsidised houses were built – more were planned, but never materialised, as the developers claimed they couldn’t afford to build properties that would command a lower rent. Already much of the housing was aspirational rather than affordable, and some existing homeowners objected to the building of bungalows – the dispute was settled when it was agreed to build a ‘better class of bungalow’.

  A better class of bungalow.

  2016

  I step off the train, up and over the footbridge, feeling a swerve of vertigo on the open-tread steps, remembering how my mum had real trouble going up and down them, thrown off balance by the sight of the drop. There’s a view of sharp, fresh green all around, oak trees by the road bridge, the footpath already fuzzy with goose grass. A sign reads, ‘To the Shops and the Golf Course’, and another, reassuringly, ‘CCTV is looking after you here’. There are sixteen new luxury homes being built right next to the station, a small development that must have broken through the red tape of planning and the outrage of local opposition. The battles of the Green Belt are still being fought here: debate rages about new housing proposals, many residents wanting to stop Brookmans Park itself expanding, and thus filling in the green space between it and London. It’s a hot local topic.

  Down from the station, the village shops stand exactly as they did, no change in style or size, only in the goods they sell or services they provide. Cutting It Fine, the hair salon, sits next to a wine seller that was a long-established off-licence, then a new osteopath practice and a takeaway offering kebabs/burgers/pizza. A dry cleaner’s, a tea room, and Methi Indian Cuisine, which used to be the wool shop. One of FOUR estate agents, one of SIX beauty salons, followed by Raj Indian Cuisine, and the Wing Wah Garden, which opened in 1977. The first place offering ‘foreign’ food, it brought a literal taste of the outside world and exposed all our limitations and prejudices. A local family said they’d move if a Chinese takeaway opened, which gave rise to a truly memorable row at my house, when my mum argued that it wasn’t just people in Brookmans Park who thought like that, to which I replied, ‘No, Brookmans Park doesn’t have a monopoly on racism!’ I was proud of my use of the word monopoly, which I’d only just learned, and expected cheers, but instead it provoked fury and then silence. I hear myself saying it now and I sound a bit smug. A bit teenage. But I still think I was right.

  I turn left at the fishmonger, and pass a small greengrocer (closed on Thursdays), another hair studio, and a dental practice where the garage used to be. The chemist is where the chemist always used to be, and next to it a Co-op where the supermarket always used to be, and where I had my first Saturday job. Two more estate agents, the Beauty in the Park salon, Groomers on the Green (dogs) in the lovely curved 1930s shopfront that was a greengrocer/pet shop. I’m delighted to see that the library is still here and still open, and the bakery is still a bakery, and the newsagent is still a newsagent, and the toyshop is still a toyshop, and the butcher’s is still a butcher’s, and the hairdresser’s is still a hairdresser’s, although now called a hair boutique. Peering through the window, I see the half-moon tables, and curly backed chairs, and overhead driers, unchanged since the 1970s.

  The DIY store is another Chinese restaurant. Amazing that the population has survived the introduction of no less than four places selling ‘foreign’ food. You might almost think people turned out to like it after all. Bringing us bang up to date, there is Body in Balance, specialising in sorting out back pain, and finally, in place of the bank, an Organic Dry Cleaner’s. The same number of shops as there ever were, thirty-nine, and so many still the same.

  As I walk around, I’m struck by how well the place seems to be doing. There is no atmosphere of rural decline. The closing of village shops and pubs, and local schools, and libraries, and the dwindling of rural bus and train services – Brookmans Park seems to have been spared most of this, in contrast to what we might call the ‘real’ countryside, which in many areas has suffered blight and neglect. There is money here, and the village has proved itself to be impervious to both change and decline. Some of the shops, and pavements and road surfaces, look a bit shabby, a bit in need of updating, but that’s the worst you could say. I walk up to look at the church, where the sound of fast trains going through is loud. Solar panels on a detached house.

  1976

  A pocket-sized diary with a red leather cover, measuring 4 × 3 inches. A week to two pages, it allowed enough room for three short sentences per day. On the front is the word ‘Haig’ and inside, beside a picture of two bottles, the words, ‘Haig – Britain’s Largest Selling Scotch Whisky. Don’t Be Vague Ask For Haig’. There follow three or four pages of metric imperial conversion tables, the year’s bank holidays, and then a ‘Wine Chart’, the years from 1948 to 1973 rated as a score of 0–7 for Claret, Red Burgundy, White Burgundy, Sauternes, Champagne and Port. And just to remind me where I didn’t live, a tube map, and then a map of the West End, detailing for me the area between the Thames and Oxford Street, where I hardly ever went.

  It begins just before the old year ended, with those entries from December 1975, about being unable to get a jumper or a skirt, buying nothing except a bag of chips, although the year ended on a high, with this triumphant entry for New Year’s Eve: ‘Liz came over in the morning, and I bought some things from the chemist.’

  I was thirteen years old, life was slow and even, and very little happened, over and over again. ‘Deb and I went to St Albans, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Barnet!! Got nothing except a Peanuts writing pad.’ ‘Tried to phone Deb but no answer.’ My emotional range was restricted to my feelings about David Essex, nothing and no one else seeming to rouse any passion in me; the films That’ll be the Day and Stardust were described in detail, on a page decorated with love hearts, and the words ‘sob sob’ repeated. Those films tell the tale of a rock star’s rise to glory and his descent into drug-addled failure, and I watched wide-eyed and open-mouthed, entranced by the beauty and the glamour of it all.

  1976 began with snow, and I was off school with a cold. ‘I went to Raybrook Farm,’ and there was ‘a heron in the garden. It tried to eat the goldfish.’ Because of the limited local shops, I bought things from Mum’s catalogue, and listed every tiny, insignificant purchase made when I did leave the house, ‘Went to Welwyn, got a face pack.’ To pass the time, like everyone else I watched a lot of telly, and the same telly as everyone else. Limited by three channels, we were bonded by watching and sharing the same few programmes, all of which I listed in my diary: Supersonic, Upstairs Downstairs, Crossroads and Candid Camera . . . The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, McCloud, New Faces and Ellery Queen . . . Who Do You Do?, Columbo, Survivors, Porridge and Monty Python’s Flying Circus . . . Call My Bluff, Bionic Man, New Avengers, Starsky & Hutch, Superstars and Kojak . . . The Six Million Dollar Man, Hawaii Five-O. There’d be a film on Saturday night – From Russia with Love, South Pacific, I’m All Right Jack . . . Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Singin’ in the Rain, The Nutty Professor.

  Most of all I loved the comedy: The Dave Allen Show, Fawlty Towers, Morecambe and Wise, Tomkinson’s Schooldays and The Good Life, which, of course, was a satire about suburbia, the idealistic Goods trying to exchange their suburban life for a more rural, meaningful one. It was funny, but also full of contemporary ideas about escaping the rat race, getting back to a utopian notion of self-sufficiency, living off the land. Tom Good suggested there was more value to this kind of life than could be found in modern Surbiton, though Margo and Jerry were there to provi
de the counterpoint, laughing at him and being laughed at in their turn. The kind of street they lived in, the kind of gardens they had, looked familiar to me, although I could see that my parents weren’t much like the Goods – who were dungaree-wearing semi-hippies, unconventional and liberal – but were in fact more like Margo and Jerry: conservative, aspirational, repressed. The atmosphere in the Goods house was relaxed and cheerful, but next door, Margo was uptight, with no sense of humour, while Gerry was cowardly and trapped. And it wasn’t hard to see that they were the villains, while the Goods were the good guys. That worried me a bit.

  If TV programmes were limited, so was our access to music. I bought the David Essex single ‘Rock On’ from a friend, and on another day, ‘Deb and I bought batteries for the tape recorder. It’s really good. Taped Neil Sedaka, Pluto and Four Seasons.’ We’d never heard anyone say that home-taping was killing music. It wouldn’t have meant anything to us. Home-taping was bringing some music into our house, and was one of the few ways we could do so, along with the radio, and Dial-a-Disc, where you’d sit at the phone table in the hall and dial a certain number in order to listen to a tinny recording of the current number seven single.

  Every weekday I listed my school lessons, wasting pages and pages on what was just my timetable – ‘English, maths, double cookery, hockey, double German, music, double science, Swimming!!’

  And here’s what a weekend looked like for a thirteen-year-old in 1976:

  Saturday – ‘Liz and I went to Welwyn today. Got a face pack and a hideaway stick thingy. Went to Liz’s in the afternoon. Had a bath and washed hair. Saw some Winter Olympics. Bed at 10.30.’

  Sunday – ‘ Did housework in morning and got 65p. Had roast lamb for din dins. Ordered a waistcoat from Freemans. Also a floor cushion. Saw M*A*S*H. Bed at 9.30.’

  Or the following weekend:

  Saturday – ‘ Got a letter from Anne. Went to Hatfield. Got earrings and mascara. Deb went to a disco. Liz stayed the night. Saw Upstairs Downstairs in bed.’

  Sunday – ‘Got up at 11. Went to shops. Liz stayed for dinner. Roast lamb, etc. Liz went home at 3.30. Tidied room. Wardrobe too. Listened to the charts. Bed at 9.’

  The diary is incredibly boring, and yet cheerful – there are no confessions of anything, just endless meals, lessons, bedtimes and shopping trips. A few pages where I changed writing style or pen colour, and then an entry – ‘Isn’t this diary getting messy – sorry!!’ – which begs the question, who was I apologising to? Who was all this for? Who is ANY diary for? Such a catalogue of the humdrum, it would eventually mutate into a seething stew of truth and lies, revelation and concealment. In later years I would lie about what I was feeling, and one memorable day, even leave a page entirely blank, unable or unwilling to find words for what had happened.

  Part of the problem was that I wasn’t convinced my diary was private, and had every reason to suspect that my mum would read it whenever possible. One day she’d made a casual remark about regretting having had kids, and I wrote a dramatic letter to a friend saying that this revelation had made me consider suicide, which wasn’t true in any real sense at all, but Mum found the unsealed letter on my bed, read it and confronted me. So I didn’t confide entirely to my diary, as I couldn’t be sure who I was telling – although a psychologist might have something to say about all of this. The unsealed letter, for instance. Why did I leave it like that, lying on my bed? Why didn’t I hide my diary properly? Why was I sometimes honest and sometimes not? You might think I was telling her certain things, hiding others. Testing limits. Sounding out a response.

  In my 1970s commuter village, I never heard the word ‘class’ used, and yet we all knew what it was, and everyone knew where they stood in the pecking order. Even for such a tiny place, there was a right and a wrong end of town. No one was truly posh because they hadn’t been there long enough, and if being upper-class is a matter of history, ancestry and inheritance – property that’s been passed down, land that has been owned for generations – then no one in Brookmans Park could claim that. There were bigger houses, but they were all as new as each other, and even the detached ones with gravel drives and wide gardens looked unmistakably suburban.

  If there was no upper class, there was no real working class either – there were no factories, no mines, no farms, no heavy industry. But this is not to say there was no hierarchy, and no looking down on people. Looking down on people was a favourite hobby, and the word used was ‘common’. My mum called people common, even though when she spoke on the phone to her own mother her accent would slip a few notches, back to where it originated in a Kentish Town terrace.

  In our house, being common seemed to be both about class and about other things. My friend S’s mum dyed her hair bright yellow and wore a mini dress with a chain belt, and she was common. Her husband had a grown-out duck’s-arse hairdo and wore chunky jewellery, and he was common too. Swearing was common, too much make-up was common, sex was common. The word described vulgarity as much as class, and a terror of being infected by that vulgarity. People who were common were not trying hard enough.

  When I left home, and met more worldly middle-class people, I realised that being called Tracey, and saying lounge and serviette and settee, meant that, whatever my mum thought, I may as well have had the word COMMON branded on my forehead. Throughout the 1980s the names ‘Sharon’ and ‘Tracey’ were the ubiquitous markers of working-class womanhood. In their choice of my name, my parents had blundered horribly, any Sharons and Traceys being the ‘chavs’ or Essex girls of their day. And yet what was I really? I wasn’t a chav, despite my name, and yet I felt different from people I met at university, who were posher, or urban, or rural. And it wasn’t easy to be defiant and proud about the difference. For I wasn’t working class. I was suburban; a bit semi-detached. Almost a class of its own. Privileged in many ways, yes, but also sometimes scorned.

  Along with the dislike of vulgarity, went a distrust of what was called ‘showing off’. Particularly disagreeable in children, it was not welcomed in adults either, and included any kind of assertiveness, individualism, eccentricity. What should be aimed for was anonymity, not drawing attention to yourself, in the hope that such quietness would be quietly acknowledged and rewarded. These were properly suburban values. Abstinence and piety defined the suburb – Robert Gaussen, the owner of the original Brookmans estate, was a supporter of the temperance movement in the mid-nineteenth century, and the Band of Hope would march from the church to the mansion for tea in a marquee – in sharp contrast to the sinful city, which was still regarded when I was a teenager as a place full of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

  Being in a band was probably showing off, I think now. I did a little bit of drama as a child, and acted in a primary school play, but it was all at a low enough level to be simply child-like and charming. Buying a guitar later on, and starting to sing, was much more demonstrative and self-aggrandising, and perhaps it’s no wonder that I always had trouble with summoning up the required self-confidence and assertiveness. Always in the back of my head was a voice telling me to stop showing off. Don’t make a spectacle. Put that drink down. Shhhh.

  But I wonder sometimes, what difference does it make growing up in an environment where you are not told to be quiet and stop showing off? It’s often written that Bjork grew up on a commune, moving there with her activist mother after her parents split up. Bjork herself has said, in an interview on a French fan website (bjork.fr) ‘I was the only child there, and they all had long hair . . . If I thought I had something to say, people would listen to me. And people would play me records that they were listening to, and explain them to me.’ At the age of six she was studying piano and flute at school, and after singing on Iceland’s only radio station, she was offered a recording contract and released her first album, aged twelve.

  I’ve seen footage of her performing onstage with her band Tappi Tikarrass, still aged only seventeen, and before forming the Sugarcubes, but already full of ener
gy, confidence and style. An untrammelled performer, expressive, vivid, not afraid to be loud. And I think – is that what growing up in that environment does, where you are listened to and records are played to you? Is it that which liberated her as an artist, or was it in her anyway? Would she have been that person if she’d grown up in Surbiton?

  J.G. Ballard was famous for living in suburbia most of his life, but was considered unusual as an artist for doing so. He lived in a 1930s semi in Shepperton for decades, in a street filled with houses called ‘Laurel View’ and ‘Ivy Dene’, and claimed that he valued the insight it afforded him into middle-class English life. But the continuing surprise at Ballard’s decision to remain in suburbia reveals how we can’t quite believe in it as an appropriate setting for anyone creative. Artists are meant to cluster together in the city or seek complete isolation. The properly rural – a croft in the Orkneys, a cottage on a hillside – is gritty in its own green way, while the properly urban – a loft, a garret – is avant-garde and exciting. Those in between, who live in clusters of modest homes, bigger than villages but smaller than towns, are looked down upon. We don’t like to admit to coming from suburbia. It’s a place you’re supposed to want to run away from.

  And yet it constantly gives birth to people who stretch and break these constraints. David Bowie may have been born in Brixton, but when he was seven his family moved to Bromley in Kent. An old market town since the twelfth century, it had been swallowed up by London’s expansion in the twentieth century, and became an example of that type of suburb. Only nine miles from Charing Cross and part of Greater London, which was more townie than where I grew up and yet still not truly metropolitan – separate from the centre yet close enough for those who lived there to have their noses pressed up against the glass of London’s windows.