sacrilege in the sitting room: contesting suburban ... - Fritz Haeg

HOME CULTURES
182
MARTIN DINES
and domestic, subsequently to be found “round the tea-table over
bread and jam and a slice of cheddar cheese;” and David, “the one
who played in strange men’s bedrooms, cars, offices and kitchens.
The one who didn’t have a family, who didn’t have any school to go
to or tea to go back for” (p. 27). The division between these two
characters is as strict as the separation of the worlds they respectively
inhabit. David is originally created as a means of protecting Hugo’s
identity: such a distinctive name renders him too easily locatable
if he were ever to get into trouble (p. 26). The fear of exposure,
however, runs both ways:
For all David’s street-tough masquerade, it was Hugo who
frightened people. [. . .] Once sex was over and a spent David
dissolved, leaving a tense and testy Hugo in his place, David’s
catches were unnerved to find an intelligent, nicely-spoken
local boy in their house. It was as if they felt they had less to
fear from the tough little tyke who might blackmail them than
from the nice local schoolboy who might tell his parents and
remember the address (p. 38).
The “nicely-spoken”/“street-tough” Hugo/David figure is certainly
also a performance of class difference and, arguably, their enforced
separation is distinctly suburban in character—the creation and
maintenance of class-segregated environments being one of the
original motivations frequently presumed to have driven and sustained
suburbanization (see Clapson 2003: 69–72). Nevertheless, the
distinction between Hugo’s housebound identity and David’s of-thestreet
mobility is more significant. True enough, David’s lack of any
need to return to school or to tea is itself only an enactment of
autonomy. For Hugo does indeed need to return home: “[The men]
never understood that David’s time was limited by Hugo’s parents.
And by Hugo himself” (p. 29). However, sex in the suburbs does
afford Hugo/David a multifaceted form of liberation from suburban
domesticity. For the “cottages,” the public toilets on suburban side
and high streets where David spends most of his time waiting for
sex, actually offer a welcome respite from the emotional vacuity
of suburban aspiration. From a surprisingly tender age, his home
suburb of Hadley has instilled in Hugo a keen sense of material
inadequacy. The daily walk from his parents’ modest “villa” home
at 40, Mulberry Avenue, past the increasingly expansive and wellappointed
homes of his friends, to his hilltop primary (“St Monica’s
C. of E. School for Children of the Comparatively Affluent” (p. 8)),
literally requires repeated social climbing. Whilst David’s absence
of any middle-class mores is also a performance, what is not is the
way the cottage replaces the large detached house as the pinnacle
of social achievement, and how cottaging in general represents an
alternative form of sociality. Indeed, not insignificantly, the Hadley