Apart from Australia, where I was born and lived until I was four, I had lived only in London by the time I was 50. Living anywhere else didn’t appeal. I didn’t think I could do it. But, in 2005, due to ill health, I moved with my husband and daughter to Pett Level in East Sussex, to a white A-frame house perched on top of a cliff in a fairly isolated spot between Hastings and Rye.
The grey Channel coursed and crashed relentlessly outside the back windows. Green fields rolled up and down out the front. No need to lock my door here; I was safe. Dropped your camera in the lane? It would be sitting on your garden wall with a note in the morning. I had nothing to worry about. My mind emptied. A most uncomfortable feeling.
I had never had, or wanted, a calm mind. I thought my interminable thoughts made me who I was, that without them I would have no personality. But as the everyday anxieties of living in Camden Town, north London – burglary, not being successful, my young daughter’s safety, the streets at night, the polluted air and the pace of life – disappeared, they left behind a vacuum. I was becoming an idiot, I thought.
After a few months of floating around Hastings in a vacant haze, not knowing who I was or how to have a conversation, a stream of seemingly inane little questions was coursing constantly through my head. Why do I prefer the architecture of one style of house to another on the sea front? Where did my love of purple originate? Why was I always drawn to music with a political message as a young person? Can I remember the names of all the women who have inspired me in the past 30 years?
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, these forays into the empty space of my mind were the beginnings of my creativity resurfacing. The swarming questions – and then the rummaging through my memory for the answers – took me further and further back. To when I was a teenager and a child. To the core of who I used to be. To the person underneath the person who got caught up trying to be a normal, successful, married, consuming careerist.
I remembered how creative and playful I used to be with my life. How I used to take risks. How I kept failing and kept trying. How I didn’t care so much about money and possessions that I squashed who I was just to have them.
After four years in this mental lacuna, I found myself one day peering into a guitar shop in Rye. Next thing I knew I had bought a Fender Telecaster (not the real thing, a copy), taken it home and started to play again. I signed on at the local art school and studied ceramics part time. I formed a band. I made an album. I wrote a book. My marriage could not withstand all these upheavals. Significant changes are not easy for you or the people around you; there will be casualties.
I am back in London now, but those years in Pett Level rebooted me. I will never grow so old again (as Van Morrison said on Sweet Thing). A couple of years after I returned, a journalist asked me if I thought I was unlucky: “So many things have gone wrong in your life,” he said. I don’t think I am unlucky. I think I take lots of risks. You are going to fail more if you take lots of risks, but you are going to succeed more, too – and live life on your own terms.
Viv Albertine’s latest memoir, To Throw Away Unopened, is out now
This story of change was published in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December
