The_Tyranny_of_Lost

Photographs

Job lot miscellaneous photographs, subjects unknown (majority feature a man, c.35 years, Caucasian, shoulder-length dark hair, beard, and a woman, also Caucasian, c.20 years, waist-length dark hair, though several unposed group shots also included featuring persons unknown), colour (Kodak instamatic film), black and white (Ilford 35mm HP5 plus 400, taken using Nikon EM SLR). Taken circa late 1970s-early 1980s.

I suppose she was right; I do look like my mother. In my favourite picture of Stella, she is in her mid-twenties and standing on the street. She’s wearing high-waisted drainpipe jeans, probably black, although it’s hard to tell in greyscale. Her hair is long and unstyled, thick. Black and white striped waistcoat, leather jacket, boots, cigarette. A slight smile that shows on only half her face. Huge eyes rimmed with black eyeliner. She looks beautiful in this photograph; all the best parts of me and none of the worst. While I am blonde and washed-out, less vivid, she is dark, unreadable. In the background, you are just able to glimpse the house.

‘Your mother was a trophy wife,’ my father said once. A strange thing for a self-confessed male feminist to say, and about a woman who, when she was up, was so much more than the most beautiful woman in the room. She was the only one who you wanted to talk to: charming, and quick to laugh, with a self-taught intelligence. At these times, she was barely recognisable as the red-eyed, dirty-haired wild woman at home who periodically gobbled up my mother. She would wear her sadness so lightly that the only hint of it was manifested in a deep and encouraging sympathy. I’ve seen her do it. Some stranger will tell her all his sorrows and her hand will grasp his arm as her eyes widen and fill with tears at whatever misfortune has befallen him. I don’t mean to imply that this is by design: it’s authentic. It’s just that at the same time she’s already plaiting the strands together to create the story. She’s addicted to stories, my mother, and she loves to tell them. When she does, she captivates. It’s one of the things my father fell in love with. ‘She was so young,’ he said, of the schoolgirl he had taken from her parents. ‘But she was full of all these tales.’

In the photograph, he’s standing next to her, offsetting her smile with a brooding expression. Despite it being the mid-eighties, he is still wearing flares; corduroy, from the look of it. You cannot tell from the picture but I know that they were lime green; my mother told me, laughing, how embarrassed she was. Everyone else had moved onto punk by then, and there he is, his hair far gone past the point of touching his collar as a delayed rebellion against his schoolmasters, and a collarless shirt accessorised with a ridiculously long hand-knitted Doctor Who scarf, knitted for him by Stella. I used to love that scarf, scratchy and moth-eaten though it was. When I wound its knitted stripes around me, it would almost conceal my entire body, and I would roam about the house with my arms out in front of me, a stripy scarf mummy.

I was five when Stella decided that the conventional family life that she had tried to build with Bryn on leaving the commune was intolerable, and she and I went back to Longhope less than a year after having left. I remember standing alone in the checkered hallway surrounded by boxes, as she sought out her old friends somewhere in the depths of the house. She had had enough of living the hippy countryside dream, she told me later. ‘You can’t imagine the boredom, darling,’ she said. ‘There we were, way up in this isolated cottage on this mountainside, miles from anywhere. I had to get out before one of us did a murder–suicide.’

The night my mother left him, she told me that she made him the most beautiful salad. She had been supposed to prepare a meal for both of them, but she was alive with a calm hungerless anger and so only laid out one plate. Then she set about carefully arranging the ingredients; the grilled courgettes in concentric circles, dotted with perfectly symmetrical slices of tomato and perfect little new potatoes. Asparagus positioned to form a star, and the centrepiece: a flower formed of slices of boiled egg. ‘Your dinner is ready,’ she had said to him, and she had walked out of the room and out of the door, putting me and our stuff into the old yellow Datsun and driving four hundred miles back down to London, blasting Elvis Costello and the Attractions all the way and smoking roll-ups out of the window. In a final act of defiance against years of imposed vegetarianism, we stopped at Wimpy for a burger.

I once asked her what the catalyst had been, and as was typical of her she said that she didn’t really know, only that the fact of the perfect salad seemed to her an affront. Her guilty desire to furnish my father with this perfectly ordered, balanced meal was so reminiscent of the life that she had tried to escape that she felt she had no choice but to flee immediately. ‘Everything I didn’t want was on that plate in front of me,’ she said. ‘So I gave it to him, like a good wife, and then I scarpered.’

This was the first of many road trips we took together; Stella was never able to stay settled for long. Throughout my childhood, usually during a manic upsweep, she would come across someplace and become convinced that this was it, this was where real life would begin for both of us, and she would truly believe it, even though there was often a man waiting conveniently in the wings.

‘We’ll grow vegetables!’ she would declare, as we stood on the edge of an overgrown patch of land that, having discerned a wonky ‘for sale’ sign in the rear-view mirror, she had pulled over to examine. ‘We shall open a farm shop!’

Another time: ‘I will establish a studio that restores antique furniture, and we shall become rich because wealthy people with taste will come to buy it from miles around.’

And another: ‘It may look decrepit to you, but soon this will be transformed into a highly desirable relaxation and yoga retreat.’

She was always full of these schemes: a health food shop, an art gallery, a community theatre. My childhood is littered with discarded grand plans, and though the failure of them would always hit her hard, their inception was part of what made her fun. As I grew older, I began to recognise the symptoms of her restlessness purely from noticing a certain look in her eye, and though it would frighten me (usually I would have just settled at school, or made friends, established a routine), her enthusiasm was catching. That’s the thing about Stella – she is capricious, unstable and deeply unreliable, but she also has a charm that you see rarely in life. If you were a stranger lucky enough to meet her, she would make you feel privileged by the very fact that she was drawing you into the story of her life. There was little concession made to the truth, granted; it was always the telling of it that mattered. If you let her wrap you up in all her twists and turns, it can feel almost like love.

Though I can barely remember the journey back to London, I do recall finally arriving and staring up at the imposing staircase in our new (old) home. The ceiling seemed to stretch for miles above my head. Suspended from it was a grubby chandelier that hinted, jarringly, at one of the place’s many past lives as a home for wealthy Victorians. The doors and windows were thrown open, as they so often were, and the breeze caused it to swing back and forth in ways that were not entirely unthreatening. Such a theatrical centrepiece didn’t exactly fit amongst the Indian batik wall hangings, the strong cooking smells and the spider plants whose dust-covered leaves my mother would wash on Sundays with soapy water. The place felt enormous, too big even for the eleven adults, two teenagers and four cats living there at the time.

At the rear of the hallway there was a large kitchen that smelled perpetually of curry. This was where the adults would congregate and cook while the teenagers, both dropouts from the local comprehensive and living at the top of the house, would blast out jungle music from the attic. Fleur, an exercise in heroin chic and the girlfriend of Rufus, who headed the DJ collective and was the only guy I’d seen in real life with high top fade hair. He didn’t seem to mind the fact that she lived with her parents – not just her parents, but also her mum’s new boyfriend and her dad’s new girlfriend. Then again, they both spent most of the time stoned. As a five-year-old I was unaware of the complex sexual dynamics in the house, or even who belonged to whom, just as I couldn’t really understand what my daddy had done that was so terrible we had had to go away and leave him in the countryside. My memories of that time are mottled, and it’s difficult to know which parts I can actually recall and which are the consequence of years’ worth of family legends, fictions that have built up like limescale, no longer brittle enough to be scraped away.

It was a sweltering summer in 1991, not dissimilar to the one I would spend at Longhope twenty years later. I spent most of the time in the garden, either alone or with one of the many other children who passed through for varying periods of time dependent on how long one, or sometimes both, of their parents were sleeping with one of the inhabitants. Together, we would rough and tumble in the wildflowers, carefully avoiding the sharp points of rusted metal protruding underneath, as the sound of reggae played through one of the many windows thrown open to let in precious gusts of cool air to the surrounding houses. It was a happy time. Though I remember seeing my mother – who had taken to her room – very little, and my father not at all, I was always surrounded by people and lavished with attention by the other adults. The strangeness of the situation became clear only later.

The house was a hippy experiment. The ghost of the sixties lived on for that generation, and communal living was as much a political act, a utopian ideal, as it was an affordable form of housing. That part of North London had paid host to the squatters’ movement of the seventies, and many of the inhabitants had lived there since then, though by this point the council had got canny to the potential of its Victorian housing stock and was renting such houses out via housing associations for a few pounds a week. Children were just a matter-of-fact part of the community, the natural consequence of all that free love, and we were largely left to our own devices. Mum spent a lot of her time upstairs in the big bedroom, crying and smoking while lying on the double mattress on the floor, listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue and occasionally throwing a picture frame against the wall.

Most of our boxes and suitcases remained unpacked, but I have a vivid memory of the excitement I felt when one evening, after several glasses of red wine, Stella one-handedly opened a trunk to reveal a dressing-up box of treats that I had never seen before. ‘I put these all away when I met your dad,’ she told me. ‘He didn’t like them.’ Lying within were layers and layers of brightly coloured silk and chiffon, taffeta and velvet. Cocktail dresses of all styles and moods, bought by eager parents for their teenage sweetheart in preparation for her attendance at suburban parties and dances, receptions and the theatre, events at which she would chat politely with the sons of doctors and lawyers, her laugh a murmur as she brushed dust from the shoulders of their fathers’ borrowed suits. How disappointed they were when she ran off, instead, with a much older waster who had been speeding for six weeks. How bitterly they regretted allowing their teenage daughter to go on that march.

That evening, we tried the dresses on and laughed and twirled to the music of the record player on the floor. It felt wonderful, as though she was giving me access to a secret world of girlhood that I barely understood, a girlhood which she had cast away like an unwanted coat and was now regretting. I believe now that she was having some kind of breakdown, the first of many ‘difficult periods’ that would come to define my adolescence. For days after this joyful ritual I would come upstairs, muddy from the garden, and find my mother sitting on the mattress on which we both slept, staring at the wall in full cocktail regalia. Sometimes, when she felt better she took me to one of the big paddling pools in the city’s parks. When I look back on that summer now, I see mainly bright squares of blue, and little white feet refracted, as though not my own.

The area has changed beyond all recognition now. In the mid-eighties, despite the fact that it was rapidly gaining a reputation as an enclave for the North London intelligentsia, Longhope’s part of town was still generally regarded as a run-down shithole, somewhere you’d come to buy a gun. The rents were cheap, the houses crumbling, and the locals mainly of Irish descent. I remember little of the high street aside from a Post Office, an Indian restaurant and a junk shop, dirty brickwork rendered even darker by the fact of being in the shade of the incongruous Archway tower, a building that everyone local hated without exception. In the tower was the dole office, where at least half of my new adult housemates would go to sign on, some still clad in the splattered painter’s overalls they had been wearing on the job (you could always lie and tell them you were an artist taking a break from your latest abstract masterpiece).

The change was slow, but inevitable. Even in 2011, the year I came back, the area remained stubbornly grotty, though the houses were already worth millions. The five chicken shops were defiantly holding on in the face of rising rents and the buildings, especially around the main road, were covered in a thick layer of hardened exhaust fumes, bricks the colour of soot and ghost signs long faded.

said one such sign, which you could just make out. Another: ‘CATERING FOR BEANFEASTS’. But by far my favourite was the yellow, smiling sun on the side of a house at the top of Hargrave Park, now almost vanished but in my childhood brighter, not long painted. ‘ATOMIC POWER/NO THANK YOU’ it read, and I would often ask whichever adult had been granted custody of me for the afternoon to take a detour home so that we could go and see it. I found out years later that it had been painted in the middle of the night sometime in 1976 by a squatter in the grip of a mushroom-induced vision.

By 2011, the council had long sold off its dilapidated Victorian albatrosses and almost all were either privately owned town houses or had been turned into flats, like our house, but the area still clung to its soul. No longer did the pubs do a whip around for the IRA at closing time, but you’d still hear Irish voices in the street and in the shops. These days, I hear the place is unrecognisable. The pubs, all of which have long ‘gone gastro’, are full of children. There’s an artisan bakery and a pretentious gift shop. The French have moved in, with their patisseries and their nurseries, and many of the houses are now houses again, homes to Parisian BoBos on the run from Hollande’s taxes. Such is London’s property cycle.

But the year I returned, that corner of North London was the only place where I wanted to be. There I was, in 2011, pink-haired and pissed off, trying to rediscover the strange, lost, summer I was five, that I suspected marked the point where it had all gone wrong and my parents buried their secrets. Five is a strange age for making memories. Some recollections are lurid in their vigour, others slippery. I suppose, in my adolescent way, by going back I was trying to claim some part of myself as my own, and not theirs. They had put so much of themselves in me that I wasn’t sure what would be left after I tore up their legacy, because how do you rebel when your so-called bohemian parents have already taken all the drugs and slept with all the people? When they’ve excused themselves from the mainstream, turned their backs on an orderly existence in favour of self-rule? I suppose you become a doctor or an accountant and, worst of all in their eyes, are happy living that kind of life.

It could have been me, had I allowed the momentary lure of stability to stick. Maybe I even wanted it to be. But what would have been the point? To rebel against my parents, as they had theirs? They would have doggedly continued loving me, their only child, regardless. They would have loved me in the baffled, bemused way of parents whose children who have taken everything they hold sacred and told them to shove it up their arses, not in the midst of an easy to handle teenage tantrum, but in a series of quiet, purposeful, adult manoeuvres too subtle to identify in isolation, barely noticeable until one day, you’re someone they no longer understand, in a suit.

Besides. In teaching me to question everything, they had conspired to make it difficult for me to function effectively in any real system. I was always getting reprimanded.

‘You look like your mother.’ The downstairs neighbour’s parting words remembered as I stood in the kitchen mixing myself a vodka Berocca the following afternoon. So she had been here all this time. The last mad hippy standing. And she had known my mother. I had not anticipated this, not in this transient city of rising property prices and revenge evictions. Everyone I knew moved about once every year, yet here my seventies throwback downstairs neighbour was, a museum piece. A generational relic. I wanted to know what she knew, but her dawn screaming, the suggestion of abuse, disturbed me.

I had slept until four, having sat up long after our encounter, smoking, my teeth grinding against one another. Now, mid-comedown and maudlin, I wondered about Josh’s comment that we were girls fixated upon the past. ‘Why glamorise a generation’, he had said to me, once, ‘when their commitment to their principles only lasted as long as a twenty-five-year-old’s lease on one of their buy-to-let properties?’

‘I don’t know,’ I had said. If only Bryn and Stella could be so easily dismissed. I thought back to Lucia’s words in the kitchen. ‘Because they did it all first,’ I said. ‘And because they did it without caring.’