A few days after my 21st birthday in March, I left home. My parents moved back up to the Midlands (eventually settling, for a couple of years in a village called Bretforton in Evesham) while I moved into a rented room in Uxbridge town centre. I had no previous contact with the residents of the house, most of whom were a few years older than me and all worked in a variety of uninspiring jobs.
Since leaving art college the year previously, I was mostly unemployed (working Saturdays and occasionally part-time at W.H.Smiths), I still had no idea what I wanted to do, and stayed in the area while my parents moved away because the few friends I had were still here.
The first few months in the house were a nightmare. I was terrified of all the other residents - social anxiety now almost chronic - and I wondered if I had made a mistake moving here. I would avoid the living room and kitchen if there was anyone else in there, only making my meals late at night. I spent most of my days hanging out with David and John, occasionally seeing Simon, who was mostly at university across the other side of London.
It was not an ideal state of affairs, made even worse when David decided that he was no longer going to socialise as he wanted to 'work on his novel'. Anxiety turned into depression, and I spent a lot of time visiting my parents up in the Midlands. April turned to May, and John had a couple of weeks off work. Two weeks spent flying kites on Perivale Hill and sleeping over on his sofa (his parents were away). This made me feel slightly more at ease... even David came out a couple of times. I remember walking John's dog over an overgrown patch of parkland near where he lived in West Drayton, called The Closes Violet tinged evenings. Air full of seeds and electricity, a springtime optimism.
Summer began in 1993 when Philip had dropped me off at my house. I was still avoiding everyone I lived with (aside from a few awkward encounters in hallway), but we had had someone new move in. I ran into him in the hallway (or he might have forgotten his key and I let him in). He introduced himself as Paul, and asked if I 'wanted a smoke' which I declined.
Paul was 24, three years older than me, and I used to think of him as some cross between your typical lad and a hippy (the latter due no doubt to the copious amounts of cannabis he consumed). He was mostly unemployed though sometimes worked as a 'grouter' (some arcane building site job). He liked body building and looking good, was self-confident and outgoing, but he also liked painting (small water colours of geometrical landscapes) and said that he had been a child actor, and even had a credit in Omen 3 as a 'shoeshine boy'.
Paul was my entry into that summer and away from the gloomy confines of my sunless ground floor room. He always made sure that I joined him in the living room, and I began to tentatively join him for a 'smoke'. I liked being stoned - I felt relaxed and my imagination seemed sharper and stronger. My ability to daydream was much increased. Through Paul I met the other people in my house; Claire an Irish office worker who was 25, and Helen, also 25. It would be later that I would meet the other previous resident in the house, Pete. He was a year older than myself at 22, and also worked in an office, and because he was in such debt and had no money, spent all his time in his room with his best friend getting stoned.
Meeting the other residents happened gradually over a period of time, and even as late as late June that year, I was still questioning if I was going to stay.
I had been up to see me parents in their new bungalow in Bretforton. As they didn't have a spare bed I was staying on the sofa in the living room, a situation which didn't seem too bad at the time. The music I was listening to at the time? It seemed I was listening to a lot of punk / hardcore stuff; Bad Brains, Instigators,Thrust, SNFU. I remember buying Obituary's 'World Demise' album in a second hand record shop in Worcester, and a punk compilation album (quite rare too) from some market in nearby Evesham.
I spent my days in my parents garage - I had some kind of fantastic karaoke machine which meant that I could record songs in some kind of listenable quality. I played guitar and tried to sing, and used my sister's old keyboard to provide some kind of backing beat. I would sometimes double-track the voice and guitars. The kind of music I was playing was an odd mixture of punk, metal with an increasing influence of gothic rock. How I remember that huge, hot garage, everything tasting of dust and languor, and sweating in the heat, spending hours working on songs such as 'Revenge' and 'Hey Brother'.
For some reason, and I can't remember why now, this weekend, which I always referred to as 'The Last Days of June' as if it were some great historical epoch, seemed to mark the end of that period of great uncertainty which marked those months moving of first moving out of home.
I had also decided to go back to college.
Despite my failure two years ago to finish my art and design foundation course, I had decided to do another one. This decision was due in part to a couple of weeks the last autumn where, unemployed and lonely, I had discovered something akin to a passion for art - a real passion, as opposed to something I did because I was 'good at it' and couldn't think of anything else to do. I went for an interview at the Langley site of East Berkshire and was offered a place on the spot.
For the first time, probably since school, I felt my life was beginning to go somewhere.
In early July (while heading out to buy Sapphire and Steel assignment 6 on video) I was stopped in the street by a girl looking for a guitar shop. She needed to buy plectrums or strings. Usually I would have pointed her in the right direction, and left it at that, but because I was happy, and was unsure that my directions were being understood (she was French and her English wasn't great) I walked her to the guitar shop, before she asked to meet the next day.
The summer of 1993 had begun.
I was working part-time most days at Smiths, and in the afternoons I would meet up with Anne-Sophie, and we would play guitar in various Uxbridge parks (Paul had given me an acoustic guitar he had and never got around to playing). Sometimes we would go for a drink or just get stoned.
When Paul wasn't working I would hang around with him. One day, bored, (I say bored, but I don't really mean bored, I don't remember being bored at all that summer) we started throwing pears in the tangled back garden. Never good at throwing, I overshot (we had set up some kind of target in the old shed) and my pear sailed out of the back garden and with a horrifying smashing sound, realised that I had smashed someone's window, or greenhouse. In horror, we both ran back into the house. I became convinced that the police might be called and I would be taken to jail, sentenced for my 'garden crime'. I thought the best thing to do was to find the person whose window I had smashed and apologise. I set off on my quest. I ran into an old man on the way, who saw how concerned I was, and kindly advised that the best thing for me to do was to think 'it was just one of those things' and go home and forget it... which I did.
It was a sweltering summer - the heat sank into everything.
Fragments, echoes.
Walking back with Paul from a nearby friends house, talking about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and Paul noticing I had gone 'very pale'. Reading, or trying to read 'The Juvenalia of Charlotte Bronte' in the kitchen, and discovering the delights of Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' (recommended by Duncan at work, the department manager of the books section as 'that book everyone is talking about). Working my way slowly through a thick book of E.F.Benson's Collected Ghost Stories. I still have a copy of that book now, on the shelf of my bookcase. Music was supplied by Type'O'Negative's 'Bloody Kisses', Voivod's 'The Outer Limits', Brujeria's 'Matando Gueros' and a blue vinyl edition of Manilla Road's 'Crystal Logic'.
Ann-Sophie was over for the summer and was working as an au-pair in nearby Gerrards Cross. We met up most days, and despite having some attraction to her, never really considered the possibility of anything happening between us. She was the same age as me, but her background was very different, impossibly glamourous and slightly dangerous. She would tell me how she used to smuggle drugs across Europe by swallowing them in a condom, of how she really came to England to look for her brother. Her brother had disappeared after committing some kind of robbery with a shotgun in France. Ann-Sophie had traced the rumours to England, but there the trail had run cold. I don't know whether she ever found him.
One night I went over to see her at Gerrards Cross. I caught a taxi to West Drayton station, and told the taxi driver I was going to see my girlfriend. We drank whisky in one of the parks, where gangs of friendly local teenagers attempted to speak French with her. I met her friend Elizabeth, also a French au-pair. I remember Gerrards Cross being full of woods, dark trees and crossroads made of footpaths, lit by dim lamps. Somehow we ended up at some kind of night-fete. They had a bunking bronco machine there, which Ann-Sophie rode on... for about ten seconds before being flung off, much to her delight and the delight of the crowd. I have some vague memory of being at Gerrards Cross train station at midnight... vaguely alarmed at the non appearance of the train. The thought of spending a night out in the open didn't seem that concerning at the time... but the train came anyway.
I had work the next day, and I somehow managed to haul my whiskey-haunted body through work, but by the time I got home the hangover had kicked in. I remember sitting in the living room with everyone else, and Claire making me a strawberry jam sandwich to make me feel better.
It was a good summer.
It was with a shock that I realised (and wrote in my diary) that 'I hadn't seen any of my old friends for over a month'.
Growing apart, moving away.
There seemed to be so much time that summer - life was entirely without the awful rushed quality that defines it now. So much seemed to happen, but there was also so much time for daydreaming and languor too. I remember one long night reading the Secret History in the living room, that section when the main narrator Richard, elects to stay alone in Hampden Town over winter while all his friends are away. The section affected me deeply, all those images of wintry days and snow and isolation. As his winter progressed, his isolation started to turn 'into a kind of mania' - he began to hear voices in the snow, and was beholden to strange superstitions (having to drop a stone into the frozen river as some kind of propitiation of a river-god). The cold infected his dreams, and 'lost Arctic expeditions' is a phrase which still haunts me now. I remember reading this in the living room, as hypnotised and unnerved as if it were a ghost story.
I remember being in London with Ann-Sophie and Elizabeth, being at Speakers Corner as a gathering of anti-English supporters began to become vociferous (Neither Ann-Sophie or Elizabeth, both olive-skinned looked particularly English).
I remember Paul having a friend who vanished, neglecting to pay some small debt to him. He had probably gone home to Liverpool, but after opening an old suitcase of his, found in the garden (he had been staying over) and discovering letters relating to computer programming, we had decided something much more sinister was afoot. Over an evening of getting stoned and listening to early Black Sabbath, we had turned his friend into some government agent, some career criminal, some mastermind of deception. A great time was had by all.
No-one was much into washing up in the house. One day Paul, so annoyed by this, put all the pans out into the back garden. I remember the everyone's horror when, the next day, the pans were crawling with slugs. Paul was delighted by this - his hippy side coming to the fore - and said something along the lines of 'nature taking care of its own'. The next day, all the pans were back inside again, mixed with all the clean cutlery. Paul denied all knowledge of this, and no-one cooked anything for a long time.
I went away for a weeks holiday with my parents -a canal holiday along the Shropshire Union canal. As I sat on the boat reading (I think it was 'A Time of Omens' by Katherine Deverry) a leaf landed on the page I was at. It was a perfect autumnal leaf, the colour of cooling, dreaming days, of childhood and early nights, street lamps coming on and dark breezy mornings.
The first sign that this summer had an end.
When I got back I rang Ann-Sophie once, but she wasn't in, and I didn't try again. I'm not sure why. I re-established contact with David. I began to buy records from the new wave of black metal - Burzum's first album being among them. David disliked the smell of my hallway. I listened to albums by Nosferatu and Asylum A day or two before I was due to start college (college began on September 13th that year) I received a letter. It was from Ann-Sophie. She was very upset with me, wondered why I hadn't called her, and if she had done anything wrong. She wanted me to call her, but if I didn't then she understood, and wished me well and to 'have good guitar'. She ended with the words 'life is strange'.
The letter saddened me - I don't know why I hadn't called her, not really - but more than that I have no idea why I didn't call her then, why this casual, unmeant cruelty.
It's a question that still haunts me now, 20 years later.
I started college, and after the best summer of my life, the next year at college was to continue this positive trend. It was still hot when I started college - still like summer - and I'm not sure when it started to feel like autumn, but whenever it did, it was to be one of my favourite autumns ever.
That autumn was also to mark my last year of living in the Uxbridge area.
It would be a good year.
