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Stresemannstraße 3?, Kreuzberg, Berlin. 1983.

(You know want to know why this series has been in a state of suspension for the past six months? It is because every time I try and think of something to say about the few weeks I spent at Stresemannstraße, my mind seizes up. There’s not really a great deal to say about it. But let’s see what I can dredge up, none the less.)

As a German student at Nottingham University, I was required to spend my third year living in Germany. My friend Liz had already spent her year out there in Berlin, and she painted such an enticing portrait of the city that I felt it just had to be the place for me. Two main reasons stood out: the music/bar/club scene, and Berlin’s perceived status at that time as a Gay Capital – the San Francisco of Europe, maybe. So off I trotted, along with my mate Ian, in search of thrills, spills, self-discovery and seedy glamour.

Liz had arranged for Ian and I to spend our first couple of weeks with Simon, the ex-boyfriend of a good friend of hers, in his flat-share in Kreuzberg (then considered to be the hippest, most radical, most alternative part of town). The flat-share was winding down at that stage, with only a few weeks left to go on the contract. With the rent all settled up, the other flatmates had all moved out, leaving only Simon and a old mate of his, Andrew, who was on an extended visit. Thus it was that Simon and Andrew opened the door to Ian and myself, one evening in early September 1983.

Our first impressions? They were bloody hard work. You couldn’t get any real sense out of either of them. Ask them even the most straightforward question, and you would get a weird, oblique, often surreal reply, laced in several layers of irony and double bluff, and almost always delivered with a faintly mocking undertone. Essentially, Simon and Andrew - upon seeing our eager, fresh-faced, neatly groomed naivety - had decided to play an extended game of Bait The Straights with us. As we were entirely dependent on their hospitality at this stage, all we could really do was play along. We were constantly being wrong-footed, set up, walking into complex traps which they had laid for us, with the intention of making us look like terminally unhip, gullible ingénues. I think this was partly because they were actually faintly embarrassed by their own hospitality (far too bourgeois), and were trying to plaster over it with their don’t-give-a-f**k Berlin Cool affectations.

Minor point scoring aside, they didn’t really succeed. For all their sarcastic posturing, both Simon and Andrew were nicely brought up middle class English boys at heart, who couldn't quite stop themselves from doing the right thing at the end of the day. One of them even baked us a cake (although to save face, he then made us eat it using an array of ridiculously unsuitable implements, just to show that we weren’t hidebound by artificial conventions or something). Try as they might, they couldn’t help but endear themselves to us.

One night about ten days in, we were all out together at some cool Kreuzberg bar or other (unofficial dress code: black, black, bla-a-a-a-ack), when the subject of homosexuality came up. I forget how it came up, and I forget what smartass remark I made at the time, but I do remember either Simon or Andrew seizing upon it, sensing a fresh opportunity to hold that harsh, unforgiving mirror up to our assumptions and prejudices once again.

“I think that what you just said there, Mike, actually shows up a rather homophobic attitude on your part, when you stop and think it through. Wouldn’t you say?”

Their faces, when I calmly told them I was gay myself, in a studiedly casual “oh, did I never get around to telling you before” tone of voice, were priceless. I can still see their pained embarrassment now. Embarrassment which was further compounded a few minutes later. when they discovered that Ian was also gay. It had been worth the wait. They trod much more cautiously with us after that.

As a result, we all started to get on much better. Ian, Andrew and I even went busking on the Kurfurstendamm one Sunday afternoon, performing a self-penned protest song about Reagan’s foreign policy, using Simon’s Casio keyboard hooked up to a ghetto blaster. It went down rather well, making us enough money for a couple of rounds of beer.

The boys even extended their hospitality as far as offering us illicit substances: first acid (refused, despite their pained protestations that it would “really open you up as a person”), and then speed (cautiously accepted, after much reading up on the subject in advance, and even then in the tiniest of quantities – but still enough to make me dance all night at the KC club off Nollendorfplatz).

Ian was first to leave, securing a flatshare in the resolutely unfashionable Straightsville of Steglitz. I was next, moving a couple of U-Bahn stops away to a Wohngemeinschaft near Herrmannplatz. Simon eventually faded from our social radars, but Andrew remained a friend for the next few months. Away from Simon’s subtly controlling influence, he dropped most of the attitude, and revealed himself as a good, loyal mate to have in a tough, harsh, surprisingly reserved and self-contained city.

(Oh...so quite a lot to tell after all, then. It's surprising what floats to the surface when you start to concentrate, isn't it?)

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34 Albert Grove, Lenton Sands, Nottingham. 1982-1983.
Academic Centres, Students and Young Professionals

My memories of 34 Albert Grove are almost entirely happy ones. The six of us from the old house on Derby Grove simply "traded up", moving one street up the hill to a larger place in a (comparatively) better state of repair. There we joined JR, who was already living there, and became seven. This was in addition to the six good friends of mine who lived next door at Number 32, making the whole Albert Grove Experience like living in one big happy commune. (NB - at least two of our neighbours from back then are now regular readers of this blog).

After a year in a cramped box room in the attic of Derby Grove, I was now given the pick of the house, and chose a large room on the middle floor. Having just spent a month studying in Kiev, I covered the entire room in Soviet propaganda posters (we were now reaching the "Soviet chic" period of the 1980s). My favourite: Let Us Give Our Country Bigger Potatoes!

The parties at Albert Grove were much better - we had learnt our lesson from the previous year, and were now more cautious with our invitations. The first party took place on the last night of a play I had been acting in: Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. The room next door to mine filled up with theatrical types. One of them was loudly discussing the cast members who he thought might be gay, and the ones who he fancied. Emboldened by the wine (and not yet fully out), I pitched in with my own opinions. His eyes lit up and locked into mine. He duly became my first boyfriend.

It was, as I say, a happy time. Student life was at its liveliest and best, and I now started dipping my toes into the waters of Nottingham's gay scene. Alone amongst my contemporaries, I started making friends with "townies". This stood me in good stead for the eventual, inevitable dissolution of my circle of student friends. And there were further, foreign adventures waiting just round the corner...

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4 Derby Grove, Lenton Sands, Nottingham. 1981-1982.
Academic Centres, Students and Young Professionals

Our first shared house was a dump. Admittedly, nearly all rented student houses are dumps, but this one was truly a dump amongst dumps. Shabby, grubby and stale, even visiting friends from other shared houses would wonder out loud how we could tolerate living there. The reality was: we only took the place because all the other available houses were being snapped up fast, and we were getting panicky about finding anything at all.

My father, who was up at Cambridge in the 1950s, still had a fondly romanticised view of student life: May balls, college scarves, punting, porters, bicycles and bright young things in gay pursuit of the glittering prizes. After dropping me off at “4DG”, he drove home in tears, unable to believe that his son - for whom he held such high ambitions - was now consigned to such pitiful squalor.

Of course, the six of us didn’t really mind in the slightest. This was all great fun, and somehow not quite real – like playing at grown-up life. Unconsciously, we still somehow imagined that dishes would wash themselves, surfaces would be dusted, and carpets would be vacuumed – presumably by a team of invisible mothers, who would materialise in the middle of the night. Slowly, we sank further into the mire, alternately reacting with denial and anger, but stubbornly refusing to lift a finger. This would have meant being “exploited”, and we were damned if we were going to let it happen to us. If we needed a clean cereal bowl, and the sink was stacked with three days worth of mouldy crockery, then we would carefully remove the stack, wash the one bowl that we needed, then put the stack back in the sink. Very occasionally, someone’s nerve would crack, at which point they would noisily embark on what was called a “Megawash”, making sure that everyone else in the house was fully aware of their selfless martyrdom.

Officially “4DG” had six bedrooms. In reality, it had five bedrooms and one poky, narrow box-room on the top floor. We drew lots. I lost, turned the air blue for a good five minutes in an act of symbolic catharsis, then cheerfully accepted my fate. I painted the room scarlet, lost enthusiasm before finishing the job, and shoved some furniture in front of the gap on the wall.

Our landlord had the eerie demeanour of a latter day Norman Bates, with a mild manner which you could never entirely trust. However, his tyrannical mother was an all too real presence in our lives. A slight woman with an avaricious face and a capriciously prescriptive attitude toward her tenants, she would occasionally turn up unannounced, to carry out random inspections or unwanted “renovations”. One afternoon, we walked in to find her standing on the battered old dining room table (“Solid teak, and very valuable”), painting the ceiling a sludgy shade of snot green. She was a constant source of comedic source material for us all.

At the end of the Autumn term, we threw a party. Somehow, half the University got to hear about it. There were queues up the street. I would walk into a room, and not recognise a single soul. A group of passing football hooligans commandeered the kitchen – and thus the booze – and began swinging broken bottles about. The police were called, and the numbers duly thinned to a manageable level. None of this bothered us too much – it was all part of the experience of student life. If it happened to me now, I would probably be traumatised for days.

We were a resilient bunch back then, with little need of the niceties of human comfort. Looking back on what I uncomplainingly put up with then, and comparing it with the lifestyle which I have now come to expect as my due, I can’t help thinking that maybe I have softened up just a little too much for my own good.

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Sherwood Hall, University Of Nottingham. 1980-1981.
Unclassified

After my brief spell in the outside world of regular employment, residence hall immediately felt like a step backwards. For most of my fellow first-year students, who had never lived away from home before, this was an exciting new environment. For me, it felt like being back at school again – except this time, my study door had a lock on it.

Like so many teenage would-be intellectuals over the years, I had expected university to thrust me straight into the vanguard of progressive thought. Instead, it dropped me straight into a puddle of subsidised booze. In my imagination, I had anticipated earnest late-night discussions on literature, philosophy, politics and art. In reality, I found myself bopping around to Baggy Trousers and Enola Gay three times a week, minimum. It was an easy adjustment to make. I didn’t give it a second thought.

Eager to make friends, I cheerfully hooked up with anybody I happened to sit next to at dinner. Soon, I was part of a large - but fixed - circle of acquaintances, who did everything together. We quite happily referred to ourselves as “The Clique”, as we sat around in each other’s rooms over endless cups of coffee, or danced in a large circle at hall discos, or played croquet together on the quad, or organised expeditions into “town” for shopping, drinking, or gigs at the newly opened Rock City. Like the first couple of weeks of every series of Big Brother, residence hall life was fun, fun, fun – laughter, games and mucking around with my new circle of friends.

In the second term, I ditched the drab chain-store clothes, hennaed my hair and trendied myself up. As you do, in your first year at university. We were dabbling our little toes in the shallowest waters of the New Romantic Movement – that safest, most suburban youth cult of them all. It didn’t extend much beyond a touch of kohl round the eyes, hair dye, a floppy scarf or two, a long green mac and a second hand dinner suit – but at least it felt like an expression of “individuality” at the time.

I made the most of hall life, enjoying its easy cosiness while it lasted. It was a hermetically sealed bubble of still very innocent pleasures. After the rocky road of boarding school, I had been given a fresh start. I had consciously sought popularity, and had found it, and it felt entirely wonderful.

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18 Txxxhurst Hill, Loughton, Essex. 1980.
Wealthy Suburbs, Large Detached Houses

After living at 18 Txxxhurst Hill, no game of croquet would ever be the same again.

What on earth was the point of playing the game on a regular flat surface, when one had experienced the sheer thrill of playing it on my aunt and uncle’s sloped lawn? There was so much more to think about. If hitting the ball uphill, you had to calculate how far back downhill it would roll, and at what angle. If hitting the ball downhill, then only the slightest tap would suffice; anything more would send your ball careering into the flower beds. Croquet at 18 Txxxhurst Hill was a complex game, requiring immense skill and subtlety.

I shall always be profoundly grateful to my aunt and uncle, for inviting me to live with them for seven months between school and university. Seven months back at Y0rk House would have been more than I could have coped with. Instead, here I was, with a full time job selling toys at Hamleys of Regent Street, commuting up to Oxford Circus every day on the Central Line, and coming home each night to a domestic environment that didn’t feel like a constant war zone.

Architecturally, 18 Txxxhurst Hill was the very apotheosis of 1930s English suburbia - of variegated mock Tudor Metroland. Modest in aspect, sensible in design, with a gravel drive, stained glass in the front door, polished wooden floorboards, sliding French windows, a formica breakfast bar, and a reassuring domestic smell which still lingers in my memory. Brown, beige, magnolia and muted green prevailed. A piano in the dining room, a collection of corn dollies above the fireplace, old framed photos of my cousin (by then at University), reluctantly posing in her school uniform. Reassuringly ordinary, comfortably normal. It was a place where I no longer had to worry about the possible negative repercussions of my every word and deed. I could begin to relax. I could learn to relate. I could help clear the table and dry the dishes, and not be bawled out, and even be thanked for it.

I returned to Txxxhurst Hill for a few weeks in the Summer of 1981, after securing a temporary job at Debenhams of Oxford Street (selling toys once again). I loved being part of the madness of the rush hour commute – it made me feel in the swim, connected to the rest of the world, part of everyday society. I was eagerly embracing the normalcy of the mainstream, retreating from the solitary misery of the margins, imitating and blending in. A necessary process. Txxxhurst Hill was my staging post between schoolboy life and student life, where the last vestiges of teenage angst were flushed away by a healthy dose of Real Life.

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6 Brookside, Cambridge. 1979.
Academic Centres, Students and Young Professionals

Ah, the faux maturity of the Senior Sixth. Each Autumn, a few sixth-formers would stay on an extra term at school, beyond A-levels, in order to sit entrance exams for Oxford or Cambridge. For some of us, a flat was provided, situated outside the school grounds. This was a thrilling first taste of adult independence for us – mainly because we could now sneak out to the pub and back, without having to run the gamut of inquisitive housemasters along the way.

We were a disparate group – roughly half a dozen in all - thrown together at random inside the flat. I shared my large room with Andy, a day boy, and so had the place to myself at night. Andy and I got on well, and socialised with the same crowd of Sixth Form Leys boys and Fifth Form Perse School girls. For a while, our particular hang-out was Martin’s Coffee Bar on Trumpington Road – 4 o’clock every weekday, where seven or eight of us would cram into a wooden booth, making four cups of tea between us last an hour, smoking, gossiping and giggling. It was all sweetly platonic, with almost no romances developing between the boys and the girls. Hanging out together was perfectly sufficient for us.

One Saturday night, Andy and I threw a party in our room. We didn’t bother inviting most of our flatmates – they belonged to the high-flying school-prefect crowd, and we thought they would only treat our motley little gathering with superiority and contempt. Simultaneously, the other half of the flat had arranged a large sit-down dinner for the same night, and hadn’t bothered to invite us either. We all met rather sheepishly in the kitchen, stirring our respective cauldrons of mulled wine. Our side was boozier, noisier, more fun, and won hands down. I drank too much (for the first time in my life, but not the last), spewed everywhere, and was laid out on my bed underneath newspapers – bringing the party to a swift end.

It was the autumn of 2-Tone (Specials, Madness, Beat, Selecter), of Video Killed The Radio Star, of Lena Martell warbling “One day at a time, sweet Jesus” on Top Of The Pops, of Public Image Limited’s astonishing Metal Box, of gigs at the Corn Exchange (The Undertones, The Damned), of evenings drinking Southern Comfort at The Anchor, The Mill, The Fountain, The Eagle, of experimenting with hash in an abandoned garage, of skinny ties and Oxfam shops, of feeling on top of the heap, with an assured bright future stretching ahead. The fact that I failed my entrance exams to Christ’s College Cambridge barely registered on my radar. My place at Nottingham University was already guaranteed. I was on my way, outwards and upwards, eagerly looking forward, accumulating and savouring each new small freedom.

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North A House, The Leys School, Trumpington Road, Cambridge. 1974-1979.
Transient Workforces, Living at their Place of Work

Boarding school did not suit me well. Trapped for weeks on end with the same group of people, under the same roof, the constant casual cruelties of adolescence were both magnified and intensified – causing me much quiet suffering.

As prisons go, this one was not without some external architectural merit. An ivy-clad, late Victorian brick building, North A House looked out over a neatly lawned quadrangle, bordered on its other sides by a classroom block, the school dining hall and the school chapel – all of the same vintage. The overall effect aspired to evoke the atmosphere of a Cambridge college, with some degree of success.

Inside, we graduated through the house with each passing year: from shared dorms and common rooms, through to shared studies, and finally to individual studies with beds. With no locks on the study doors, privacy was minimal, hearty communality being the prescribed order. The overall look was, as in most boarding schools, plain and institutional; in contrast, every available inch of wall space in every study was plastered with posters and magazine pages. The reigning favourites: Roger Dean album covers, pin-ups of Charlie’s Angels (Farrah, Jaclyn and Kate), and fag-end-of-hippydom posters ordered from the back pages of the NME.

As the stock representative of authority in the building, our housemaster never really stood a chance. Never mind the fact that he had been forced to leave South Africa after refusing to racially segregate his classes – all we cared about was his insistence on upholding petty rules and regulations, his cheese-paring obsession with small economies, and (most fatally of all) his involuntary nervous twitch. He did his best under difficult circumstances, but remained a tense, suspicious figure whose occasional attempts at cheery bonhomie always struck a false note with us.

My abiding memories of North A: the smell of dirty laundry, piled up for collection on Monday nights – the scrum round the toasters in the basement at break time – the fetid atmosphere of the TV room, packed on Thursday evenings for Top Of The Pops – the mad dash for the morning post – the marathon “round the table” ping pong sessions – the gramophone in the common room – the schoolgirls on the afternoon bus who we all waved to for a couple of weeks, leaning out of our study windows – the water bombs – the pillow fights – the morning wake-up bell – struggling with the trunks at the end of term – and not knowing which was worse: term-times or holidays.

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Y0rk House, Blyth, W0rksop, N0tts. 1965-1981.
Wealthy Suburbs, Large Detached Houses

The second house I ever lived in also had a name, not a number. As a young boy, I couldn’t imagine ever living in a house with a mere number attached to it. People who lived in houses with numbers on them weren’t really our sort of people; they spoke with accents. My father created a scarlet Dymo label for the new house, and stuck it on the front gates: Y0RK HOUSE FORMERLY THISBE FORMERLY THE HAVEN.

In actual fact – as my grandmother told me many years later – my father nearly fainted when Y0rk House went to him at auction, as he wasn’t at all sure whether he actually wanted it or not. As it was, this random capriciousness on his part ended up providing me with my main home address for the next 16 years.

Y0rk House had a vast garden, with an orchard and a paddock. There were figs, walnuts, mulberries, apples, pears, damsons, gooseberries, elderberries, raspberries – and chickens, which we had inherited from the previous owners. In the time we had them, the chickens only ever managed to lay one egg between them; this was treated as a minor miracle. We got rid of them after a year or so.

The garden had many different areas, and I took great delight in wandering round and naming them all. At the age of seven or eight, I devised an imaginary tube map, which linked all the areas of the garden together in an elaborate network of lines. I would then pace round the garden, constructing imaginary tube journeys, changing lines at various stations and so on. The garden had become a rich source of material for my private imagination, which was growing ever more powerful. Other children might have had an imaginary best friend; by now, I had an entire imaginary parallel city - then country - then world. It didn’t just have a tube system; it had TV stations, pop charts, celebrities, warring nations, a history, and even separate languages. I wrote and drew comics, TV guides, pop charts, history books, and – believe it or not – school text books for my new imaginary languages. I had particular fun devising the irregular verbs, which were as far out and irregular as I could possibly make them.

Somehow, I was aware that my fantasy life had become a little odd. I kept nearly all of this strictly to myself. I didn’t want anyone to find out what I was up to.

My new room was very big, with lino on the floor, a huge toy cupboard, and a set of Matryoshka dolls on the chest of drawers beside my bed. I loved being in my room. As the years went by, I loved being in my room more and more. After my parents split up, and my mother moved out, and my father’s temper grew worse, my room became my sanctuary against the outside world. After my father remarried, and my stepmother moved in with her three children, my room became my only remaining place of refuge. I sat on my bed for hours on end, with my albums and my pop magazines, and lost myself in music.

Y0rk House stayed in the family as I left home, followed in turn by my sister and our three step-siblings. When my father died, my stepmother stayed on, remarrying a couple of years later. Her new husband was greeted with a certain amount of suspicion in some quarters of the village. One day, shortly after moving in, he took a pot of red paint and daubed, in large letters above the kitchen sink: I AM NEVER LEAVING YOU. IF ANYONE SHOULD DOUBT IT, LET THEM READ THIS. The letters remained there after his death from cancer less than two years later, and right up to my stepmother’s death three years after that.

In the 34 years that Y0rk House remained in our family, almost no structural maintenance ever took place. By the time it came up for sale in 1999, it was in a truly dreadful state of repair, suffering from chronic damp and in need of a new roof. It sold for a fraction of its true original worth. I saw too much misery, rage and sorrow there to retain many fond memories of the building, which is still being renovated by its new owners. I wish it happier times ahead.

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Puncknowle, Plantation Avenue, Bessacarr, Doncaster. 1962-1965.
Wealthy Suburbs, Large Detached Houses

The first house I ever lived in had a name, not a number. Puncknowle was the name of the village in Dorset where my mother and father first met – at a regimental ball, while my father was completing his national service. Puncknowle (pronounced to rhyme with “funnel”) was a neat and tidy post-war bungalow, situated on a quiet, leafy lane on the outskirts of town. The ideal starter home for a smart young couple, freshly returned from their society wedding in London.

A pair of potted hydrangeas sat on either side of the front door. There was a rose garden off to the right, with tall roses that seemed to me like trees. Behind the bungalow, a lawned area led down to a compost heap and a small ditch at the bottom of the garden. I liked this area the best. It was my territory: wilder, more interesting, less boringly formal, where I could indulge my already fertile imagination, and lose myself in elaborate fantasies.

Although we left the house when I was only three and a half years old (on September 13, 1965 – the date has always stuck with me), I have strong and detailed visual memories of most of the house – except for my parents’ bedroom, which for some strange reason I cannot remember at all. There were stairs leading up to a loft, and to my baby sister’s bedroom – ideal for throwing myself down when she returned from hospital, in a bid to regain some attention for myself.

One morning, my father came to the breakfast table, his face beaming, bringing me exciting news. We were moving! To a large house, with a big garden, in a village called Blyth! I had never heard of Blyth before. I knew that London existed, and Sheffield, and Cornwall (we had all been to Cornwall). But that was about as far as my universe stretched. Twelve miles away from Puncknowle, Blyth was something new entirely. My father’s excitement was infectious. This would be a new adventure.

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