Price The Peanut Factory

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-8384719-5-8
Verlag: Guts Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

A coming-of-age memoir about a young woman and her friends squatting in abandoned houses in London in the late 70s during the emerging counterculture scene. Set in South London (Crystal Palace), Deborah mingled with some of the biggest names to emerge from the scene. She booked The Damned's first show, served pints to Johnny Rotten, and attended a backyard gig from King Kurt. Squat life was sex, drugs and punk rock but it wasn't all fun and games. The Peanut Factory shows Deborah navigating a male-dominated scene, moving every few months and living with drug dealers, sex workers, people on the run, and working-class kids like her. Despite the chaos, the squatters were a family. They were kids creating their own rules. Making art. Living life on the fly. The Peanut Factory is an ode to the youthful rebellion of the 1970s and to London itself. 'A window into a time of raw energy and rough edges, Deb Price paints a vivid picture of life in the squats of South London. By turns amusing and alarming, but always engaging, we accompany a teenager as she navigates her way to womanhood in a sub-culture on the margins.' - Allie Rogers, author of Little Gold and Tale of a Tooth

Deborah Price was born and bred in South London and moved to Brighton in 1986. She has a BA and MA in Film Studies from the Open University and also taught children's literature there. She has written and co-written six books on early years, mainly focusing on equalities, LGBT issues, leadership and grief and loss in children's lives. The Peanut Factory is her debut memoir. She now lives happily by the sea with her partner, where she writes, swims and travels.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Price, Deborah

Leseproben

          Chapter One     My stepfather shoved all of my things in the boot of the car. Not much. Clothes, books, a chest of drawers, and little things I treasured. My childhood books tumbled out, lying in the boot like abandoned orphans of an Edwardian institution: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Five Children and It. In silence we drove to my new home, a big room in a Victorian squat. It was in Crystal Palace, a part I didn’t know, just behind where the buses stopped and right by an estate of prefabs. Not far, about a twenty-minute drive. When we got there it was dark and only a few of the streetlights were working. The road was pockmarked with holes and bits of gravel. It had been raining as we drove and the gravel shone blue and black under our feet when we got out of the car. ‘It’s that one there,’ I said pointing. I couldn’t tell him this was the first time I had seen it. He looked up at the large building. I didn’t know if he had taken in the decrepit air of the street and the run-down look of the house. ‘I haven’t got much time,’ he said, his mouth screwed up with effort as he opened the boot. His body blocked mine as I stepped forward to help and his arms grabbed everything carelessly. He showed less thought getting everything out than when he was packing away his market stall. My life’s possessions were not as important as ladies’ tights, knives, and the roller thing that gets lint off clothes. The larger furniture tumbled out first then my smaller things that he shoved onto the road. A crochet shawl fell into a rain puddle followed by my dress from Kensington Market. I heard a faint tinkle and saw a little wind chime in broken pieces. Something inside me clenched with regret. At that moment I was close to putting it all back in and going home. ‘Is that OK? Is that everything?’ ‘Yes, I think so.’ ‘OK, I’ll be off then.’ He didn’t ask to come inside, and didn’t help me take anything in. Stiffly, after all the bending, he walked round to the driver’s side of the car. The light from the streetlamp caught his glasses. He paused and turned towards me. I stood in the minimal light, my bravado gone, clutching my broken wind chime and my shawl like they were precious friends. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he repeated. There was a pause and a nod, then he got into the car and did a complicated manouvre to turn round without driving over my things and drove away. I stood in the dark, the smell of London petrichor wafting from the surface, the hot evening drying the damp, watching his taillights get smaller and smaller. ‘He wanted me gone anyway,’ I thought. I walked up the stairs to the front door and looked for a knocker. There was a bell, so I pressed it and heard the sound echo inside the house. No one came so I tapped on the door. Still no one came, and I was worried, looking at my pile of possessions at the kerb and wondering if another car would come and run over them. ‘Hallo,’ I called up, my voice unsure and thready. The street was silent like it disapproved of me being there. Every atom of it was unfamiliar and strange. I felt like the air was repelling me and telling me I wasn’t wanted. I tapped again and called, ‘It’s me.’ A window went up on the middle floor and a head came out. ‘Oh, aye it’s you. I forgot you were coming. Hold on a minute, hen.’ It was Jimmy, the Scottish boy I had met, and the best friend of my boyfriend. I had met him before Joe when he started coming into the pub where I worked. He was charming and funny and I really fancied him but then I found out he had a girlfriend. I think he felt the same towards me but was loyal to Jill and encouraged Joe to make a play for me to keep me close. Jimmy had told me they were opening up a new squat. I had asked shyly if they had a room free and he said, ‘Well, aren’t you moving in with Joe? ‘He didn’t ask me,’ I said feeling stupid. ‘Oh, aye he’s into it. He told me before he went away.’ And this was me now standing outside having made the sudden decision to come that evening. I felt like a house of cards that was about to come tumbling down. I was eighteen and had just finished my A levels that summer. Home felt strange. My mother had gone to America to work and I had spent my whole life battling my stepfather so it felt alien to be in the house just with him, the non-parent, and my little brother. To him I wasn’t a child; he had never fathered me, but I wasn’t an adult either. It was too difficult and weird to work, so I wanted out. I hadn’t seen Joe for over a week. He had only come back from Germany that evening. Maybe he wasn’t ‘into it’ like Jimmy said. Despite the cool evening, sweat prickled under my arms. My eyes felt hot and my throat got narrow and lumpy. I steeled myself; whatever happened I mustn’t cry like a baby. I was an adult now and about to start a new and exciting life. Only it didn’t feel new and exciting. I suddenly felt a wave of regret for my home that I had carelessly discarded like an old newspaper. I fancied sitting in the living room, even though it was a Saturday night. Sitting in the living room drinking a cup of tea and watching ‘High Chaparral’ with my stepfather on the flickering screen of the big cabinet in the corner. ‘Hey Manolito,’ he would say in a fake Spanish accent when that character came on screen. Our silence would be something approaching companionable. The front door creaked. I blinked in the light pouring out into the street, swallowing tears. I tried a smile and Jimmy bounded out followed by Joe who wrapped me in a bear hug. They both looked behind me at my pile of gear. ‘This yours then?’ Joe said. ‘You moving in?’ ‘Course she is,’ Jimmy said as he started to scoop up my possessions. ‘We’ll have this all in in no time and then we’re going out,’ he said. ‘Going out?’ I said. ‘It’s Saturday night and we’re off to a party in the prefabs.’ Joe started picking things up and moving them inside. ‘We’re up on the first floor,’ he said. ‘The kitchen’s on the top floor and some junkies have moved in but I think they’re OK.’ At the top of the step he turned and looked at me, his head poking out from behind my shoes, skirts, and books. ‘By the way, first rule of squatting, never ring the bell. Only pigs and bailiffs ring the bell. Just knock and eventually someone will come. And if you’re inside and you hear the bell, never answer it. If you hear a knock, open the window to check who it is before you answer the door.’ I nodded and couldn’t believe that I had broken some sort of basic rule before I had even set foot in the house. My new family took all of my things from the street and piled them in the middle of the room. Jimmy left us and went next door where he started moving things around and sneezing. ‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be,’ I said kicking the clouds of dust and wondering if it would be laughable to ask for a broom. It smelt of damp and emptiness. Joe lit a joss stick and wedged it between the sash window frame. ‘We’ll make it look nice,’ he said putting his arms round me. Looking at the high ceilings, I wondered about curtains. There was a door to the next room, but Joe had blocked it off by putting a mattress there for us to sleep on. It looked a bit stained, but I had an Indian throw that would cover it. I could see that my chest of drawers would look perfect in one corner and started to cheer up. We kissed. ‘What’s this about a party?’ I said. Joe sat on the mattress and shrugged. ‘There’s one over the road if you fancy it.’ I tried to comb the tangles out of my hair with my fingers. I didn’t want to stay in this room with him, not yet. ‘Yeah, sounds great,’ I said and leant against the wall, avoiding the mattress and trying to summon up enthusiasm. Joe stood up and cracked his knuckles. ‘OK let’s split then. We can sort this lot out tomorrow,’ he said then knocked on the adjoining wall and shouted, ‘Party!’ The party was across the road in a prefab. The one-bedroom bungalow seemed homely and sweet after the echoing spaces of our Edwardian house. I danced and drank, felt adventurous and adult. I had left the confines of childhood and was with my tribe, launched on the world. The next day I grieved for the broken windchimes and felt bereft at the way I had left home. For those first two weeks in the squat I hardly ate. Food tasted like ashes in my mouth. I had the odd bit of toast. I had a continual unreal feeling as I went about my daily life. It reminded me of when I was at school and we had to close our eyes to pray in assembly. As soon as we did that I would sway to keep my balance. That’s what I was doing now, swaying continuously as I tried to make this new life balance. I managed to get up and get dressed for work. The boys all wore the same kind of clothes: tatty jeans and ratty Shetland wool jumpers with the elbows poking out. Joe was more adventurous and sometimes wore pale blue cord dungarees with long flowing scarves. He was good looking and closely resembled Patti Smith on the cover of Horses — a fact he was well aware of and played up to. He liked a feminine look and I sometimes came home from work to find him pottering around in one of my skirts with a beret on. My boyfriend showed me how to make a basic tomato sauce that we could add to pasta. I wondered who had shown him, how he knew these skills. He could cook, sew,...