T he house in which I turned 18 was full of clocks. Dark wooden things with aged faces. Every room ticked. If you stood in certain doorways, you could hear all the misaligned second hands racing. I could not understand why anyone would want to count away life like that or decorate their living quarters with so many symbols of mortality.
There was no escaping time. Shortly before each hour, a mechanical whir heralded the first chime. We lived in a retirement town with an elderly and conservative population, which amplified the ticking. Worthing, on the south coast of England, was known as “God’s waiting room”. Death was there in our wide, slow roads and low bungalows, the grey sea mists and blue rinses.
But I was young, and I scorned the clocks. Time was no master of mine. I answered only to love. And poetry. And fashion. And boys I liked.
At least, I think I’ve got that right. But how well does any of us remember being 18? For 17 years, we set our sights on that beacon of independence, the coruscating wonder of adulthood and all the freedom we imagine it entails. But within a few years, the day slips from view.
How did you celebrate? What did you wish for? Who did you hope to be? And if, like me, you’ve lost all memory of your 18th and need an HRT patch, creatine powder and phone alarms to recall anything, can you get it back? Over the past month, I have tried to return to April 1990 – when I became an adult – to turn back the clocks and rediscover what life was like then. And what I was like.
Sadly, no one has invented the machine for this yet. But no worries. I have other tools: vintage Poison eau de cologne, a clutch of letters I wrote and never posted, photographs, books, college reports, my teenage poems, Facebook, a bottle of Southern Comfort and a bag of granny smith apples.
With these, I hope to send myself back in time, to visit my old best friend, and the guy I loved, and to experience life, however fleetingly, as my 18-year-old self experienced it. I hope to see again how the world looked to my peers and me as we hatched into adulthood – right there at the dawn of the 90s, a decade coveted by natives of every decade since, but from which I longed to teleport to the 60s.
The cap’s off the purple flask, wrists doused with Christian Dior’s Poison. I’m on my way. “Most sensory inputs go first to an area of the brain called the thalamus,” says Catherine Loveday, a podcast host and professor specialising in memory. “Smell goes directly to the memory centres.” I’ve been catapulted into my 18-year-old body. It’s a blitz. A spritz of pure joy and promise. I keep sniffing my own wrist: I can’t get enough of me. I smell dramatic. Strong. Sweet. Potent. Ready. Something is going to happen.
Drenched in plum and spicy tuberose, I drive the 60 miles from my home in London to Worthing. At the general election in 2024, Worthing West got its first ever Labour MP, partly due to a spillover from edgier Brighton. Although the average age of the town’s population has risen by a few years since I turned 18 – 44 at the last census – it feels much younger.
There are other changes. The phone box at the end of our road, where I made my private calls, has gone. I have a phone in my pocket, of course, which in the spirit of 1990 I’m trying to pretend doesn’t exist. I’m unable to access emails. For anything urgent, please write me a letter …
Our old house is painted yellow still, and the wooden gates my dad, a builder, made remain – though they’ve gone grey, and the house hasn’t been ours for 22 years. Seeing the sameness and the differences simultaneously is like wearing bifocals. I’m both here, and back there.
As I set off to my former college, I’m amazed to find that my feet know exactly where to cross each road. I walked this route daily, no phone or headphones, and took in whatever the path put before me. The slope of a church roof; ivy lacing through the chain-link fence; litter snared in weeds. Each apparently insignificant sighting thrills me with a very specific sense, unfamiliar to my 54-year-old self, that I am in the right place.
Thoughts fly up out of the paving cracks: the 1960s minidress pattern I found in a charity shop; phrases from the Italian library tapes I got on permanent renewal; “Moon Lady” and “Balloons”, the titles of the poems I was working on; the dream Saturday job I’d landed at Volume One bookshop in town; my next order from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where I solemnly sent dollar notes, then waited six weeks for excitingly slim volumes of poetry to land on the mat, into whose pages I would tuck slips of paper bearing precious observations: “Vowel length.”
I probably thought about my homework essays. “Why did race relations become an issue in British politics after 1945?”, and “Is the change in Mr Darcy credible, or do we believe it because we want to?” I certainly wanted to believe it. I thought about “the one” incessantly. In 1990, the median age for a first marriage in the UK was 24 for women. When we turned 18, we all heard the clocks ticking.
And there was another, adjacent, race against time. The world divided into haves and have-nots, and I had not. If the internet had been built, it would have told me that most women in England lost their virginity at 18. It was a core belief of mine that this state of being must be addressed before my 19th birthday, and that failure to do so would mean there was something seriously wrong with me.
There was no reprieve from self-consciousness about this. When my secondhand jeans tore at the ass, channelling my love of William Blake and the Beat poets, I patched them with a rose from some curtain fabric, and one day, as I was climbing the stairs at college, the boy behind me asked, “Is that your flower?” The shame.
So many things have gone since then. The Lloyds bank tower I passed each day has been turned into apartments. Its huge digital clock was removed a decade ago, after it got stuck on 00:00. My college is a housing estate, the bakery a patisserie. The newsagent has stopped being anything at all. Only the butcher has retained its beguiling awning: National Award-Winning Sausages.
I used to buy a Crunchie from that newsagent – the honeycomb was less fattening, and I sold enough copies of Rosemary Conley’s Hip and Thigh Diet on Saturdays to know the dangers – and a packet of salt and vinegar Discos. Thanks to the fetishisation of 1990s snacks, you can find them in Tesco; I’ve brought a pack with me.
The salt is saltier and the vinegar more vinegary than any other crisp or chip I know. It could burn the bumps off your tongue. Good, because a postdoc research fellow at the University of North Dakota, Utkarsh Gupta, has shown that multi-sensory integration can help people who wish to undertake “mental time travel”. Last year he published research showing that “people who were embodying a younger version of themselves” – by seeing themselves virtually embodied with their childlike face – “had better childhood memory”. The Discos are doing the same for me.
As I walk, I look around for friends. I keep an eye out for anyone interesting crossing the central reservation. Round the roundabout the cars come and go. Unlike them, I am heading somewhere.
At high school, when I took on science subjects I wasn’t very good at, my grades sprawled from As to Ds. Our family had a tradition of work over further education, and at 16 my dad suggested I look for an accountancy apprenticeship. By then, I’d held 10 part-time jobs, in shops, a cafe, guest house, a supermarket and offices. Every week, the local paper had eight pages of situations vacant and I’d switch jobs for 10p more an hour. I rarely heard the word “university” – nobody had graduated in my family.
But I loved books. In our house, shelves dense with clocks and ornaments, reading felt transgressive. Sometimes I’d bring a book to the dinner table, and be told to put it away. (“No phones at the table!” parent-me echoes.) As rebellions go, enrolling at college sounds pretty tame, but it was the first meaningful choice I made for myself, and it remains, to this day, my best. A door opened right then to a different life.
Education made me feel special. In the staffroom, words like “delivery” and “impact” were creeping into the lexicon, but we students remained blissfully ignorant. “Impact – so much more violent than effect,” Mr Fraser, my old English teacher, muses now.
Of course, we were all debilitatingly self-conscious – but not collectively so. We hadn’t yet been named generation X. Douglas Coupland’s book was still a year away. And I don’t recall hearing the word “anxiety”.
We had a future.
The world wasn’t ending anytime soon. Michael Jackson had his oxygen chamber and was going to live for ever. Maybe we would too. There was no climate crisis. As an advert in the local paper promised, 1990 is going to be another scorching summer. At least for the lucky ones in a Mazda open top. I didn’t drive; I rode a bike, oiled myself with Hawaiian Tropic and bragged to a friend that it was “boiling” at 24C. Sure, there was a hole in the ozone layer, but it was small and far away. The girl I sat beside in government and political studies wore a CND badge, doodled mushroom clouds and taunted meat-eaters with mad cow disease, but we thought her a pessimist.
Initially, I took it easy at college. “Perhaps a more consistent effort across the board would enable her to raise her standard,” my report observed. But somewhere between 17 and 18, I grew serious. I spent lunch breaks in the library. The reports changed their tune. “Paula always gives of her best.” One morning, my form tutor told me: “Carry on like this and you’ll be applying to Oxbridge.”
I knew about Oxford and Cambridge from the boat race, which was televised annually on BBC’s Grandstand. But I’d never heard of Oxbridge. I asked my tutor where it was. “Well, it’s a word for both of them,” he said irritably.
Later, I studied matching towel bales, teasmades and filter coffee jugs in the Argos catalogue in preparation for my next life phase.
T he month I turned 18 was momentous in England. In the evenings leading to my birthday, I curled up in my corner spot on our brown Dralon sofa – it just about went with the orange carpet my dad brought home from an American Express refurb – to watch the BBC Nine O’Clock News. Inmates of Strangeways prison in Manchester paced their roofs. Riots spread to other prisons. There were riots against the poll tax and the egregiousness of a system that asked people living in council housing to pay the same as millionaires. Billionaires weren’t on anyone’s radar; there were fewer than 100 in the UK and US.
In six months, Margaret Thatcher would be ousted. The week of my birthday, a poll reported her to be the least popular prime minister in half a century. And alongside the ads for lost cats, funeral directors, private vasectomies, Dial-a-Tan and cars with one careful lady owner, the “Coming of Age” section of the Worthing Herald announced, “COCOZZA – Congratulations, dear Paula. Good luck, health and happiness in the future. Much love Dad, Mum, Rob, Joe and Nan.”
The Labour party was a joke in my house growing up – how we laughed when Neil Kinnock fell in the sea in nearby Brighton. My political awakening comprised a moderate shift to the left. My radicalism was confined to my reading – the Beats, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud. There were drugs in those books but I went no further than an occasional smoke with friends on the forecourt of a beach hut.
Members of my extended family had undergone shock treatment. Graylingwell psychiatric hospital loomed at the corner of my mind’s eye. Now, I wonder if the Beats appealed because they made mental illness seem heroic; swapped the stigma for a beatific glow. Maybe my folks weren’t crazy, but the best minds of their generation.
I never made the connection. I was about to unwrap a rose-gold bracelet, a hardback copy of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, and a Smith Corona electronic typewriter, on which I hoped to write better poems. (Exiling myself./I held the door;/Shut/On those sharp,/Intransigent, wood-chipped faces,/Quilted cuddles/Of oven glove and potpourri wraps.)
The week after my birthday, I awoke in the middle of the night and fumbled for a pencil. Without switching on the light, I wrote a verse:
“This World is Full of Words”
Mmm hmmm
and went back to sleep.
Then, as now, I believed that the best answer to riots, the possibility of nuclear war, political upheaval, ticking clocks and pretty much anything else was love and books.
I was so busy revising for my A-levels that when C, the boy I liked, phoned to invite me to play tennis, I told him I was busy.
If I stepped back to consider the vastness of the continents, the world’s 5.3 billion population, and the needle-in-a-haystack odds of finding a soulmate, I felt incredibly lucky to have walked into the extracurricular English poetry class and seen him, floppy-fringed, bespectacled, watching Don’t Look Back, DA Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan on the classroom television, which I too had recorded from TV on a VHS.
He was a year older than me and already had a place at Cambridge. He gave me feedback on my practice essays. “It’s really not as important as you think,” he scribbled in red pen on a torn bit of A4. “It’s not as important as Chaplin, as Dylan, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Beatles, football, love, life, sex and death. It’s worthless in the face of these.”
To me, he was sophisticated. His family wasn’t in the phone book. They had two sofas. His mother once told my mother, highly amused, that I’d asked her what broccoli was.
C could quote from anything, including Casanova. Sometimes he brought his guitar to my house and sang, and I felt an immense release, and joy, listening, too shy to sing along. We sat for hours on opposite ends of my pink duvet, in my immaculate room that my mother tidied daily, with my pink carpet and matching velveteen wastebin Mum had made from a washed-out catering tin, and we talked and talked – though neither of us remembers what about – and we both smiled when the brooch holding my crossover sweater accidentally unpinned itself, but for now, nothing happened.
“Men and women can’t be just friends because the sex part always gets in the way,” Harry told Sally; how I hoped he was right.
“Yes, but do you love him? Or is it an obsession?” my best friend, D, in her infinite wisdom, asked. She liked psychology and could parse the meaning of things said and unsaid. I thought it was love. But I didn’t see the big difference.
Obsession, as we all knew from Calvin Klein, was a very sexy, intense and stylish state of mind. It meant you couldn’t stop thinking about the other person, which sounded about right, and in some regards was more special than love. There are many loves, but only one obsession.
I carried out endless feasibility debates with myself about my romantic path. I wanted what Lizzy Bennet and Mr Darcy had, Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, or Fay Roadnight and Colin Benzie, the newlywed couple featured in the Worthing Herald the week of my 18th.
Every Friday, when the paper came out, I’d sit at the pine kitchen table Dad had made, eating the salted peanuts my nan brought on her weekly visit, savouring the wedding announcements. Given away by her father, the bride wore a taffeta, Bo-peep-style dress and carried a bouquet of roses and gypsophila.
I was by now an A-grade student, but I had no intellectual or ethical problem with spending hours immersed in the practicalities of my fantasies.
Tom Cruise was officially The Sexiest Man Alive, but he wasn’t my type. Ideally, I wanted to go out with Bob Dylan as he was in 1967. I would have settled for LA Law’s Victor Sifuentes or Paolo Maldini, the young AC Milan defender. But mostly it seemed a travesty to my 18-year-old self that I was born 31 years after Dylan, an age gap that rendered him a romantic outlier. Maldini was more attainable, being four years my senior and on the same continent, and weren’t we soon all going to be in the Exchange Rate Mechanism? Mind you, he had his World Cup debut at Italia 90 to focus on.
It is one of the puzzles of the age that all yearning seemed faintly plausible. Nothing was completely ruled out. I don’t know if this was naivety or arrogance or both. I bought Dylan’s Under the Red Sky when it came out in September, but the guy on the sleeve looked ancient. He was 49, an age I now know to be young.
“Do you believe in women’s rights?” C asked one day.
“I believe in human rights,” I told him. I wanted the same as the next person, but I wasn’t going to throw my love life under the bus for feminism; we still hadn’t kissed.
“What did we talk about?” I ask him now. We’ve met up for lunch, as we do every few years. It’s a bit of a blur, he says. I shouldn’t take it personally. He has whole marriages he doesn’t remember. “We would have talked about books, played records …”
He says memory has an evolutionary function. We remember what we need to survive. Of our time together at 18, there are only “pretty vague memories, because they’re essentially quite positive. They didn’t really serve,” he says.
My laptop is open at a document of notes: scraps of dialogue, an exchange of looks, our first kiss, all as sharp and infinitely replayable as mental gifs. I wonder what this says about our relative threat to each other’s survival.
Were we happy? Content? “You know, this notion of happiness,” C says. “You only know it in retrospect. The point when you’re happy, you don’t go: ‘I’m happy.’” Besides, he says, “I’ve never had a very good barometer on my actual feelings. There actually, genuinely, was the friendship level to us. Completely. We liked similar things, and not many people did. You were very observant. Somehow subtly you were always paying attention. You were always watching stuff. And you were very strong-willed underneath it all. You were introverted, a little shy, thoughtful, and you were always interesting to talk to. Even if I talked more than you. That’s my take.”
O n Monday morning, my alarm clock wakes me with a Saturday night feeling. I am going to see my friend D, and it doesn’t matter what the calendar says. D means Saturday nights. We used to get ready in her bedroom; kneeling on the carpet in front of her mirror, swigging from a 1.5l bottle of Liebfraumilch.
Before I can recall any of the above, some ancient muscle memory has put me in matching underwear and knelt me on my bedroom floor, wondering why the mirror is so dusty and all my eyeshadows have crusted over. I haven’t seen D in 30 years. I no longer wear makeup. Or get ready. This might be because I’m always ready, or never ready.
Who cares about makeup? You’ll only have to take it off tonight. Do you even own makeup remover? … I’m waiting for my middle-aged self to intercept, but she’s busy rummaging in the jewellery box, joy in her heart and a song on her lips. She snaps a gold bangle around her wrist – my 18th birthday gift – and bounds out the front door as if something very exciting is about to happen.
And it is.
I am going to hang out with the friend I hung out with at 18. The friend I went on Saturday-night pub crawls with. The friend who went to the bar because she looked 18 before she was 18, while I didn’t look 18 even when I was. For my milestone birthday, she laid the table in her family lounge with a red paper cloth, lit a candle and cooked me dinner. I loved her. But we haven’t met in 32 years.
D drank snakebite and black from pint glasses; I sipped Southern Comfort mixed with lemonade. Sometimes she was very sophisticated and asked for Perrier, a drink I was not confident of pronouncing. Over the course of an evening, we’d have five or six, but somehow only paid for one or two. I was the one who occasionally had to be pushed home along the promenade in a shopping trolley.
Now here we are, sitting across the table at a lounge bar at midday, scanning QR codes for menus and wondering what it means that we both want the same salad and fizzy rhubarb drink.
She remembers me as coy. We talked about our loves, our mothers, fathers, brothers, jobs, the Black Lace book series, Ann Summers parties. We vented, made each other laugh, barely thought about the future.
“I do believe I LOVE people and have faith in human nature,” I wrote in a letter to her that year.
And: “Sometimes it can do us good to put up with things we don’t like. It brings other elements in our personality out and makes us feel proud of our powers of endurance.”
Sometimes I mailed letters to D even when we were both at home, a mile apart. “Would you like to go out early this wk? Will phone …”
T he day after D and I meet, my daughter turns 18. I ask her out for a drink. I want to taste Southern Comfort again, see if it will catapult me back, like the Poison, the sight of my teeth marks in the waxy green skin of a granny smith, or the detonating surprise of warm ketchup on a cold piece of iceberg lettuce, when I honour my 18-year-old self with a plate of Birds Eye chicken and chips.
But our local pubs don’t stock Southern Comfort.
“Is it a sipping whisky?” my daughter asks, and I laugh at her use of a phrase I have never needed, even at my age. We both get Cokes.
So, did turning 18 feel like a big deal?
“I didn’t give a fuck,” she says. “Everyone else seemed to, though.”
When I was two months older than her, my A-levels done, I got a job in a secondhand bookshop. Few customers came in; most wanted to sell us John Braine’s Room at the Top. One day, a customer asked if we had any Kerouac. Did he know he was in Worthing? I lent him mine, he lent me his Neil Young tapes. He became a regular, rolling cigarettes into a little tin by the three-bar electric fire while we chatted.
R had left school at 16, and was considering night school, something he clearly accomplished because he’s now a university professor. “There was a sense that it was a good time to be young,” he says. “Or that youth was something valuable. We were quite disillusioned – at 18 there’s always an existential stress – but it didn’t feel like a burden. If you think about our kids, and students now, the pressure … They can’t escape. They’re scrutinised all the time.”
“You helped me realise that reading could be a momentous act, rather than just a way of filling time,” R says. “And that writing meant something.”
A few months after we met, I found residential work at a hotel bar in the Italian alps, and R became another person I wrote letters to. In the mornings before my shift started, I’d sit on the balcony and write to friends au pairing in France, Germany, Panama, or in their first year at university. I listened to Neil Young on my Walkman and the drip-drip of melting snow. From noon till 8pm, I’d manage the bar, the fog of smoke lowering as the day wore on. I paid careful attention to the customers’ grammar. Non la trovi bellissima? one guy asked his friend about me. Don’t you find her beautiful? No, the friend replied. Oh, the things that stick in our heads.
“I really believe there’s not much to leaving home,” I wrote to my brother. “When you want to get out, just DO it; cos it’s not true that you NEED things doing for you – cooking etc … There’s SO MUCH TO SEE.”
I’m not sure how to explain my approach to personal safety back then to my own children, who are 15 and 18. “To get an offer of dinner, all you have to do is walk along the pavement,” I wrote. “Cars stop all the time. If they look OK, you jump in.”
I have to order the Southern Comfort from Amazon. It’s a powerful time machine. At the first sip, I feel I’ve had too many. It tastes sweet and intense and full of things that might happen and haven’t happened. Sticky carpet. Worry I’ve laddered my stockings. The countdown of melting ice, leaving me with a watery drink that’s gone on too long and finished too soon …
Above all, I suspect that life then was lived in a state of yearning, teetering between delight and disappointment.
The year I turned 18, everything happened and nothing happened. It was the year I fell properly in love and, unrelated, lost my virginity. It was the year I first left home, travelled alone, made my own clothes, learned Italian, and admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer, even if I forgot this till I read it in a letter 35 years later and realised I’d been living the dream all these years.
I went to Cambridge. C met someone else.
Meeting, and occasionally embodying, my 18-year-old self has felt exhilarating, debilitating, harrowing. Like being stuck between worlds. I’ve watched makeup tutorials, bought coloured eye sticks, ogled a silver leather miniskirt with my future 21-year-old self in mind, and found myself asking, “Are they the one?” of random souls who cross my path (sorry).
When I’ve tried to make sense of the disorientation by writing – something that hasn’t changed – every key on the keyboard has felt like a mess I can’t put away. So how to evaluate my life since? I am not a published poet, as 18-year-old me would have loved me to be, but I have written two novels. I’ve found love a few times, and have a loving family.
Three years ago, when I turned 50, I asked my parents for a carriage clock. It sits on the mantelpiece, and I only occasionally register its tick.
