By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#2 / PETTS WOOD / 1987
Second station in and I’m already beginning to regret hanging the ‘psychogeography’ label on this station to station series of articles.
According to Wikipedia, “In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” “
Then again, he also called it “charmingly vague” so I’ll take that as my cue to go off on the tangents required from here on in. Before the geography, let’s go psycho.
Because I grew up in Petts Wood, the overwhelming prism of subjectivity looms large and requires some context. Forgive me for getting personal, but perhaps declaring an interest will shed some light on how I interpret this part of the railway journey. Because every place is a multiverse, offering wildly different ways to experience it. Some way more than others of course, but there are always choices.
“The next station is Petts Wood…”
They say ‘it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at’ and it ought to be true. But when you meet someone, it’s always ‘where are you from?’ In other words, where you’re from is one of the first clues people want as they decode where you’re at. I need about half an hour to answer that one, though I never get it of course.
My family come from the ‘other’ bank of the River Mersey, specifically the docks that gave both sides of the family employment. This is more accurate than ‘the Wirral’ and its image of Liverpool’s more affluent neighbour. My dad’s father died when he was 14, forcing him to leave school and abandon the art he was so talented at, in order to get a job and look after his disabled mum. Tyrer Street, Birkenhead North. It was into this street I was born, but somehow my dad got a job down south and within 5 years, in 1968, as Paris was burning, we moved from all this into the middle-class idyll that was Petts Wood – all tree-lined wide avenues.
Most of the neighbours appeared to have known only snobbery rather than poverty. I suspect imposter syndrome may have been a threat to my parents, but it was never discussed. My best friend at primary school disowned me out of the blue one day, which caused serious trauma. I found out years later that it had been on the orders of his mum, when she found out my grandparents were dockers. True story.
It’s been proved that cells carry genetic memory across generations and this discovery was something that fascinated me as a possible explanation for how alienated I felt on deep, profound levels from the Petts Wood people around me. The celebration of the normal was the iron fist in the velvet glove. Situationist tropes about alienation seemed to offer some explanation that made sense, certainly more so than any of the straight stuff I was getting pummeled with at school. Thanks to the Wise brothers in Notting Hill for that one. Music too, of course…
“It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win”
Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen
When the film Cemetery Junction was released many years later, the people behind it cited this Springsteen couplet as the inspiration. I immediately thought of Petts Wood. Not because it’s full of losers in the capitalist sense, indeed quite the opposite. But it was a local celebration of the ordinary that led me to insisting on a life less ordinary: a continual justification of the bland and a raising up of living a boring life to some kind of virtue.
The parable of the Good Samaritan was made for Petts Wood – full of people who would pass by on the other side of the road. Especially if you had dyed hair! Materialism is the god in Petts Wood – just take a look at all the shining 4x4s sprawled across the yellow lines outside churches on a Sunday morning. Jesus wept, I strongly suspect. This is the kind of Toryism that pays lip service to the teachings of Jesus on a Sunday as some kind of imagined balancing for their actions the rest of the week.
Petts Wood itself was young then. It had only come into being in the 1930s when the train station was built. An Essex boy called Basil Scruby did some early property developer conjuring, based around the newly built train station, and PW came into being. The vision of fields being torn up and trees being torn down, so commuters could indulge their consumerism in semi-detached comfort seems fitting. How cutting that detachment is held up as a virtue to be aspired to. It’s easy to imagine loveless, semi-detached marriages behind the twitching curtains, though whether it’s fair is a different matter.
In writing this, however, I feel a lot of affection for the years spent growing up. Whilst writing off 5 traumatic years at secondary school, I found the fount of all knowledge in Petts Wood library. Though only small, someone in there could have filled the shelves just for me – I hoovered up every book available on the alternative culture, the occult, chess, the sixties. Auto-didactism became my life. They left part of a beautiful wood too, where nature became my religion.
This column is being written against the backdrop of what the media is hyping as ‘culture wars’ and it’s impossible not to think of Petts Wood as being entrenched on one side of the argument. There seems little to no sympathy for progressive politics there. The Wetherspoons heaves with Sun readers, old and young – morning drinking, loud Tories providing the nearest yin to the yang of the quiet, ‘nice’ Daily Mail Tories that populate the semi-detached avenues. The only culture war in Petts Wood is a slight difference of style in how they manifest their enmity to progressive politics. I drove through there just a few weeks back and it’s barely changed since 1987, indeed since we first (dis)graced town. And that’s the way, uh huh uh huh, they like it. Uh huh huh.
For all this, I grew up there and retain a Stockholm-style affection. Somehow I carved a black sheep presence that was largely tolerated and on rare occasion, admired. I’ll never forget a beautifully dressed older woman, elegant like Audrey Hepburn in La Dolce Vita, chatting to me on the steps of the station as the commuters streamed past either side. She was making her own stand, in her own way. I, on the other hand, was smoking a spliff (back when this was considerably less acceptable of course), and intensely aware that it wasn’t an ideal place to be stopped, each passer-by a potential off-duty cop. It was the kind of place they lived.
In Orpington, in the previous article, all this was partially offset by Orpington College being a magnet for south-east London’s finest dissidents. No such luck in Petts Wood though, I was very much flying solo, even in those times. There had been a couple of punks – Cameron & Andy – who lit the way. Neither of them appear to be findable on Google though, which does make you wonder about the digitally disappeared.
Even vague scruffiness suggested a deviation from the norm, but that too was in short supply in amongst all the Scruby-doo. Clothes from charity shops weren’t just cheap, they were a statement. Looking in any way disheveled (unless you were a builder) was a call out to like minds. Only in Petts Wood, there weren’t any.
It’s a pretty damning condemnation of an area to say the best thing about it is the train line out of there, but that was where any kind of life satisfaction lay. Even if it was only one or two stops away. A night out never ended in a simple walk home. The sound of this suburb was the rolling of stock, dodging the cream of South London’s late night train drunks.
It was literally a one-pub town and I never went there. The Daylight Inn, named in honour of local William Willet’s idea to introduce daylight saving time (the clocks going forwards & backwards, twisting reality in the most pernicious fashion). I never went there, not least because all my friends tended to live somewhere with more to offer, so why would they come to me?
The pub did, however, contain an archeological artifact that fascinated me and gave evidence that others had trod this path before me. On the wall of the Daylight, was this graffiti:
It’s still there to this day and to the credit of the generations who’ve appreciated its value rather than scrubbing it off. It will be sixty years old in just over a couple of years. There was another statement on another wall, presumably by the same people on the same night, another CND symbol with ‘Committee of 100’ written next to it. The radical end of the peace movement, no less! That one did get painted over though, perhaps by Basil Scruby’s modern counterparts. I never managed to find out anything about the origins of these, but they were a source of comfort. I picture the perpetrators in duffel coats and polo necks, wavy hair and NHS specs, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart for making me feel less alone.
Graffiti was back with a vengeance during punk and I was always at it. My first band – Anabollic Steroids – became famous around south-east London before we ever played a gig, due to everyone in the band being prolific with a marker pen. Anarchy signs, political slogans, band names and – yes – CND symbols continuing the tradition. It was a valid part of the underground – it hooked up like-minded souls just like those beatniks had back in ’65. Perhaps it was a beacon of comfort or hope to the alienated the way they had been to me.
Over time, I compartmentalised my life, with Petts Wood becoming a kind of bolt hole, but never a place where the memorable part of life was lived. One year, I worked out that I ‘crashed’ the night in other peoples’ houses over 200 out of the 365 days.
Do people still ’crash’ the night? Is it still called that, or was that a hippie hangover like ‘man’ and ‘far out’? Did ‘Always crashing in the same car’ have a hidden double-meaning when it came out?
Petts Wood train station was the venue for a regular hobby we devised – business spotting. We devised a scoring system, marks out of ten, based on whether any given commuter had a:
- Briefcase
- Waistcoat
- Bald head
- Bowler hat
- Copy of the Financial Times
We’d hang around the bottom of the station steps, gently confrontational, giving people scores and generally going a bit crazy on the rare occasions we spotted a ten. Cries went up “it’s a ten!”, followed by a standing ovation born of a twisted respect, by all concerned. ‘We’ incidentally, would usually be comprised of various punks who had come down to Petts Wood for a visit, it was the only thing I had to entertain them with. All the cliché ducks lining up – it was all fields around here, we made our own fun back then etc.
The station staff hated us for doing this and were forever engaged in a cat and mouse game over the fare-bunking which was so commonplace then. In my teenage naivety, I was disappointed they sided with the ‘straights’, which is kind of embarrassing to look back on now.
Throughout my youth I felt the need to ‘upgrade’ where I was from. Hence, being born in Birkenhead North was upgraded to Liverpool. Living in Petts Wood was upgraded to Bromley, or even London if the conversation was with someone from abroad.
It always felt like an upgrade. Partly this was a matter of shorthand clarification but within it was a yearning, a rumbling under the floorboards that I always seemed to live in the ‘also ran’ part of town.
When you ‘upgrade’ to Bromley, you know you’ve got problems.
When I finally moved to Brighton later on, one of the biggest bonuses was that I finally lived somewhere that was a place of its own, not just ‘near’ somewhere else. I finally made it to the middle!
It’s time to get back on the train, leave the nostalgia that was always destined to permeate this station and this essay, and move forwards.
Approaching platform 2. Calling at Bickley, Bromley South, Shortlands, Beckenham Junction, Kent House Penge East, Sydenham Hill, West Dulwich, Herne Hill, Brixton & London Victoria. I begin to breathe when I’m on that train, anticipation with every station taking me in the right direction.
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.
