The Tyranny of Lost Things Read online

  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.

  ‘fancy work

  overalls

  blouses

  corsets

  gloves

  hosiery

  laces

  ribbons

  haberdashery

  flannels

  flannelettes

  calicoes

  underclothing

  maids’ dresses

  caps & aprons’

  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 afterno
on. 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.’

  Summer 1984

  Mark says it’s time to go, but I do not want to leave this place. It has cast a spell on me and I can’t go home.

  Last night, Bryn walked up to me as I swayed to an old soul record, handing me a beaker of cheap red wine. ‘Stay,’ he said, looking at me. ‘We all want you to.’

  I glanced at Stella dancing next to me, her cool gaze unreadable beneath her dark fringe. But she did not contradict him, and after he had walked away to get another drink she placed her hand in mine and twirled me under her arm in an imitation of a 1960s dance couple at a contest. ‘Follow my lead,’ she said.

  In the few days that I have been here, the possibility of another life has intruded with sharp-elbowed insistence. There’s nothing for me at home. My measly job at the shop, my knackered mam, stewing panacalty for hours next to the stove to try and soothe Dad’s pain and fury when he returns from the picket; Pete, his rough hands rummaging underneath my skirt as I stare at the patterned wallpaper of my room, peach and pale blue, counting the petals on its sprays of faded forget-me-nots in time with his grunts. He doesn’t know how to love me. My moans are a false balm to his ego. He’s a good man, kind; a catch, even, but when we are together it’s like he needs a dictionary and I, a tranquiliser. He’s never made me come.

  I have noted the way Bryn looks at me. I know that look well. Famished. It scans the half-moons of my breasts and backside, greedy, but it is also shot, like silk, with warmth and friendship, and this is something new. I know he wants to sleep with me, and Mark knows it too. My brother watches me possessively, as though he’s loyal to Pete and not me, the little girl who would skip after him down the chares, pleading with him to let me play.

  We spend hours talking, sitting up into the small hours. Bryn’s wife, too, who seems to have a fondness for me I don’t deserve. ‘It’s so great to have a woman closer to my own age here,’ she says, and she puts her hand in mine. ‘We are not so different, are we? You and I? I was young and innocent too when I came here.’

  I think that I am not that innocent but I say nothing. Instead we talk about painting and poetry, surrealism and Simone de Beauvoir. When I reply to her questions she seems struck by the breadth of my knowledge, but quickly hides it. ‘I read a lot,’ I say; ‘it’s my way of being somewhere else.’

  There is another life for me here. What fun it is to laugh and talk and drink and feel that, finally, I am understood. This is a world of music and ideas and freedom, and a whole city at my feet, unrolling before me like a magic carpet, rebuking my threadbare childhood at home as it beckons. This, I tell myself, this is the place.

  Slip

  Slip, vintage (1950s), nude silk-trimmed with white lace (Valenciennes), size 38, label reads: ‘Fabriqué en France’. Frayed hem on right-hand side. Faint grass stains on the back. Accompanying receipt for £3.50 from Marie Curie charity shop, 27 Junction Road N19, 22nd May 2011.

  London in the summertime. I’ve always loved it, maybe because it was there that we ran away to, or maybe because it’s the only time when the city truly feels like itself. People come out of their houses to slacken their straps and lie in the parks, or sprawl out of the pub onto the pavement in after-work hordes, collars damp, ties loosened, pencil skirts straining, cool liquid rinsing the sweat on their upper lips. Londoners will even, sometimes, sit relaxed on the steps of their houses, drinking beers filtered through slices of lime in the warmth of the evening sun. London in summer is the sound of reggae and soul floating from cars and shops and bedroom windows, and saxophones too. No one ever seems to play the saxophone except in summer, when, as the heat of the day dissipates into the early evening, some neighbourhood musician must feel an urgent need to dust it off, walk over to the open window and make it sing. In the sunshine, all the houses appear whiter, and everything that was, in winter, a source of dissatisfaction or disgust is filled with a sense of vivid promise. Even the fumes of the traffic seem romantic somehow, the buses wobbly and marbled when admired through the waves of heat rising from the tarmac, the horns and sirens more muted and distant. It feels safer, too, with the nights only drawing in when you want them to, as you lie hazily on the grass, giggling, watching the sky turn puce.

  When you are young, life plays itself out in a succession of summers. School comes to a close and the days stretch before you, filled with countryside wanderings, fruit-picking, sticks and stones thrown across streams and ditches during unspoken battles with the kids from the other side of the cul-de-sac. Then, later, sex, drama, weed. Guitar music, sixteen-inch-long spliffs because you don’t know any better, virginity loss, and four-mile walks home through the fields because the buses haven’t started yet. Before we grow old, we live a life of summers.

  I always found it strange and slightly laughable how British people still harp on about the summer of 1976 – the hottest summer to end all hot summers. That it held so much cultural weight was surely more of a symptom of our horrendous climate than a reflection on the unique magic of that three-month stretch. But as a summer, there’s no denying that it is fixed immovably in the minds of those who were young then, a witness to the freedom they experienced in casting off hundreds of years’ worth of ingrained desire for shelter and warmth and becoming, briefly, an outdoor society. Breakfast on a patio in Solihull may not be dinner by starlight beneath a cypress tree in the Tuscan hills, and a quick fumble down the bottom of the football pitch may not be a romp through the lavender fields of Southern France, but for a brief period of time at least, our parents and grandparents embraced the feeling of being European. Fewer clothes, fewer hang-ups; Cinzano; olives. Sticky afternoon sex, limbs coated in the coconut sweetness of Hawaiian Tropic.

  My mother’s memories were less romantic. Having been urged by a friend to visit the local lido despite the plagues of ladybirds congregating there, she vomited insects on the lawn.

  Wife-swapping was still going on in the mid-seventies, my mother told me. Those poor suburban squares who missed the actual summer of love, who felt the lack of it so profoundly that they thought a bowl of keys would help kick off their own sexual revolution in the bedrooms of their Essex new builds. The husbands blamed Cosmopolitan, Stella said. Divorce inevitably followed, though not for her own parents, who never swung, instead opting to sit, suffocating in the front lounge throughout the heatwave, a still life in brown and mustard polyester as the grass yellowed outside and the neighbours sunbathed, oiled and topless. When, in the early eighties and not even out of her teens, she met my father and he led her by the dainty hand into a life of sin and squalor, she had been glad to get away from suburbia and come to London, where the houses were older and the people younger and more alive, their bohemianism more instinctive. After the static electric shocks of her mother’s daisy-patterned curtains, her suburban semi in its shades of nausea, what she sought was authenticity. Even now, she has a hatred of synthetics – materials, smells. She will leave a room if there’s even a hint of air freshener.

  But we were elsewhere, d
eep into another summer. Not hers, but mine, a time in my mid-twenties when, as a dropout, my only real responsibility was to turn up at the pub when I was needed, and even when I was needed I was replaceable. The absence of air conditioning meant that, when I was there at all, I spent a not insignificant amount of time standing in the walk-in freezer, or smoking in the cool little courtyard, dodging the drying pools of blood from the huge joints of meat that were unloaded weekly from the van. In mid-June, there was talk of a hosepipe ban, and there had been no rain to wash the blood away, so its metallic, rusty smell endured. The loquats in the garden had all been picked, or else were puffing and withering amongst the wildflowers, soon to be dust in the mouth of cats. I was working very late shifts, and, though I had banged on the door a few times, finding out about how the woman downstairs had known my mother became less of a priority than it had once felt. Simply being there, in that house, was enough.