were not railway children to begin with
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children
My family looked happy enough. From a distance, or from the photos. We lived in an ordinary suburban house, a bit like the one in which Nesbit’s railway children begin their lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Ours was a bit smaller. Inside, there was a big square hall with an emerald green tiled fireplace, and a kitchen with a glass-fronted dresser and an archaic bell system that no longer worked. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a mock balcony, accessible from the main bedroom or by climbing out of a side window, where you could sit on the slatted wooden floor and smoke Camel Lights. We even had French windows, like Nesbit’s children, which hooked back so that you could walk onto a crazily paved patio. The garden was long. It had a gate leading onto the local woods. There were hydrangea bushes and a rockery in the garden. An unsteady sundial with an iron pointer that you could lift up to ambush a colony of ants running in frenzied circles. A gently rotting greenhouse, in which we used to store old furniture. It was a quiet road, the silence broken by the sound of the Tube making its way down the end of the Northern Line, or our next-door neighbour trying to kill squirrels with his air rifle. The house is my earliest memory. The front door in particular.
I remember walking down the path, looking at its pale blue wood (later painted yellow) and jewel-like panels of coloured glass – blue, green and red teardrops against a grid of lead. There were row after row of houses like this in our neighbourhood, all with their own individual take on topiary or pampas grass. Our road was one of the many suburban semi developments of early twentieth-century Metroland, the place with elastic borders, no beginning and no clear end. The architectural critics call these roads joyless. Phoney. A kind of Neverland. Semis like these were, in 1910, bang on trend. Tudorbethan, blackened timber nailed onto the stucco, leadlights in squares or sometimes in diamonds. In the really posh bits of London, architects lovingly built houses along these lines, attempting to capture the idea of human craft in the machine age. The ones in our street were aspirational knock-offs – the rows of pseudo-artisan houses embodied that oddest of ideas: mass-produced individuality. All suburban semis are alike, but each suburban semi is alike in its own way.
Our road was a cul-de-sac. Bag End. Traffic calmed, there was nowhere to go. If you went back the way you came, further up the junction, onto the main road, there was the North Finchley cinema complex, and Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and the open road to Little Chef. And holidays. The North Circ, and Neasden and David Lloyd Sports Centre and multiplex cinemas. Homebase and B&Q. Smooth and bland. A place that brings with it a sort of atrophy of body and mind, a numbing alikeness. This is what J. G. Ballard called the real England. And with it, he writes, comes a boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.
A century ago, Edith Nesbit had a similar, if less scary, response to Metroland. As a ritual, each evening, she would put aside her drafts of novels and make a series of models of factories and suburban houses out of brown paper. She’d then take them out to her back garden, and set them on fire. It’s little wonder that Nesbit soon has her railway children leave their villa, engineering the plot so that they are forced to take a cottage in the country.
Finchley in Nesbit’s day was an omnibus ride from town, up through Swiss Cottage and Golders Green. A strange mixture of city and countryside, famous for its compost heaps and Barham’s model dairy farm. Visitors on the omnibus would continue through Temple Fortune for their day in the country, on the edge of the city. Overlooking the presence of Simms Motor Units, they would head for the idyll on Regent’s Park Road, where they could view the rows of pedigree Express dairy cows, admire the silver bottle tops and have a scone in the adjoining tearooms. It was a stop-gap. A commuter village. From Tally Ho Corner, you could take the omnibus direct to Marylebone, or pick up the train on a cross route from Finsbury Park to Edgware. But Finchley didn’t join the London Underground for years. Perhaps it makes sense that the man who designed the Tube map was off the map, at least when he first drew it. When he died, nobody even knew it was his idea. Harry Beck lived just around the corner from me – a dweller in nowhere.
Nowadays, Finchley still feels more to me like a place to pass through than a destination. A few months ago, I took a journey down the road to my old house, rounding the corner past West Avenue and Lovers Walk. Everything seemed wider and larger than I recalled, but the quality of silence was still the same. The houses are the same mixture of the dark red of the late eighties and the determined solidity of 1930s mansion flats. I walked along the undulating road, past Chestnut Row with its pollarded trees. The house at the corner of my road has been converted to a care home. Shielded by a high fence, only parts of it are visible from the street. A burgundy awning perches above its door, desperately trying to create the effect of hotel luxury. The strange combination of porticos and extensions and satellite dishes make it feel as if it is about to fall into the road.
Ahead to the left is Lovers Walk, the shortcut up to Ballards Lane. Not much in the way of love ever happened to me there. The closest I came was being flashed at while walking back from Tesco. My road bends to the right, down a shallow hill. It seems much the same. The same green-gated park on the left-hand side. I remember the overwhelming shades of green – conifers – and the slow descent of the road down to the bottom where our house stood, still marked by the leafless silver birch, with its white trunk and electrocuted shock of narrow branches. The road was still quiet, apart from the banging of some builders a few doors up.
There was an ache about the house that I couldn’t put into words but which I remembered from before. Growing up, I understood that our house was steeped in compromise. It was not quite a mistake but felt a place in which we could never truly settle. Every few months, an outing with an estate agent acted as a peculiarly ineffective kind of family therapy. We trooped around other houses, further down the Northern Line, nearer to town. They smelled of polish or mice, or a different kind of pain. But the houses we saw, the ones without net curtains and stucco, were unaffordable. Window shopping over, we were stuck.
Sometimes there were arguments. Quiet arguments. Voices never raised. Tension about money, I think. Holidays. A particularly vivid un-shouting match seemed to be about what shade of beige we should paint the front room, but probably wasn’t. Mostly there was just a sense of things unsaid. My father insisted on long journeys to National Trust stately homes, and I threw up in the back seat.
Once, at the end of one weekend, something happened. Someone was not able to talk. Someone else was angry. The contents of a coffee cup were poured around the kitchen table, like a bizarre midsummer rite. We were packed into the car with suitcases. We drove to my friend’s house where we arrived without warning and were awkwardly made lunch. Our suitcases remained in the hall. When we returned home and walked back into our kitchen, accomplices of this short, failed separation, my father was still standing in front of the square window above the draining board, staring at the revolving washing line and fiddling with the silver tankard full of screwdrivers, as if he’d been there all day. The magic coffee circle had been cleaned up. I watched the raindrops make their way down the glass, breaking off and then joining one another, like companionable tears. Then I went outside and played with the tap, pressing my hand against the pattern of small shiny stones embedded in concrete until it hurt. Nobody felt at home, and there was no hope of anyone going anywhere.
My father was invisibly sick. We all knew he was sick, but I didn’t fully understand why or how or where. Sometimes he was at work, leaving every morning in a suit with a briefcase to do things that had something to do with the Government. Sometimes he left a little later, with a vinyl suitcase packed with pale blue pyjamas, and then he was going to the Big Hospital, and didn’t come back for a while. Once he was there for a very long time. We visited. The Big Hospital corridors unfurled like a medical version of Oz, rising and falling as we walked. Everything smelled of oranges and Pine Harpic. I was allowed to buy a Beatrix Potter cookery book and a stained-glass colouring book on the way home. Then my aunt arrived with a neat collection of bags and a bright smile and made marmalade.
When my father finally came home, he spent a long time upstairs in bed and there was a differently strange smell in the bedroom. His left leg was marked with two shiny ovals, bigger than my mother’s hand. It looked as if someone