Hometowns

There’s a name of a town that some people will have only seen etched onto a sign, as they race up the M5. It exists in history in charters and on illustrations of the country and you can find it if you zoom right in on Google Maps. It’s rarely mentioned in the News. Not many people have heard of it. Isn’t that always the way with home-towns? “I’m from a small town, you’ve probably never heard of it.” How many times have you heard this expression or one dressed like it? Too many times to count, possibly? No-one knows this little town, it wasn’t the site of great battles and it wasn’t where Kings and Queens were born. The people from this little town don’t have distinctive accents, with rolling ‘R’s or hesitant ‘H’s. Unlike the cities it doesn’t sink greedy claws into your skin, bursting through it like teeth breaking the flesh of a peach. And it’s not like the countryside, which travelling through seems like less of a holiday and more like an astral projection. The countryside, whereupon looking into the eyes of the grazing cow feels eerily like you could be trapped in the gaze of a great prehistoric deity, a goddess who collects the songs of children and has been long forgotten by the world. No, it’s just a town akin to any other town.

It’s had different monikers in days past. On ancient tongues, they called it ‘Salinae’ and on later, but sill old ones, it was dubbed ‘Saltwich’. I know it as Droitwich. My laptop doesn’t even recognise these names as I write them. I’ve lived with the impression that it means “dirty town”, something a relic with thick-framed glasses told me in school, but, admittedly, I’ve never checked their sources and am not sure if that’s true or not. It’s the town which no-one knows and it sits by a beautiful city few have heard of, and it’s my home-town. Not my birthplace and not the place I have full-time lived my whole childhood, but it’s still the place I think of as my home-town.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s not a place of great importance, but as the landscape for many of my childhood memories, it’s the most important place in the world. The memories aren’t always good, but they’re not always bad. It’s not a place you’d run from; looking back with ragged, heaving breaths. It’s the opposite: a place people come to settle. A place people can build their sacred families and grow old, and it’s not that you know everyone, but every face is one you’ve seen at least once before. Everyone is vaguely familiar and sometimes they’ll appear in your dreams, regardless, of you never knowing their name. There doesn’t have to be any desire to know them, either. However, when people ask me where I see myself in the future, I usually reply with added venom; “anywhere, but here.”

All land has its own, unique and sometimes terrible history, and we usually care the most about the history that is attached to the land beneath our feet. Lesson after lesson in school was dedicated to the town’s past. I’ve started to think of places as people; it makes them more interesting. I’m alone in a bar and a woman called Salinae walks through the door, and obviously, this bar isn’t like the ones that litter the city streets now, but a bar trapped in a time loop. There’s a man enrobed in Edwardian attire serving me a cold glass of pineapple juice and Marilyn Monroe is playing darts with Albert Einstein. Salinae is an elegant woman, who looks startlingly like Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit combined. We don’t know each other and we don’t even speak the same language, but I hear her order a drink. Just water. She empties her purse and small packets of McDonald's salt pour out like a waterfall. She tears through the packets, opening one and tipping it onto her tongue before swallowing it, a look in her eye tells me her existence is dependent on the white, grainy substance. No-one stares or grimaces as she does this, just me; gawking because I’m just a small child trying to understand the events of this piece of land which just so happens to be my home-town.

When I was in middle school, I remember going on a day trip to the local museum, or rather heritage centre, which is planted near the town square. There are remains kept there that date back to Roman times. At first, I find it cool. But then the tour guide points to what looks like a grey rock on a transparent shelf. “This is a brain,” she tells the class, and suddenly mine feels way too heavy in my skull. It spins a little and it feels like I’m rocking on a boat, but it’s actually one of those pirate ships they have at theme parks that swings crazily and you swear you’ll never ride it again, but you always do. I feel sick looking at the little brain. An uncomfortable thought nestles in my mind like it’s an empty nest, longing for an occupant. What if hundreds of years from now my brain is in a museum, or heritage centre, and there is woman, possibly a robot who has the whole history of this town saved onto a little chip in her “brain”, pointing at a little grey mass, possibly just hovering over a round, white table, and there’s another little girl looking at it, with no idea what this life looked like? Just another era in the book to research, but never truly understand.

This was around the same time you are taught that Droitwich is built on salt and once you learn this it’s, like, how did you ever miss that titbit? You learn about the salt king (all hail!) and, for some reason, on the same field trip, you are taken to look at an old house, of typical Tudor fashion. You don’t get to go into the house, the teacher just ushers you all together to stand before it’s menacing glower. A woman and her lover murdered her husband here, she tells the group of 10-year-olds, and they proceeded to bury him in the back garden. This, of course, is a hugely important place to take children when they’re learning about their town’s salty history because the husband’s body was (apparently) preserved like a pickle due to high amount of salt in the ground. I never fact-checked this either, everyone knows teachers don’t tell ghost stories on history school trips, so this must be 100% fact. (Who approved this stop on the trip?)

When I re-examine these memories now, I see how instrumental these lessons were in cultivating my interests. It’s not a reflection I am entirely comfortable with, because although I said people don’t run from Droitwich, I guess, that’s what I’ve been doing, hoping that I could disappear from one spot and reinvent myself in another. Running, but always coming back as the runner does on the track.

As with history, there are, at all times, aspects we wish to bury (and hopefully they don’t preserve in the burial plots we choose for them), they belong in past lives, best left forgotten and rotting like the cow deity. Then there are things we like to push to the forefront, something to define a whole era even if it was only, in reality, a snippet of the picture. For example, we hate to think of every ounce of frustration we poured into a job which was ultimately chipping away at us, but we like to think about that one time we were voted employee of the year by our colleagues. We like to think of Britain being victorious in World War 2 and how “our men” defeated the Nazis and everything they stand for, but we try to reframe our country’s colonial, imperialist blood-soaked past in golden hues. We like to feel all patriotic when Remembrance Day rolls around once a year, but are hypocrites for the remaining 364 days. The most classic example of this? The roaring 1920s, oh the glamour! Let’s just not talk about the rampant nationalism, racism, overworked labourers… that’ll ruin the whole aesthetic! But I’m not talking about world history, today I’m just thinking about my history.

When I reflect on my home-town, I can’t help but think about how history and identity are so irrevocably intertwined. (I write this knowing this is probably the understatement of the century!)

I once worked at a place of great historic significance in Droitwich. A landmark that signalled when you approached from the north that you had entered the town. A beautiful building, salmon in colour and majestic in appearance. It’s an aspect of my own personal history I sometimes wish upon stars to forget about. Not because anything that terrible or traumatic happened to me there, but because it’s been tainted with adult memories, which rattle the foundations of my childhood ones, which are the most charming ones. You see, I have a hazy memory, and it’s an uneasy business when the slivers of memories you do have are darkened my time’s progressing hand. I say a ‘hazy’ memory, but maybe I’m just too lazy to remember a time of my life where I cringe so violently at my own actions that the need to forget about them is so strong. As I said, there are things that belong in past lives and I’m happy to make that time of my life one of those lives.

I own three distinct sets of memories of this place; three distinct impressions of what should just be bricks, dust and history. The first comes from my Nan. It’s one of the earliest imprints I have of the building. Just to make it clear before I carry on or else this might make little sense, this wasn’t just an ordinary building: it was a palace. Well, not exactly a palace, but when you’re a child everything seems bigger and more significant than it really is and I thought that it was a building that only a Disney Princess could live in. It was our very own Cinderella’s Castle on the outskirts of our humble town. I mentioned that it’s salmon in colour earlier, but have you asked me what colour I’d had labelled It as a child, I would have confidently said pink. So, it made perfect sense to me when my Nan, who would never tell a lie because grandparents are legally forbidden from ever deceiving their grandchildren, told me that the tooth fairies live in the attics there. Oh, what a delicious and gorgeous town I must live in! Even the fairies think so because they live in the tippity, toppity part of our Castle’s towers. This is a memory I’ve shared with many people (mainly kids because they understand best when we talk about fairies), as it delights and feeds the child that still lives in my brain that loves fairy-tales and gasps when the moon looks extra, extra big, shiny and round. The building had become a monument in my mind that symbolised magic and everything that encompasses. Don’t we all want a little bit of magic in our lives?

Then it grew in my mind, from just a place of magic to a place of magic and romance. During that aforementioned school trip, we learnt about a man of utmost, historical importance in Droitwich lore: John Corbett, or The Salt King. He’s the Man! (I can’t stress this enough. If there was a supernatural show based in Droitwich, his would be the figure who hung over the plot either as a hyper-sexual, hyper-Hollywood, too gorgeous (and evil!) vampire, who made a deal with the devil to become the Salt King, or perhaps he a merlin figure, or he’s reincarnated and… you get the picture!) But I almost can’t find the words to explain the very real man behind everything I just imagined, because he was a businessman, a very successful businessman and I bulk at the thought of businessmen nowadays. I mean, I’m sure he is admirable for all his economic prowess, but economics and I are enemies of the most stubborn and eternal kind and I don’t even wish to contemplate them. What I found interesting about John ‘The Salt King’ Corbett (I just like saying Salt King) was that he had built the place where the fairies lived, and, even more scrumptiously, for his wife! Oh, the romance of it all! The story I hung onto from middle school was that John married an Irish lady, who he’d meet in Paris (the City of Love! Come on, my little goblin hands are making this into chocolate brownies to devour), and when she came to Droitwich she missed Paris so much that he build a little slice of French heaven here for her. This is when I first learnt that it wasn’t a palace, but a house! A house styled on the classic French Château design! Unfortunately, no marriage is perfect and it didn’t last. Oh, how romantic and tragic! How tragic for Mr C, who loved his wife so and she left?! How heartbreaking! There’s a part of me which has always slightly admired her though, despite the lavishness of the gesture she still said: “see ya!”. (You truly don’t owe anyone anything) That was the story I believed for so long, this charming and distressing tale of John and Anna, and that it was truly just a place built with love as the foundations, but then I grew up! I learnt I didn’t like capitalists (Sorry, John), Anna was rumoured to be unfaithful (We were all rooting for you, Anna!) and that John might have built it one-up a local rival (love might be dead). But that’s now, then a child who didn’t know better or who’s mind hadn’t evolved enough yet, just saw magic and old-fashioned romance.

The third memory isn’t just one, but a collection that I don’t have a firm grasp on. A time-period that spanned just over three years and is mostly made up of boring days, misogynistic men and rude customers, but good times, too. Although, in hopes of forgetting the bad and, at best, mundane, I have lost grasp of the precious ones; the ones that should keep me company when I’m old and withering, or alone and feeling hard on myself. The memories that should be like the firepit in the maze of my body. There have been times when the good ones have hit me like splashes of boiling water, but even as I’m writing this and trying to exhume them, they evade me. It saddens me that it’s the bad memories that come back to me when I pass the place now because they dare me to look and I regret when I do. I drive past and I have to look away. Prior to this set of memories, I was compelled to stare, entranced, when I saw it. It was an enchanting mystery to me, which almost felt like a secret I kept close at heart. Even when I first started working there, something about it felt special to me. Now I hate it.

It’s funny to me now, because I never thought it was so important to me before. I never thought about how significant it played a role in my way of perceiving the world. Going back to that girl on her school trip, she wouldn't've ever guessed that at 23-years-old she would still be silently hoping fairies and ghosts were real, that she would love history and crime shows and haunted houses and that romance seemed so important to her despite trying to act at every external moment that it wasn’t. I don’t think she had the concept of a “cool girl” yet (She definitely hadn’t heard how amazingly Amy articulates the “cool girl” experience in Gone Girl yet. Side note: we all know she’s kind of right!) and despite being embarrassingly uncool in most aspects of her life, when she really likes someone that’s her defence mechanism and, more often than not, she actually comes across as the cold girl. When I think about my home-town in an abstract way, I think it’s funny how life turns out.

Let's get back to running away. I’ve always wanted to leave home, not because I wanted to be independent. If I could take my family wherever I went I probably would. I think my life would be a lot more fun with my sisters by my side every time I went food shopping and it would be easier to get up in the morning if my Mum was struggling to leave her bed in the room next door too and if my dad was there encouraging me, albeit in his distant, yet love-filled way, to go out and live, I would more eagerly (I say all this with the experience I have gained through living without any of them, though). Life is probably always a little bit more fun with a little co-dependency, and I fear we forget humans have always flocked to each other in history and this pressure from society to be the most independent we can be is a way of isolating us further from each other (But that’s a mountain to climb on a different day). But I always wanted to leave home, to leave Droitwich and to be more alone.

Perhaps it’s because the woman I admired and loved most, my Mum, was always meant to be somewhere else and I knew it early on, that she belonged somewhere kinder and lovelier and with fuzzier edges, and I have always felt so close to her that I feel I didn’t belong there, too. Or perhaps it’s because I was an avid reader growing up and I realised in Droitwich the things that happened on pages didn’t happen there. I now know, of course, that’s more my fault than Droitwich’s fault. (Plus, my book collection consisted mostly of Twilight, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, and that just doesn’t happen anywhere. It’s just my deepest fantasy, snuggled in the right chamber of my heart, that wishes it does.) Or maybe it’s because the shy girl always glows up when she disappears from her home-town in the movies. I say all this knowing I’m overthinking and being pretentious because I know the real reason is that there must be more to life than Droitwich. There must be towns and cities who have their own castles grander than ours, with tales of romance and deceit and fairies in the attic. There must be towns where people don’t settle. Towns were people are living fully and bursting with foreign words for feelings and colours I know, too; where we can’t communicate properly, but that’s okay because both of our souls know the colour red, that it’s passionate and fiery and feels like a heatwave. Even when words fail, we have ways to communicate and connect which might be the most beautiful thing on the planet. There are towns I can walk around and no-one will know me and I’m just a blank face walking past because I hate randomly bumping into people I know. I need to be prepared to see anyone at any given time or else I find myself unable to act like a normal person, and more like a robot being asked to act have it imagines humans act.

Despite this.

I think I’ll always return to Droitwich, not to live. I haven’t decided that yet because there are two ghouls inside of me arguing over that outcome. One who wants to live in a lighthouse, where encased butterflies adorn the wall lining the spiral staircase and lavender fields surround it, because I’m also begging the universe for there to be a lighthouse which isn’t by the sea, but at the centre of a field and people pass it and puzzle themselves crazy, asking themselves why on earth there’s a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere and they wonder what sort of person could possibly live there. They assume I must be either a reclusive French millionaire (because I adore the idea of people looking at me and thinking I’m French or the reincarnation of Princess Anastasia, however, I can’t imagine her living in a lighthouse, can you?) or an old lighthouse keeper who grew tired of the sound of waves crashing against rocks, slowing eroding it away and the longer he listened the more he thought about the aggressiveness of time and nature, the more he thought that life was crashing against him too, and chipping slowly, but steadily away. He wears knitted jumpers no matter the weather and ankle-high wellingtons (They’re obviously green in colour).

The other ghoul longs to live in London. A girl froze in her twenties, who dances along the cobbles in an act of shadow chasing and she pleads with the moon to let the sunrise already so the day can start. Here are some facts about this girl: she only owns red shoes and is like Dorothy in Oz, she exclusively drinks champagne, only baths if the bubbles are big and overflowing, she has a massive back piece which depicts the phases of the moon, and she has a story for every situation. She thinks with glee most days about how far she’s come since her great depression which plagued her late teenage years. She’s also the more optimistic of the two ghouls. They’re fighting for dominance and like the girl in middle school, feeling nauseous at the sight of something being labelled a brain (which for all she knew could really just be a rock) I don’t know which will prevail. However, whichever is the future me, she’ll always go back to her home-town. Not because it’s home to her or because her history took it’s unsteady, baby steps there, but because it’s still a place which has the potential to refresh her. What a juxtaposition! A place with a history which feels like a burden, but also the place that reawakens that desire to get out and be better.