1945

Not all that long ago I took a trip back to the place where I grew up, which we all knew as the Old Town but which everyone else in the country knows as a strange little seaside resort that’s lost in the spirit of fifty years ago - when the height of holidaying ambition was to pack up for a week and travel eight miles east by bus to a place where there was a beach, ice cream parlours and lines of imposing sandstone guest houses staring out over the cold firth whose waves rocked the shores a hundred yards away. It’s probably lost a lot of that charm in the passing.

I hadn’t been back for a long time and noticed some major changes; the greens where we played football were now either planted with flowers and benches, or were built upon with shops and houses; the low-cost houses whose residents’ sons and daughters we laughed at for being poor were now either completely renovated or had been flattened to make way for modern housing; the shape of the streets and the major landmarks remained, but the details had changed beyond all recognition; even the street lamps were no longer the old cast iron question marks. The place had changed, probably as much as I had since those old parochial days. All the mills had closed but were till standing, now spruced up as office space, restaurants and car salesrooms. The disused railway line where we played in abandoned cars was now a main road with brick clad housing and turfed lawns, and the steel latticed bridge where the trains used to run over was gone, replaced by a concrete structure over which cars drove on their way into Tesco, or Sainsbury or Morrisons, instead of Lipton, Carlysle’s or the dark little corner shop where I used to be sent for groceries, but which was now another house in a string of other faceless ones.

As I drove the car through the streets I found myself not recognizing anyone, then suddenly picking out one or two faces from a long time ago, some even seem to be my old counterparts. I felt like a prisoner of war who had dug a tunnel, got himself out and then buried it without telling anyone else about it. One plump, middle-aged woman was recognisable as a pale and sickly child that was in my class. She still had the same discontented face and vacant eyes, but she seemed to have changed beyond all reason, now at least being able to do things on her own and not burst into tears whenever she is spoken to by other people. Further down the street there was a fat man whom I knew as a bully in the year ahead of me at school. He was carrying bags for a very old woman beside him and was dressed in a weird mixture of clothes and colours, none of which matched and none of which seemed to entirely fit him. I then recognized the woman as being his mother, someone I had always thought of as the femme fatale in our street – a dark and slim woman who seemed to be the object of every bored local married man’s fantasy and the object of abject derision among the type of woman who chatters on street corners.

Then I remembered that I was judging these people against the memories I had of them from thirty years ago, and that they were as alien to me as I would no doubt be to them. I was sure that, were I to get out of the car and walk in the street, I’d be ignored completely, walking like a ghost among the memories of people who only exist in my mind.

The Old Town was now a town of ghosts, and I was one of them. I didn’t stop and I didn’t brake. I kept on driving through the town, past the cafes and churches and ironmongers and dentists and pillars and ivy-covered walls and never looked back, because looking back is maybe the gravest error of them all.