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By George Berger.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
And so we depart Beckenham Junction, but not Beckenham itself. Because Kent House is still part of Beckenham really.
The station – just seven miles from London Victoria, was named after Kent House Farm. Yes, there was a time when you could travel seven miles from the centre of London and come across farmland. One day they’ll say that about Sevenoaks. Maybe one day they’ll say that about Maidstone – the Japanese know how it works.
In the Petts Wood article, I mused on how my parents moved down from Merseyside for a better life. That was where we lived, but Kent House was where my dad worked for the main part, at Ravensbourne Registration Services. From the late 60s until a couple of strokes forced his retirement in the late 80s, whereupon he hi-tailed it back to the Wirral, got happier and never looked back.
RRS was something to do with shares, I never really understood what. It was also, as far as I could see, something to do with wearing suits, lots to do with feeling pressure and nothing to do with happiness.
Kent House, then, is immortally tied to the world of work in my eyes. To the concept of work, the protestant work ethic, the numerous morality tales and guilt trips laid on me as I tried to find my own way through early life from the ages of 5-25.
Of course, all this was seen through the prism of my dad’s experience only. Perhaps the other employees were happy as Larry. That’s how life works though, isn’t it? You only see what you want to see, and in a decidedly pre-internet world, that view could be quite narrow, almost the wrong end of a telescope.
From when you’re born up to roughly when you start school, your brain operates in theta state, forever downloading information without question, wherever it comes from. This becomes your subconscious programming – all downloaded without a virus checker – and it’s a bastard to shift if you want to change it later.
I mention this because, as in the Beckenham Junction piece, I was busy downloading pop-hippie song lyrics off the radio. Songs that suggested a better world but also often hinted that avoiding a lifetime of work was a great path to ‘feeling groovy’.
“Slow down, you move too fast…”
My dad left Merseyside before us, staying in a B&B for over 6 months while he earned enough for us to move down. Thus, the first thing Kent House did was steal my dad. He’d work 12 hour days, 7 till seven, in an attempt to improve his lot in life. OK, our lot in life. He was permanently stressed out.
This was held up before me as some kind of noble way of being. Train to Kent House every morning, home again in the evening, too tired to do anything except drain a bottle in a fumbling search for equilibrium.
Of course, a part of growing up is watching your parents morph from the omnipotent infallible beings you thought they were, into normal people doing their best to muddle through. You experience a similar loss of magic to that moment you realise Father Christmas doesn’t actually exist. My dad did his best, it took me a long time to realise that he had his own set of influences, experiences and circumstances to deal with. That he could feel doubt and pain and fear and all those things that never plague comic book superheroes.
“And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die”
– Teach Your Children, Crosby Stills Nash & Young
I sought my dad’s love and approval at every turn but our relationship was massively strained by my being a punk rocker and deciding not to get a job. The conflict of values would take decades to get over or more accurately just fade into the past. I was taught to seek his approval, but that approval was only ever measured in exam results, in conformity and in supposed ‘good’ behaviour. As puberty hit, I started failing these tests more and more.
At the time, I just thought he was being completely unreasonable, that he wouldn’t listen. That he put his values before any love for me. Nowadays, as I approach the 25th anniversary of his passing, I can see that I somehow tapped into his deepest fears and exposed them like bare nerve-endings. Like that moment when the dentist gets a filling wrong. That’s how I made him feel. Which isn’t a great realisation.
Whether he should have felt like that is almost beside the point. We were two strong characters and there could be no meeting point at the time. And Kent House was the HQ of these values, the temple where he devoutly practiced his beliefs five or six days a week, in exchange for the money to survive and feed his family. An impartial observer might almost start hating capitalism for the soul-crushing cruelty of all this.
And then, finally, I have a vision that changes everything. A vision of my father as a frightened little boy, one who had a far tougher upbringing than I did, for all my whinging. A scared little boy who doesn’t understand his harsh surroundings. A tear running down his five year old cheek. A barefoot boy who left school at 14 to get a job and look after his disabled mum, his father having passed away due to an accident on the docks. A boy forced to be a man way before his time.
But also a boy who could never know what he didn’t know, what he’d never been shown. Who became a man who did his ultimate best with the paltry toolkit he’d been provided with. Who did his best for me, and got little to no understanding in return at the time, or since. Until this vision. This vision that points out you can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t give what you haven’t got. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
And the forgiveness pours out of me like healing light. And I relax – for the first time since I was born – about all this.
He was a victim in Kent House, but not of Kent House, as such. So the forgiveness spreads like heightened awareness, like some kind of benign goo from a kid’s cartoon. I would’ve got away with a cartoon vision of all this too, if it wasn’t for the pesky kids of awareness pulling my mask off.
It took me six months to write those last few paragraphs. You could say it took me 40 years to think them.
A bit of light relief, you say? Well, one of his workmates was a relative of Siouxsie Sioux. Tom Page, I think my mum said he was called.
My parents told me another workmate would have a bottle of Guinness with his breakfast. In my everlasting naivety, I just thought this was gorgeously eccentric, rather than any kind of tip of the iceberg stuff. An impartial observer… etc.
As a young child, I remember proudly telling someone my dad was “fourth in charge of a skyscraper”. Cringeworthy stuff, for sure. Perhaps 7 stories high, his office was a skyscraper to me. I think I just made up the ‘fourth in charge’ bit. I desperately wanted him to be important. These were the values I was growing up in the presence of; in acute, deliberate hostility to the relative benevolence of Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & Papas.
And then I heard Patti Smith singing ‘Free Money’:
“Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad
I take that money, buy you things you never had.”
And everything changed, again. She’d already bought my heart with ‘Birdland’. Another guy in my class went further with it, all the way to prison for armed robbery. Almost an antique crime now of course. He became good pals with my mum later, before tragically succumbing to cancer.
I watched from the sidelines, but I always knew which side I was on. Not my dad’s, sadly. Not Patti Smith’s either, ultimately. Nice words Patti, but none that you ever lived. You just painted them on sounds (and I thank you dearly for that, but…) then you walked away, backstage – to your tour manager and your backstage rider and your paycheck. I don’t begrudge you that, but it wasn’t much use to me.
Or my dad. Especially my dad.
Only Arista was pretty. And so it goes. But where it’s going, everyone knows – let’s not kid ourselves.
Fast forward to 1993 and the IRA put a bomb on a train which exploded at Kent House. By this point, my dad was back on Merseyside and I was in Brighton so I have no memory of this at all. Due warnings had been given and there were no injuries. I do wonder why they chose Kent House – or maybe they didn’t? Maybe it was just where the train happened to be when it was evacuated. Either way, it’s one of the more notable things to have happened on this trainline.
So, yeah, Kent House. My dad the unconsciously willing victim, like Woodward in Wickerman style. Led by the limits of his perception into a world populated by others with (I’ve always thought) a knowingly different reality going on. And here I am, the result of it all, writing about Kent House from some far off viewpoint.
You see, a short while later, I heard the Clash advising me to Stay Free. And, for all their faults, something in their song – maybe the south London setting – rang more true than Patti (and it hurts to say that TBH). So I thought fuck it and I decided to stay free.
Which I did – all the way to Sydenham Hill.
But first…
Barely any distance at all up the line is Penge East, which is more of the same. There really isn’t enough distance for anything to have happened since the last station.
Only something has happened – as you pull into the platform, everything suddenly feels more urban.
Because somehow Penge East in the 80s is an island of a more cosmopolitan society, unlike the stations before it and unlike the next couple of stations after it. It’s like a peninsula – or a needle – jutting into the side of the surrounding areas and gives off an accordingly different vibe.
In the six months it’s taken to write this piece, I’ve been reading Tracey Thorn’s book, Another Planet. Purportedly a book about the suburbs, I read glowing reviews about it and figured it would be a nice companion to this train journey. Only it’s actually about a place outside London completely – beyond even the M25, and she seems to look back on it all with more affection than I do. So it’s weird and makes me ask questions about myself – am I still fired by anger as I write this? I’d very much like to think not, but Tracey’s writing makes me think of comfort blankets, even when she’s being critical.
Far closer to my feeling is the recently departed lyrical genius Mark Astronaut, venting – indeed spitting – his disdain out: “I might crack up soon, but they won’t bury me in the suburbs”. Mark was from Welwyn Garden City, north of London and not far from where Tracey grew up. It gives me a pathetic kind of pleasure to think that my suburbs are more urban than theirs.
At least the train is heading in the right direction. We’ve crossed an invisible line and we’re now in the territory where people can catch buses into the West End as well as trains. Indeed, they seem to have more options in every direction. Proper destinations on the front.
In some respects, Penge East in the 80s was like Green Park tube in London, which should really be renamed ‘change at Green Park’, because that’s what you always do there.
‘Change at Penge East’ would be to a bus for me, but not into the centre: first to Crystal Palace football ground when Liverpool would visit, back in the 70s and 80s when we used to win everything and every game was a survival test outside the ground.
Then in the other direction, some years later to Forest Hill where Bill, the Flowers in the Dustbin drummer, lived for a wild while. Every time I see Forest Hill mentioned anywhere, it seems to be the venue for wild happenings – from legendary swinging sixties parties to the punk/reggae 70s at Don Lett’s house.
Then, later still, back to Crystal Palace to see the Sex Pistols play what I gather (hope) was one of their most disappointing gigs. Change at Penge East, the place that never changes.
Have you ever missed a station because your mind was elsewhere? I’m afraid I’m about to do that.
There’s a big hill just beyond this station. A hill that at some point had to be tunneled through to get the train line towards London, Rather like most of the train lines in Switzerland I guess. But the sound in my head is not the sound of music; not at all. It’s a darker sound altogether.
Every time I’m on this train, as it pulls out of Penge East, it enters the tunnel and, a slave to cliché, I involuntarily enter my own darkness.
Because the next station is Sydenham Hill. A place where… where words start to fail me through the sheer terror of remembering… not that I could ever forget… not that I would ever forget…
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.
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