Snakebite in the Sun

a look at home, and what that might mean.

Snakebite in the Sun.

I have a birthday coming up, 61, and last week my daughter took me to the pictures as a birthday treat to see Empire of Light starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward (no that isn’t a typo), Toby Jones and Colin Firth to name but a few of the cast. We ate fish and chips at the Heart of Northumberland beforehand and I had such a good time. I thought the film was one of the best I’d seen in a while. The cultural references took me back to a place and time I rarely visit, and it set me thinking: ‘what is home? What does that mean for us and where exactly is home?’

Empire of Light is set in 1981, in a seaside town down south. I was 19 in 1981 and grew up in Sunny Worthing as it was known in good old Sussex by the Sea as the song goes. Empire of Light was filmed mostly in Margate, but I caught myself shouting out loud when Hilary Small, the duty manager of the cinema on the promenade, goes dancing in what was the Denton Lounge which was a restaurant in the Pavilion buildings on Worthing pier. I could tell the filming had deviated from Margate because through the windows you can see the iconic ‘Amusements’ sign on Worthing pier in red; home of the ‘slotties’ where we would feed 2p pieces and before that, large brown pennies into machines to the sound of fruit machines being played, sometimes with the sound of falling coins as jackpots were won and with the smell of candy floss in the air.

 I worked at the Denton lounge, clad in black with a small white waitress apron in the summer of 1978. We served pensioners’ dinners for £1.50 and got adept at taking false teeth out as on more than one occasion we dealt with a heart attack victim who had keeled over on the floor. Worthing had more than its fair share of geriatrics in those days and if a job couldn’t be found in one of the seaside restaurants, then nursing home jobs were plenty. Worthing back then was faded and shabby with Kiss Me Quick hats, pink seaside rock and old women asleep in deck chairs, legs apart, bloomers on show with false teeth that had slipped their mooring and rested on large bosoms. Seagulls wheeled overhead stealing chips from families on the seaweed-infested stony beach.

Watching Empire of Light, I recalled teenage me, snogging boys at the roller disco, the backcombed hair and eyeliner. I would rollerblade down the promenade, with my blue mini transistor radio and my blue wheeled roller boots. Like Stephen in the film, my brother was into two-tone and ska. I went to Rock Against Racism demos and feared the National Front. My younger self had a friend whose dad was a candidate for the National Front. Perversely he was also a lay preacher. I remember the fights on Brighton seafront where the police loaded skinheads into post bag trucks having taken the shoelaces out of their DocMartens and pulled them up the hill to the police station.

I turned my back on the south coast in 1981, the year this film was made migrating slowly north via London, Liverpool, Teesside, Co Durham and have now settled in Northumberland. I got turned on to ska and reggae when I moved to Toxteth in 1984 and lived with my boyfriend (now husband) in a small flat on Prince’s Boulevard that had once been the Cuban Consulate. Granby street was behind, with its graffiti ‘This is Toxteth, not Croxteth – Ganga Only,’ and the community bobby sat on a stool in Seb’s shop and dreadlocked kids would come in for some skins and a ciggy. It was a complete culture shock to this southern softy who had gone to teacher training college in Richmond-upon-Thames and then moved to Liverpool to live with her boyfriend. I remember the race riots when the summer got so hot you could fry an egg on the streets and the police walked around in threes. My partner was one of those caught up in mass unemployment, unable to get a job with a Toxteth address. Interestingly, when he used his parent’s address in Hertfordshire, he got an interview to train as an accountant with ICI on Teesside – another move!

Watching Empire of Light last night made me think about my cultural heritage, where my roots are, what made me who I am and where exactly is home. Did I ever feel at home in Liverpool? Is it here in the Northumberland where I’ve lived for the last twenty years? Or was it Weardale where we renovated a cottage and raised our family of three, with me teaching in local primary schools but were labelled ‘incomers’ by the locals? Possibly suspect as Tim had long hair, we drove a hippy truck with a chimney that stuck out the top and job shared both work and parenting and held raves in our kitchen.

 I have played down my southernness, ashamed of my open vowels, and even tried to change my accent at times – you should have heard my rendition of Chicken Licken to a class of 25 nursery children in Walton, Liverpool as a fledgling teacher. I was terrified of being labelled a stuck-up southerner, so tried to perfect a Scouse accent. I must have sounded ridiculous.

 I landed in Easington Colliery the year after the miner’s strike and saw for myself what Thatcher had done to the community. I witnessed poverty as I had never seen before. The staff in the school I worked at were wary of me, still reeling from the effects of the miner’s strike, and I was told that with my southern accent, I represented everything they had fought against. After gaining their trust, I enjoyed ceilidhs and pie and pea suppers at mining institutes and making some very dear friends, some of whom came to our wedding. But did I feel at home, or was I waiting to be found out as a fraud?

We’ve lived in the north of England now for decades, our three kids now in their late twenties and thirties all having been born in Northumberland.  They’ve all moved out now, and bought their own homes. My son at the weekend called out, ‘bye mum, I’m off home, ‘ and I thought to myself, how can that be, you were home.

So, what is home? I may have migrated from my southern roots, and called many places home, but last night, as I watched Empire of Light, I felt a nostalgia, a celebration of culture, of my identity and pride for those shabby seaside towns of the seventies and eighties where I grew up as a teenager, drinking snakebite in the sun, and just maybe went home for a couple of hours as I sat in the cinema.