2001: A Teen Odyssey
Aged 16, and thinking about what I might like to study at university, I found myself leaning towards Classics, as well as English Literature. The only snag was my school didn’t offer classes in Classics. So I did what any normal 16 year old girl would do: I asked my mother if it was possible to attend an intensive Ancient Greek residential school over the summer.
The course has existed since the 1960s and offers all levels of intensive tutoring in Greek and Latin. Students commit to three hours of study per day, and they stay in a boarding school. It lasts ten days, and if you commit to it, you learn a huge amount in a short period of time.
Upon arrival I felt the painful mix of shyness and also a sort of blank horror that I had chosen to do possibly the most dorky thing imaginable. I scanned the room of awkward teens and found two girls who were objectively cool, and decided that we should be friends. They were called Vanessa and Lucy, they both came from London and inhabited that effortless cool that teenagers who grow up in London all possess: a knowingness, a clear and accurate superiority. Lucy was delicate and poised; Vanessa was sharp and brilliant.
We quickly formed a bond — we ‘broke out’ of the school and went out drinking in Bath, illicitly swam in the school pool, formed a separate group that we knew was intimidating and unapproachable, it was incredible. That summer, I had fallen into my first serious relationship with a guy called Rob. Even at the time I knew that I was with Rob not because he respected me, or inspired me, but because he hadn’t rejected me. That summer was the first time we had been apart, and I spent far too much time on the phone texting and calling him — something that characterised the next six months of my life. He was cruel, callous, and had a car: the teenage boyfriend trifecta.
On the last night there was a toga party which the three of us sneered at. Refusing to conform, we settled on a different costume: we would dress as each other. Vanessa was me, I was Lucy, Lucy was Vanessa. It was absolutely vicious: we all focused on the parts of each other we were somehow most ashamed of, it felt cruel to see our worst parts reflected back to each other. I distinctly remember Vanessa’s costume entailed taping a mobile phone to her head and saying “Rob” every other word. And yet somehow we still left Bath thick as thieves, and eager to see each other in the real world.
Rob was two years older than me, and had just finished his A-Levels. He was taking a year off before starting university in York, and had secured a job at a sorting and distribution centre for the Ministry of Defence. It was a strange job, he often called on his lunchbreak and told me about all the weapons he had handled. This expanded to a highly illegal side job where he stole machetes and sold them on eBay (it was 2001, and the internet was a lot less regulated). He had taken several home, and had drunkenly threatened me with one once. I thought I loved him, in the scared and depressing way that one can love people who hurt and want to hurt you. We spent all of our free time together, and my school work suffered but I didn’t care because I had a boyfriend, I was having sex, I was living.
I was now in my final two years at school, and as such, had access to a common room with a TV in it. We had a steady roster of teen movies and shows. I think we might have worn out copies of both Grease and Bring It On! I would bring in comedy shows I’d taped at home: Brass Eye, Big Train, Jam, The League of Gentlemen. I was once told off by a classmate for the shows I liked being too dark to be funny (the Fat Handed Twat skit from Big Train tipped her over the edge). One idle morning in early September, my friend Iszi and I were hanging out in the common room when Rob called me. It was unusual for him to call during school. “Turn on the TV” he said, “the Twin Towers have collapsed”. I switched channels and saw the wreckage of the first tower, thinking it was some sort of nightmarish accident. Within a few minutes I watched the second plane hit the second tower and knew that wasn’t true. Iszi and I decided we needed to tell the headmistress, and ran across the school before breathlessly finding her and informing her in the middle of her teaching a maths class that there had been an attack on America.
The hours that followed were impossible to comprehend. We talked about it all day but in an abstract way. America was distant, the world felt both smaller and unfathomably large and more than I could understand. The footage was played over and over and over again until the falling pixels were part of the digital landscape and not real people at all. We were at war, a war fuelled on the surface by revenge, and all I could do was think of my favourite sketch from The Day Today.
I was five years old when the first Gulf War began, and the only real awareness I had of it was based around my neighbours. They were American, and had moved to a rural Cotswolds village because of its proximity to a US air base. The family really informed what I thought America was: the daughter was blond and was fixated with pink and My Little Pony, the son had a camo bedspread and his room was littered with GI Joes. Their parents had a water bed, their house smelled like Tide, and the kids had a Slip’N’Slide in the back garden (which was on a hill and landed in a rose bush). I didn’t understand that they lived there because their dad needed to be closer to a war. I did understand that at the air base there were Lucky Charms and ice cream cake. Early on in that conflict, we moved north to Yorkshire for a period of time. My grandfather was dying of leukemia, and my mum wanted to be close to him and her family. In that part of Yorkshire, RAF jets practice flying, and contouring. The air was frequently interrupted by the sonic boom of military jets, rapidly followed by the low menace of a plane clinging close to the moors. One day, the quarry siren rang out, signalling an imminent blast. I hadn’t heard this before, so I asked my eldest sister what it was. Urgently, she said “The war has begun. Go in the cellar, and wait there. If the rest of us don’t make it, it’s because we’re dead”. Panicked, I ran, and hid in the scariest room of the house. I sat for hours, huddling in some warm laundry until my grandmother came down and I burst into tears with relief that she wasn’t dead, and she called me an idiot.
In November of 2001, Nessa invited me to go and stay with her in London, and I was delighted to have a brief escape from the routine of my life. She lived in Hampstead, and it was joyful to knock about in Camden — go to Rokit and try things on, go to Oxfam and buy old jeans to cut up and sew into the largest flares imaginable. We sat at Camden Lock and smoked some weed, went back to her house and I was struck by how cosmopolitan and cool her life was compared to mine. Her bedroom was in the basement of her home and had clouds painted on the wall, and her back garden had a door that went right onto Hamsptead Heath; it was another world to me. I had met a few of her friends, and Lucy of course, but on Bonfire Night we went out to Primrose Hill to watch the fireworks. I felt immediately out of my depth, these girls were cool and cutting and a clique that I was clearly infringing upon. I was some desperate idiot who their friend had met at Greek summer camp of all places. As the fireworks illuminated the London skyline, someone said “Wouldn’t it be funny if the BT Tower blew up?”. To which I replied “It would be funnier if the fireworks formed to make Bin Laden’s face”. To say I got a frosty response is an understatement. One of the girls whipped round and said “I can’t believe you’re making a joke out of this, thousands of people died, what the fuck is wrong with you?!” I felt stung, I was riffing in poor taste on purpose — doing the only thing my awkward 16 year old self knew to do — make people laugh.
Only, I hadn’t. Mortified, I stood in silence while these girls proceeded to make similarly obnoxious jokes which they all laughed at and I stood silently in the dark in a daunting city feeling completely alone.
Eighteen months later, I was offered a place at Bristol University to study English and Classical Studies — and Vanessa was too. We arranged to meet at the open day, which was on March 20th 2003: the day the war against Iraq began. I had attended the Stop the War march — still the largest in British history — and had felt a crushing dread that nothing was going to change because of it. I recently found my journal at the time, which reads: “It is hard to feel any sort of hope for our future when the world seems so intent on obliterating it”. On Woodland Road in Bristol, students rolled in a soundsystem and shut down the street with a protest, and it alleviated my sense of despair — if only for an afternoon. When my mum drove us home to Oxford, the harvest moon rose blood red and it felt like an omen.
By then, Rob was long out of the picture. His fervent belief that he was superior to me in every way eventually undid any fondness we shared, and we fell out of contact. I last heard from him at the height of #MeToo, where he told me he was happily married and his children looked like Minions, and got very close to the perimeter of an apology but couldn’t quite make the leap. Vanessa didn’t end up at Bristol after all, and we lost touch as time slouched on. A few weeks before I moved to San Francisco I saw her on the canal path at Camden Lock. She was wearing a bright red top and was unmistakably herself. It was the end of summer and the light was changing, the crisp promise of cosy evenings was just around the corner. I found myself too shy to say hello, fearful that our brief friendship had meant less to her than it had to me. I awkwardly beamed at her and carried on walking home to Hackney.
