The Road that Sheltered Me Twice
Repeating Patterns of Abuse and Sanctuary
There’s a road I’m weirdly drawn to.
A lot of people are. Many people I know, including the one who is helping us convert a horsebox to a tiny house on wheels, have lived in this road.
If I’m ever close by, I go out of my way to walk down it. I nod hello to the two front doors I used to have keys to. 106. 82. I pass them in remembrance. Pain and recovery.
Tell me it has some magic about it. Tell me it’s on a leyline. Tell me a warrior queen of Ancient Britain is buried under its pavements. I’ve no idea. But something’s going on between me and this road.
Maybe I lived here in a past life. Brighton has a big list of creative misfits who’ve made this place their home.1 When I stepped off the train in this town for the first time as an 18-year-old, I had the strongest feeling: this is my spiritual home. Given I was an atheist, coming here to do a science degree, to even think the word ‘spiritual’ was a weirdness that, living here, you soon get used to. The home feeling has remained. When I left my first husband, I didn’t leave him for a man, but for Brighton. I knew I had to get back here.
When I moved back, raw and recovering, it was here, to Lansdowne Place, that I came.2
I didn’t understand then how significant that was.
This last December, as I started preparing for the Writing Home Challenge, I was doing a series of tasks set by my daughter to get me out of my head and into the Christmas spirit. Mindful activities. This was the Mindful Christmas Walk: no podcast, no music, just up to the park where, forty years ago, I used to feed the squirrels, and twenty-five years ago I used to drink Lemon Hooch, write poetry and cry while my kids (poor kids) ran off to find less depressing playmates.
You don’t shed your past when you live a long time in one place. You keep touching base with it: how am I doing?
Pretty well. A lot better than that. Remember the time that you— Wow, this park. All the “me”s that hang out there. The student in a homemade kimono with a packet of monkey nuts. The single mum under surveillance, chasing a man who is tailing her: out of the cafe, across the park. The model-thin one in a tan suede mini skirt and white knee-length boots, who toys with having sex behind a tree. But I digress.
Mindful Christmas walk, remember? Look for signs of winter. Frost on the branches. Check. Pumpkin-coloured leaves. Of Christmas: yes! Fake snow sprayed on the cafe windows. A bauble tied to a tree.
Let’s make it a gratitude walk. Flood everything I notice with love.
Love the birds. Love their winter songs. Love the squirrels who skitter up trees. Love the half-hearted dogs they’re escaping. Love the owners who return my smile. Love the owners who don’t. Love this woman’s hat. Love that man’s stubble. Love those young mums in the distance with their buggies, laughing. Love the bright blue surface of the tennis courts. Love the scented garden for the blind. Joy.
Turn out of the park, past the school my boys attended. Still little, shirts often untucked; the one who nibbled holes in the cuffs of the sweatshirts I couldn’t afford to replace. Love to them. And their mum, always late, even though we lived five minutes away. Always flustered. Too often hungover. Love to her, old me, messed-up me, who was dealing with more than most people could contemplate. Who had no hope she would someday be me, and okay.
And then? The small diversion down Lansdowne Place.
Maybe it’s planning the Writing Home Challenge that does it. Maybe it’s the fact I have prised myself open with gratitude. But as I reach the first of the doors that used to be mine, I flood with tears and realisation. They’re the same. The two times I lived here: the same.
Both flats at the top end of the road.
Both flats on the East side of the street.
Both flats on the ground floor.
Both on the right side of a mirrored pair of houses.
The physical similarities are sharp, but the circumstances? There are details in common so rich that I laugh out loud. How had I never seen this pattern before?
The First Time: No. 106
It was the year I had my first breakdown. Vulnerable, after pulling back from the brink of suicide, I made a serious mistake of judgement. Or maybe — it’s easy to say this now, clear of the suffering — not a mistake. Sometimes you have to go through stuff. If you’re carrying damage at a cellular level there’s no easy fix. There’s always pain when you’re digging out a wart. Sometimes it takes acid, and patience.
The mistake: I let a frenemy winkle me out of the place I was safe and loved. A shared house, four girls, it was working. It’s not like she didn’t give me clues, Louise. On my birthday that year, in the midst of my breakdown, we went clubbing with friends. She suggested the night — a birthday night — as a fix for my broken heart. There was a man who liked me, who I liked in return, but I knew I was fragile. I told her I fancied him, yes, but I wasn’t quite ready.
It’s my birthday. I’m drunk, on the dancefloor, lost in the music. One minute my friends are dancing around me. The next? They’re gone. Seriously, not in the club, and not one of them told me.
My birthday, and I walk home crying. Recently dumped and the loss of my brother rubbing me raw. They left without me. On my birthday. Then I can’t go on; I slump in a doorway and weep. A man I don’t know stops to ask, You okay? I say no. He counsels me home. And when I crawl under my quilt, there’s a reason I can’t get to sleep. The sound of fucking from the next bedroom. The sounds of Louise fucking my almost-next boyfriend.
Happy birthday, sucker. And when I let this pass without a word, accepting my worthlessness, I guess she knows. Stage 2. She suggests we move out, just me and her, to a shared house with some male friends of hers. She tells me they’re great; they have two spare rooms.
Friend, they were not great. They hated me from the outset. She stopped being my friend at all; was entirely theirs. They treated me like the lump of shit I fully believed I was. They left angry notes if I left a pan to soak. One of them, drunk, hammered on my bolted door late at night, demanding I let him in. I stayed in my room, day after day. Listened hard at the door to be sure there was no one about if I needed, for any reason, to go out.
Odd thinking about this now, and her motivation. I used to attract people who tried to destroy me. I was so shit hot from the outside: I had everything. Beauty and brains and talent. Lead singer in a band. And a deep-carved script that said I’m afraid you’ll hate me. You get what you focus on, whether you want it or not. She was short and Welsh and dark; she had a lisp and an average face I suppose (I am face blind, what do I know) but I’ll tell you, I loved her. I wanted to be where she was. Guess I needed destroying.
Despite the mess I still was, I got a boyfriend. Andy. He lasted six weeks, but we danced a lot, and dance was my therapy then, alongside alcohol. He saw the way my housemates treated me. He told me it was wrong, which I really hadn’t considered. That gave me the strength to move out.
A flit with my abusers elsewhere. My housemates have gone home for Easter; my chance to get shot of them all without facing their anger for leaving the contract a whole term before it expires, and landing them with my part of the rent.
I’ve found a place a couple of streets away. A woman who can’t really afford her flat has made a bedroom on the mezzanine and advertised for a student. I’m moving in: pot plant, second pot plant, hifi my dad gave me — record player, amp, speakers — records, quilt, books, more books. The borrowed car is still half-full and her face is more and more aghast.
“Is there a problem?” I ask.
“I thought you’d have a bag of clothes and a bag of books.”
We stand there, looking at each other. I am holding the pot of a large weeping fig in my arms.
“This isn’t going to work out, is it,” I say.
“No,” she says.
So I move the stuff back to the borrowed car. And then to a musician friend’s cellar. And for several weeks I’m homeless, sleeping on my bass player’s sofa.
It’s from there, his sofa, that I finally move to Lansdowne Place for the first time. A bedsit on the ground floor of 106. This is where I start having panic attacks, but also, it’s the place where I start to rebuild my life. I’m alone, with no one to treat me like shit. I install a phone line and ring my mum most days. I start therapy. I write poems and songs; answer to no one. I start making proper friends. I start dating Bobby, which will see me through the next three years.
Just one thing troubles me. The neighbour in the basement. Every time I let out a bath she starts shouting. The downpipe discharges into her yard, which is hardly my fault. But her anger scares me. She shouts up horrible things. Pushes notes through my door in scratchy, mis-spelt capitals. I’m glad to leave that neighbour when I move out.
The Second Time: No. 82
Thirteen years later I’m coming back round to play out the same pattern, even though I don’t know it. The background I’ve written about, already, at length. An abusive relationship with someone who started as a friend. I was still vulnerable. Therapy had unpeeled me but not healed me. And another safe-seeming frenemy winkled me out of my safety, and moved me to a place I knew no one.
This time it’s serious. This time it’s marriage, and there are children. This time I am properly trapped. And afraid to escape, until it becomes life or death.
But l’d had a rehearsal. Practiced it already. First, a daytime flit, while my abuser was not in the house.
The interim place I moved to was more suitable; no resident owner to object to what I brought with me. But in fact I brought nothing. Indeed, very close to the “bag of clothes and bag of books” that first non-landlady had hoped for. Add to that only my children’s clothes, books and toys. I wish I could say I’d taken my record collection. But time was short; he wasn’t away for Easter. Just for the day. And I couldn’t afford to get caught.
From my interim bolthole I searched for something more permanent in Brighton, and was drawn — like water — to a flat in Lansdowne Place. But I couldn’t move in straight away. Others had to move out.
The first time I played this pattern through I’d ended up homeless. This time, the threat of homelessness pressed very close. The landlord of my interim place was in the process of selling. He wanted me out, but I was six weeks away from my new set of keys. The last time, I’d simply looked at her face and agreed. This time it wasn’t just me. I had three little boys. We couldn’t go sofa surfing or sleep on the street. And I know what the council hostels are like: grim. My kids had enough to deal with, without being homeless.
So I dug my heels in. I rang the agents and said I couldn’t leave. They threatened legal action and I said, “How long will that take?” Long enough, it seemed, to buy me the time I needed.
It got scary for a while. The owner started parking his car outside, sitting there like a furious cloud. When I’d spot his 4x4 turning into the Close, I’d grab the children from the gardeb and bring them inside. I’d close the blinds. He’d sit there for hours. It was hard to sleep, knowing there was another angry man with me in his sights.
Then his sale fell through and the message arrived: stay as long as you like. But I was moving to Lansdowne Place.
Where again, I rebuilt my life from the ground (floor) up. Where again I recovered, and eventually made new friends, and then a lover who would last. And where — and this detail cracked me up, when it came to me on the Christmas walk, the one wrong note was an angry basement neighbour. Who’d shout at us, when the kids ran around having fun, and bang the ceiling with (I presumed) a broom.
The Pattern
When the pattern came round again, I played it better. But goodness, how strange that I’d never noticed the pattern!
A frenemy winkles you out of safety and into abuse. Leaving is a flit while the abusive ones are away. The interim place is shadowed (or quickly followed) by homelessness. And then sanctuary, in a ground floor flat in the right-hand house of a pair, on the upper East side of the same wide road, with the sea glinting at the bottom of it, above a basement neighbour who objects to the normal signs of your living there: bathing, and footsteps.
I give thanks for this road, these flats: my healing place.
But still the downstairs neighbour to remind me: work to be done. More stuff, buried deep, keep digging, all the way down.
Postscript
Oh my word! So many people joining me for the first time this week. How to Evolve is having a major growth spurt. What a place Substack is! Imagine publishing a poem that has been sitting in your ‘unpublished’ folder for 15 years and getting over 800 likes.
And then there is this very popular note, extracted out of my International Women’s Day post from 2024, my word. I can only say thanks to my (now deceased) stepdad, for the opening line, which has made so many women, nearly fifty years later, so outraged on my behalf! 1,700 likes as I write this and on an exponential growth curve from the looks of it.
So thank you for being here, for reading, for sharing…
and for liking! Yes DO press the heart!
It truly helps get my writing in front of more eyes. Speaking of writing…
Post-It Notes
This week I have:
Picked up the new novel again, completed chapter 2, started chapter 3. Currently, it’s a passionate love affair. I am bursting with excitement to share this world, which is all the fuel I need, truly, to write it.
Completed a very gnarly section of an academic paper I am co-authoring with someone who has done great research but doesn’t write very clearly.
Had an extremely interesting call with my agent, the contents of which I have shared in the paid subscriber chat because a) I have to keep it under wraps for now and b) these lovely people are helping me pay my mortgage and they deserve some insider info perks!
Attended the first Brighton Substackers meetup!
Over to You
You know I love to hear from you in the comments. So tell me:
Is there a road you are particularly drawn to?
Is there somewhere you’ve lived more than once? And if so, how was it the same/different?
Have you ever been tricked into a bad decision by a frenemy?
Was it really a “bad” decision though… now you have time/hindsight?
What patterns keep showing up in your life?
The Writing Home Challenge: Week 8
If you’re doing the Writing Home Challenge this bit is just for you. After my failed experiment with a new format last week, we are going back to Tuesday posts! Just to space out what lands in your inbox. So on Tuesday, expect the follow-up post to this one, giving you the inside story to how it got written and what decisions I made in structuring and revising it, and how you can apply those tips to your own writing: with a practical exercise to try!
You can explore the list of famous residents here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Brighton_and_Hove. As a teenager, I was particularly pleased the town had spawned Aubrey Beardsley.
Strictly speaking, in Hove, or as locals say “Hove Actually”, because it’s about four streets over from where Brighton segues into its conjoined twin.
++ Remember: a “like” is both free and priceless! ++
2. Lived on 2nd Street in the East Village in Manhattan twice. A few years in between. First time it was the worst slum. 2nd time it was completely gentrified. I let Elodie keep it in the divorce agreement. She sold it for 5 times what we'd paid- gentrification. She never left NY again. Rented out Carnegie Hall on her 60th, and almost filled it.
3. At the end of the millennium, I had a great job, in the hippest neighborhood in Manhattan, a registered Architect at the top of his game. Working directly with the nationally famous founding partner. After 5 years successful years there, I was teamed up to design and admin the construction for a new High School in Manhattan, a very rare thing. Problem is, no one told me, certainly not the asshole-shit to whom I'd been assigned, who had pretended to be my friend for a couple of years. So after being dragged for a bit with some crap jobs, they all thought I was being a stubborn jerk, including my boss, Mr famous New York, and I was let go. 😑
4. It got me out of working around the Trade Centers, in lower Manhattan, where an ongoing project of mine was destroyed, on 9/11. (I'd left the city by then, late '00). And a few years later I designed, and, had built, a wonderful Community College in West Texas
I read and listened and enjoyed your piece Ros. Couldn't decide which I liked better. You must have been great in that band.
Loved this Ros. I find and found and find myself, constantly, returning to roads in Brighton where what could have been and might have been and was feels like echoes and weird deja vu, and it's very profound and emotionally intense. I try not to think too heavily about it, and then find myself having to, to address things. I found myself very familiar with your street, in my own head! Xxx