Again
You can go home again, but things will not be the same.
Here’s the bus stop where you caught the number 6 via Park East to go to school. The wind still bites but now you don’t have to wear the uniform. No chilblains now.
Remember that time your dad came with you? He was ill then, in his last year, but you did not know it. He looked so shabby in his overcoat and there was a drip at the end of his nose and you were embarrassed. He came to see you off to school that day. You don’t know why. He loved you but you were fifteen.
The front garden: paved over now, the fence torn down, two cars where there were King Edward potatoes the first year, to break in the soil; then a square of lawn and a border of lobelias every summer.
The house is smaller now even though there’s an extension out the back and the garden shed has gone and the coal hole is where they keep the string trimmer and the leaf blower. There’s an ornamental pool where the rhubarb grew and the compost heaps steamed in the winter.
What happened to the pub on the corner? And the parade of shops — gone now except the betting shop. The greengrocer’s where you could buy a pomegranate in the autumn and pick out the seeds one by one with a needle now sells phones. The sweet shop where they would sell you a five-pack of Players Weights even when they were not supposed to, stands empty and the window boarded up.
The church where Judith got married and where you used to meet in the basement when you were in the Brownies for two weeks that year you broke your arm is now rented out for events. And look — that place where you used to play endless games of catch is now a supermarket with parking out back where the field used to slope down to the stream with sticklebacks and where you fell into the nettles that time and everyone laughed, blackberry hedges spilling over the gate.
They widened the road by the park. There’s a queue of cars at the lights where you used to cross on your way home. The railings are still there and the rhododendrons, though they took away the big slide. Too dangerous, they said, and the roundabout thing that you could push and push and never ever make it go fast. You don’t play like that these days. The knees won’t let you. But you dream it.
The big tree that had the rope swing, it’s still there. It shades the corner of the car park for the Visitors Centre.
This is a response to this week’s W3 hosted by David at the Skeptics Kaddish.
The image at the top is a detail from George Shaw, The World Turned Upside Down, 2019,
