GOING BACK
Alexandra Jones spent her youth trying to escape the life she was born into. But what happened when the pandemic forced her to move back to the very place she left behind?
After 11 years in London, the pandemic left Alexandra Jones with no choice but to move back in with her mum – the one place she’d spent her life trying to leave behind
I MOVED BACK TO YORKSHIRE to live with my mum at the tail end of 2020, after 11 years in London, aged 32. She’s offended by the negative inflection in my voice when I tell people. ‘It’s not you, Mum,’ I explain. ‘It’s the optics.’ There’s something tragic about it, a whiff of the ‘haven’t got your shit together yet’. Knowing that I’m one of roughly 40% of young people who have hightailed it out of the city does nothing to soothe me. One of my A-level teachers told me that people change when they move to London; they act as if it’s the only place that matters. As I packed my meagre belongings – more than a decade in the capital and I’d amassed a total of one painting and 17 boxes of clothes – I thought bitterly that London was the only place that mattered. I’d become one of those people – cut me and I bleed Vagabond flat whites and pastries from Pophams, air pollution and the last stop on the Central line. But I was paying more than £1,000 a month in rent and bills alone, a fact as inescapable as a haemorrhage, and increasingly difficult to justify (and actually pay) given the financial Armageddon the global pandemic had left a writer for hire, like me, in. Most of my friends had already bought houses in London or the home counties. They’d married, were having or had children; their lives seemed as stable as iron rods in
cement, especially in comparison to mine, which, I realised – looking around at 10 years packed into a few boxes – could be blown away as easily as dandelion seeds. Every time the stable option had been presented to me, I’d taken the other path, the mystery box instead of the cash prize. I thought of relationships I’d exploded, well-paying jobs I’d left in favour of freelancing. (I’d quit the last full-time job I’d had at an advertising agency within a few weeks of starting, handing my notice in one blurry Wednesday morning after an accidental big night and 25 minutes of sleep.) I should have settled down, found a corporate job and a corporate boyfriend. The shoulds piled up as I got onto the M1 northbound, speeding through middle England towards my past. Recriminations that could not be drowned out, neither by the radio nor the dull roar of the road. Outside London, the skies seemed limitless, sunset clouds flamed gently like peach candy floss, but I did not feel optimistic about the future I was speeding into. At about midnight, I pulled up in front of a house I did not know, but felt familiar. My mum had sold the family home two years earlier and downsized to a small stone cottage on the rural outskirts of Sheffield, not far from where I grew up. I flicked on the light in ‘my’ new room and sat on the bed heavily. My mum loves cleanliness and order. ‘Keep it tidy,’ she whispered through the door, the same line she’d thrown me a hundred times throughout my childhood. I felt exasperated. Not at my mum, but at myself: a thirtysomething woman who had craved independence from a room just like this as a teen, yet had returned compliantly to my mother’s house over a decade later. A few days later, I messaged H. She and I had been in the same form at school but became proper friends when we were 16 and went to indie nights in Sheffield. I still had her number, though I hadn’t seen her since we were in our twenties. I asked if she’d be free to hang out. We met one slate grey afternoon in Sheffield; she looked exactly as she always did, sleek and minimal, dressed in Cos knitwear. We walked around town, past clubs we used to sneak into with fake IDs. That was the early 2000s, when Sheffield briefly burned white-hot with cool bands. The Arctic Monkeys, The Long Blondes, Little Man Tate – we’d go to gigs on Tuesdays, then see them at clubs on Saturdays. We’d wear oversized men’s shirts with fishnets and scarves in our hair. We’d get boys to buy us drinks so we had enough money for the £25 taxi back to the countryside. I’d always thought of myself as deeply uncool, but reminiscing with H reminded me that we didn’t do too badly for two girls from no-name villages in the depths of rural Yorkshire. The foundation for all the nights to come were laid here, I thought. The smell of stale smoke, alcohol and sweat worked like an aphrodisiac on my 16-year-old self. I fell in love with parties and nightclubs – and with the escapism of night-time. H works for the NHS now and lives in Sheffield. Talking to her is like slipping on a well-worn pair of boots, so comfortable, everything still fits. ‘So, what now?’ she asked me as we stand on the corner outside one of the grimier clubs. Her life has followed the trajectory she set out at the start of her career. I told her I didn’t know. ‘I feel like I’ve missed some kind of important point… Like I should have left the good times behind much quicker than I did.’ She laughed. ‘You were never good at calling it a night and going home.’ She’d visited me in London one summer when I was having a party for my 25th birthday in my flat. Even when the toilet got smashed off the wall, the party kept going – for almost two days. ‘I don’t think I would have survived your twenties,’ she added. I said that I wasn’t sure moving back in with my mum counted as surviving.
“I got onto the M1 northbound, speeding TOWARDS MY PAST”
I WASN’T EXACTLY POPULAR at school, but I had a handful of close friends. There was S, my best friend when I was 12 and 13. I’d spend every weekend at her house, sleeping in her bunk bed in the room she and her sister shared. We’d read Smash Hits and Mizz and talk about boys we liked. In the summer holidays, days would pass and Mum would call to ask if I had any intention of coming home. ‘Yeah, I will,’ I’d say, then stay for two more days. After her, there was M. M and I had one of those deeply entwined, hormonal friendships that teenage girls specialise in. I’d spend literal weeks on her family farm, or we’d rove around the villages going to house parties on the estates. We got into stolen cars with boys who’d tear down country lanes and plough through hedgerows, before burning the evidence. We’d climb through smashed windows to drink stolen alcohol in boarded-up houses. She came with me when, aged 16, I decided to get a tattoo from a dodgy ‘artist’ on one of the estates (and encouraged me to do it when I considered getting two). We grew apart; she had children when I went to uni. We were in touch sporadically but I realised the last time I’d seen her was more than 10 years ago. I messaged on Facebook, saying I’d be around for more than a few days this time, if she wanted to catch-up. ‘Jesus,’ she rolled her eyes when I told her that I’d returned home, a total failure. ‘I think you’re feeling sorry for yourself. You did everything you set out to do – your London friends are just rich. You need to stop comparing yourself. You never were satisfied.’ I conceded; there’s a grain of truth in this. ‘You’re very pragmatic now,’ I said. ‘God, remember how wild we were?’ She appraised me for a second. ‘I don’t think I was ever that wild. I just tagged along. You were the one who wanted to do all that stuff. Be wild, get f*cked up. You’ve always been running away.’
When I left M, I drove towards the three-bedroom semi I grew up in. Mum sold it two years ago and, sitting outside it, I reflected that I could not have moved back to that house, even if it meant spending every last penny I had to be somewhere else. I don’t even know how to write about it accurately. Memory folds like light around this place; the facts strobe in and out of existence. It gives me a headache just trying to remember. Some things are definite. That a man living in one of the council flats opposite used to beat his wife, who was a sweet, quiet woman. That our neighbours were dealing heroin until their house got raided by police one autumn night after I’d left for university. That a man down the street – who I guess must have been suffering from some kind of mental illness – became obsessed with my mum, once turning up at our door at 3am demanding to be let in. That she called the police who asked if she’d been ‘goading’ him somehow, and that a few days later her car tyres were slashed. ‘It’s become rougher,’ I thought as I surveyed the street. Lawns have grown wild and are pockmarked with weeds, and there’s a plastic child’s slide on its side on the pavement. The whole street looked forgotten about. I suppose the emotion I recall most readily about growing up here is boredom; a toxic kind of stillness, a stillness close to death. I remember being 14 or 15 and thinking, ‘If this is all there is in life, why does anyone bother?’ It’s hard to tell now if I was being overdramatic – and it’s a real possibility, because I was prone to dramatics – or if my home life really was painful. It wasn’t just the neighbours, we had our own shit to deal with, mostly around my stepfather’s alcoholism. He died when I was 19. The day of his funeral, I told my uni housemates I was popping home, but didn’t tell them why. I didn’t even tell them that my dad had died. Afterwards, I went back and pretended nothing had happened. If I were to interrogate my reasoning, I didn’t want misery to follow me to my new life. I was happy and free, life was suddenly frenetic with activity, bright with opportunity. Stillness? What stillness? I was 19 and gone. I’d never be still again. As I drive away from my old house, I see myself at nine, at 12, at 15, and I feel sorry for her. But also a bit envious. She had it all to come. A few months ago, my mum moved into a cottage on the edge of the Peak District. This is wild Yorkshire, the seasons writ large on the moorlands, which flame and bloom with life and death. The cottage is recently renovated, the walls smoothed with fresh plaster and painted a tasteful off-white. In the kitchen there is a boiling water tap, which Mum and I agree is the height of modernity. One morning, she said: ‘Did you ever think…’ and paused. ‘That we’d end up somewhere with a boiling water tap?’ I said, completing her sentence, thinking of things we use to shore up our personalities, symbols of progress. ‘No,’ I answered myself. She smiled. ‘Me neither.’ In practice, we both prefer the kettle, but we like what the tap represents. Before I left her, M said: ‘Maybe you need to be here to work out what you’re running away from.’ Maybe. It seems too kind an assessment, because I still feel like a failure, but perhaps there’s a grain of truth in it. And I think about H, and what she said. I never was very good at going home.
“Memory folds around this place; facts strobe in and OUT of existence”