Another Planet Read online

  From that suburban setting sprang his iconoclasm, his rule-breaking, perhaps proving that commonly held belief that growing up in a conservative environment is inspiring, giving the artistic type something to kick against, a reason to rebel. Following in Bowie’s footsteps in the mid-’70s were a group of his fans who became known as ‘the Bromley Contingent’, and who are often thought of as the first true punks. Made up of characters like Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, Jordan, Soo Catwoman, Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O’Keefe, they were the ones who confronted Bill Grundy with the Sex Pistols on TV in 1976, and who were arrested after the famous Malcolm McLaren-organised boat trip down the Thames during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. They were the ones who worked in Seditionaries, and whose pictures appeared in the press. I try to imagine them now, setting out for an evening in town, first having to leave their homes in those quiet, conventional streets. Did they get on the bus dressed like that? With their dramatic cat’s-eye make-up, hair sculpted into spikes and wings, wearing dog collars and fishnets, Siouxsie black-lipsticked and bare-breasted? It would have taken guts to walk around Soho looking like that, but Bromley?

  In Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, Siouxsie is quoted describing the place. ‘I hated Bromley. I thought it was small and narrow-minded. There was this trendy wine bar called Pips, and I got Berlin to wear this dog-collar, and I walked in with Berlin following me, and people’s jaws just hit the tables. I walked in and ordered a bowl of water for him, I got the bowl of water for my dog. People were scared!’ Picture it. Going out for the evening, down to the trendy wine bar. Leaving the house, closing the front door behind you, stilettos clacking on the paved path, lifting the latch on a gate. Setting out into the suburban street, shutting the suburban gate of the suburban garden.

  Those gardens were all the same, and ours was typical – a small front lawn, surrounded by flowerbeds full of peach and yellow roses, separated from the pavement by a low, crenellated brick wall, that little hint of the Englishman’s castle. Our back garden was long and narrow, mostly lawn, and was where we played badminton, or put up a tent in the summer, as if the actual outdoors was too much. We’d sit sweating inside it, drinking orange squash and getting hayfever from the cut grass. Next door, Gladys grew flowers for the horticultural show – huge, overblown dahlias, bright and velvety, propped up with canes – and given that she was also chair of the local horticultural society, there was some grumbling when she won every cup every year.

  Mum said that Dad gardened like the accountant he was, with everything in neat rows. That sounds rather cutting, but is not as vicious as the comment I once heard, that a neighbour was ‘the kind of person who has too many annuals in the front garden’. Like everything else in this country, gardens reveal your class. There’s a posh English style: shrubby perennials, plants that need staking, and which climb and tumble over canes and pea-sticks, sprawling and spreading with the untidy opulence of the shabby chic country house interior. The plants are the equivalent of worn rugs and inherited furniture, ideally set off by mossy statuary, lichen-encrusted stone urns and terracotta pots. Nowadays there’s a new urban minimalist vernacular too – steel planters, bamboo, wooden screens, rectangular pools, pebbles – a low-maintenance, faux-Japanese style.

  But our garden was a typical example of mid-twentieth-century suburban taste. Not terracotta but practical plastic containers, half-barrels and hanging baskets; a kidney-shaped goldfish pond; a small row of two-foot-high conifers in a bed outside the kitchen window; a whirligig clothes drier on a crazy-paving patio; a waist-high chain link fence between us and next door. Valuing tidiness above naturalness, Dad would mow the lawn as soon as daisies flourished, and then, as Mum pointed out, he would plant things in neat rows. And not necessarily the ‘right’ things. For plants can also be U and non-U. Peonies are quite posh, marigolds not. Wisteria posh, Busy Lizzies not. Alchemilla Mollis? Yes. Pampas Grass? Definitely no. Hostas not rockeries. Clematis not conifers. We loved our garden, but in these terms it was all wrong. Common, and too full of annuals. Who knew.

  1976

  The diary continued, comfortingly routine and uneventful.

  20 February 1976 – ‘Went to St Albans and Hatfield. Got jeans in Dimple, £8.75, and a waistcoat in Tamla.’

  6 March – ‘Did paper round Bluebridge Rd.’

  8 March – ‘Went to Brent Cross after school. It’s lovely!! All indoors. Got a shirt, scarf and a necklace.’ This would have been my first trip there, as it had only just opened.

  27 March – ‘Went to a disco in New Barnet. Cost 35p. It was good. Went with Liz, and Deb and the mob.’

  29 March – ‘Liz’s birthday. Got her some Aqua Manda talc and perfume. Went down the town after school with Deb. Didn’t get anything. Bed at 9.’

  1 April – ‘In registration we hid from Miss M and we turned all our room around for Mrs Evans. Deb put a notice on me – I AM A FOOL. Meanie. Bed at 9. Nannie and Grandad came.’

  3 April – ‘Dad lost Katy over the woods!! Found her though. (Phew!!) Got some jeans. Watched the Euro Song Contest. WE WON!! Hooray. Bed at 11.’

  I would describe what was in my packed lunch, ‘cheese sarnies today’, ‘salmon paste rolls’, and list the meals I made at school, all of them straight from a 1970s magazine. ‘Made hot Swiss trifle in cookery . . . Did a salad in cookery . . . flaky pastry . . . sausage rolls . . . chicken vol au vents . . . Swiss roll . . . bread dough . . . pizza . . . a chocolate log’.

  In the spring I went to visit my friend Deborah, who had moved to Derby.

  15 April – ‘ Went for a walk. In the afternoon we went to see Jaws. YEEUUCCHH!! It was REALLY GRUESOME. Got home at about 5.15. Watched TOTP, Are You Being Served? and The Burke Special. Bed at 9.30.’

  And then there’s what I didn’t say. After seeing Jaws I woke at 1.30 a.m., feeling sick and terrified. Sitting up in bed, staring bleakly into the dark, thinking about the black water, that tug from below, the body in the dunes, that rolling head, or was it just a skull? I wasn’t looking by then. My mind was full of death and mutilation and horror. It was so vivid, such a formative experience, that I remember it clearly, and yet in the diary there was no room for such feelings. Deborah’s Dad had come to comfort me as I was retching in the bathroom. ‘Oh dear,’ he said gently, ‘Jaws-type stomach?’ ‘NO!’ I said, appalled that he’d think I was scared of a silly film. ‘No, I must have eaten something. I just feel sick.’ He wasn’t fooled, but he didn’t push me on it, or tease me, just sympathised. I couldn’t admit being scared to him, or to my diary. If you didn’t talk about things, they weren’t happening. I was only thirteen. but I’d already learned the code.

  Next day, ‘We all went for a drive and had a drink in a pub! TUT TUT!! Bed about 10.’ That ‘TUT TUT’ was something I would often write to myself, sometimes about a late bedtime, sometimes about not doing homework – this time about having an underage drink. Was I judging myself? Or slightly bragging? Oooh, you naughty girl.

  18 May – ‘Did high jump at school, I could only do 1.15m TUT TUT.’

  19 May – ‘Bed at half past 10 TUT TUT.’ Such mundanity, and then I didn’t properly describe the things that did happen, like the first time I got off with a boy. It’s there, but it’s so brief you could miss it if you didn’t know it was a first snog. In every way, there was no room to talk in detail, so all my diary entry says is, ‘Went to Stanborough for the day. Went to the disco with Deb in the evening. Got off with Gary !!!!!??**!!! Deborah got off with Bill. Snigger. Bed at about 12.30. Tut Tut.’

  It was my Summer of Disco, and it began in May when I started going to the Brookmans Park Hotel, where a disco took place every Saturday and Monday night. I would often go twice a week, with a friend or with my cousin Marion. Punk was happening, but not yet for me, and not here, so instead we danced to soul records – ‘For Once In My Life’ by Stevie Wonder, ‘Get Up Offa That Thing’ by James Brown, ‘Get Dancin’’ by Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, although the whol
e point of the night was the moment when the DJ slowed things down and the dance floor would empty, girls to one side, boys to another, and we’d wait, staring at the floor or resolutely over the shoulder of any boy who might seem to be approaching, until one would mutter, ‘Wanna dance?’, without ever making eye contact, and we’d head back out for a slow dance. Hands on his shoulders to keep him at arms length if I wasn’t sure, or clasped behind his neck if I was keener. And his hands would be on the back of my waist, or resting on my hips, or they’d slide down, and later I’d write ‘WHT’ in my diary, for ‘Wandering Hand Trouble’.

  31 May – ‘Went to disco. Danced with this bloke who was about 6 foot 5.’

  The slow songs were always the same. ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago, ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10cc, ‘Without You’ by Nilsson, and my favourite, ‘Misty Blue’ by Dorothy Moore. And I was only thirteen, but the boys were older, always older.

  24 July – ‘ Creep asked me to dance again but I said no – found out he is called Tim and is a policeman! Yikes!!’

  I was thirteen, and he was a policeman. I keep thinking about what this means, and what it says about the time and the place. I picture myself, and I look like one of those girls in the Top of the Pops audiences, grinning at the camera, caught in the too-close embrace of an over-familiar DJ. I had shoulder-length hair, parted in the centre and with a fringe pushed back in wings that flicked out to either side of my forehead. The next layer of hair fell to the side of my head like spaniel’s ears. I wore an A-line, knee-length denim skirt, with side pockets, and a wide, three-buttoned waistband, circled by a thin plastic belt. A peach-coloured T-shirt with a white collar, and on the front a print of a 1920s-style bob-haired beauty, like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. On my feet, a pair of denim sandals, rope soled, each foot bearing an appliqué butterfly. I was slim, but self-conscious; I was trying hard, but felt plain. Did I look thirteen, or even fourteen? I suspect that, to the men and boys I met, I just looked like a bird. Fair game. All the same.

  31 July – ‘Danced with boy I really fancied – blond hair, collarless shirt, really nice looking.’

  Sometimes the boys would say, ‘D’you want to go outside?’, which was code for a snog. I was slow-dancing with Gary when he said this. We went outside to the car park, where the air was immediately colder, and there was a patch of green between the hotel and the road to the station. He was dressed in a wide-collared shirt and tie, looking like one of the lads in Gregory’s Girl. And we snogged and snogged while I kept my elbows pinned to my side, trying to stop him getting anywhere near my bra.

  18 September – ‘Went to disco. It was really good. Got off with Gary again. Got home about 11.15.’

  19 September – ‘Saw Gary in his car, it’s a dark green Cortina with 2 yellow stripes down the side.’

  I put the registration number in my diary too. I was nothing if not a stickler for detail. But the detail that screams at me now, though it apparently was not worthy of comment at the time, is the fact that he must have been at least seventeen. I’ve always complained bitterly about how strict my parents were, and yet that summer they didn’t seem to have any idea what I was up to. Did the boys at the disco notice how young I was, or was everyone playing with fire, all the time? In every other aspect of my life, I was a child. Aside from the disco, my hobbies were walking the dog, playing badminton and piano lessons. I had a paper round. In September my periods started, and I circled the day in black in my diary.

  25 September – ‘Went to the disco. Saw Gary but he didn’t ask me to dance. SOB.’

  The next day I turned fourteen. I think of myself wandering off out into the dark with this older boy who I didn’t know at all, with his tie and his car, trying to look like a man. It seems weird, and somehow worse than thirteen-year-olds getting off with other thirteen-year-olds behind the bike sheds. More curious than confident, I had boundaries but no idea how to police them. I didn’t know I was still a child, and the boys didn’t care either way.

  23 October – ‘Went to the disco with Marion. Got off with Rod. Marion got off with his mate Martin. They both asked us out but we said no!!’

  30 October – ‘Went to the disco with Marion. Danced with this mad bloke who thought I was a secretary.’

  The atmosphere of the disco – all mirrorball and Long Cool Screws and ‘Get On Up’ – conferred upon us all a kind of faux adulthood. The bar served us drinks, the boys asked us out.

  6 November – ‘Went to disco with Marion. Danced with two blokes – one grotty, second one, not bad at all!!!’

  13 November – ‘Went to the disco with Liz. I danced with John. Talk about WHT!’

  In my diary it was all a joke. Nothing was real. September the 7th was my first day back at school, a new school year, and my periods started that morning, though I didn’t say so. There’s just the BLACK circle, when the rest of the diary is written in blue. I must have had to go and find a black pen. But all I wrote, in blue, was this: ‘Back to school. Mrs Myers is our new form teacher. She’s really nice – but MAD!! Had double science. Saw Spring and Autumn. Bed at about 9.’

  Bed, wearing the uncomfortable belt and sanitary towel arrangement that Mum had given me. She didn’t talk to me about periods, having described them to my sister Debbie a couple of years earlier, and presumably feeling that it was Debbie’s responsibility, being two years older than me, to pass the information on. It would be a while before I found out about convenient stick-on Kotex pads, and even longer before I dared to go anywhere near a tampon. The first time I tried, with no help or instruction, it got stuck, and I spent an excruciating hour in the bathroom trying to remove it, fearing that I had removed essential parts of my insides along with it.

  Mum never explained sex to me either. One day when I was off school sick, she gave me a book to read, full of information about puberty and chromosomes and intercourse. Words no one ever used. She left it with me for the day, and I glanced at it, curious, puzzled, embarrassed, and later she simply said, ‘What did you make of it all? Pretty complicated isn’t it, hahaha.’ So we lived in an atmosphere where sex was invisible and ever-present, girls were both ignorant and fair game, there were rules and no rules, and everything was a joke. The day after my periods started, ‘ I watched Carry On Up the Khyber.’

  I think of the 1970s, and I think of children playing grown-up games. ‘ Me and Deb got followed home by 2 cheeky fellas! Saw George and Mildred. Bed at 10.’ The emotions in my diary are stylised, infantile, and yet I was on the cusp of something I knew nothing about.

  11 September – ‘ In a mood cos Liz wasn’t allowed to disco and we said we’d see GT there. I’m really FURIOUS and also BLUE. Bed at about 10.30. Sob sob . . .’

  There’s a drawing of an eye, with teardrops falling from it. Which could be used in all sorts of circumstances. A week or so later, on the 20th of September: ‘Had double cookery – made plum jam. Feeling fed up. 6 days till my birthday.’ Again, the crying eye. I think I liked drawing it. And on the 25th: ‘ Went to the disco – saw Gary but he didn’t ask me to dance SOB. [crying eye] Feeling BLUE. Bed at about 11.30.’

  Next day was my fourteenth birthday. ‘Got 2 LPs and 2 singles – Beach Boys, Eagles, Can, Jefferson Starship.’ And the year ended just as it began, with nothing happening. Or should I say, the next year started just the same. For here we are, heading into 1977, January the 1st, and what did I write in my diary? ‘Went to Welwyn again but couldn’t get any boots.’

  On a day towards the end of summer, in September 2017, I went on a walk with my sister Debbie, around the outskirts of Brookmans Park, to try to find out whether or not the Green Belt felt like countryside. I had realised that the fields and lanes and woods around the village were largely a mystery to me; that I had played on the fringes of them as a child but never walked there as an adult, and had no sense of whether it was at all rural, or whether it was merely an approximation of nature, a scaled-down, tamed version, something a very long way from those wild places be
loved of nature writers.

  In his book Scarp, the writer Nick Papadimitriou describes the area thus: ‘A vast yet seemingly invisible presence hovers over the northern suburbs of London. Screened from the consciousness of the city dweller by the pressure of the day-to-day . . . the North Middlesex/ South Hertfordshire escarpment – or Scarp as I prefer to call it – broods and waits.’ He goes on to say that ‘Despite being some seventeen miles from east to west and attaining in excess of 400 feet above sea level in places, Scarp is seldom commented upon by either topographers or psychogeographers, and seemingly possesses no cultural currency.’

  On the map at the front of his book are shaded areas that show where the land elevation is over 400 feet. There’s a ridge to the west of Brookmans Park, reaching up towards North Mymms, and then another to the north-east of the village, stretching from the point on the Great North Road where the transmitting station is located, all the way to Newgate Street. It was a starting point at least, giving me a little germ of an idea: to see whether I could find any wild terrain, any landscape that felt other than suburban.

  Debbie had come up to stay the night before, bringing her teenage diaries with her, and we’d sat up talking about them, and about her own memories of our family and of the village. Not as punctilious a diary-keeper as me, she had only three from her teens, and they all petered out halfway through the year. But still, they recorded a young version of me – aged eleven and pre-dating my own diaries – happily playing tennis every day, oblivious as yet to the sense that there was anything stifling about my surroundings. In her later teens though, many of her entries described dramas similar to those that appeared in mine: the same mood swings, the same rumbling discontent, the same need to break out.