Ticket to There and Back Again: Moving Away From Home

A brown skirt suit, Jesus, what was I thinking? I thought borrowing something smartish from my big sister would help, and maybe it did, but it absolutely wasn’t me! I felt like a total fraud. I sat on the coach at Maidenhead bus station thinking it was the start of the rest of my life! That 11 quid fare was my ticket to freedom! It was the summer of 1989. I arrived at the house, super middle class affair, lovely villa in the burbs of Brighton. I packed my nerves away and rang the bell. I was greeted by the whole family. The interview went ok, I got the job, and suddenly, just like that, I was moving to Brighton to be a nanny to twins! My first digs away from home was with a chap who was about 4.5” tall, his house was filled with 50’s memorabilia, it was a little odd but he came recommended so I went with it. Fred was a lovely chap but I felt very nervous about it all and stayed in my room most of the time. I wasn’t there long.

I had no idea how to do this.

West Pier in 1989. Image: (c) Carol Homewood

Next place was with a family who seemed to live in the attic, only coming down to cook. There were 3 students and me. It was a fun place, a warm place, they took care of us. None of us really knew what we were doing. We all had Sunday Roasts together cooked for us by the family. I stayed at this place the longest.

The job was going well. I was up at the crack to arrive at 8 each morning, home at 6...long days for shit pay, the usual mother's helper lark. I worked hard, I took those toddlers on the buses to the beach, the train into town, cafes, museums, parks. It was wearing me down though...spending half my weekly pay on rent and trying to carve out a life with the rest. I’d made a few friends but I felt so out of my depth. I had just turned 21 years old.

I only knew one person when I moved there and I’d met him once, at a party in my hometown, he invited me to stay but he hadn’t been completely truthful with me at the start. He wrote me a letter and after a lot of cute rambling he admitted he had a pregnant girlfriend. I was a little crestfallen but I followed him up on his invitation hoping it might be a window onto a new world. He was in a band, they played that sort of earnest folk rock that was pretty popular at the time. They never really got anywhere big. That friendship soon fell away. I soon made a few new ones though, I met some amazing people, I only wish I still had some of them now!

The Prince George pub in Brighton, I met Jeremy and John on the corner of that bar.

I went to The Prince George and sat with a book on my own hoping someone might talk to me, they did, it was Jeremy. He had long dreads and a nice smiley face, he invited me to join him and his mate John at the bar. They said they were in a band called The Levellers. They took me under their wing that night and continue to this day to be friendly with me if our paths cross. Which they hardly ever do!

The job was starting to wear on me, I was feeling out of control a lot of the time. My social life was fractured at best.

The Berlin wall came down and we celebrated hard, our German friend wept and wept, we drank and drank. It was an incredible thing to happen, we all knew we would remember that moment forever.

People gather at Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin, on November 12, 1989. © Stephane Duroy/Agence VU/Redux

Gareth and Tina’s house was always open, Gareth often wafted about with not much on, dancing to his balletic and elegant beats, his long limbs springing about to Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Tina would giggle, tell us stories, make exciting meals. Their friends became my friends.

New Years Eve 1989, a new decade dawned...We were still under the hefty cosh of a conservative government but we had hope. I went to the party of a boy I fancied rotten. He had long hair, was blind in one eye and was terribly clever! I got far too drunk far too quickly and blacked out! I woke up at about 3am with a black eye and carpet burns all over my face! It took me 3 weeks to find someone who knew what happened. Thankfully it was just me being dramatic and nothing sinister.

We went to The Basement Club, couldn’t see our hands in front our faces for the dry ice. They played things like Hocus Pocus! We danced like fools and thought we were just about the coolest kids on the planet! We’d nurse our hangovers with Grubbs Burgers and go down the beach to kill a few hours. But even during all these adventures, I felt a bit like an uninvited guest. Always feeling I was outstaying my welcome.

A sunny spring day, my friend Kester took me on a cycle ride. I burned my face that day riding along the seafront. He bought me dinner when we got back, we had organic wine, it was awful! I loved him very much, such a kind and funny man. He made the time we spent together feel important and special. We were only ever romantic as friends, it was more than enough for me.

We all piled into coaches up to London in March 1990 for the anti poll tax demo. I was proudly wearing my Levellers design Anti Poll Tax T shirt. The atmosphere was truly electric. The crowds were immense. I drank whisky with a stranger, laughed and learned and shouted my way around the route. Once we hit Trafalgar Square it was clear to us that a small core of people had a more violent objective. I was trapped between a row of riot police on horses and demonstrators armed with sharpened sticks from their placards, bricks, stones, glass bottles. I froze on the spot! Whisky man came and grabbed me just after a half brick hit me in the back and as we got away the two sides closed in and all hell broke loose. He made us swap T shirts so we wouldn’t be recognised. He got the better half of that deal!

Poll tax riot kiss © David Hoffman 1990.

I’d go to a cafe off The London Road, meet with some people I was desperate to be friends with. I never felt like I quite made the grade, or was enough, a hangover perhaps from being bullied at school, maybe something to do with being from a single parent family, very likely the ever growing onset of a breakdown, who knows.

My political fever was burning hot but my ability to look after myself was failing. I was too young to make good judgements or clear decisions. I quit my job, I moved to a tiny room at the top of a 4 storey house up a big hill. It wasn’t long before I’d lost everything. My mind was becoming more and more fractured and I was unable to understand or communicate what was wrong. I didn’t know how to get housing benefit, perhaps I was just a bit too ill to really try.

My friends from back home visited for a party one weekend. I was so keen to impress them with my new exciting life, show them how cool and independent I was, we had such a great time. I was filled with a manic energy and wrote poems through the dawn while they slept about me on various sofas and on the floor. When I waved them goodbye later that day I was sad to see them go, I wanted the party to last forever!

As the weeks went on towards summer I was losing my grip on any kind of order, and just like that I was out on my ear, on the streets. I don’t fully recollect the sequence of events at this stage. I’d already half planned to go back home to my Mums, but I didn’t want to give up! I had no choice really. I had no order in my life, no control. I was lucky though, I only spent a couple or so nights on the street. Kester saw me one day and couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t already asked for help, he took me to his house where he looked after me for a couple of weeks. My trust and faith in everything was all but gone. I felt like a spare bride at a wedding, a sore thumb, I didn’t belong anywhere! His housemates were kind but I thought I was a burden, I may well have been. Kester booked me in to see a friend of his who was a hypnotherapist, so I went along, went down the steps into a basement room, gave myself up to the experience...almost! When I emerged from the gloom I felt like I was tripping. The grass was kind of glassy and fractal, the sky was too bright, everything was whooshing but slow too, the colours were so sharp. The air hurt. I didn’t feel right at all. When I got back to Kesters I slept for hours!I think it was May when I went to see The Levellers play a gig at a seafront pub. I was in a pretty bad way and didn’t know what to do. The band passed a hat round to raise the coach fare. That 11 quid ticket took me home again.

All my stuff was in that house up the hill, I never did get myself together enough to go and collect it. Irreplaceable things.

I didn’t trust anyone, not even my Mum. I only trusted one person, Alan, he was such a good friend to me. I was in a deep depression, I felt hopeless and afraid. I didn’t know how to be in the world. I stuck to simple things, signing on, watching telly, going to my local. I wrote a lot of poetry during my time in Brighton and for a short period after I came home too. It’s awful, obviously, but it’s like a diary of my thoughts! I still have it. A black notepad, the spine long since fallen apart, held together with a shoelace. It’s stuffed with extra bits of paper too, and kitchen roll or tissue I’d written a quick ditty on. This was an outlet for all my feelings, those ones I wasn’t able to properly express.

Von’s book of patented self indulgent poetry circa 1989 - 1992

My sleep pattern was all over the shop. I would often find myself wafting about the garden at 5am, brushing my hand against the flowers my Mum grew, feeling the dew on the grass sneak up between my toes. I think these moments were the ones in which I felt ok. It really was darkest before the dawn. It took a couple of years at home to get the puzzle of my brain in some kind of order. I started to feel normal again, though I would never be the same. I looked to move and this time it was Bristol that was calling me. I visited some old friends from home who’d moved there, we went to Ashton Court Festival, I was completely in love with the place, so at the summers end in 1992 I moved into a bedsit. I was determined not to make the same mistakes and I organised myself very carefully to make sure I had money and a roof over my head. I made some good friends and began a real adventure of independent living.

This was my first brush with a mental health breakdown, the doctor said it was a reactive depression. I worked through it eventually but never with any proper therapy. It wasn’t surprising to me that some years later when I had a baby it all came flooding back with even bigger boots on, but that really is another story.