Ourselves in the tune as if in space …
WALLACE STEVENS, ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’
The boys we really wanted to dance with were not those who sat next to us at school but the older ones, who had jobs and behaved like men. Most left school at fifteen to follow their fathers onto farms and into factories, or to take their place in the family firm of roofers, scrap-metal dealers or greengrocers. They were almost the last apprentices, training as printers, butchers and joiners. Like Wheelwright, Burgess and Cooper, these trades were also local surnames; thirty years on, they seem almost as quaint.
These boys learnt to drive when they were about twelve, in someone’s field or along the one stretch of straight road out by the reservoir. At seventeen, they could do so legally and now that they had jobs, they could afford cars. They would swagger into the pub swinging their key fobs and then slamming them down on the table, like gauntlets. Outside, the lane was full of Heralds and Cortinas – cars with chivalric names, which the boy racers had patched together and souped up. They fitted them with new cassette decks and stereo speakers. After all, what was the point of going fast if you couldn’t make noise?
The summer I first knew boys with cars was astounding. To leave the village just like that, without having to wait two hours for a bus, and then to travel so fast. Word would go round the pub that there was a party ten miles away and we would cram into someone’s car, two on the passenger seat and three boys in the back with girls on their knees, and we would be there just like that.
The boy drove fast. He wanted the girls to bounce and scream, and we did. If the other boys said anything at all it was to urge him to drive faster, or to turn off his lights as he crossed a junction, or to take a corner on the wrong side of the road. Two boys died this way, coming round a blind corner into the path of a double-decker bus. We were shocked, but not touched: it seemed no more likely that such a thing could happen to us.
This swerving through the dark felt like lift-off. The car was a bubble of noise and light that collapsed all the distances and flew through the dark fields that had kept me so marooned. Some nights the driving around became the whole point and we would flit and zip from pub to pub, party to party, wanting to keep moving just because we could.
Essex, though flat, is not straightforward. To the north, the land has readily submitted to Roman roads, motorways and single fields as broad as the view. Essex is resistant. You see your destination long before you reach it. The back lanes through those fields are all hairpin bends and humpback bridges. Hedgerows tower and trees throw out awkward branches. Roads twist round copses, paths are eroded or overgrown, and fields either brim with crops or erupt under the plough. I felt so perpetually thwarted that if I came across open ground I would run for the sake of it. I never got anywhere even then.
In the car, we needed music in order to feel how fast we were going and for these boys, that meant heavy metal: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath – all juggernaut bass lines and skidding lead-guitar breaks, the volume turned up so high that a song would lose shape and I would feel rather than hear it. Everything shook – the car, my body and the world outside, as if by sheer force of sound we could make every empty church, closed shop, locked gate and lurking police car rattle and vibrate until they came apart and the world was nothing but parts, all up in the air.
Too young to bring about change, we brought about disturbance. Heavy metal was our engine noise – it was trucks on the cricket pitch, bulldozers tearing up the green, boots stomping on flowerbeds, cars driven through hedges, the only thing that could tear a hole in the silence of a Sunday afternoon.
Sometimes the boy driving turned on the radio and we girls would sing along to some anthem from our disco nights, which was crackly and distorted as if it had rushed too fast across space: ‘I can’t li-i-i-i-ve … if living is without yo-oooou …’ Now it was not so much a song as a continuum, a booming tunnel of desire through which we flew like static.
In the dark, music was our landscape as much as our map. The real daylight map was less interesting than its contortions might suggest. There are no proper hills in Essex and so we were like the Dutch who used to have to climb a church tower in order to see the view. We lived in a world that was two-thirds sky. How to get up in the air? One night Robbie drove us to the top of a multi-storey car park. He turned up Black Sabbath and then raced down the narrow switchback of the exit ramp. He threw the car round each corner as if the ramp were nothing but corners and we swerved and swerved, almost bouncing off the concrete walls. Was I scared? No. I remember it as a moment of pure pleasure driven and held by the blast of that music which had propelled us like a rocket through the exosphere until we broke through gravity and were nothing more than sound in space.