Homecoming (Part One)
"I see it around me, I see it in everything. I could be so much more than this. I've said my goodbyes, this is my sundown. I'm gonna be so much more than this."
Home is where the heart is, and my heart has never truly been in North London and the Hertfordshire suburbs. It’s too drab and damp and broken here, too many bad memories threading their way between all those sad, semi-detached houses and the ever-diminishing pools of cool, green silence I used to love discovering. As the year I allowed myself for contemplation draws to a close, and the darkened room I used to spend so much time in grows ever more accustomed to a life without my constant presence, I find myself wondering what I’ve learned and what I intend to do with it.
This began, you may recall, with my birthday and with my family. My mother and stepfather and I took a train to East London to celebrate my twenty-fifth and have lunch with my sister. Now, almost a year on, I remember only sitting there eating something inappropriate and kicking one leg of my chair with a light but insistent rhythm, waiting for questions I only ever have vague answers to, especially when asked by members of my family. Later, we walked back to my sister’s place in the rain, and I moved ahead of the umbrellas and the conversation, letting icy water soak my hair and trickle into my collar. My mind was somewhere else, and all I really wanted was to go home.
In the end, almost everything I write is about going home. The thread I’m grasping at really is that simple and that obvious. The Darkened Room, in both literal and metaphorical terms, is a refuge, a place to hide when I feel as though I can no longer cope. And really, when you take a look at the last twenty-five years, you’ll find that coping isn’t something I’m very good at.
When I was about six, my infant school class was asked to write a story about something that had happened the previous weekend. I find it hard enough to remember the motivations for things I did when I was eighteen, so I can neither justify nor analyse this, but for some reason I penned an outrageous lie about a lightbulb going on the first floor landing of our house, and my dad slipping and falling down the stairs as he tried to change it. My teacher of the time (Miss Barnes, I think) bought it hook, line, and sinker, and when my mum came to collect me from school that day, she enquired as to whether my dad was okay. Both were horrified when they discovered the imaginative detail of my lie. The worst thing about it, I recall Miss Barnes saying, was that it was meaningless. I had committed one of the ultimate childhood sins for no apparent gain but my own amusement.
Sometimes, when I was little, I honestly believed that my fictions were a depiction of what had actually happened. Over time, some of them even replaced the truth. It wasn’t so much that I was deluding myself, as I’m pretty sure I was always aware when I was lying. It was more that the talent I had for sidestepping the truth while leaving just enough detail in there to make it all the more convincing made substituting the fantasy and the reality all the easier. I was a good liar when it didn’t harm anybody. I still am. If I’m stubborn and lucky enough, I might even make a career out of it.
When I first moved to Borehamwood, I was fourteen. It was only a few months after dad died. I was in the middle of puberty, dealing with the loss of a parent, and being dragged to a new town where I had no friends and no life. The concept of home became important because home was the place I’d been taken from. In some indefinable way, I felt that if I went back to our little house in Burnt Oak, everything would be okay. It would be the Burnt Oak of about 1985, my family would be whole, and it would be always be those first glorious weeks of the summer holidays, when I’d go to Watling Park and watch the older boys play football until they finally relented and let me join in, humouring me with dramatic missed tackles and then theatrical goal celebrations when I finally managed to put the ball between the piles of coats that served as posts. I thought about that a lot during those first few months in Borehamwood, but events were forcing me to grow up faster than I wanted to, and over time those images slipped away. It’s only now – with so many years between the kid that wanted only to score the winning goal and the man that got married less than two weeks ago – that I can look back and see those precious times for what they were without wanting to be or save the child I used to be.
King’s Lynn and Cambridge were the next two places I lived. I was eighteen then, and so desperate to escape from Borehamwood that even my spectacular failure to live up to A-Level expectations didn’t stop me from returning to the lies that had served me so well in childhood. Of course I wanted a Sociology degree, and of course I was willing to take history alongside because for some bizarre reason that was the only criteria on which Anglia University would take me. What more could a boy possibly desire from life? Certainly not a clerical error that sent me to a backward college in the middle of Norfolk where the average age of the students was about forty, that much is clear. Seven years on, I’m still confused as to how I came to be living in the converted loft of a huge house on a street I forget the name of in a town where everything closed at five in the afternoon and everybody spoke like they were from some mental Victorian farm town. My three months in King’s Lynn were, I think, the absolute low point of my entire life. On the average day, I spoke only to answer my name in class. Home? I think not.
Cambridge was ruined for me by the messy break-up of my first relationship proper and my struggle to find some kind of identity for myself. It was and is a beautiful city, and I have surprisingly warm memories of 68 Garden Walk, where I spent a strange and exhausting year living with four Greeks and a Spaniard, reeling from the highs of plate-smashing parties and life-affirming 3am conversations to the lows of collapsing in drunken tears at the Student Union bar and sitting in my room all night trying to work up the courage to use the cheap plastic razor I held against my wrist. I learned a lot about myself that year, but the idea of returning is a horror.
It was in returning bruised and hungover to Borehamwood that I learned to live inbetween. I spent all of my time at work or out in London, doing my job and then spending my wages on so many insane nights that the details became something I’d invent just to have something to say. I’d remember the beginning of the evening, and I’d remember where and how I woke up. I’d remember the dramas and the moments of clarity. Other than that, it was back to white lies for the simple reason that the only other thing I could possibly say was that I’d gotten wasted, danced like a maniac, and done all manner of strange and stupid things because that was all that lay between me and the realisation that in all these years I’d gone nowhere and done nothing. That was how I coped.
Home is a feeling, not a place. Home is a certain warmth and a certain security. Home, if you’re as nomadic a soul as I am, can be just about anywhere, even that winding stretch of Interstate 15 that can – with the right kind of eyes – look like the loneliest place in the world. Home can be looking across from the passenger seat of a rented car and realising that everything you’ve been uncertain about is nothing but the fading doubts of all those years you didn’t know where you were going and how you’d get there. It took me twenty-five years to figure that out, and that makes me feel both old and naïve as hell. The road was long and not without detours, but eventually, I found one of the things I’ve been looking for. I found home.
That, in case you were wondering, is the point of the story that follows…
Home is where the heart is, and my heart has never truly been in North London and the Hertfordshire suburbs. It’s too drab and damp and broken here, too many bad memories threading their way between all those sad, semi-detached houses and the ever-diminishing pools of cool, green silence I used to love discovering. As the year I allowed myself for contemplation draws to a close, and the darkened room I used to spend so much time in grows ever more accustomed to a life without my constant presence, I find myself wondering what I’ve learned and what I intend to do with it.
This began, you may recall, with my birthday and with my family. My mother and stepfather and I took a train to East London to celebrate my twenty-fifth and have lunch with my sister. Now, almost a year on, I remember only sitting there eating something inappropriate and kicking one leg of my chair with a light but insistent rhythm, waiting for questions I only ever have vague answers to, especially when asked by members of my family. Later, we walked back to my sister’s place in the rain, and I moved ahead of the umbrellas and the conversation, letting icy water soak my hair and trickle into my collar. My mind was somewhere else, and all I really wanted was to go home.
In the end, almost everything I write is about going home. The thread I’m grasping at really is that simple and that obvious. The Darkened Room, in both literal and metaphorical terms, is a refuge, a place to hide when I feel as though I can no longer cope. And really, when you take a look at the last twenty-five years, you’ll find that coping isn’t something I’m very good at.
When I was about six, my infant school class was asked to write a story about something that had happened the previous weekend. I find it hard enough to remember the motivations for things I did when I was eighteen, so I can neither justify nor analyse this, but for some reason I penned an outrageous lie about a lightbulb going on the first floor landing of our house, and my dad slipping and falling down the stairs as he tried to change it. My teacher of the time (Miss Barnes, I think) bought it hook, line, and sinker, and when my mum came to collect me from school that day, she enquired as to whether my dad was okay. Both were horrified when they discovered the imaginative detail of my lie. The worst thing about it, I recall Miss Barnes saying, was that it was meaningless. I had committed one of the ultimate childhood sins for no apparent gain but my own amusement.
Sometimes, when I was little, I honestly believed that my fictions were a depiction of what had actually happened. Over time, some of them even replaced the truth. It wasn’t so much that I was deluding myself, as I’m pretty sure I was always aware when I was lying. It was more that the talent I had for sidestepping the truth while leaving just enough detail in there to make it all the more convincing made substituting the fantasy and the reality all the easier. I was a good liar when it didn’t harm anybody. I still am. If I’m stubborn and lucky enough, I might even make a career out of it.
When I first moved to Borehamwood, I was fourteen. It was only a few months after dad died. I was in the middle of puberty, dealing with the loss of a parent, and being dragged to a new town where I had no friends and no life. The concept of home became important because home was the place I’d been taken from. In some indefinable way, I felt that if I went back to our little house in Burnt Oak, everything would be okay. It would be the Burnt Oak of about 1985, my family would be whole, and it would be always be those first glorious weeks of the summer holidays, when I’d go to Watling Park and watch the older boys play football until they finally relented and let me join in, humouring me with dramatic missed tackles and then theatrical goal celebrations when I finally managed to put the ball between the piles of coats that served as posts. I thought about that a lot during those first few months in Borehamwood, but events were forcing me to grow up faster than I wanted to, and over time those images slipped away. It’s only now – with so many years between the kid that wanted only to score the winning goal and the man that got married less than two weeks ago – that I can look back and see those precious times for what they were without wanting to be or save the child I used to be.
King’s Lynn and Cambridge were the next two places I lived. I was eighteen then, and so desperate to escape from Borehamwood that even my spectacular failure to live up to A-Level expectations didn’t stop me from returning to the lies that had served me so well in childhood. Of course I wanted a Sociology degree, and of course I was willing to take history alongside because for some bizarre reason that was the only criteria on which Anglia University would take me. What more could a boy possibly desire from life? Certainly not a clerical error that sent me to a backward college in the middle of Norfolk where the average age of the students was about forty, that much is clear. Seven years on, I’m still confused as to how I came to be living in the converted loft of a huge house on a street I forget the name of in a town where everything closed at five in the afternoon and everybody spoke like they were from some mental Victorian farm town. My three months in King’s Lynn were, I think, the absolute low point of my entire life. On the average day, I spoke only to answer my name in class. Home? I think not.
Cambridge was ruined for me by the messy break-up of my first relationship proper and my struggle to find some kind of identity for myself. It was and is a beautiful city, and I have surprisingly warm memories of 68 Garden Walk, where I spent a strange and exhausting year living with four Greeks and a Spaniard, reeling from the highs of plate-smashing parties and life-affirming 3am conversations to the lows of collapsing in drunken tears at the Student Union bar and sitting in my room all night trying to work up the courage to use the cheap plastic razor I held against my wrist. I learned a lot about myself that year, but the idea of returning is a horror.
It was in returning bruised and hungover to Borehamwood that I learned to live inbetween. I spent all of my time at work or out in London, doing my job and then spending my wages on so many insane nights that the details became something I’d invent just to have something to say. I’d remember the beginning of the evening, and I’d remember where and how I woke up. I’d remember the dramas and the moments of clarity. Other than that, it was back to white lies for the simple reason that the only other thing I could possibly say was that I’d gotten wasted, danced like a maniac, and done all manner of strange and stupid things because that was all that lay between me and the realisation that in all these years I’d gone nowhere and done nothing. That was how I coped.
Home is a feeling, not a place. Home is a certain warmth and a certain security. Home, if you’re as nomadic a soul as I am, can be just about anywhere, even that winding stretch of Interstate 15 that can – with the right kind of eyes – look like the loneliest place in the world. Home can be looking across from the passenger seat of a rented car and realising that everything you’ve been uncertain about is nothing but the fading doubts of all those years you didn’t know where you were going and how you’d get there. It took me twenty-five years to figure that out, and that makes me feel both old and naïve as hell. The road was long and not without detours, but eventually, I found one of the things I’ve been looking for. I found home.
That, in case you were wondering, is the point of the story that follows…
posted by Michael at 11:40 AM
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