At the weekend, I returned to the place I grew up. I don’t go there very often and I’m reluctant to call it my hometown, even though I was born and lived there for nineteen years. It never felt completely like home and I have yet to find the place that does.
There’s always a brief pang of fear and loss as the train trundles across the border between London and Hertfordshire. I’ve tried to analyse this but end up objectifying my memories into a packet of interlaced transparencies. Depending on juxtaposition, they produce different hues and emphases. A memory that is never wholly accurate is but a myth, and yet such stories have the power to perforate objectivity with random emotional detritus. I have maps for the estate where I lived, but none for my responses to it.
The flat-roofed Kebble houses still stand, little boxes on the hillside, a swarm of social ambition, where a new car in the drive and a child in the Grammar school were the pinnacle of achievement.
These cubes are an abstraction, alienation. They reek of safety, the 2.1 children, the nine to five, the christenings, graduate photographs on the walls, shag-pile carpet, woodchip wallpaper, parquet flooring, teak furniture, turquoise glass, brushed nylon sheets, fake fires, fishponds and lilac satin bridesmaids dresses.
The houses were built alongside the canal, when barges still worked its commercial routes and water gypsies moored for the night. Children fished for tadpoles and crayfish, fed the moorhens and water voles, and hung around the locks with hope of helping to swing them open and sudden dread at the drop of water beyond.
The common moor behind the locks was a strip of land embedded with a paper mill, to where I would flee the stresses of family life. In the summer, I kicked off my shoes and ran like the wind along the river path, oblivious to the brambles and thorns that stuck in the thickened soles of my feet, to be picked out with tweezers later. The river was polluted but I swam in it anyway. But my real joy was to walk along the old railway line.
I still dream about trains, mostly those that are stranded in sidings, those that await action upon tracks running into the distance. Where do they lead, those tracks? I sense a redolence that is not my own. The demanding memory can dredge up any number of scenarios that belong to others, from a dusty terminus in the panhandle to the gates of Auschwitz. Abandoned tracks have neither owners nor answers.
The mill, the river and the railway played out some Untold Want in that desperate creature who used to pen poems entitled “Death to the biological factor that keeps me enslaved”. Where did she go? Nowhere, perhaps. Our natures are not partitioned and sometimes I feel I can touch her fingertips with mine.
Travelling back to London over the bridge by the moor, I noticed that the river was diminished. The mill had been torn down some time ago and replaced with a housing estate. The railway no longer exists. It is all very neat and tidy.
I dug out some old photos, which I had taken when I was about fifteen, and began to ponder my love of the functional beauty and loneliness of gasworks, factories, railways. And I understood, at last. They are honest.
You see, I remember what went on beyond those neat verges and spotless net curtains: the infidelities, abuses, addictions and violence. I know now that I feel fear because it was integral to my process of growing up. The loss is for those moments when I didn’t know any better.
Suburbia is liminality, a hybrid, hypocritical in its adherence to appearances. I did not realise the impact this physical space and mindset had made upon my love of the margin, or how I may have fooled myself into believing I was too colourful for my environment, when what was really required for escape was black and white.
