Home and where the heart went
You can never go home again. This is especially true if your hometown - or adopted hometown, if your parents moved out there when you were too young to sensibly object - is one you never very much liked in the first place.
The most interesting things I could quote to you about Thundersley in Essex are the following:
A car for the disabled called the Thundersley Invacar is made here.
A hip-hop collective (of sorts) known as Collapsed Lung once released an average single called “Thundersley Invacar”. It wasn’t a big seller.
During the late sixties, a band called The Mode hailed from here, who were rejected by Decca as being “too way out”. I have some recordings by them. They’re quite good, though when people ask me for compilation tapes of odd sixties psych and garage stuff, I seldom put them on despite local loyalties.
Sadly, the only way anything from Thundersley could be described as “way out” now is in reference to its geographical location. It straddles one of those baffling bits of commuter-ville where it manages to be miles from any useful railway station, existing in a sub-suburban state. In other words, it’s not even very good at being hinterland, which is the only serious reason I could come up with for living here. When one does actually get to the railway station, one is charged almost the same to get to London as it would cost to travel from mid-Canada to Toronto. Therefore, the greedy railway company gobbles any sensible savings that folk might get from living here instead of the capital. There have been moments of my life where the difference in terms of cost between renting a room in London or staying with my parents has been negligible.
These are all simply the logistics of the place. I haven’t even got on to its appearance yet. The street my parents inhabit in Thundersley is rather like Brookside Close, only with small pensioner-friendly bungalows rather than houses. The action of Brookside rather passed this street by, mind you. It’s true to say we have had our deaths over the years, but given that most of the close’s population is over the age of 65, I think it’s safe to say there were no suspicious circumstances. So dull is the close, in fact, that a visit from my friends when I was in my teens used to illicit a flurry of curtain-fluttering from the neighbours as if it were the most controversial thing they’d seen all week. My long-haired, scruffy associates (this was the early nineties, and looking grunge was almost compulsory in suburbia) used to slowly drive their cars back up the road, giving them all the royal wave. Nobody laughed.
As soon as you walk out of my parent’s street and on to the main road, it’s an ugly feast for the eyes. The main A road leading up to a highway that services Southend to London is here. Pedestrians haven’t been given much regard. The pavements are so narrow that I once had my head bashed by a passing lorry’s wing-mirror. Fumes and dust spray up from the road, and the residents of Thundersley are clearly very keen on home improvements, because there are so many renovations and reconstructions going on that debris and mud spews out on the pavement from the front gardens of many a half-finished home. A little further north lies the Thundersley industrial estate, home to a branch of Sainsbury’s, some electrical warehouses and various factories (including, of course, the Invacar one). That’s as exciting as it gets.
The rest of Thundersley was built at various times. The centre, which the locals laughably call “the village”, was built at some point in the late 1800s, and boasts a few pubs and, despite continual protest from the locals at the planning stage, a kebab shop. The pubs have locals who will get served at the bar before you regardless of how long you’ve been stood there. As a youth, it took approximately two years of solid drinking in one of these establishments before anyone would even vaguely recognise me. Indeed, I was nearly thrown out of the said establishment one New Year’s Eve for being “drunk” (and not noisily or disruptively drunk, you’ll note, just being over-happy and unsteady on my feet). As soon as I left for university and came back again after one term, I was treated as a stranger once more.
There’s a separate part of Thundersley, which promisingly refers to itself as “New Thundersley”. Clearly someone somewhere was insinuating that things had gone horribly wrong the first time, and they could make a fresh start. I applaud their vision, however the brainwave took place at some point in the nineteen sixties, which was never the best time in history to have utopian town planning visions. The best thing that can be said about the end results is that the design of the grey concrete shopping strip is “jagged”, and therefore rather odd looking. Rather than have shops in a straight lined terrace, they decided to build them so that each store juts out in front of the one before it at a bizarre obtuse angle. Sometimes I could look at these shops on a cold morning and get rather excited. You never knew quite what store was coming up next.
Of course, people will argue that the nearest town Rayleigh is only a 45 minute walk or short bus journey away, and that’s really where the action is. Except the action isn’t necessarily of the kind you’d desire. Once, in 1996, I was walking along with my friends minding my own business when somehow (and nobody is too sure how) we were set upon by a gang of shaven-headed men. The net result was me being punched out and kicked around the floor like a rag doll by seven pairs of boots for rather too long. A long night in casualty ensued, with me in something of a state of shock.
There are lots of pubs in Rayleigh, and indeed even an alternative nightclub (or at least it was when I last went twelve years ago) called The Pink Toothbrush, which has always attracted a sulky Goth contingent. This, I’ll grant you, is more than most backwater towns have to offer. Sadly, though, I have concluded since returning from my travels that this is probably one of the most miserable towns I’ve ever clapped eyes on, and I’m not just referring to the gothic element. Walking into town yesterday I observed that most of the men were doing the Thom Yorke slouch and scowling into the middle distance, and the majority of the women had sucked-in lips and petulant expressions. This would all be well and good were Rayleigh a deprived area, but sadly it’s actually quite a wealthy town which always returns a convincing Conservative majority at every election. What they’ve got to be so pissed off about I’m none too sure, though as Amanda pointedly remarked to me the other day, “it’s probably because they think they deserve even more”.
Suspicion and hostility come easily to these locals. When they heard that a new street was going to be built in Thundersley largely centred around supervised homes for people who had suffered brain damage, a petition started up. A neighbour of ours believed “it will probably house a lot of paedophiles”. Please note that she had very little grounds for this suspicion, it was just the mention of brain damage that did it for her. My parents told her to go away, but sadly a large number of people in our neighbourhood did indeed petition the council to stop the facilities from being built. Fortunately, they failed.
Thundersley is, sadly, typical of much of middle England, and Essex in particular. There’s nothing nice about it - all the nearby countryside is mostly just flat farmland - the traffic is suffocating, the architecture functional at best, the people paranoid, unfriendly, suspicious and periodically drunkenly violent. The “chocolate box” visions of England that many foreigners have are not to be found here. Here is only where you’ll find Legoland come to life and housed with utterly miserable middle class fuckers, and occasionally their spoilt and violent offspring who try to make life more exciting by strutting around in gangs (don’t give me any crap about violence being a “working class” phenomenon - it’s an English phenomenon full stop).
True, it could have been worse. I could have grown up in Baghdad, or even Moss Side. However, whenever I return here I often begin to feel the energy slowly draining out of me, and my mood slowly getting blacker and blacker. And, of course, that’s probably where the residents of this fine parish first came in. The only option open is to get out as soon as you can, and that’s what I always try to do.
The most interesting things I could quote to you about Thundersley in Essex are the following:
A car for the disabled called the Thundersley Invacar is made here.
A hip-hop collective (of sorts) known as Collapsed Lung once released an average single called “Thundersley Invacar”. It wasn’t a big seller.
During the late sixties, a band called The Mode hailed from here, who were rejected by Decca as being “too way out”. I have some recordings by them. They’re quite good, though when people ask me for compilation tapes of odd sixties psych and garage stuff, I seldom put them on despite local loyalties.
Sadly, the only way anything from Thundersley could be described as “way out” now is in reference to its geographical location. It straddles one of those baffling bits of commuter-ville where it manages to be miles from any useful railway station, existing in a sub-suburban state. In other words, it’s not even very good at being hinterland, which is the only serious reason I could come up with for living here. When one does actually get to the railway station, one is charged almost the same to get to London as it would cost to travel from mid-Canada to Toronto. Therefore, the greedy railway company gobbles any sensible savings that folk might get from living here instead of the capital. There have been moments of my life where the difference in terms of cost between renting a room in London or staying with my parents has been negligible.
These are all simply the logistics of the place. I haven’t even got on to its appearance yet. The street my parents inhabit in Thundersley is rather like Brookside Close, only with small pensioner-friendly bungalows rather than houses. The action of Brookside rather passed this street by, mind you. It’s true to say we have had our deaths over the years, but given that most of the close’s population is over the age of 65, I think it’s safe to say there were no suspicious circumstances. So dull is the close, in fact, that a visit from my friends when I was in my teens used to illicit a flurry of curtain-fluttering from the neighbours as if it were the most controversial thing they’d seen all week. My long-haired, scruffy associates (this was the early nineties, and looking grunge was almost compulsory in suburbia) used to slowly drive their cars back up the road, giving them all the royal wave. Nobody laughed.
As soon as you walk out of my parent’s street and on to the main road, it’s an ugly feast for the eyes. The main A road leading up to a highway that services Southend to London is here. Pedestrians haven’t been given much regard. The pavements are so narrow that I once had my head bashed by a passing lorry’s wing-mirror. Fumes and dust spray up from the road, and the residents of Thundersley are clearly very keen on home improvements, because there are so many renovations and reconstructions going on that debris and mud spews out on the pavement from the front gardens of many a half-finished home. A little further north lies the Thundersley industrial estate, home to a branch of Sainsbury’s, some electrical warehouses and various factories (including, of course, the Invacar one). That’s as exciting as it gets.
The rest of Thundersley was built at various times. The centre, which the locals laughably call “the village”, was built at some point in the late 1800s, and boasts a few pubs and, despite continual protest from the locals at the planning stage, a kebab shop. The pubs have locals who will get served at the bar before you regardless of how long you’ve been stood there. As a youth, it took approximately two years of solid drinking in one of these establishments before anyone would even vaguely recognise me. Indeed, I was nearly thrown out of the said establishment one New Year’s Eve for being “drunk” (and not noisily or disruptively drunk, you’ll note, just being over-happy and unsteady on my feet). As soon as I left for university and came back again after one term, I was treated as a stranger once more.
There’s a separate part of Thundersley, which promisingly refers to itself as “New Thundersley”. Clearly someone somewhere was insinuating that things had gone horribly wrong the first time, and they could make a fresh start. I applaud their vision, however the brainwave took place at some point in the nineteen sixties, which was never the best time in history to have utopian town planning visions. The best thing that can be said about the end results is that the design of the grey concrete shopping strip is “jagged”, and therefore rather odd looking. Rather than have shops in a straight lined terrace, they decided to build them so that each store juts out in front of the one before it at a bizarre obtuse angle. Sometimes I could look at these shops on a cold morning and get rather excited. You never knew quite what store was coming up next.
Of course, people will argue that the nearest town Rayleigh is only a 45 minute walk or short bus journey away, and that’s really where the action is. Except the action isn’t necessarily of the kind you’d desire. Once, in 1996, I was walking along with my friends minding my own business when somehow (and nobody is too sure how) we were set upon by a gang of shaven-headed men. The net result was me being punched out and kicked around the floor like a rag doll by seven pairs of boots for rather too long. A long night in casualty ensued, with me in something of a state of shock.
There are lots of pubs in Rayleigh, and indeed even an alternative nightclub (or at least it was when I last went twelve years ago) called The Pink Toothbrush, which has always attracted a sulky Goth contingent. This, I’ll grant you, is more than most backwater towns have to offer. Sadly, though, I have concluded since returning from my travels that this is probably one of the most miserable towns I’ve ever clapped eyes on, and I’m not just referring to the gothic element. Walking into town yesterday I observed that most of the men were doing the Thom Yorke slouch and scowling into the middle distance, and the majority of the women had sucked-in lips and petulant expressions. This would all be well and good were Rayleigh a deprived area, but sadly it’s actually quite a wealthy town which always returns a convincing Conservative majority at every election. What they’ve got to be so pissed off about I’m none too sure, though as Amanda pointedly remarked to me the other day, “it’s probably because they think they deserve even more”.
Suspicion and hostility come easily to these locals. When they heard that a new street was going to be built in Thundersley largely centred around supervised homes for people who had suffered brain damage, a petition started up. A neighbour of ours believed “it will probably house a lot of paedophiles”. Please note that she had very little grounds for this suspicion, it was just the mention of brain damage that did it for her. My parents told her to go away, but sadly a large number of people in our neighbourhood did indeed petition the council to stop the facilities from being built. Fortunately, they failed.
Thundersley is, sadly, typical of much of middle England, and Essex in particular. There’s nothing nice about it - all the nearby countryside is mostly just flat farmland - the traffic is suffocating, the architecture functional at best, the people paranoid, unfriendly, suspicious and periodically drunkenly violent. The “chocolate box” visions of England that many foreigners have are not to be found here. Here is only where you’ll find Legoland come to life and housed with utterly miserable middle class fuckers, and occasionally their spoilt and violent offspring who try to make life more exciting by strutting around in gangs (don’t give me any crap about violence being a “working class” phenomenon - it’s an English phenomenon full stop).
True, it could have been worse. I could have grown up in Baghdad, or even Moss Side. However, whenever I return here I often begin to feel the energy slowly draining out of me, and my mood slowly getting blacker and blacker. And, of course, that’s probably where the residents of this fine parish first came in. The only option open is to get out as soon as you can, and that’s what I always try to do.