We moved to London from Scotland in the very late summer of 1985, when I was 13. I say London but what I mean are the very edges of London, those semi-anonymous suburbs, Janus-faced, that one way face London and the other s strangely wild and scraggy countryside, more industrial than rural in feel. We spent a few short months living in a condemned house in Northwood (to be pulled down for a car park) then in the October of 1985 moving to Ickenham. I have written about this house before and its alleged haunting. I moved from Ickenham to a room in a shared house in nearby Uxbridge in 1993 when I was 21, before leaving the area permanently the following year. There have been two other return visits, the first in the summer of 1996 -I did the same route yesterday- and the second in the late January of 2006.
It was always my intention to take the Central Line underground to West Ruislip and then to walk into Ickenham from there, and to alight at West Ruislip just as twilight was starting. I hadn't thought that the lack of light would forestall much in the way of photography - hence not many photographs, and furthermore, the actual quality of the light - or rather the quality of the darkness itself - made any usable photographs quite difficult to obtain.
1: From West Ruislip tube station into Ickenham
I remember this station. This station would be used quite often to return from London, where I would use the travelcard to catch the bus to the top of Woodstock Drive where I lived in Ickenham. Remember coming here with Leighton on our bikes, Christmas Eve of 1986, remember buying a volume or two I was missing from the Pan Books of Horror Stories in the stall that used to be here (now no more). Remember most waiting at the bus stop, looking over at the bleak fields that formed some kind of demarcation between Ickenham and Ruislip, cold and eager to be home, bag heavy with records bought in one of the many second hand shops I would visit in London. That bus always seemed to take an age to arrive.
I walked today, and as I set off down the hill into Ickenham, it struck me quite how old everything felt. I'm not talking about the buildings (there were plenty of new buildings to my left I didn't remember) but something old about the air. It tasted of something ancient and laced with history and centuries and centuries of things happening. I think it helped that there was a welcome raw quality to the twilight too; the red in the sky just over the houses, the cold sliver of a crescent moon hanging in leafless branches. People live and grow old and die here, have children and settle down, go to school, leave for university, go away and come back. Brighton is not a place where these things seem to happen - not in the centre anyway, where everyone lives in an extended adolescence of drink, indie bands, beach barbecues and plans for things that never really happen. Easy in Brighton to live as if the city is a stage to show off on. In suburbs such as Ickenham less easy. Too many houses, too much anonymity, too many spaces and hidden places that might swallow you up. By the side of a pub called The Soldiers Return, I saw the entrance into the curving section of rough parkland that followed the River Pinn into Ickenham. One of those very dark and carnivorous spaces. I saw a man unhook a gate from a fence, glance round, and seem drowned in the rush hour roar of cars passing by.
Ickenham doesn't change much. Same old shops, same old petrol station. A new pub. Saw the library that I spent a week doing working experience at when I was 17, January of 1989. Passed by the churchyard where I once found odd bits of writing on notepaper; 'it shows the danger of living in a place like this, even though I feel the presence of my father near me' and another; 'a violinist violins a murderer kills'. The latter was written in a scrawly child-hand but the former I've always wondered about and why I have always presumed the writer was a she. I remember finding the note when I was helping Mum tidy up the graveyard, bright summers day and those words a winter cool. I took the note but soon lost it.
2.The Road of Old Autumns
There was something deeply autumnal about the road from the centre of Ickenham to the park. Something deeply autumnal and nocturnal about Ickenham itself. The day was slipping fast into night. There was a woman walking across the other side of the road from me, a shadowy cipher, slipping behind cars, under trees, under the sky still sunset-pink. The night seemed to rise up from the road itself. The street lamps seemed to be miniature nocturnal suns.
3. Swakeleys Park
It was a short walk through Swakeleys Park. The birdsong in the twilight was strange, used as I am to seagulls. It gave the place an air of very early spring perhaps. The smell of the water in the pool to my left tasted heavy, stagnant yet strangely refreshing, a summer spell. Across the tangle-thrash of the islands, -reachable only in winter when the water froze, and then only if you were brave enough (I never was)- lay the grounds of Swakeleys Manor. An incongruous thing to find in an anonymous suburb of London. I could see the flood lit walls and windows of the building through the branches. It was mentioned in Samuel Pepys diary but when I was 13 I was more interested in the story of the ghost there, a servant child found locked and starved in the walls.
4. Photographs from the Bridge (Hidden Things in the Everyday)
When I was 13, the bridge was daubed for a short while in heavy metal graffitti; Deep Purple, ACDC, Black Sabbath. White dripping paint on the brickwork. I found this incredibly exciting, but it didn't last for long.
Across the other side of the road, the river Pinn curved toward the A40 and the Middlesex fields. There used to be a rope swing there that fascinated and frightened me. It was a magnet for the hard kids of nearby Vyners School, and was best approached with caution. Thoughts of the ropswing make me think of early summer, of falling in there because I wasn't hanging on properly, and of Leighton's tale of how he fell further out, in the deep part of the river, near a sewage outlet poking out of the brown water. The Vyners kids who were there laughed at him and didn't help him.
The woods across the river were thick and clustered, and one morning, a summer dawn, Craig and myself explored them. There was something thick and unpleasant about them, and after that they were always known as 'The Wood of Oppressiveness'. The land immediately by the river Pinn seemed to attract this kind of less than pleasant description. Further down the river, in the Middlesex fields themselves, there was a place we called 'The Place of Disgustingness', All green stinking mud, rusting factory iron and toxic looking weeds.
Adolescence was full of secret views like this, hidden parts of hidden rivers whose course was difficult to chart. Tangled and often overgrown, there was a curious mixture of danger and safety about such places. I remember in a flash flood once, the river burst its banks, sending all of the park under water, and another time, with Leighton, my sister, and two of her friends, we were attacked by older kids at another bridge, deeper in the park. We were in the water and they stood on the bridge throwing stones at us. One of the kids said to his friends 'you stay here while I go and get reinforcements'. This was the most terrifying sentence I think I had ever heard at the time.
There aren't parks like this in Brighton. Down here they are all too neat and ordered and too mapped and too known. There is nothing to explore in the parks down here, but maybe you need to be an adolescent or child to really see those hidden things lost in the everyday.
5. Woodstock Drive is a Dark Road.
I noticed this before, on the return visit I did back in January of 1996, and I actually noticed when I lived here too. I assumed it was something to do with living inland rather than by the sea, but I thought that the London nights seemed dangerous, less to be trusted than the Scottish ones. These nights, I thought, seemed full of muggings and knives, ghost stories that defined my childhood. The darkness actually seemed somehow deeper here.
I noticed it again last night (Last night! Not even twelve hours since I was there and it seems months ago!). The spaces between the pools of street light seemed to contain an almost palpable darkness, a thick tenebrous quality you could sink into. No wonder I would sometimes run between the street lamp pools when I was coming home from school. Behind the pools of light, behind the houses, there seemed to be great patches of darkness in the hidden gardens too. I could imagine these pools of black rising over the slopes of the semi-detached roofs. Maybe it was some curious effect of the street lamps, that their bulbs were a little dimmer, or the lamps were placed a few metres too far apart... but Woodstock Drive seemed a dark road, as if it were situated at the bottom of an ocean, or was one of those villages you come across in legends, drowned under lakes, with the church bell ringing still on certain days...
As I walked up Woodstock Drive, it seemed that any sense of linear time had fragmented completely. Did it feel like now or did it feel like the 1980s or the early 1990s? Did the past feel a long time away or did the present? Actually it didn't feel like any time. Woodstock Drive felt actually removed from the flow of time. Walking up that street, in that strange darkness felt like one of my dreams of the place rather than the actual place.
Then there it was, my old home.
33 Woodstock Drive.
I was too afraid to take a photograph of it, though wish I had now of course. I slowed my walk down instead and looked over.
All the lights were on, and all the curtains were open.
I could look back into rooms from my own past.
The front dining room, empty and yellow, and upstairs, the spare room that was my sisters for a while. I could see what looked like a bunk bed in there, and then, I saw that I could see into my room. My old room. I still feel proprietorial about it.
An angle of the cupboard, that little alcove that led to the door. The familiar plane and shape of the ceiling.
The room I slept in between the ages of 13 and 21.
Out of the door of my room I could see a fragment of the landing.
I could see no-one moving about the house, so with all the open curtains and lights on, it had a strangely abandoned, empty quality to it. The light from the lamps had the same impersonal quality I remember from my teenage years, a 60-watt gloom that failed to illume much as if the rooms that were larger than they were. The house seemed caught up in itself, lost in its own deep and unknowable mechanisms.
I was too afraid to take a photograph of it, though wish I had now of course. I slowed my walk down instead and looked over.
All the lights were on, and all the curtains were open.
I could look back into rooms from my own past.
The front dining room, empty and yellow, and upstairs, the spare room that was my sisters for a while. I could see what looked like a bunk bed in there, and then, I saw that I could see into my room. My old room. I still feel proprietorial about it.
An angle of the cupboard, that little alcove that led to the door. The familiar plane and shape of the ceiling.
The room I slept in between the ages of 13 and 21.
Out of the door of my room I could see a fragment of the landing.
I could see no-one moving about the house, so with all the open curtains and lights on, it had a strangely abandoned, empty quality to it. The light from the lamps had the same impersonal quality I remember from my teenage years, a 60-watt gloom that failed to illume much as if the rooms that were larger than they were. The house seemed caught up in itself, lost in its own deep and unknowable mechanisms.
It still seemed haunted.
As I walked up Woodstock Drive, the dream-like sense of surreality only increased. There was a deep and quite profound serenity in the houses I passed - and though I passed houses I passed no-one else. Under the street lamps there was an air of undeniable waiting, as if all the cul-de-sacs off Woodstock Drive were nervous with a kind of watchful anticipation. Too many empty spaces, and yet, that sense of sleepy Christmas time peace. I paused at where there used to be an entrance between two houses to an old rickety playground hidden between the gardens of the houses. We called it The Twilight Zone. The slide like the skeleton of a dinosaur in a museum, a set of swings like something Victorian and the scattering of green-moss covered benches. I suppose when the houses stopped being Ministry of Defence housing they shut up all the parks, tore them down, fenced off their spaces and extended the gardens of the houses they backed onto.
I left Woodstock Drive, curved right into the cul-de-sac of Roker Park Avenue, where a temporary best friend, Leighton, lived for a while before his family moved to Langley and we lost contact. As I walked down the road I realised that I could hear the ever present hiss of the A40, and had been able to ever since leaving Swakeleys Park. A ceaseless sea of traffic. No silence here. I don't remember that sound during adolescence at all.
At the end of Roker Park Avenue, I slipped into the alleyway I was glad to see was still there.
6. The Raggedy Alley
From Roker Park Avenue, and Leighton's old house, the alleyway splits in two. The right hand path takes you down the hill, back into those streets behind Woodstock Drive, or you can turn left, up the hill, and onto Swakeleys Road, which is the way I took.
The alleyway was popular with me when I was a kid. Dares at night with Leighton (alleyways are always invitingly dangerous when young), opportunities for freefall bike riding (no brakes allowed), places where you might find stashed and badly hidden porn mags. An inbetween place, another twilight zone. One night here, Leighton and myself convinced ourselves the alleyway was haunted because one of the street lamps switched itself off every time we moved underneath it. For reasons lost to time we (or rather myself) called it 'the night of the watcher', but after that night we never talked about it again.
The alleyway still recurs in dreams though I can't remember much of the alley dreams, though I have a feeling they may be about the houses on the other side of the alleyway. Playing football here with Leighton in an empty residential car park. Vague memories of winter cold and deep night. Or is this one of those dreams I can hardly remember and not a memory?
Walking up the alleyway, I was surprised to see just how overgrown it was, with weeds creeping underneath the fences either side, and the fences themselves looking old and ramshackle, the concrete of the ground cracked and uneven.
But at least all the street lamps worked and didn't flick themselves off when I walked underneath.
7. Ministry of Defence Housing Estate Gothic
A street lamp, slightly crooked. A pavement full of leaves. A wooden fence, and a dark and rumoured geography of houses behind.
That's all you need really.
8. Omens of the Inbetween
So I left Ickenham behind me, prepared to cross over the A40 and head into Uxbridge. As I approached the A40, on the edge of those trees that stretched right down into The Wood of Oppressiveness I noticed these:
When I was at Uxbridge College, failing my A-level in Art (1990 / 1991) I would pass these everyday. I had some strange superstition regarding them, some sub-OCD system of ascertaining omens as to how the day - or weekend - might go. I can't remember the precise mechanics of them now. As I passed them by last night it struck me how like little gravestones they looked. I still don't know what they are. Hydrants of some sort or another? Something to do with electricity cables? Something to do with sewage or water pipes?
They struck me as something a little sinister anyway. Little gravestones. Or little teeth, hidden amongst the grasses and the weeds for twenty years or more.
Looking over the A40 back into London. A liminal place between Ickenham and Uxbridge. There used to be a 'curly-wurly bridge' here, but they widened the road and tore down some trees and tore down the bridge, and now there's a zebra crossing. When they were doing all of this, I was 16 or 17 and became fascinated with the idea that hidden in the building site, disquised as labourers, were bands of travelling cannibals. I meant to write a story about this but never did.
I walked along Park Road to Uxbridge. To my left the Middlesex Fields, a labyrinthine collection of fields and meadows tiny fragments of green and woodland. The river Pinn cuts through it as does the tube line. There are broken bridges there, stagnant bits of water, and the ski-slope. The ski-slope is closed now, and as far as I could see. now completely obscured by overgrowing trees and bushes.
The Middlesex Fields is one of those odd geographies you don't really get in Brighton, something forgotten and somehow industrial, an overgrown and fascinating but oddly disquieting region. A place someone could vanish in, even though on the other side of the fields are only more suburbs, a seeming infinite regression of them in fact. Semi-detached houses stretching on into forever.
As I walked along Park Road by the far too fast traffic within touching distance, I had one of those strange Proustian time-slips I am wont to do every now and again. An odd overwhelming memory of, well, nothing in particular;
...walking to college, 1991, wearing me denim jacket I'm proud of, patches, sewn on by Mum, of bands I like Metallica, Sodom, the Misfits. A grey-white January day, bobbing along, and it's morning. Definetely morning, and I'm in that eighteen year old body again, with my short, neat hair, and then tiny frame, all potential and worry about the future, listening to some compilation of old heavy metal bands, using acrylic paint for the first time, off to meet Julian before classes begin, Julian with his cigarettes, and later Edward with his green-dirty jacket and tales of what stories he's been writing because since leaving school he's done nothing...
That's it though. All I could remember.
9. So I eventually made it to Uxbridge, passed the house I lived in when I left Ickenham. Used the toilets in the Pavilions shopping centre, looked around the giant Poundland where Woolworths used to be. Everything changes and stays the same. I bought a notebook from W.H.Smiths where I used to work. I wishes I could have stayed longer, but I was tired and it was getting late, so I caught the tube back to London, and finally the train back to Brighton. I got in about 9:00pm. We had a pint in the Evening Star and I came home.
I was exhausted.
Travelling back twenty five years is a long way.
