a walk round the past
The original reason for a trip to my childhood home town was to attend a memorial rugby match for a late school friend. The players were largely former pupils, a few veterans and a retired Scottish cap. All good natured fun. (Aside for the slight concern that at any moment someone might have a cardiac arrest, or break an aging hip.)
It is very odd to go back in time like that, when you have been away for decades. I mistakenly said that I’d been away for thirty years, to my friend’s wife and she said, ‘I think you’ll find that’s nearly forty!’ How can I possibly be that old? Some of the familiar feels like you’ve never left and other parts are surreal, a slightly out of body experience as though you’ve been reincarnated, yet can still recall some of a past life. If you had revisited regularly every other year, you would see faces age over time, or changes made to the town. In my case, my parents moved away shortly after me, so I never returned. This has left this market town forever frozen in my memory, as alway stuck in 1985.
Staying with a friend of my late mum’s I was shown a photo album of a hockey trip to Cornwall in 1977, when I would have been ten. Having lived in Cornwall for eight years, I never knew she’d been there before me. Maybe I didn’t know anything other than she was away on a hockey trip, or didn’t know where Penzance was. She must be thirty five in the photos, over half her lifespan and looking so young and earnest.
I went for a 5km walk round the town with no fixed destination, I just took a right or left turn, on a whim. I passed the Junior High School and its gym hall where I first mastered the round off back flip, then later a back somersault, past the YMCA where my brother went to Boys Brigade, and his Scout Hall, the former Rugby Club pub, where my dad taught me to play pool and let me sip his beer. I walked past the church I’d only ever been in at midnight on Christmas Eve with drunken teenage friends, saw the graveyard where we used to dare each other to go in at night. I walked down Lover’s Lane (that I used to hope had been named because of some great historical romance) and saw the school building where, girls only, were sent for cooking classes. I was under strict instructions to bring what ever we made to my dad, for his lunch. I clearly remembered his disappointment, the day he opened the box to find today’s ‘cooking,’ was a salad.
I walked as I would have coming home from Primary school, I passed by friends’ houses and turned into the road where I had learned to ride a bike, remembered my art teacher’s house then stopped and looked at my family home, noting the new windows, door and driveway. Looking up at the roof I marvelled at the height of the apex, that my sister and I had climbed over from out own bedroom, to sit on my parents dormer window and wave to the three brothers we knew up the hill. In the park, a place we did all kinds of things we shouldn’t have, I saw the tree I used to climb had grown taller as I had, but it was definitely winning. I saw the railway bridge where my sister taught me to smoke. I looked at the lamp post under whose light I had been kissed goodnight by my first love. I walked as I would to the Senior High School, a steep incline up steps, remembering the garden we stole apples from, to the wall I climbed over every day, as a short cut across the playing fields where I had run the 100m, played hockey on frozen ground and where I loathed having to do cross country. They have now erected a barrier to deter little scamps like me! I then took the, still fresh in my mind, familiar route, to my first love’s home, I knew the kerbs, the lamp posts, the scents of the gardens, the driveways and gates, by heart. I’d also sprinted this route, a few times, high heels in hand, making my bare feet bleed running on the tarmac, so as not to be grounded for a week, by being a minute late home. On a few other occasions I had been perched on his bicycle seat, him standing on the pedals, careering dangerously down the hill, at 2 minutes to eleven. Yes, I knew this road alright.
At the rugby match and the following afternoon at the sevens tournament, I met a retired PE teacher colleague of my dad’s, a woman who had been in my gymnastics team, ‘children’ I had nannied for before art school and others I’d babysat for, who now had children of their own. I saw two old school friends, who used to be very big brotherly and protective towards me, one of whom I used to try to put back together, when his young heart got trampled on by his latest crush. — This morning they were just two middle aged men in lycra, who left for a bike ride. I barely know them anymore. I heard stories of my parents, was reminded of past hi-jinx, saw faces that looked older but familiar, heard names I had forgotten.
So what does it mean, or do for us, to revisit the past? Does it let us see how far we have come? Feel wistful and sad wishing we had never left? Is it better to have travelled, have lived in new countries, reinvented your life, learned new ways, crammed in experiences? Meeting those people back ‘home,’ who are so rooted to that very first place of many I have left, have a strong sense of continuity, support, familiarity and family around them. Are they not the smarter ones? If like me, you change things when they no longer work for you, or you seek new challenges and adventures, keep starting again, do you just become a nomad, forever searching for something more, not satisfied with what is already there?
Essentially I’m asking, who is happier?
It’s a big question and has a lot of variables! I can’t reverse life and have what they have. I do know now that I am longing to be anchored to one place, to put down roots, sail calmer seas. I know that for all my adventures, I’m ready to belong to one very special person and build a life around us. Maybe it will be with another adventuring nomad who has reached the same conclusions.
Me being exuberant me, I will always want some sense of adventure. I can’t change who I am, but stealing apples, climbing over roofs, or running home barefoot like Cinderella at midnight, need to remain firmly back where they belong, over forty years ago in the past!
