By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#8 / SYDENHAM HILL
Being the eighth in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and… something.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
Introduction
I’ve not written an introduction to any of the other chapters in this journey, but I fear that without one here, I might never get through it.
Because this is the most emotionally difficult thing I’ve ever had to write. I feel, in turns, self-indulgent / exposed / vulnerable / open to disdain, criticism, even ridicule / overly negative / as though I may tread on others’ toes. Sometimes misguided. Sometimes just wrong.
And yet, here I am. Writing it. Without obvious recompense of any sort. So, with what reason?
I’ve been putting off writing this for months. I’ve started it a hundred times, mostly in my head, but occasionally on the computer. I’m frightened of the emotions it will churn up. I guess this is PTSD in action.
Because what I’m about to write about is certainly the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. How are you expected to fit that into mere words?
I’ve changed some of the names here. Not because of you, dear reader, but because of Google. Because to this day, against all logic, I will occasionally Google her name in the hope that some proof she existed outside my memories has somehow turned up. She has a sufficiently unusual name that no-one else shares it. No-one.
But… nothing. Every time.
I worry that in my later years, I may Google her, find nothing, and start to wonder if she ever existed at all. That I might start to doubt my own sanity. A sanity that was pushed to its very limits over the ten-year period I’m about to write about.
So, if others were to Google her name in the same weird way I do, I don’t want them to find this. Because they would. Her parents may still be alive for all I know. I presume Alan is.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a bit pathetic, misguided or even a footpath towards mental illness. But I haven’t got much beyond memories, you see.
Three photos. That’s it. Three photos as a memory of all that happened over the best part of 10 years. It demeans the intense, lasting love and friendship we had. As does what happened next…
SYDENHAM HILL
“Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with?”
– Pete Shelley, Buzzcocks
Like a suggestive old black and white film, we left the train line entering the tunnel after leaving Penge East. The darkness has never seemed so perfect.
On the other side of the hill, we pull out of the tunnel and into Sydenham Hill station. And every time, I get the same flashback: getting off the train that rainy dark evening in the winter of ’82, and seeing her waiting at the end of the platform. “I saw her standing there”. Lit up like an angel in the yellow shade of the platform lamps, as if in a Hopper painting. That magical moment that only first love can deliver. Or so I thought for years. I always think of the film Brief Encounter, despite a paucity of parallels.
* * *
We’d had a mutual friend — and local hero — called Zina who decided we should meet each other. She announced this to me one day in the canteen at Orpington College.
Zina had explained to me that she had this friend who was “pretty fucked up” and she though that I could help. Or maybe she just thought that would make us a good fit. Looking back on this moment, I can see that my knight in shining armour ambitions cross-fertilised tragically / beautifully with my low self-esteem.
Also, I wanted a girlfriend. Y’know…
CH had had an elder sister, Natalie, who had committed suicide the previous year, Zina explained. CH was quite straight but had hippie leanings, having inherited the sister’s record collection.
I’ve written previously that CH was ‘reassuringly, a car crash’.
Reassuringly… that’s telling. I didn’t consider myself fit for ‘normal’ people, so this represented a slightly opened door for me. As tragic as it sounds.
And so it came to pass that on a cold wet night in November 1982, I found myself walking in the rain towards Zina’s place in Beckenham. Bleached hair and huddled into a black mac decorated with epaulettes from Laurence Corner in Euston. CH was getting out of her car as I approached.
‘You must be George’ she said, with a confidence that I neither expected nor shared.
The three of us went to see the film Catpeople. That’s how I know the month and year — I’m rubbish with all that usually. I don’t usually hang love on dates, or anything else for that matter. I barely remember my own birthday and completely rely on a calendar for anyone else’s.
She was beautiful. I genuinely hadn’t expected that. I mean, really beautiful. I really hadn’t expected that. It was confusing. I didn’t think beautiful people got fucked up. Or came near me.
I fell — hook, line and sinker — into her orbit. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and save her from the cruelties of the world.
“I’d like to get you / on a slow boat to China / all to myself / all alone.”
I wanted us to run away to a cottage in the middle of nowhere, become untouched by the dirtiness of the outside world. I sellotaped a small picture of the cottage of my dreams to my diary, and to my heart.
In this place, I figured, she would naturally lose the voices in her head that tormented her so dramatically. And we would live happily ever after. Away from capitalism. Away from the trauma of everyday life. Away, maybe, from other people in general. Away from all the bad stuff. All you need is love. That was the limit of my understanding, still so childlike.
She was beautiful, but the clues were there if you looked more closely. They were all over her arms — the subtle scars of self-harm, as it was never called then. Scores of little white lines, somehow whiter than her already pale skin. Tattoos that whispered more quietly, and screamed more loudly, than ink.
The first cut is the deepest. Our relationship blossomed in its own way. I’d just left home and started living in the shared house I talked about in the Orpington Station piece. She’d come over and we’d lie under the duvet in ignorant innocence of what would inevitably happen next. Strange stirrings. Two virgins on the cusp of anointing adulthood. My first experience of any kind of intimacy with a woman, and hers with a man.
* * *
I always felt like she was Cassandra to my Rodney. Or Princess Diana even — still to my Rodney. She had that same demure enigmatic smile. She was from a vaguely different world, one that didn’t exactly welcome pink hair, weird attire and political activism. Her parents never spoke to me beyond a cursory hello. But I loved her, and she loved me. We built a bubble around us where that was all that mattered.
“We were so close, there was no room,
We bled inside each others’ wounds”
– Melanie, Candles in the Rain
It would be fair to say we were an odd couple. Her music taste ranged from Opera to whale music, to bands like Supertramp and Runrig. We did meet in some kind of middle with Melanie and Fleetwood Mac.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get her into Crass, with the idea that maybe all this turmoil she felt could be filtered into an anger more external and leave her more peaceful inside. She did like some Poison Girls stuff, but not in any kind of way that tempted her off the straight and narrow. Or the self-hatred.
Straight was the land she inhabited, despite her squareness never even vaguely fitting into the round world. She had a succession of well-paid, successful ultra-straight jobs in central London, inhabiting worlds that were alien to me. They inevitably finished when her mental state would sabotage everything with a suicide attempt or simply a bout of not turning up due to her illness. I desperately wanted to take her away from that world, but she wasn’t having it.
She ended up working at the then nascent TVAM (British breakfast TV), sitting next to Ulrike Johnson in the office. I’d meet her for a lunchtime pint in the (now legendary Goth) Devonshire Arms opposite, back when it was an Irish pub. Well, I’d have a pint.
She was impossibly beautiful and insanely intelligent. She knew something like 6 languages by the age of 17, including Swahili and sign language. I’ve no idea how or why. She was wired different in so many ways.
In a vain(glorious?) attempt to understand, or at least shout about the situation, I interviewed her for my fanzine, about her state and how the state dealt with her in mental homes. Pretty much the whole of that issue was dedicated to exploring mental health — both hers and mine also by that point, I guess.
It was heavy, it was miserable and, as such, a mirror image of my life at that point. You could perhaps throw stupid in there as well, inasmuch as I was pretty keen, in an arrogant teenage posturing way, on RD Laing’s anti-psychiatry stance. I was so sure, in the way teenagers often are.
The issue of the zine pushed some people away, as you might imagine, and also inspired a few of the most moving letters I ever received. If nothing else, it connected with some people very deeply, and those letters made any amount of ridicule or rejection bearable at least. Not much fun though. Some people actually got angry.
* * *
We split up after about a year — she finished with me. I was devastated and my self-esteem in that department tumbled even further down the rabbit-hole. I wasn’t even good enough for a car-crash lady. She didn’t need me and it didn’t matter how I felt about that.
But that was far from the end of it. For the next decade, through my loving relationships with a couple of other women and through her developing a long relationship with another man by the name of Alan, I remained devoted to her, and we shared a sometimes difficult and perhaps inappropriate mental intimacy. When we were both single (but only then) the intimacy was also physical. That closeness was responsible for at least one of my relationships failing – the mental intimacy, that is.
“You love CH more than you love me” said Emma, crying and vulnerable. It wasn’t true. At least, I don’t think it was. I was madly in love with Emma, but nothing on earth could make me lose touch with CH. She still held that bomb over my head — an unspoken blackmail.
Throughout this time, CH made regular suicide attempts. Whilst some seemed possibly symbolic; others definitely weren’t. She never left me in any doubt that it was her intended ending.
The constant threat of the woman you love killing herself does a couple of things. Firstly, it gives her a massive power over you. One wrong move and it could tip her over the edge. By which I mean, into killing herself. That’s kind of nuclear. Being ill, it was a power she sometimes used (in retrospect, and albeit subconsciously). A seductive habit to develop I suspect — all power corrupts.
The other thing, of course, is the constant stress of it all, both existential and physiological. It coloured what should have been the best years of my life and cast a terrifying, disabling, hypercortisolemia shadow over every moment I couldn’t forget about it.
I looked at others getting on with a more carefree existence like they were on a different planet. Yet I could never join them, I just didn’t possess the spaceship.
She’d ring up and announce she was about to end it all. That she’d had a new idea about driving down to Beachy Head and throwing herself off. What was I supposed to say?
Sometimes she’d ring and tell me that with last night’s phone call, I saved her life. She sent me a thank you card once that said the same thing. I still have it.
Should I throw it away? Is it an insult to my (extremely happy, thank you) marriage? Should I even be writing this?
Heavy doesn’t begin to describe it. Abuse might. She’d ring up from a random hospital where she’d just had her stomach pumped. I’d drop everything and rush to see her, wherever she was in the country. It was no way to live.
I moved in with her temporarily, dysfunctionally, towards the end. She was in Crouch End by this point, working in the latest high-powered job. One night I’d gone to sleep having hidden her door keys, following her threat to go out and throw herself off ‘suicide bridge’. She woke me up in the middle of the night screaming aggressively for her keys. Heavily self-medicated against the situation on Special Brew and stress, I gave them to her and went about waking up.
Once I’d properly come to, I spent the next few hours wandering around Crouch End’s dark empty night-quiet with a banging head and a lot of fear. Looking for this bridge (pre-internet, you see) and for her body. Special Brew hangover and corpse-searching. I eventually gave up, went home and called the police. I was 20 minutes into that call when the door opened, and she came back in. We made intense love. Every threat intensified everything and drew me closer like a Venus Fly Trap.
I moved out shortly after that. Back to the room in the shared house in Catford that I’d kept on throughout — I guess deep down I wasn’t kidding myself.
One day not long after, she rang me to say goodbye and thank me for everything I’d done for her. Not for the first time. But for the last.
I lost my temper and asked her why she was doing this to me. For the first time, I shone the spotlight on myself as well as her. She’d left me teetering on the edge of a breakdown for ten years and I just couldn’t handle it anymore. Not that I ever could.
Then she died.
* * *
I have, of course, often looked back and wondered what exactly was wrong with her — how she would be diagnosed if doctors knew then what they know now. Bipolar doesn’t seem to cut it, but what do I know? But what did they know?
Contemporarily, I’ve developed interests in the cutting edge of neurological science and quantum mechanics. One thing that came up was cellular memory: the idea that we can inherit memories from previous generations.
Sometimes I figure that’s an offensive rabbit hole to go down. But that’s what happens when you can’t explain horror — you become more open to clutching at straws. Just look at conspiracy theorists right now.
So, I’ll never have explanations and I’ve never had closure. The closure that going to the funeral may have afforded me.
* * *
I was still living in the shared house in Catford when the phone call finally came. It was Alan, telling me that she’d gone back to Friern Barnet hospital (a horrendous Poe-like Victorian asylum deserving of the word) where she’d previously been sectioned, and where I’d visited, with horror. There, she’d hung herself.
That night, back in Catford, there was a party at a neighbour’s house. Talk about timing.
People showered me with genuine love, much appreciated concern and a lot of strong spliffs. I ended up very drunk, very stoned and dancing. I was free. She couldn’t threaten me anymore.
I was surprised and shocked by my reaction, no doubt heavily buffeted by the dope, but there it was. Alongside a shock so deep I hadn’t begun to process it yet of course. It was quite a lot to take in in one day.
Because Alan had told me something else in that phone call. ‘Her parents don’t want you to come to the funeral. They said Natalie’s funeral turned into a circus and they don’t want that happening again.’
‘Are you going?’ I instinctively asked.
‘Yes’.
I nodded silently. I knew he was going to say that.
So, there you had it. My presence at the funeral would have turned it into a circus. That short segment of a phone call damaged me almost as much as her death. Maybe more. The idea that I wasn’t important enough in her life to be there. Ten years of giving everything, ten years of dropping everything every time she tried to die.
And I wasn’t even considered important enough to go to the funeral. Because my dyed hair, or my height, or both, would have turned it into a circus. A clown too many.
When something that incomprehensible happens to you, you have a hundred options of how to interpret it and react to it. How to then fold it into your life experience, and subsequent outlook. There are healthy options and there are ‘let it fester’ options. But I was only ten years on from being the fucked-up person who fell in love with her in the first place. I let it fester.
* * *
Lack of closure does strange things to you. It sometimes crosses my mind that it could all have been a big conspiracy where she just wanted to get away from me and the whole thing was a theatre production to engineer that outcome. That she went off to start a new life abroad, utilising her languages. Desperate times, desperate measures. She got cured and happy, but the condition was that I could never know. Everyone is in on it except me.
Of course, rationally, I know that’s not true — at least I’m 99% sure — but that door in my mind should have been slammed shut by the funeral, and wasn’t. There’s a cruelty therein that I’ve never been properly able to fathom or process. I forgive her parents in my head but my heart struggles to do the same. Sometimes forgiveness can feel a bit like self-harm.
Her parents were grieving, of course. The second suicide of a second daughter must deliver unthinkable pain. But none of that has ever helped me heal.
In some ways, being banned from the funeral has been more difficult to get over than her death itself. Of course, I could have just turned up in defiance of their request. But I was too much of a coward to do that. Plus, I hate funerals and had never thought they were a properly legitimate way of saying goodbye.
I was wrong about that, of course.
* * *
Then, on what would have been her next birthday, I get a phone call out of the blue from her dad. It’s the first time he’s ever said anything more than hello to me. Suddenly, I’m his confidant and it feels awfully selfish.
I’m lost for words; I really don’t know how to respond at all. I ask him how he is and he’s clearly not good. As he details his self-pity, all I want to do is ask him about the funeral ban. I want him to know what he did to me. A part of this feels really out of order.
But a greater (as in bigger, rather than better) part of me thinks this would be just being cruel to an old man. So, I don’t. Instead, I try to console him and in turn consign myself to thirty years of pain. At the end of the phone call, the space between us is almost solid. At no point have I been considered.
* * *
Just in case you’re wondering, (because I know I would be, if I were you), I’ve decided to finally get some counselling for the PTSD I’ve been dragging around with me for the last 30+ years.
Because I still think about her — still feel the emotions. Whenever Leonard Cohen sings ‘Suzanne’, there she is in my line of vision; it’s about her. Or James Taylor singing ‘Fire and Rain’. Or whenever Melanie sings anything. Or ‘Songbird’ — our song.
Zina, who introduced us all those years back, passed away from lung cancer at 54, too early. Suzanne makes me think of her too, and the jumble sales we would visit for rags and feathers. It’s all a world away from my life now, partially rid of these demons and false gods.
The list is long, and I deliberately visit it sometimes, when fortified by a few sherries. Still trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps trying to confront those dark emotional memories in the hope that I build the muscle-memory to overcome them.
I’ve had a few sherries tonight. I’m playing Suzanne on the headphones, and I remember CH and I remember Zina. And I remember the younger me too, who I love. I love all three of us, in fact.
* * *
You know those old films where writers sit at typewriters, white, open-collared shirt and dark braces, drenched in sweat and frustration? A hundred bits of screwed up paper on the floor around them. Then, the latest attempt joins it in a flash of angry frustration… well, that is this moment for me.
Only here, the latest screwed up piece of paper is retrieved in a fit of existential nihilism and a need to get this finished. Somehow, anyhow.
There are missing celebrities. Many missing incidents. The pain isn’t painful enough. Some serious weirdness left out. The lows aren’t low enough and the highs aren’t high enough. Some of the most extreme, jaw-dropping drama is redacted. The level of overwhelm is reduced — and therefore betrayed — in an attempt to make some kind of readable form out of the actual dark swirling razor blade chaos.
So, that’s one version of the 100 remixes I’ve concocted in trying to tell this story. But it was always going to be like that — I’ve resigned myself to that inevitability now. The whole story would take a book, and I’m not sure I have the strength for that.
* * *
Where were we? Oh yes, Sydenham Hill station. The thing I’m hanging all this on.
Shall we go back there? To a beautifully looked-after platform on a relatively genteel part of the train line. Eventually, no matter how glued to the platform your backbone is, you have to haul yourself onto the train and get to the next station. As with British Rail, as with life.
Dominated by the above thoughts, feelings, and memories. I’ve only ever got off at Sydenham Hill one other time. When I was writing a book about the previously mentioned anarchist punk band Crass, I interviewed band members Phil Free and Joy De Vivre in their house near the station on the other side of the tracks.
It was a pleasant evening with two lovely people and three lovely bottles of wine. Standing on the platform waiting for the train back to Petts Wood, and buoyed by the wine, I momentarily felt like it was a past I’d left behind. Ironic really, as Phil & Joy must have been going through similar emotions about Crass that night — another story without a happy ending.
Many years later, I meet up with my oldest friend from primary school. He commuted to school on this line and tells me that in the Penge East-Sydenham Hill tunnel was a war zone.
There would be light bulb wars with pupils from a rival school on the train, passing by in the opposite direction in the darkness. Private / public education wars. Class wars, if you will. Light bulbs would be removed from the train carriage ceiling and thrown at the enemy through the open windows of both trains as they passed. South London, la-la-la.
The scope for metaphor is so wide as to be overwhelming, so I won’t even try.
West Dulwich next, and the sun is finally coming out.
An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
