Remembering Heligoland
A place where the ground actually fucking shimmered under my feet.
It is some time in 2010 or 2011, and I’m sitting in a writing booth at one of the back windows of the Bevan library, looking out over Trent Park. It’s twilight, the dreamy kind of twilight that seems to characterise most of my first year at university, my first year in London. I seem to remember that year in constant half-darkness: night setting in, a barely-contained chill on the edge of the air, a muddy, indescribable feeling in my bones that was a thick mixture of excitement, and danger, and vulnerability; something like a Massive Attack album. In fact, that’s precisely what it is — it’s Heligoland by Massive Attack. That album sounds like what that year felt like. For whatever reason, they’re just inextricably linked in my head.
In fact, at this moment, I’m sat at a desk in the window, watching the purpling sky descend over the silhouetted trees by the lake, trying to write about Jean-Paul Sartre and the bourgeoise theatre (a word I still cannot spell), and I am listening to a certain remix of ‘Paradise Circus’, off that same album. It’s an ethereal, breathy piece of music, and at the exact moment that it slips away into a trance-like percussion break near the end of the song, a plane appears in the distant sky — sailing into the sunset, as if carrying the song in its long, airy jet stream.
It sounds stupid. I can’t really describe it in writing. It was nothing at all really. It was a moment. But, to me, it was magical, and I have thought about it almost every day since.
Heligoland is a bunch of tiny islands off the coast of Germany. They’re remote and wild. There are no cars. Steeped in mythology, they are the homeland of the Norse god Forseti and the hypothesised location of Atlantis. Trent Park, meanwhile, is 320 hectares of country park at the far end of the Piccadilly line. Henry IV hunted there in the fourteenth century. During the Second World War, German prisoners of war were interrogated there, and spied on through microphones in the trees. There are no cars.
I’m not really an outdoors person, so it seems odd for me to feel such an ethereal affinity for a place like Trent Park. Yet, something of that place is in my bones; whole strands of my life — my nascent adulthood, the friends I made there, my craft which I refined there — seem rooted in its soil.
I arrived in October 2010 and stayed until the summer of 2012 when the university relocated, taking hundreds of heartbroken students — myself included — with them. I didn’t live on the campus, although plenty of my friends did. It was inhospitable in many ways. There was no phone signal. Two canteens, usually closed, had little to offer when they were open. The station, and the nearest shop, was a mile away via a hilly, tree-shrouded road called Snakes Lane. It took nearly 20 minutes to walk it, and the only alternative was an elusive shuttle bus called the ‘Golden Boy’. If you arrived at the station as the bus was pulling away, that was game over. You could choose to wait, and be late, or walk, and be later.
It’s January, it’s raining, and I’m late. I have a tutorial ten minutes ago, so I’m running. Around the sports hall, past the Vice Chancellor’s rose garden, across the dilapidated halls of residence (‘grubby Gubbay’) — it’s raining, and I’m running. Right by the bus stop for the Golden Boy, there’s a little grass path through the Orangery (what is this place?): a shortcut to my tutor’s office. I take the 90-degree turn at speed, but my right leg continues in the direction I was coming from and drags me into the most spectacular horizontal dive. As I fall in slow motion I watch as a guy I know sees me, decides it’s best that he doesn’t see me, and scurries away. On the ground, in the puddle, I’m grateful to him for this.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say when I arrive in Nicola’s office, “but — look.” I turn to reveal the perfect stripe of mud down my side, from my shoulder to my ankle. Nicola is my close friend and colleague now, and the way she laughed at me then is the same way that she laughs at our students now, when they’ve failed so badly at life that there’s nothing else you can do except laugh and be glad it wasn’t you.
I’m eight years old: it’s the summer of 2000 and a song called ‘Toca’s Miracle’ is number 1. I really like this song. The music video revolves around a women’s football match. At the time, for some reason I can’t now explain, I thought the video was set in Russia; but I later discover it was actually filmed in the sports hall at Trent Park. You can even see the university’s logo on the floor. Ten and a half years later, my freshers fair is in that same room. Everyone gets really excited when someone starts handing out a stack of Domino’s Pizza boxes, but they’re empty except for some vouchers, a pen and a fridge magnet.
I’m twenty, and we’ve just finished a big show. A guy in our year is going to jump in the pool. The pool is never open. It sits next to the mansion inside a jungly hedge and a low fence which always claims to be alarmed, though no-one really believes that. It’s a cold, snowy winter and the algae is an inch thick. No-one believes that Darrel will jump in the pool, either but, just as we finish sweeping the theatre, a shrill noise none of us have heard before reverberates across the campus, and a security officer is dragging a stark-naked, shivering-wet and grinning man away from the pool by his ear.
Saturdays, in grubby Gubbay, with my boyfriend, watching Sex and the City in a bed two feet wide. Walking down Snakes Lane to the petrol station and returning with San Pellegrino lemonade — we kept the foil tops — and a tray of mini brownies.
The trees surround two elliptical lakes and extend far back up a long, gentle incline to a point in the far distance where an obelisk joins the park to the sky. The woods are magical. Thirty years of inhabitation by arts students has left its mark. Ribbons and dreamcatchers hang discarded in the trees. Once, something sparkled underfoot: I discovered that someone had left shards of mirrored plastic under the leaves — a remnant of some project or another. Magic.
It’s magical because of the way life, and art, and nature, are actually woven together. Literally, not figuratively. The ground actually fucking shimmered under my feet. Above the ground I was growing into my adulthood, I was learning my craft, I was meeting the very people who now characterise my life. Had these things happened somewhere else, instead of in this bizarrely isolated oasis, they would still be important; but where they happened would be less significant, and it certainly wouldn’t bind them together in such a beguiling, ethereal way.
And so the dreamy twilight air of Trent Park still rises and swirls in my imagination, in a way I’m sure it never truly did in real life. But no matter how I write about that, that’s not what it’s like. So listen to the last minute and a half of ‘Paradise Circus’ instead — because that’s what it is for me. The dreamy twilight air; rising and swirling.
