Heads and Straights Read online

  Lucy Wadham

  HEADS AND STRAIGHTS

  Contents

  Heads and Straights

  Acknowledgements

  Penguin Lines

  For Mum and Dad

  Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company Mind the Child

  The Victoria Line

  Danny Dorling The 32 Stops

  The Central Line

  Fantastic Man Buttoned-Up

  The East London Line

  John Lanchester What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube

  The District Line

  William Leith A Northern Line Minute

  The Northern Line

  Richard Mabey A Good Parcel of English Soil

  The Metropolitan Line

  Paul Morley Earthbound

  The Bakerloo Line

  John O’Farrell A History of Capitalism According to the Jubilee Line

  The Jubilee Line

  Philippe Parreno Drift

  The Hammersmith & City Line

  Leanne Shapton Waterloo–City, City–Waterloo

  The Waterloo & City Line

  Lucy Wadham Heads and Straights

  The Circle Line

  Peter York The Blue Riband

  The Piccadilly Line

  The first time I admitted publicly to having been brought up in Chelsea I was thirty-five and at the launch party for my first novel, which was being held in a tapas bar in Clapham. At that stage in my writing career I wasn’t aware that I was allowed guests of my own, so it was just myself, the sales team from my publishing house, a handful of book reps and some booksellers. After supper we pushed back the tables and danced. It was easily the most fun I’ve had at a literary event. For much of the evening I talked to a woman called Luthfa, who worked for one of the book chains. She was Bengali and had been raised in East London. She had a deep laugh and an irreverent turn of mind and I found myself wanting her to like me. She told me about the book world that I was entering, how much she had loved it and how it was doomed. We shared our experiences of the eighties and our feelings about Thatcher and her legacy, and we discussed how much life in Britain had changed in the thirteen years since I had left for France. At last she asked me where I was brought up. Usually I would stay vague about the borough of my youth or, when pressed, lie and say Putney, where I had lived briefly as a teenager, but this time I confessed. She teased me gently about being a Chelsea girl, as I knew she would, and then gave me a brief lecture about the misguidedness of trying to conceal my background. Complexes like mine, she suggested, were reductive and led to a skewed and paltry view of life.

  Soon afterwards I heard that Luthfa had left the book trade and we have not met since. Strange how a single encounter can so deeply affect your view of yourself. Had it not been for that conversation I doubt I would be attempting to write about my Chelsea upbringing now. It was Luthfa who, in the wake of her own struggle to extricate herself from her background, gave me permission.

  Inverted snobbery was embedded in my sisters and me from an early age, so being from Chelsea was never a source of pride for any of us. I don’t know where this class shame came from, certainly not from our parents. Dad liked to pore over his family tree, claiming that his ancestors could be traced back to the Plantagenets, an assertion for which I have never found any proof whatsoever, and Mum seems undisturbed by the fact that she often sounds like the Queen. Nor did it come from our Home-Counties, pink-gin-quaffing grandparents, or even from our wild, bohemian grandmother, whose wildness, I’m sure, sprang in part from her sense of entitlement.

  Not all of us went as far to dissemble our background as my elder sister, Florence (Fly), did. By the time she had turned sixteen she had changed her accent and adopted the ‘Mockney’ that would distinguish her from her four sisters who, in 1976, still sounded like Jenny Agutter from The Railway Children. By then it was easy for Fly to slip free of class boundaries. Punk rock had set up its headquarters on the King’s Road, three minutes’ walk from our house, and armed with her new voice and all the right gear she enrolled as a full-time rebel, no questions asked. At night, after our parents had gone to bed, she would steal my dad’s BMW 320 and cruise up and down the King’s Road in it, Mohawks protruding from the open roof. Today, when I ask her, she says she has no doubt that there were other posh girls in hiding with the gangs that haunted the Water Rat, the Roebuck and the Cadogan, but at that time, where you came from didn’t matter half so much as whether or not you had balls.

  Armed with the battle scars of the punk movement and a long fight with addiction, Fly eventually escaped to Australia and returned home years later to settle in Peckham. I, along with my two other big sisters, Izzy and Beatrice, ran away to France, where, as foreigners, we could elude the delineations of class. Indeed the only prejudice we encountered on arriving in Paris in the mid eighties was the presumption that all English girls were easy lays, a presumption that, in our case, happened to be true.

  My sister Izzy, who recently attended an alumnae reunion of St Paul’s Girls’ School, said that there was something suffocating about being in a roomful of people who seemed to look and speak and think alike. Perhaps ours was simply the fear of seeing our individuality watered down – just another of the multifarious manifestations of snobbery, the means by which we lord it over other people.

  I don’t often go to Sloane Square, the Tube station nearest to where I grew up. I would not go to Peter Jones again, the scene of so much childhood boredom and frustration: waiting for what felt like hours in the shoe department after school, amusing myself by building up static with my socks on the thick, green carpet and then trying to shock my mother with my fingertips.

  On the few occasions when I’ve been back and walked along the King’s Road, it has felt to me like a place divested of all idiosyncrasy. Instead of the old thoroughfare of tribal display and rebellion, the passeggiata of punkdom, I find nothing but a strip of upmarket retail and desirable real estate. Today it is hard to imagine how this could have been the teeming Petri dish of counter-cultural innovation that it once was. I look at the yummy mummies in their cashmere and remind myself that they were here too at that time (my own mother being one), nipping out from behind their railings to run the gauntlet, past the punks outside the Chelsea Drugstore, past the patchouli-and pot-scented emporium of shadiness that was the Great Gear Trading Company, to scurry into one of their safe zones: the Royal Hospital Gardens or Peter Jones. Nowadays, however, these men and women with ski tans and highlights no longer have to contend with a population hostile to them permanently occupying the street. I take another look at the perfectly groomed young woman pushing a pram that looks like it was designed by NASA and feel a stab of sympathy for my mother, who tried so hard to bring her girls up in her own image, but who could not possibly contend with the terrifying force the King’s Road had become at that precise moment in history. One minute her daughters were dressed in tweed coats with velvet collars, lace tights and Start-Rite patent-leather shoes; the next they were bemoaning US imperialism, advocating free love and walking the strip between World’s End and Sloane Square with bare feet and no knickers.

  Like most acts of rebellion, our repudiation of SW3 began with refusal; in the case of my three elder sisters, the refusal to emulate the lives of their parents. Back then my father referred to himself as an entrepreneur. The younger son of divorced parents, he had been told by his father that there was not enough money to send him to Oxford. His elder brother went to Wadham College (founded by a pious and wealthy ancestor called Dorothy), an injustice, as my father saw it, from which he never quite recovered. My mother, who is mistress of the unspoken, always led us to believe that Dad was the handsome, charming one, and his elder brother the bright one, by which she
meant that he probably wouldn’t have got in anyway. Back in 1974 he did not care as much as he later would, because he was rich. His successful PR business was paying for three houses: the one in Chelsea, another in Berkshire and one in the South of France, two cars and the private education of his increasingly wayward daughters. For Mum and Dad the taboos about displaying your wealth that were dear to their own parents’ generation had disappeared during the fifties of their youth. Like the generations that would follow them, they cared about interior decor and food. All through the seventies, as we grew up, our house seemed to be in a state of constant redecoration, with rooms being tented or stippled or dragged, mostly with variations of the colour coral. Mum and Dad were proto-foodies, who served elaborate, continental recipes from Robert Carrier at their dinner parties and sent their offspring to school smelling of garlic, something for which they received a written rebuke from my headmistress.

  To the Big Three, as my parents called my three elder sisters, this ease and plenty was stultifying. Although at the time they saw their defiance in political terms, as scorn for the trappings of privilege and also, of course, for the patriarchy, it may have been more a matter of a certain failure in the redistribution process, for my parents kept them on a short financial leash. Izzy believes that they might have been less angry as teenagers if they had been bought off just a little. As it was, lack of pocket money meant that they were all waitressing from the age of sixteen and very soon their hard-earned tips were funding a full-blooded rebellion.

  I was ten in 1974. Fly was fifteen, Izzy was seventeen and Beatrice was eighteen. The Big Three possessed at that time an unwitting loveliness combined with a keen appetite for adventure that made them a permanent source of anxiety to my parents, and to my mother in particular. Increasingly, she pictured the King’s Road as an evil force field that threatened constantly to engulf her daughters. Unbeknownst to her, Izzy had already had a narrow escape while posing naked for a white-haired sleazebag called Godfrey, who sat outside the Picasso café masquerading as a fashion photographer and picked up girls with the question, ‘Did you know you could be a model?’ Eight years later, he approached me and used exactly the same line. I cannot remember what I said but I have never been any good at put-downs, so it would certainly have been lame. I’ve always wished that I had Fly’s withering repartee. I once heard her respond to a wolf whistle with ‘I wouldn’t fuck you for practice’.

  The King’s Road, as my mother knew, was awash with drugs. For my sisters the world was divided between ‘Heads’ (good) and ‘Straights’ (bad). Heads were people who smoked pot and Straights were people who didn’t. In time these two categories would broaden to include, on the one hand, people who are cool, spontaneous and open-minded, and, on the other, people who have a tendency to play safe. Heroin was still seen as a drug for rebellious middle-class kids in search of a rock-and-roll aura, rather than the social disease it would later become, so none of my sisters had ruled out trying it.

  Izzy played Wendy that year in a musical production of Peter Pan, a co-production between the boys at Westminster and the girls from St Paul’s. I have never been more bewitched by a performance, before or since. I sat in awe, watching my big sister flying about the stage on wires, dressed in a long, white, Laura Ashley nightie, her blonde hair flowing, my ears burning with pride. I remember the hall erupting into wild laughter when she said in her clear, high voice: ‘I’ve never kissed a boy before!’ She now tells me that she was stoned on opium during that performance and that the boy who played John beside her Wendy introduced her to LSD a few days later. She remembers running terrified with him up and down the King’s Road, goblins in pursuit. The same boy, when she dumped him, set up camp across the road from our house and spent days and nights under a broken black umbrella, gazing up at her window, willing her to take him back into her bed. I thought she was mad for rejecting him and would lie in bed at night, with the nursery window open, my hair spread out on the pillow in readiness and imagine him flying up to my windowsill like Peter Pan and kissing me in my sleep.

  By the end of the following year, two of the Big Three had tried heroin. Beatrice would wait until she had escaped to Paris, where she would, like Izzy, use it recreationally throughout her twenties. For Fly, whose desire to escape her background burned the strongest, the drug was a quick route to the underworld. She would become trapped down there and for many years her addiction would effectively rub out all the distinguishing marks of her class, nearly killing her in the process.

  By 1976, the rows had become so bad at home, particularly with Izzy, that my parents began casting about for a solution. Beatrice was soon to leave for Bristol University to read French, but Izzy, whose thirst for freedom was now making her openly assert her right to experiment with as many drugs and sleep with as many boys as she liked, had become dangerous. She needed to be kept away from me and my eight-year-old sister, Cissy, because we both worshipped her. My parents decided that it was too late for Fly, but we, the last two, might still be redeemable. So Izzy was billeted with friends of theirs in Fulham, where she got a job working in a local Spanish restaurant. She tried to augment her income by selling dope to kids from the French Lycée in South Kensington, but she got caught and was asked to leave St Paul’s before taking her A-Levels. She moved to a squat in Willesden, enrolled in City and East London College and severed all links with her middle-class life.

  I missed Izzy. Most nights she would sing me and Cissy to sleep: Joan Baez, Dylan, Cat Stevens, numbers from the musical Hair, including the famous and then unintelligible song ‘Sodomy’.

  ‘Masturbation,’ she would sing sweetly, as she stroked my hair, ‘can be fun. Join the holy orgy, Kama Sutra … Everyone!’

  Izzy would only come and see us when Mum and Dad were away on their annual skiing holiday and our maternal grandmother, Eileen, would come from Wales to look after us. As a bohemian intellectual, a nature lover and a child of the suffragette movement, Eileen had little respect for the world we were being brought up in. She disapproved greatly of TV, which stayed off for the duration of her stay. Under normal circumstances, Cissy and I would switch it on every day when we came home from school and watch it for two straight hours, from the mesmerizingly banal Play School to the mute and psychedelic Crystal Tipps and Alistair. With Gran, we were expected to play, paint, read or listen to her stories. She also disapproved of money and most of the things it could buy. Her scorn for my father the entrepreneur was palpable, as would be her scorn for Laurent, the French management consultant whom I would later marry. On her eightieth birthday we threw a party for her and when I suggested that my new husband sit next to her, she looked past him at me and said with a stony glare, ‘I should rather like to have my own kin around me.’

  Her brand of snobbery was different to that of our parents and unbeknownst to us, her tastes and prejudices would have a deep and lasting influence. She certainly nourished the recklessness in all of us, for, as we were growing up, she read to us, beautifully and compellingly, carefully chosen novels that expressed her bohemian, romantic leanings: Lorna Doone, Ivanhoe, Wuthering Heights. She believed in all the big abstract nouns with capitals, Love and Art and Beauty and Truth, and in following your heart and living with passion. She married three times and spent her later years with a lover twenty-nine years her junior. Izzy recently confessed a childhood fantasy that she is sure came from Gran. ‘I didn’t want to marry a suitable boy and settle down,’ she told me. ‘I’d dream of going to the altar with one and then a tousle-haired gypsy showing up to carry me off.’ Fly and I didn’t love David Cassidy or Donny Osmond. We loved what my father called ‘rough trade’: Oliver Reed from Oliver! and Alan Bates from The Go Between.

  Eileen’s intellectual snobbery did not come from her parents. Her father, whom she always described as a man of letters, was also an entrepreneur, but she preferred to emphasize the fact that he spoke seven languages. In 1916 he bought a weekend cottage in a little village called Rodmell on the Sussex
Downs. Three years later Virginia and Leonard Woolf moved into the cottage next door. Gran was seven. Virginia was thirty-seven. Something about my grandmother must have appealed to the novelist, who was as discerning and uncompromising about children as she was about everything else in her life. Virginia allowed her, so long as she didn’t talk, to accompany her on her long walks. She must have seen something in my grandmother, something ‘fine’ as she might have put it, and touching.

  Eileen was small for her age, exceptionally bright and emotionally insecure. When she was four she had been taken by her father to Victoria Station along with her elder sister and her two elder brothers and asked to make a choice. At first she didn’t understand. There on the platform, dressed in cream silk, stood her beautiful, red-haired mother, Elspeth, whom her husband had recently repudiated and banished to Wales on the grounds that she was ‘a secret drinker’.

  ‘Choose, baby!’ urged her elder brother, Ernest. ‘Who do you want to go with, Mama or Papa?’ Her siblings had no difficulty choosing their father, with his servants and his yacht, over their disgraced and penniless mother, and they stood resolutely beside him, but little Eileen ran to her mother and buried her face in the soft pleats of her long skirt. Elspeth held her child’s head for a moment, then tore herself away and ran off down the platform.

  Eileen would not see her mother again until she was fifteen. In the intervening years she was hothoused by her fierce and exacting father and punished or cajoled by a string of short-lived mistresses, all of whom found her insolent and wild. Her closest friend was her collie, Duke, with whom she would sometimes sleep in the garden, under the stars.

  At last, she was caught ‘necking’ with a boy in the stables and her father decided it was time she went to live with her mother. One fine spring morning in 1927, Twig, the chauffeur drove Eileen and Duke to Paddington Station and waited with her under the giant clock on Platform 1. Elspeth hadn’t seen her child for eleven years. They embraced awkwardly, the dog in between their feet. On the journey, they sat in silence, neither of them willing, after their painful separation, to sink to artificial conversation. Elspeth read her newspaper and Eileen stared at the tinted photographs of Western Super-Mare above her mother’s head, occasionally letting her gaze stray downwards to the elegant, auburn-haired stranger opposite her. At last, a man with a moustache, wearing a bowler hat and a dark suit opened the door of their carriage and asked if he might join them. He was a welcome distraction and they both encouraged him to sit down.