— 1982 —
They were not railway children to begin with
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children
My family looked happy enough. From a distance, or from the photos. We lived in an ordinary suburban house, a bit like the one in which Nesbit’s railway children begin their lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Ours was a bit smaller. Inside, there was a big square hall with an emerald green tiled fireplace, and a kitchen with a glass-fronted dresser and an archaic bell system that no longer worked. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a mock balcony, accessible from the main bedroom or by climbing out of a side window, where you could sit on the slatted wooden floor and smoke Camel Lights. We even had French windows, like Nesbit’s children, which hooked back so that you could walk onto a crazily paved patio. The garden was long. It had a gate leading onto the local woods. There were hydrangea bushes and a rockery in the garden. An unsteady sundial with an iron pointer that you could lift up to ambush a colony of ants running in frenzied circles. A gently rotting greenhouse, in which we used to store old furniture. It was a quiet road, the silence broken by the sound of the Tube making its way down the end of the Northern Line, or our next-door neighbour trying to kill squirrels with his air rifle. The house is my earliest memory. The front door in particular.
I remember walking down the path, looking at its pale blue wood (later painted yellow) and jewel-like panels of coloured glass – blue, green and red teardrops against a grid of lead. There were row after row of houses like this in our neighbourhood, all with their own individual take on topiary or pampas grass. Our road was one of the many suburban semi developments of early twentieth-century Metroland, the place with elastic borders, no beginning and no clear end. The architectural critics call these roads joyless. Phoney. A kind of Neverland. Semis like these were, in 1910, bang on trend. Tudorbethan, blackened timber nailed onto the stucco, leadlights in squares or sometimes in diamonds. In the really posh bits of London, architects lovingly built houses along these lines, attempting to capture the idea of human craft in the machine age. The ones in our street were aspirational knock-offs – the rows of pseudo-artisan houses embodied that oddest of ideas: mass-produced individuality. All suburban semis are alike, but each suburban semi is alike in its own way.
Our road was a cul-de-sac. Bag End. Traffic calmed, there was nowhere to go. If you went back the way you came, further up the junction, onto the main road, there was the North Finchley cinema complex, and Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and the open road to Little Chef. And holidays. The North Circ, and Neasden and David Lloyd Sports Centre and multiplex cinemas. Homebase and B&Q. Smooth and bland. A place that brings with it a sort of atrophy of body and mind, a numbing alikeness. This is what J. G. Ballard called the real England. And with it, he writes, comes a boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.
A century ago, Edith Nesbit had a similar, if less scary, response to Metroland. As a ritual, each evening, she would put aside her drafts of novels and make a series of models of factories and suburban houses out of brown paper. She’d then take them out to her back garden, and set them on fire. It’s little wonder that Nesbit soon has her railway children leave their villa, engineering the plot so that they are forced to take a cottage in the country.
Finchley in Nesbit’s day was an omnibus ride from town, up through Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. A strange mixture of city and countryside, famous for its compost heaps and Barham’s model dairy farm. Visitors on the omnibus would continue through Temple Fortune for their day in the country, on the edge of the city. Overlooking the presence of Simms Motor Units, they would head for the idyll on Regent’s Park Road, where they could view the rows of pedigree Express dairy cows, admire the silver bottle tops and have a scone in the adjoining tearooms. It was a stop-gap. A commuter village. From Tally Ho Corner, you could take the omnibus direct to Marylebone, or pick up the train on a cross route from Finsbury Park to Edgware. But Finchley didn’t join the London Underground for years. Perhaps it makes sense that the man who designed the Tube map was off the map, at least when he first drew it. When he died, nobody even knew it was his idea. Harry Beck lived just around the corner from me – a dweller in nowhere.
Nowadays, Finchley still feels more to me like a place to pass through than a destination. A few months ago, I took a journey down the road to my old house, rounding the corner past West Avenue and Lovers Walk. Everything seemed wider and larger than I recalled, but the quality of silence was still the same. The houses are the same mixture of the dark red of the late eighties and the determined solidity of 1930s mansion flats. I walked along the undulating road, past Chestnut Row with its pollarded trees. The house at the corner of my road has been converted to a care home. Shielded by a high fence, only parts of it are visible from the street. A burgundy awning perches above its door, desperately trying to create the effect of hotel luxury. The strange combination of porticos and extensions and satellite dishes make it feel as if it is about to fall into the road.
Ahead to the left is Lovers Walk, the shortcut up to Ballards Lane. Not much in the way of love ever happened to me there. The closest I came was being flashed at while walking back from Tesco. My road bends to the right, down a shallow hill. It seems much the same. The same green-gated park on the left-hand side. I remember the overwhelming shades of green – conifers – and the slow descent of the road down to the bottom where our house stood, still marked by the leafless silver birch, with its white trunk and electrocuted shock of narrow branches. The road was still quiet, apart from the banging of some builders a few doors up.
There was an ache about the house that I couldn’t put into words but which I remembered from before. Growing up, I understood that our house was steeped in compromise. It was not quite a mistake but felt a place in which we could never truly settle. Every few months, an outing with an estate agent acted as a peculiarly ineffective kind of family therapy. We trooped around other houses, further down the Northern Line, nearer to town. They smelled of polish or mice, or a different kind of pain. But the houses we saw, the ones without net curtains and stucco, were unaffordable. Window shopping over, we were stuck.
Sometimes there were arguments. Quiet arguments. Voices never raised. Tension about money, I think. Holidays. A particularly vivid un-shouting match seemed to be about what shade of beige we should paint the front room, but probably wasn’t. Mostly there was just a sense of things unsaid. My father insisted on long journeys to National Trust stately homes, and I threw up in the back seat.
Once, at the end of one weekend, something happened. Someone was not able to talk. Someone else was angry. The contents of a coffee cup were poured around the kitchen table, like a bizarre midsummer rite. We were packed into the car with suitcases. We drove to my friend’s house where we arrived without warning and were awkwardly made lunch. Our suitcases remained in the hall. When we returned home and walked back into our kitchen, accomplices of this short, failed separation, my father was still standing in front of the square window above the draining board, staring at the revolving washing line and fiddling with the silver tankard full of screwdrivers, as if he’d been there all day. The magic coffee circle had been cleaned up. I watched the raindrops make their way down the glass, breaking off and then joining one another, like companionable tears. Then I went outside and played with the tap, pressing my hand against the pattern of small shiny stones embedded in concrete until it hurt. Nobody felt at home, and there was no hope of anyone going anywhere.
My father was invisibly sick. We all knew he was sick, but I didn’t fully understand why or how or where. Sometimes he was at work, leaving every morning in a suit with a briefcase to do things that had something to do with the Government. Sometimes he left a little later, with a vinyl suitcase packed with pale blue pyjamas, and then he was going to the Big Hospital, and didn’t come back for a while. Once he was there for a very long time. We visited. The Big Hospital corridors unfurled like a medical version of Oz, rising and falling as we walked. Everything smelled of oranges and Pine Harpic. I was allowed to buy a Beatrix Potter cookery book and a stained-glass colouring book on the way home. Then my aunt arrived with a neat collection of bags and a bright smile and made marmalade.
When my father finally came home, he spent a long time upstairs in bed and there was a differently strange smell in the bedroom. His left leg was marked with two shiny ovals, bigger than my mother’s hand. It looked as if someone had drawn on him with a stencil and then polished his skin like an albino dining table. First the oval was surrounded by ugly black threads with little knots on them. Then these disappeared, leaving a border of pale mauve marks and ridges.
He spent the weekends avoiding the inside of the house. Leaning on the hall windowsill, I could see his corduroy trousers sticking out from under the car, against a background of various greens – the sickly privet and spotted laurel over the road, the bitter green box hedge next door, and the grey-green lamp post rising behind him. The scene, as I looked out, was contained by the neat grid of lead, like a picture in a maths symmetry book. Our garden was filled with his temporary structures. A broken caravan. A homemade treehouse. A lean-to for the mower. Half a green Renault sat on the drive, plundered for parts. I keep this world in the few photographs I have, a dozen round-cornered prints of birthday teas and Christmas trees. I remember it too, in reverse, in the memory of negatives I used to find in boxes. I loved pulling them out of their little pockets in strips, wondering at the inverted world they gave me. The childhood face of my past is pale umber, my pupils translucent, my hair almost black. It is in this looking-glass memory that I get closer to the moment of the taking.
At teatime he came in, washing his hands with green Swarfega, before watching the wrestling and the Grand Prix. One of the wrestlers was called Big Daddy, which made me think he might be something to do with God and forgiving our trespasses as we forgive those, but my father told me that his real name was Shirley. Shirley wore an enormous pair of blue and white striped stretch dungarees. He bounced off the ropes and straight into Giant Haystacks. At some point Haystacks bounced up and down on Shirley’s stomach and the bell rang. Someone quietly turned the thermostat up.
All houses have their own climate, their own smell, their own temperature and particular ecosystem of air currents and creaks. They all have that specific combination of humid or fetid, of warm or cold that depends on the kind of central heating system you have or do not have, or whether or not the window in the bathroom is open. Smells and sounds can be put into words. Ours had a scent of McVitie’s digestive biscuits and furniture polish about it, with a sad hint of hamster in the back living room. A ticking sound as the central heating system turned on and clanged through the pipework. But atmospheres are speechless. When we say that a house has ‘an atmosphere’ it is as if the sentence has given up hope of explaining itself. Atmospheres exist somewhere between sound and silence, and in the pitch and cadences of voices. In a house with an atmosphere, it is as if someone has imperceptibly turned the volume down, and flattened every voice. When there is an atmosphere in a house, a question is answered with silence, or in the way a head is moved just an inch away from centre when someone speaks, so that there’s space for a roll of the eyes. The television, of course, is the friend of the atmosphere. In periods where the difficulties of shared space and time have felt too much, the television, eternullity in a box, gives the bodies within the family permission to stare forwards, like communicants at an altar.
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 allotments, 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.