The Obsessive Diary

But first I jumped naked off a viaduct in Normandy. Almost naked. We’d driven in convoy, Angel man and me, to a festival in northern France where there were more crew than punters and we lay about in the sunshine smoking pot and he said, Let’s go bungee jumping. It was appropriate, that leap into nothing, trusting a rope I couldn’t see and trusting the calculations of others who said if I reached out my hand, I would touch the water in that microsecond halt between going down and bouncing up. A leap of faith echoed in the leap to leave the squat in Ealing and move to a farmhouse high up on a hill hugged by woodland. I don’t know why I elected to strip, just me and a pair of tiny pink shorts flying from a bridge. Probably showing off. It made sense at the time. I remember Angel man rushing up to do it again and almost jumping before they’d attached the chord. I remember someone doing it on a bicycle. I remember the ridiculous rush of stepping into nothing, my brain telling me I would die. It was a rush to catch the ferry too, that afternoon, we were late, we’d picked up new friends, we had various drugs to hide as we sped to the border. I was so blasé. Being caught – and we never were – never crossed my mind. We ruled the world. It was all about friends, new connections, wherever we went we made them. Two more that weekend who came with us back to the farm. We set them to work stripping carpets and scrubbing underlay, revealing wide floorboards. This house in the country that I owned, to which I’d been sent an ancient key had ancient stone and brick and oak hidden beneath wall-to-wall sixties interior; beige cupboards, avocado carpets and red plastic lino gave way to stone and oak and brick. Everybody worked for free and a piece of what we were building, a scene in a house in the country, wisteria dripping, sun shining, kettle always on. We filled the bedrooms with mattresses pulled from skips and filled them with people. We tore and painted and smoked and practised circus skills in the garden. Everyone was learning to juggle. Acrobalance was all the rage. We decided to start a commune.

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The queue snaked round the block hidden by traveller’s vans. It was fifty pence on the door, up stairs so narrow you had to pass sideways. At the top, a bar fashioned out of a plank of wood across a doorway, behind us coats were thrown onto a mattress on the floor. We sold cheese and gave away booze to get around the licensing laws. The mushroom tea was free, ladled into plastic cups from a vast, hot vat; harvested ourselves from the fields we hadn’t bothered to pick out the grass and mud, England floated and sank amongst psychedelia. Nobody cared. Each room of that two-hundred-year-old factory was painted into its own party; a brick dungeon of techno, a psychedelic of trance, and deep in the belly through a maze of corridors a womb dressed in red velvet, where live cello made grown men weep. The building sweated and shook, through boarded-up doors steam escaped into the night. I remember thinking, If fire ignites or a staircase collapses, none of us are getting out, but nothing bad happened; no blaze or crush, week after week the wildness contained in a pulsing building in Ealing, the House of Grow parties to raise money for a studio in the country. Everyone was welcome. We turned no one away no matter what they did, like Mick who was huge, an overhung forehead, sunken eyes. He liked crack and scaring hippies and pissing in the womb but Bach and poetry brought him to his knees and he’d tell us about his mother. The police left us alone. They said the streets of Ealing were quieter when we were around. We took care of all the lost boys and girls. We had five of these parties I think, it’s hard to remember because I was high and wild and dancing and serving mushroom tea and there is no record. On the day of the last one my angel-faced boyfriend discovered all the money we’d raised, that he’d stashed in a box, had been stolen. We didn’t ask who did it. We went ahead anyway with the last party, a stomping, sweating, wild affair and then we left that factory in Ealing and drove to a farm in the country.

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I don’t think I’d told my friends I was the kind of girl who got keys through the post from law firms in Westminster about houses that were empty and mine, but they took it in their stride. As we piled into my camper - my tall and pretty as an angel boyfriend, his dog, some of the band, a few friends who’d been passing by - I remembered the last time I’d been there. It had been a day like that one, sunny and bright, summer coming. I was eleven years old; I’d been hanging about in the low-beamed kitchen of the cottage where my father lived, the place we invaded at weekends. 70’s jeans, Kickers on my feet, my mother baking bread and my father in tweed suit and wellies saying, Come along. I’m taking you to see your house. His Porsche on the gravel, the soft front seat, his ordered hands on the wheel, the secure warmth of him, it wasn’t the, your house that I registered, it was the being with him; we could have driven in circles all day and I would have been happy. We slipped along narrow sunken lanes, hedgerows green and stretching, the sun shining, the car warm and purring to a house on a hill hugged by woodland where a man tidied away the blankets he’d slept on in front of the wide fire, guarding the place while it was empty. I remember standing on the first floor and looking through the windows at the view stretching like the Serengeti. And now this same view, my rag-taggle friends and I, a pink camper, a black and white dog, the same sunshine, the same woods that hugged, the same expanse of fields and trees swooping. The key was turned in the lock, the ancient doors swung open, my friends disappeared into rooms, up stairs, calling out, opening windows. I sat on a low wall, remembering. The letter had said, between tenants, but what was to stop me? Nothing but a few parties to raise money to build the studio in the garden that my boyfriend and his band had always wanted. I touched the iron gate hitch shaped like Aries horns and decided. By the time we were on the road back to London, The House of Grow was born. Parties were about to happen. I wrote to those lawyers in Westminster and told them I was moving in.

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I was living in a squat in Ealing when the key came through the door. Hang on. Let’s roll back a bit. The sea of bodies parted, he was six foot seven and had the face of an angel, we hugged hello and maybe we hung out a bit on that pulsing psychedelic dance floor and then we went our separate ways. The next time we met was by firelight in the woods near Newbury where a camp was set up to protest the building of a bypass. People were living up trees and refusing to come down, I’d driven out in my camper to join the fight. It was night, dark, mud and dirty faces. I parked and approached the first circle of flickering warmth and there he was on the other side. This third meeting proved too much for both of us. Fate, we agreed, was at play. I was determined, he was hesitant. He’d had other plans involving Sinéad O’Connor. I shaved my head again to look more like her. It did the trick. He took me to see the rhododendrons bloom in Windsor Great Park. We listened to Mike Scott and The Waterboys. I met his friends. He was in a band, he lived in a squat in Ealing, a two-hundred-year-old factory of bricked-up doors, freezing water, a maze of narrow stairs. I moved in and signed up at a music school thinking maybe this is it, this other thing I’ve been searching for. I sang a bit and was bad at it and shivered in the rigged-up shower cubicle and smoked spliffs at the rickety kitchen table picked up from a skip and one day a key came through the door. Hold on a minute. How did they find me, these people who sent it? It was a squat, right? Nobody knew I was there; I hadn’t told my parents as I’d moved and moved and moved again. Yet there it was, a large brown envelope heavy with a key which slipped out onto my lap. The factory was quiet, my friends all sleeping, my boyfriend, that six-foot-seven angel quiet in our basement room and I was alone at the rickety kitchen table. I pulled out the letter that came with it, a letterhead I knew. The lawyers who handled my father’s affairs by extension handled mine. It said, Dear Eleanor, your house is between tenants, would you like to come and see it? The key was fairy tale, huge and heavy, iron and rusted, teeth to fit an ancient lock. Had I told my friends that squatting wasn’t my only option? Did they know I had money? I put the letter away and turned the key over in my hands.

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I’m midway through my retreat, and midway through the first draft, and much as it feels like I’m wading through concrete, I’m on course to have a 30,000 word novella in the bag before I fly to NYC. That’s my aim. There was no way I could complete a first run at a novel in 30 days, but a treatment for a novel that will give me and my agent and pretty good idea if this idea has legs, that I can do.

Kimberley mentioned in passing yesterday, while talking about In Defence Of… , how the struggle makes her think she can’t do it. I was happy to correct her (“that’s just called writing” 😂). Here at First Draft front line, I’ve had all weathers; from concrete to crystalline flight. Every day is the same. And this midpoint of the second act is what sorts the sheep from the goats, reveals the chops a writer has or needs to develop. Gone is the exciting set up, that thrilling first act. Not yet in sight is the avalanche tumble toward the end, the relief of act three. Act two is the slog for writer and character alike. It’s when everything goes wrong, when our hero finds themselves further from their desire than they were when we met them. Act two is death. And boy, does it feel that way.

If you missed our conversation, here it is:

And can I recommend that you sign up for Kimberly’s memoir class, Writing The Unfixed Life? Too late. I’ve already done it. It’s a four week course designed to help you move beyond the mind’s grip and allow prose to rise from within, the kind of truth the body carries long before the brain finds words for it.

Every life holds stories that refuse tidy arcs or endings—illness, loss, identity shifts, and everyday uncertainties that shape us. Writing the Unfixed Life is for writers sitting (or wrestling!) with those stories.

I’m going to go further. I’m going to recommend you pre order her luminous memoir, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home

It’s fantastic and threaded with a magic that keeps on going (see the end of our conversation when we consider the possibility that Charlie is still alive… )

Meanwhile, I went for a flea market jaunt to Port Grimaud today. Corner table on a square? ✅. Croissant dipped in café crème? ✅. Ancient woman in swirling patterns of fire plus soft hat at jaunty angle? ✅✅✅ The literal translation of flamboyant is flaming wavy and she had it in Gallic spades.

As you were,

Eleanor

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Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in West London, the house in which I’d lived before my detour to Glastonbury and snare in a ménage à trois. It was a time of parties and protests, MDMA and Reclaim The Streets, me and my split-screen camper with its twenty-one windows and a roof that slid back, a miniature sink and tiny plug under the bed, I named her Hera. In Hera I drove to derelict buildings behind King’s Cross taken over by techno, to squatted land in Wandsworth turned into a riverside farm. A girl who’d been sectioned in Hackney Marsh got us on a mission to that place of stopped clocks to rescue her. We danced to a broken strip light in the lift and spirited her out hidden under a blanket in the back. On Battersea Bridge we held up traffic and graffitied the tarmac, put on a party til the police shut us down. We took a lot of psychedelics. We laughed. Our friends had a club called Return To The Source, a psychedelic trance night born of Space Tribe that came to life at The Rocket in Holloway and south of the river at The Brixton Academy. We decorated and danced; London was turned beautiful in the morning light. At the New Year’s Eve party in Brixton I was deep in the wild when the bodies parted on the dance floor like the Red Sea and at the end of this pulsing human tunnel stood the man whose back I had leaned against in the Moroccan tent at the Harvest Fair that summer when two hundred people had taken off on a psilocybin spaceship and spun around the universe. He saw me and I saw him. He was six foot seven and had the face of an angel. We laughed and hugged and recognised, let go and got on with the night. I wore spandex flares covered in moon and stars bought from Anjuna market. My hair was still short but I would make it shorter. It was our second coinciding, there’d be a third before he and I decided there was something, before I set off on a personal mission to get him, shaving my head again. Pursuing him felt like a challenge I couldn’t turn away from; a man with the face of an angel who’d been celibate for seven years. A red rag to my injured bull. He told me he had a thing for Sinéad O’Connor.

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Home to the tall, cold house in London, my ruptured disc and I, this place of my childhood where Hollywood stars lit cigarettes with survivors of Russian oppression, where refugees and royalty passed each other on the stairs. Or used to. As a child, my father’s friends and my mother’s politics built a world of artists and argument. My father was Scottish aristocracy, a Tory-voting, Maggie-loving, patron of the arts. My mother was a member of the Labour Party who liked to pretend to be in touch with the real world while keeping a horse in the country. Why they married is a mystery I’ve lately been unravelling, they seemed so ill-disposed to suit each other. They had parallel lives, joined by artistic intellect, separated by their need to live exactly as they chose; she in the tall, cold house in London giving refuge to the lost and the lonely, he in a small, low-beamed cottage in Sussex. Both homes were part of vast estates he’d inherited and bought, a fact she bore with something close to shame. He wanted a wife who enjoyed tea with the Queen. I’m not sure what she wanted, not him, anyway. He’d come up to town occasionally and they’d meet like their guests on the stairs, one coming down for a Cinzano before supper, the other rushing up to get changed for a meeting. She was an architect; he was a writer. Her drawings dominated the dining room table where we never ate while in the kitchen where we did, my father in bow tie and three-piece suit, would crouch at the end with his tea or drink, about to go out, never staying. We had a housekeeper who made marmalade and hated everyone except for my father and us and a fat, funny artist who lived downstairs and painted and never sold. There was the woman from Czechoslovakia in the basement flat. Amongst these ever-moving feet I found my place in Lego, my cat, my teddy. A house of parallel realities; the need and the glamour upstairs and in the basement flat, something else. But in 1995, I only knew that I was cold and my back was broken. The surgeon said it was lucky I was young, he wouldn’t fuse the vertebrae, L4 and L5 would remain as independent as my parents. He removed the floating bits of disc and sowed me up and sent me to lie on the sofa and stare at the paintings that hung on the dining room walls; Inveraray Castle where my grandmother had grown up, the 8th Duke of Argyll bearing down over snapshots of us.

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The house in France was a haven and still is. It sits on a crystal mountain on the edge of a national park, its walls hold a peace and a sanctuary. It’s where my parents spent time together without one of them disappearing off to his studio and the other packing her car on a Sunday night. There were guests, but they were nice, the rooms were broad and warm, the garden messy and secret, at night wild boars came snouting about the roses. As a child I’d play on the drive with my busybody men mending potholes. I learnt to swim in the pool, I smoked my first cigarette, stolen from a packet left out on the terrace, in an airless, windowless bathroom. My father who died sixteen years ago is there; his presence as crystal clear as the mountain. I see him in the hall in soft hat and pink shirt, off for coffee in the village, or on the roof mending tiles, the scent of lemon trees and E45, happy in the sunshine. That summer he padded about not getting involved with the catastrophe that was me. My mother in lilac Liberty shirt fawned over my handsome and kind Knights Templar who had carried me across Europe in his arms. She was delighted by him while I lay on a sunlounger, shaved head, a painful buddha. She called a doctor who laid me on my front and lifted my leg till I screamed and hit him. He agreed the disc had ruptured, there were pieces floating in spinal fluid, and returned with a huge needle. The muscle relaxant, pierced into the flesh of my backside, made me scream again but after he’d gone, I went outside and sank into the pool, the weightlessness of water. The summer passed, croissant and Paris Match, tomatoes from the garden, my mother in lilac Liberty shirt, my father on the roof. Departure came like autumn. My father disappeared in his Porsche. My mother packed the car. We dropped my handsome and kind Knights Templar off on the motorway to hitchhike to Spain to see his children. My mother put on her tape of Anna Karenina. I reclined in the front seat to save my pain. Avignon and Lyon whipped past. Supine in the low-slung Citroën, I watched the sky and imagined Russian farming, Count Vronsky in the snow, Anna in her red coat as we reached Dover, the ferry to England and home.

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