Thorn - Another planet: a teenager in suburbia

Another
Planet

Also by Tracey Thorn
Bedsit Disco Queen
Naked at the Albert Hall

Tracey
Thorn

Another
Planet

A Teenager in Suburbia

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

Copyright Tracey Thorn, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

For permission credits please see p. 211

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 255 3
Export ISBN 978 1 78689 256 0
eISBN 978 1 78689 257 7

For Debbie and Keith
And in memory of Audrey and Dennis
With love

CONTENTS

PREFACE

You look as if you wished the place in Hell,

My friend said, judging from your face. Oh well,

I suppose its not the places fault, I said.

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

(Philip Larkin: I Remember, I Remember)

W hen I try to summon up the past when I want to remember what really happened, instead of what I think happened, and what I really felt, instead of what Id like to think I felt, and what I really did, instead of what I say I did I look at my diaries. They never fail to shock me with all the things they say, and all the things they dont. Going right back to the start, I try to picture myself on the day I first decided to keep a diary: 29 December 1975, when I was thirteen years old. I must have been given it as a Christmas present, and although it was for the year 1976, its first few pages invited entries for the end of the previous year. So I began as the old year ended, just before it turned to face the new.

I would have settled down with a pen, riffled through the years worth of blank, empty pages before breaking it open at the very start, and then:

29 December 1975 Went to St Albans with Debbie. Got a belt. Could not get a jumper or skirt.

Thats it, thats all she wrote. No starting with a bang, no announcing herself to the world, or to a future reader, no declaration of intent. Nothing along the lines of Dear Diary, draw closer and listen to what I have to say. Here I am; this is me; let me tell you the story of my life. Not even the guileless enthusiasm of a thirteen-year-old self-introduction Hello, Im Tracey and this is my diary. Instead, I draw a circle and leave it empty, my eye caught by an absence. And it wasnt an aberration; I carried on in that style for years, making countless entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, not going to school, a piano lesson being cancelled, the school coach not arriving. Its a life described by whats missing, and what fails to happen.

My second-ever entry is just as banal:

30 December Went to Welwyn with Liz. Didnt get anything except a bag of Kentucky chips.

Was it me or was it my surroundings? Was it just that I was the dullest child in existence, noticing nothing, experiencing nothing, thinking nothing, or was it at least in part an embodiment of something in the air, something vague and undefined? Even when I write about it now, I realise that the time and place in which I grew up, 1970s suburbia, is easier to define by saying what it wasnt than what it was. Brookmans Parks was a village but not a village. Rural but not rural. A stop on the line, a space in between two landscapes that are both more highly rated the city, and the countryside. A contingent, liminal, border territory. In-betweenland.

1 January 1977 Went to Welwyn with Mum and Dad to get some boots but couldnt get any.

8 January Liz and I went to Potters Bar in the afternoon to try to get her ears pierced, but she couldnt.

Anywhere with a tube station, however end of the line that stop may be, still feels to me like part of London, physically linked by the tunnels and rails. Things would still happen there. But beyond the reach of the Underground lies a different and less certain terrain. Where things might not happen at all. Where you might continually try but continually fail, in endless small endeavours.

19 January 1979 Deb and I went to St Albans. Tried to get some black trousers but couldnt find any nice ones.

17 March Tried to go to the library but it was shut.

When I came to write a song about the place, Oxford Street, I fell back into this habit of describing by subtraction, stating what wasnt there Where I grew up there were no factories and only then going on to admit that there was a school and shops, and some fields and trees. But although there were fields, there was no agricultural life. No one worked as a farmer. All the men got on the train every morning with a briefcase to go up to town. Nature writers would have found little there to describe; it was not a place of shepherds, or hawks. There was no real scenery no hills, or lakes, nothing in the way of a view.

Here I am again, talking about what it is not. What is it about the place that it demands to be written about in such an equivocal way? I rebelled as a teen and so have often felt there was a clean break between my past and my future that I abandoned the old me and invented a new one, casting off the time and place I came from. But as I get older, I sense its presence inside me. I think I want to reconnect with the self I left behind. Its partly that common impulse of curiosity which informs a TV programme like Who Do You Think You Are? or a song like Where Do You Go To My Lovely. I want to look inside my head and remember just where I came from. Because I cant quite believe it was as lacking as my diary suggests.

Like the negative of a photo, its as if the Technicolor version of life were happening elsewhere, full of events and successes, dreams and achievements. Meanwhile, whenever I tried to sum up the place where I lived and the life I was living, I would write over and over again: this didnt happen, that didnt happen. Its neither one thing nor another, and Im neither here nor there.

2016

I m on a train back to my childhood, as though it still exists, as tangible and re-visitable as the place I left behind. Although it feels a hundred years ago and a thousand miles away, it is nonetheless actually only fifty-three minutes on the train, with one change, from what is now my nearest station, Finchley Road & Frognal. The last time I took this train was probably thirty years ago. I wouldnt have had a phone in my bag. No one would. I wouldnt have had a child, but I would still have had both parents. I would have been on my way to see them.

The London Overground train is packed, standing room only and air-conditioned to iciness, yet it still has that city buzz which is a kind of warmth, everyone jostling prams and backpacks and suitcases, and its busy in that city way, everyone heads down or engrossed in something, to try to create a tiny private space. Through Hampstead Heath and Gospel Oak, to Kentish Town West, which would have been my mums nearest stop when she was growing up in London. Between here and Camden Road there are buildings going up beside the line, cranes in the sky everywhere you look, London still growing and still filling in every gap. At Highbury & Islington I head to the platform for trains heading north, and the crowd thins out. By the time I am waiting for the train to Welwyn Garden City, there are only five people left, while at the far end a man whistles tunelessly and eerily, the notes fading away into the tunnel.