Essentially the Only    One

As my visits to England are separated by years, I often take the opportunity while there to revisit some place or area that once I held in great regard.

This year, I decided to stop in the Hampshire village of Bramshott. It was here that my grandparents had a home while I was a young child. I have fond memories of the old house and garden, so I was curious to see how it looked today.

I was on my way to Bishopstone in Wiltshire to meet my wife who was completing a walk along the Ridgeway, and by allowing a few extra hours and taking a southern detour, I could fit in a trip.

It was easy to follow the same route that I was carried over as child, heading out from Guildford through Godalming, down past Hindhead - bottlenecked as it ever was - and then exiting close to Liphook.

As I drove into the upper village, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it 40 odd years ago. I drove down the narrow lane that led past the church and came out onto the road that led to the driveway of the old house, Heronwater.
Just before reaching the stone bridge that crosses directly in front of the garden, I stopped the car and stepped out to walk. It was a gloomy gray day, with water in the air, and that peculiarly English light formed by cloud and rich green vegetation. I carried on to where the driveway began, and here I met a shock. What had been a open access gravel road up to the house was now gated and locked.

I looked more closely. On the brick gatepost was a key code touchpad and intercom, the only way of opening the gate. I looked around. High wire fences now enveloped the property. No more open access through the woods and garden that I and my sister played through as children.

A deep drainage ditch was being dug around the perimeter. Perhaps built only to cope with runoff water, it had an unfortunate impression of suggesting a moat, further isolating the house from its surroundings.

I walked around, trying to get a good view of the house. None was to be found. Only by peering through some overgrown trees could I make out out the building. It looked exactly as it always had, further increasing the jarring feelings that were generating within me.
I stood back and looked at the road and the stone bridge I used to splash under when I was a very small person.

Again, the landscape was unaltered. It was just as I had always pictured it.

With little else to do, I explored around the house but everywhere it either fenced off or overgrown. I returned to the bridge and to look on the little river where I would throw sticks from one side and rush excitedly to the other to see them pass under. I once spent hours doing this, but I didn't feel like it today.

As I stood there, several expensive BMWs, Mercedes and Land Rovers passed by. It all seemed very wealthy. It had been when I was a child, but much less ostentatiously and less dramatically removed from the surroundings. The gate and fence around Heronwater took on added symbolism as I contemplated this. I was beginning to feel a deep gulf between what was and had been.

In truth, there always is this gap in perception. 40 years is a long time, and much has changed even if the land has not. England, with its cherished and protected houses and lands, emphasizes this disparity far more than the more volatile United States where houses, fields and land have not yet developed the shielding barriers of history and track human activity much more closely.

I stood for a little while longer, looking away from the house into the field and wood on the other side of the bridge. As I looked, something caught my eye. It was a longhorn cow, much as I had recently seen in Scotland. This was new; clearly a change in farming practice.

I gazed at the cattle. Seeing that large animal in those familiar woods somehow comforted me. I can't explain how. But as I walked back to the car, I felt at ease.

It's a cool and very windy Sunday, with cloudy skies and swirling trees. A good day to stay in and rest - as becomes a Sunday. Perhaps because of the weather, and most precisely the wind, I found my thoughts drifting into memories, revisiting some of the ground I wrote about two years ago.

Why wind should have such an influence, I don't fully understand, but it clearly does. Michelangelo Antonioni used the wind to great effect in the pivotal scene in Blow-Up, one of my few truly essential movies. Only after repeated viewing did I fully grasp that a good part of the tension of that outdoor scene where our protaganist may - or may not - have witnessed the prelude to a murder is due to the camera encompassing and lingering on the wind as shown by the movement of the trees.

The direct stimulus for my return to the distant past was the discovery of this old photograph, taken in the late 1970s, of a view from top of The Chantries hill, looking south into Surrey. I was rooting around in the basement, attempting to organize some of my oldest things.


A largely undistinguished photograph, and one that needed to be balanced again for color after I scanned it as it was faded and browned. Sometimes I wonder if I do not do the same thing to my memories. Perhaps I do. What was remarkable to me, looking at that photograph, is that I was not seeing what I once saw. Nothing to do with my eyes, although a pair of reading glasses is now a necessity, and everything to do with my mind.

So, why then, does it look so different? The answer lies in the emotion behind the seeing. In the past, I would have felt an acute nostalgia at such a sight, and I can still feel glimmerings of that around the edges of my thoughts, but now I see it largely as the landscape it is. A beautiful landscape, but by no means uniquely beautiful. It used to be so. Much of my early adolescence revolved about that land where I roamed again and again, and my earliest deep and remembered thoughts derive from that time.

The influence of those memories and that state of mind, in large part one of loneliness and anxiety (but also a delicious aloneness), was very strong throughout my early life and well into my middle years. Today, it has effectively vanished. So I can say I am not the same person who took that photograph, and who gazed upon for a long time. Yet I am made out of that same person, so I cannot regard it with complete dispassion. That's why I am writing this.

Moments such as these will return from time to time for the rest of my life.

It's funny how certain memories never go away, returning with such cyclical certainty that one can even predict under just what circumstances the memory will return. It's a bleak, rainy day here. Cold and forboding. A set of circumstances designed to bring back a specific class of recollections.

I began building model aircraft around the age of 8 or 9, and kept at it well into my teens. A second wave of construction impulses came over me in my late thirties/early forties resulting in this -


Unfortunately my enthusiasm for purchasing the models ran ahead of my actual building capabilities, leading to this!



Nevermind, I am sure I am not the only hobbiest who has gone a little too over the top with his pastime.

What these pictures do demonstrate is just how much pleasure and involvement I have gained from this hobby. So much so that certain powerful memories - such as those that returned today - revolve around these little plastic kits.

One the earliest I attempted was the Airfix model of Baron von Richthofen's Fokker Triplane. I must have been about 10 years old or so, and I was spending the days just after Christmas with my grandparents in their country cottage, Heronwater.

A beautiful house on some beautiful land near Liphook in Hampshire, England. For me - and my sister too - it was an oasis away from what was sometimes a tense and difficult time at home with my parents. How ignorant we become as adults to the emotional undercurrents that dominate a child's life. And how ignorant is a child to the concerns that can dominate his parents'.

But grandparents, somehow, escape this fate. Being older and more experienced, wiser in some things, but always more aware of the role of time in one's life, they can bypass many of the trials that can sabotage a young adult, and leap, unfettered, back into an appreciation of childhood. My grandfather, in particular, was adept at this. Not least because he lost his own mother when he was a boy and thus was prematurely thrust into a harsher world.

So I built my little model, fumbling uncertainly with the three wings and smudging the plastic with glue, in this atmosphere of almost supernatural peacefulness. The progress I made with it marked out the passing time, such that the final day there was the day I painted it bright red and applied the transfer decals.

Perfect, it was not, but it was my best effort thus far, and it gave me enormous pleasure in the making. Still, as the decals dried and I went to bed for the last night, a rising dread from the return home threatened to swamp my joys.

The following day was more than just a return home - it was an early morning journey back to the house and then straight onto school for a new term. I woke up that morning feeling physically sick and gathered up my things in a daze. With me came the model airplane.

We drove back to my parents' house and, in a moment of distraction, I moved too far across the seat and crushed the model. The undercarriage snapped off; one of the wings broke free of its struts. I picked it up, the bottom falling out of my morning. We arrived, I swiftly changed into my school uniform and my dad drove me to school.

Drawing up to the wall that surrounded it, I unbuckled, picked up my satchel, opened the door - and vomited.

Years later, of course, it seems of little import - compared to what Richthofen must have been felt as he prepared to take off once again to do battle, especially in his last days when injury and stress led to periods of nausea. But to a child, even small things are big, perhaps as big.

Don't let me stay
Don't let me stay
My logic says burn
So send me away
Your minds are too green
I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives
On a saviour machine

Recognize those lyrics? Probably not, as it is a song from the worst selling album of an admittedly very well-known rock star, but I was playing it today in the lab. It's been running through my mind ever since, and cast me way back to a memory of when I was 16 years old and took my first solo holiday in Wales.

I had been on a two week Marine Biology course at the field center at Orielton in Pembrokeshire. The rest of my family, my sister and parents, had taken this opportunity to take a holiday in Spain. The upshot of this was that I had a few days after the course ended when I was essentially on my own, either to come home or to do something different.

A year earlier, I had spent a week at the Cliff Hotel in Cardigan with my maternal grandparents and I had very fond memories of that time. So I decided to spend those few days returning to Cardigan and walking the coastal pathways.

This time, though, I stayed in a far less grand and cheaper hotel in Cardigan town itself. That took away some of the magic. To my chagrin, I also found out that the railway journey I had planned from Pembrokeshire was all for nothing as the line had been closed. It pays to have an up-to-date Ordinance Survey map! So I took a pleasant but much less entrancing bus journey to Cardigan. More magic gone. Nonetheless, I found my hotel and checked in for the three days I planned to spend there.

I had with me a Phillips cassette recorder. This clunky predecessor to the Walkman - and now the iPod - produced a decidedly lo-fi sound, either through a mono speaker or a single earphone. Regardless, for me it was heaven, and the tinny sound that emanated from it made up for a myriad of disappointments. For this, I bought a cassette tape including the song I quoted above. I didn't have a lot of cash, but that cassette plus a copy of The Beatles' Abbey Road seemed like very good ways to spend it. I was lucky to find them in small Cardigan music store. I already had some self-made compilations that I had played to death at the field centre, and I was ready for a change.

So it was this little player, glued to my ear, that accompanied me as spent three mostly wet days walking the cliff path. It was beautiful, gray skies notwithstanding. I saw seals splashing by the rocks at the base of the cliff shore, and seabirds by the thousand - all kinds, seagulls, kittiwakes, puffins and many more that I did not recognise at the time.

The great paradox of this memory is that I felt both lonely and deeply depressed at the time - perfectly in tune with those lyrics - with all the fears that a young man has about his future and expectations running rampant through my mind. Every carefree recollection of that earlier vacation at the Cliff Hotel seemed to be confounded by what was now happening, and I felt a heavy weight dragging me down. But now, decades later, that veil has lifted, and all I clearly remember is the sea, the rocks and the birds. And the music. The disturbing emotions have all gone.

This is yet another example of the astonishing filtering that time, age and experience apply to even the grimmest of memories. I am always amazed at the human mind's capacity to adapt.

Why write? What is it about putting words on paper or disc that makes the effort worthwhile?

Defeating time is one reason. My memory, at the very least, is selective and prone to distortion. Particularly of events with a large emotional component - and these are the memories that I hang onto most tenaciously. But if I have a record, in words, of what I actually thought and did at the time (even allowing that anything that I write is going through a subjective pre-filter before it is even recorded), I can refresh and reeducate my memory to come closer to what really happened.

In this way, I confound the misapprehensions that time places on me.

This seems important. I am always conscious of the present as a stopping point betweem past and future. Writing about it gives the moment more buoyancy, even as it floats away into the past. Looking back, I can reel it in.

Of course, some events are so engrossing and so of the moment that it is impossible to record them as they happen. About 15 years ago, in an effort to reclaim some of my early life, I wrote an autobiography about those extraordinary - and still so to me after all this time - years during my early 20s. It developed into a full length book. A few close intimates have read it, but that's as far as it goes. By writing it, when my memory was fresher than it is today, I reclaimed some of the past. Not perfectly my any means, for I had only a few scraps and notes from those days to remind me of names and places. Some details hovered between invention and recollection.

Time had already stolen those moments.

Today, as I grow closer to my death than my birth, such efforts do not seem so important. What once loomed large has shrunk. I approach this change with mixed feelings. Yet I continue to write.

One of the many astonishing things about growing old is the realization that memories stretching back decades lose neither their strength nor their power to evoke powerful emotions of all kinds. Furthermore, they may pop back into your mind, complete and untarnished, seemingly prompted by the ripples sent out by other memories from different times and places.

Thus, tonight, as I was playing Bryan Ferry's version of the Velvet Undeground song, What Goes On, and being cast back into a vision of the day that I bought that original Velvet Underground album - a strongly tactile memory as the L.P. cover of that album was unusually textured, and I can still recall the surprise I felt when I first slipped my fingers over it - I was kicked back again into a another almost contemporary but differing recollection.

This was a summer's day in the mid 1970s when I went for a walk through the wheat fields leading up to a set of hills not far from my house. These were The Chantries, a National Trust preserved series of hilltop copses that had been managed and semi-cultivated for centuries. Rich in the history of the land itself.

With me I had a Phillips cassette tape player, a bulky contraption compared to the Sony Walkman let alone an iPod, and I was listening to the tinny reproduction through its small, distinctly lo-fi, built-in speaker.

I walked up a hillside path that was shaded by hedges on both sides. Eventually I came to a break in the hedge that let the afternoon sun flood through. It was warm, and as there was a cool breeze, I lay down to let the wind pass over me and absorb the radiant heat.

I put the tape recorder to my ear and let it play. I still remember what I heard - a long song by The Who, A Quick One While He's Away. I can picture exactly the quality of the light in the sky, the scattered clouds, the rustle of the wind through the hedgerows and over the wheat fields.

That was all that happened - there was no drama, no exciting or unusual events at all. It was simply a moment of thoughtful repose, yet it, above almost all others, became embedded in my mind as a vivid and unforgettable memory.

Now, I have been through enough psychotherapy to know full well that the reason this particular memory has such power is related directly to the emotional aura of other events that occurred at this time, events I do not remember so well. These were not so happy, and thus I feel relieved and rather astonished that the recollection that has left its strongest imprint today was so peaceful.

But perhaps I shouldn't be. The mind is powerful and manifests its healing and recovery from hurt in subtle ways. This, I am sure, is one of them.