I remember the precise moment when the summer of 1991 started. I was sat in the canteen of Uxbridge college with Julian and two girls, neither of whom I liked and who felt the same about me. I had actually finished my art A-level (taken in a year) over the previous weeks. Julian and myself were hanging around the college because we really had nothing else to do.
My first year outside of school had been ambiguous; I had managed to secure a place for myself that autumn at a college in Harrow to do a foundation course in art and design – but I hadn’t actually excelled artistically during my art A-level. Neither had I overcome a sometimes crippling shyness that had blighted my sixth form years – particularly around the opposite sex. I had made some friends at Uxbridge College, but none that were to last beyond that day when I left.
That first year after school also marked my first ‘proper’ job (i.e a job that wasn’t a paper round basically) – working part-time (or sometimes just Saturdays) at the local W H Smiths on Uxbridge High Street. I made some friends at work – but didn’t really fit in at all – and never socialised with the people I worked with.
Anyway, that summer of 1991 began when I was sat in the college canteen. I had decided that I had had enough of the two girls, whom no-else really liked either, and walked out. I had said some parting shot to them both, nothing particularly witty, but which had silenced them both. I could hear Julian sniggering as I left.
I never went back into that college again.
It was a hot day – sunny and metallic – I passed by the Middlesex fields on the short walk home – and the green there was already turning to yellow, even though it was surely no later than early June. I remember I got back home and lay on my bed in my room, and put on some record – it was some death metal artist whose name slips me now. There was a certain sense of triumph as I lay there on that hot afternoon, aged 19, another summer just begun, and a song called ‘Necronomicon’ playing on the stereo (I wish I could remember the name of the band though).
I don’t remember much about the first part of the summer – I probably met up with Edward, Simon and Philip (the few friends I had were all from school). I saw less and less of Julian. He had managed to find a group of friends at college to hang about with and he began to drift away. I was envious of his new social group. They got stoned and went to pubs, had jam sessions at local rehearsal halls. They were young in a way that I’ve never been able to be. Things were changing – people were moving on – but I had the increasing feeling that I had was of being left behind.
Ickenham – where I lived – was a labyrinth of houses and neat gardens – suburbia in excelsis – I remember on those first summery nights, wondering this maze of near identical homes, the street lamps on red, and that feeling of life happening elsewhere. Edward – whom I saw most of – shared these feelings too – he was unemployed since leaving school the previous year – but as he had a girlfriend and I didn’t (and whom I had liked before him back when we were both 16), I didn’t quite believe him and felt he just wanted to join in on my late teenage melancholy.
At some point Edward and Julian had decided to go inter-railing around Europe. I had the opportunity to go but decided not to – I can’t remember why now. This was over August, and the summer had settled into some kind of claustrophobic suburban rhythm; work on Saturdays, London over the week, usually Thursdays, to buy albums from the second hand shops down Notting Hill Gate and Soho. I would have a driving lesson every week as well – my driving test (my fourth) was set for later that summer. I wasn’t confident of passing.
With both Edward and Julian gone, that creeping sense of isolation tightened about me. A vague kind of troubled melancholy managed to turn itself into a moderate depression. Everything felt too hot and exhausted, shot through with either a resignation or creeping despair. Those trips to London provided some escape from it all, and also from the constant stress-headache that plagued those August days.
Another friend – C – worked in a second hand bookshop in Uxbridge. One day he showed me a box full of old horror comics. He gave me a very good deal on them, and I bought them all. They were mostly from the late 1960s / early 1970s – magazines such as ‘Creepy’ and ‘Eerie’ – as well as a few lesser known titles such as ‘Chilling Tales of Horror’ and ‘Dracula’. I was nearly very pleased, but he had told me that there had been more horror comics – and had nearly rang me to tell me about them, but hadn’t got around to it. Even now, 22 years after that summer, I wonder what other comics might have been there.
I think it was also from that bookshop (though I can’t really remember) that I procured a load of old Doctor Who novelizations for a very cheap price. Long hours were spent in my room reading through them all – short night turning into too-hot dawns. I remember finishing the last of the Dr Who novels ‘The Sea Devils’ as another feverish sunrise crept about my spider-infested room. Another of the novels ‘Fury From the Deep’ I spilled tea all over. The pages smelled of tea-bags, and were stained a deep autumnal brown.
In early August we spent a week or so at both grandparents houses in the Midlands – my Nan lived in Wolverhampton, and my Granddad in a small village called Stone just outside of Kidderminster. We split our time between the two houses. On the Monday (the 12th of August to be exact) Metallica released their famous ‘black album’ (as most people refer to it). I remember being in the cramped spare room listening to future single ‘The Unforgiven’, finding too many parallels to my own life – or to this summer anyway. Then there was first single ‘Sandman’, I remember being at the bottom of Nan’s garden with Dad and my sister, watching the glowing remnants of a bonfire, and the words echoing through my head ‘exit light, enter night…’ On the other side of the garden was an inner city park, a long stretch of woodland where we would play ball when I was a kid, and where the nostalgia-song of wood pigeons could always be heard.
My grandfather lived out in the middle of the Worcestershire countryside. I remember over that holiday we all took a walk deep into the woodland where my Mum would play when she was a kid. To get there you had to walk down a long narrow country lane that seemed to last forever. There was a section actually inside the wood – near a wide and shallow stream – that Mum called ‘the spinney’. There was some kind of humming electricity box deep in the trees, too small to be a substation, too deep in the trees, but I can’t imagine what else it would have been for. It all seemed incredibly mysterious, and even now, when I’m falling asleep (perhaps on another hot summer afternoon, (like this one, a summer when I’m 41) that I imagine walking, alone, down that long narrow lane, deep into the woods, looking for that lost spinney.
After that week away, we returned to Ickenham, and summer in London suburbia continued. I failed my driving test for the 4th time – much to the surprise of my driving instructor. I remember his disappointed face, and his determination when he said to me that I could drive perfectly well, and that he would now give me free lessons until I passed – fortunately on my next attempt. I also discovered that I had failed my art A-level. On the one hand I wasn’t too bothered by this, as I already had a place at college that autumn, but there was something else about it that troubled me. A bad grade I could deal with, but to actually fail..? Particularly as I hadn’t thought the stuff I had done was that bad at all…
I saw a lot of Philip that summer. Philip was a bus driver, and another friend from school – though we hadn’t really got on that well until we had left. That summer he had a couple of new routes to learn, and I remember long hours in his car tracing the new routes through unfamiliar fragments of London suburbia; Eastcote, Rayners Lane, Pinner… Those trips in the car became intense and feverish. If he had air conditioning it didn’t work very well, and even with the windows open, the sweltering heat didn’t lessen. The evening sunlight sparked glass shards off of cars, and the taste of melting tarmac became ubiquitous. As the long days dragged themselves to evening, the bloated sun would hang like some omen in the sky, a deep and hypnotic red. Fragments - shimmery haze – late summer deeps – dark maps full of old factories and violence. I remember one of the routes we drove took us into some tower block industrial estate. In the dead ground between the blocks, a no-man’s land of yellowing grass and playgrounds, a number of children played noisily. Surlier teenagers stood round the outskirts in clustered groups of adolescent conspiracy and concern. This looked like a bad place to be. Directly in front of the car there was a figure. Not really a child or a teenager, but something in-between. He had an oversized head, and something not quite right about his darkly hooded eyes that regarded us with a mixture of suspicion and mute malevolence. He began to run, back towards the tower blocks in the near distance, where he presumably lived. Philip quickly reversed the car and we noisily escaped this suddenly sinister dead end.
The growing sense of desperation and despair that accompanied the heat faded –slightly- as summer grew to an end. Edward and Julian had come back from their travels, and though I was glad they were back I was also felt left out and distanced from the both. I had a project to do for college that was about the idea of ‘place’ and I chose the back garden, because I didn’t have to go very far. This took up most of my days, and though I was nervous of starting a new college I would be glad when the summer was over. I spent the evening in the gentle late-summer blue dusks drawing the willow tree, the shed, the leaves on the apple tree, and the brick work of the house I had always believed to be disquietingly haunted.
This late summer swan song was accompanied by a new raft of records – bought not from second hand shops in London, but from Our Price in Uxbridge. They were getting rid of most of their records to make room for the then new format of compact discs. There were cheap treasures to be had here! -A double Diamanda Galas album, ‘The Plague Mass’ a special coloured vinyl edition of the Swans ‘Filth’ album, a white vinyl Newtown Neurotics compilation, also solo albums from ex-Husker Du singer Bob Mould and others too I’ve long since forgotten.
As I knew exactly when that summer began, I also know the exact moment where it ended. It was the Sunday before I started at college and I had gone record shopping in London – I remember some of the albums I bought that day; Husker Du’s ‘Everything Falls Apart’, the first Anti-Nowhere League album, and ‘Defiance’ by Dead Moon who were to become one of my favourite bands. I remember I got back in the last of the light at Hillingdon tube station. That tube station was demolished a couple of years later and a bright shiny new one erected, but I liked the old one. It was small and ramshackle, and slightly mysterious. By the time I had walked down Swakeleys Drive and had just embarked on the upward slope of Woodstock Drive where I lived, the streetlights had come on; deep red hues watching the empty streets. There was a certain exciting coolness in the air, and a sober breeze had started up, stirring the shadows between the lamps, between the houses and under still heavy summer trees to deepen in ways that no longer belonged to the summer. This was the point where autumn was to begin. I had a new college to start the next day, and new records to listen to.
I was glad that the summer was over.
