Never Go Back!?

                                                                                        The elderly man parked behind a tractor by a field. The field was next to an old village church. He strolled to the lychgate, opened it. It creaked with a sound he recognised from 55 years ago. He found the church door unlocked so he opened it. The clunk matched the lychgate in its familiarity, the same but different.  He entered the church, recognised the pew where Alan Salisbury, his Latin teacher had positioned himself every Sunday, noted the lectern from which Sammy Ashamu read the lessons on most Sundays. Lovely fellow, beaming smile, very keen but ‘could you find another reader only the local Somerset farm workers find it hard to understand his broad non-Somerset accent’? Well, OK, but without sounding contrary and arrogant, he doubted the congregation would understand the content of the lesson no matter who was reading it. Religion is like that isn’t it! The man smiled as he remembered being the pupil responsible for getting the Sunday readers.  He quietly left the church, ensuring the heavy door thunked behind him. He was now on the green sward, the grassy park that surrounded the old manor house. The large trees bespoke the confidence of a different age. He could see himself on a Sunday, freed from the formality of the church service, with a rugby ball in his hands and playing touch rugby with his peers.  He felt the joy of the pass that he did not give, the deception that fooled his opponent, the sudden amazement that the line beckoned and he was sprinting towards a score.  There was a sprint no more now. He wandered onto the driveway which stretched through the woods to the road where they used to pick up the school bus every morning. But he skirted the outside of the big house and found himself at the portals, the columns at the front door, where he used to wait for his father to pick him up at the end of every term and where his mother had dropped him off fearful and homesick on that fateful day in 1965. There was a doorbell. Should he press it or should he let sleeping memories lie? The pupils were all at school. There might be nobody there. He may not pass this way again. He could leave and get into his car and let what was, remain what was. A mental shrug of the shoulders, no regrets, a stepping away from 5 years of memories and nobody any the wiser. A moment of madness, he reached and rang the bell. Part of him hoped there would be no answer. He was about to turn on his heels when the door opened. A cheery, middle aged woman announced herself as the cook and asked if she could help. She obviously loved where she worked and he was soon being given the guided tour. The dining room was just the same, the room where he used to stand every morning to listen to the day’s moral message on the radio was now a lounge. He looked in vain for the impressionist picture with the message below:-

‘The cessation of strife will wither and wear the hopes and aspirations of a vigorous race.’

He guessed that message was now considered inappropriate for current youth. Probably should have been children skipping through a field of sunflowers with the message,

‘You can be what you want to be’.

 The rooms downstairs were now bedrooms which housed two students, not the 10 boy dormitory where he awoke that first morning to the mooing of the cows in the field. He found his pictures on the wall, the first a photograph of all 80 boys, the second the prefect’s picture with himself one of ten.  It was strange indeed to see such insecurity and immaturity, such an angst ridden interior, mustering a smile for the camera. Such a happy mask concealing deep anguished uncertainty. He was offered a cuppa tea and a biscuit which he accepted gratefully and indulged himself with 20 minutes of reminiscence which his guide tolerated with equanimity and, in the process, told her own stories. The environment linked their tales but the gap in time did not. He left Kingweston House and the village of Kingweston feeling glad that he had visited.

                 Dear Friends, I don’t know why I wrote the above in the third person, probably because the ‘he’ might have had a better hindsight, a more dispassionate perspective, than the ‘I’. Probably didn’t work, did it?  The journey home at the end of term was always a pleasure. The release was a relief. The sun always shone brightly on that hour long journey even when it didn’t.  So, for the last couple of paragraphs I can speak in the first person for those reasons. Thanks for your tolerance.

                                         On my drive back to my brother’s place in the village of Kenn, the road was much the same as it had been all those years before. Bypassing the city of Wells, one climbs up into the Mendip Hills, green farm land, wooded combs, descent through the gorge of Burrington Combe or was it Brockley, crossing the Bristol road and ‘home’.  There was time to think. I thought about the advice that I had been given years ago. “Never go back.” They had said it with a knowing smile, a condescending omniscience. The inference was that it would never be the same, never be what it was, would fall short of one’s expectations, there would not be the joy.  Aha, the joy! There lay the word. On this particular excursion I did not expect the ‘joy’ to return because it seemed that back then ‘joy’ was an infrequent visitor in my life.  I was too much of an oversensitive wimp to find joy at every meal, in every class, in every interaction.  Joy came to me through physical exercise. If I had visited Kingweston House as I did last November in hopes of renewing joyous memories of my teenage years I would probably not have made the spontaneous decision to drop by. It was not a hardship for me to visit. I was not nostalgic for the days of my youth. I was more inquisitive to see if it was ‘the stream that changed, yet stayed the same’. I do not regret going back to my old boarding house of 55 years ago.

                                Should we go back, Dear Reader, to places where we were very happy, where friendships and camaraderie were wonderful, unforgettable, life changing? Should I walk into the Strathspey Hotel in Aviemore where I was an hotel porter for some months in the early 1970s, where I first heard Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ and cannot hear it to this day without a passing memory of the ski resort and village? Can I hear Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step…..’ speech as he steps onto the surface of the moon in 1969 and not feel the flap of canvas and the smell of the Scots Pine in my tent at Coylumbridge? I can’t.  Should I not hear the crash of waves elsewhere when I walk and hear the surf on the seawall in West Vancouver? Sometimes I can.  I have been back to happy places of my childhood and have enjoyed the experience. The smell of a juniper hedge after a shower will always evoke.  A rowan tree or a foxglove will always beam me back to times and places. These are happy, calming moments, a therapeutic presence, a balm for troubled thoughts. Of course, a whole acreage of life and living has passed since those days and, strangely, life has gone along perfectly well in those places without me!? Of course, I wonder where they all are now, those people whose lives I shared.  Occasionally one hears the blast from the past and mostly it is not good news. But when we stumble on a memory, Friends, whether good or bad, should we not place it amongst the pantheon of other memories and recognise it for what it was and pay it some form of homage for where and what we now are?  I suppose that in some small way as W.B.Yeats said ‘because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike’. Going back is like taking a bag of  beads and  weaving  them together into the necklace of my life. I have no fears of going back.

                                 Thanks for reading,