Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach mydestination, and everything has changed.
Nearly half a century has passed since I last stepped out of a train at this little wooden station, but my feet carry me with a kind of effortless, dreamlike inevitability down the sloping station approach to the quietly busy mid-afternoon main road, left towards the muddled little parade of shops, and left again by the letter box into the long, straight,familiar avenue. The main road’s full of fussy new traffic arrangements, the shops have impersonal new commercial names and frontages, and the stringy prunus saplings I remember along the verges of the avenue are now wise and dignified trees. But when I turn the corner once again, off the avenue into the Close …
There it is, as it always was. The same old quiet, sweet, dull ordinariness.
I stand on the corner, looking at it, listening to it,breathing it in, not sure whether I’m moved to be here again after all this time, or whether I’m quite indifferent.
I walk slowly up to the little turning circle at the end. The same fourteen houses sit calmly complacent in the warm, dull summer afternoon, exactly as they always did. I walk slowly back to the corner again. It’s all still here, exactly as it always was. I don’t know why I should find this so surprising. I wasn’t expecting anything different. And yet, after fifty years …
As the first shock of familiarity subsides, though, I begin to see that everything’s not really as it was at all. It’s changed completely. The houses have become tidy and tedious, their disparate architectural styles somehow homogenised by new porches and lamps and add-on timbering. I remember each of them as being a world unto itself, as different from all the others as the people who occupied them. Each of them, behind its screen of roses or honeysuckle, of limes or buddleia, was a mystery. Now almost all that luxuriant growth has vanished, and been replaced by hard standing and cars. More cars queue silently along the kerb. The fourteen separate kingdoms have coalesced into a kind of landscaped municipal car park. The mysteries have all been solved. There’s a polite, international scent of fast-growing evergreens in the air. But of that wild, indecent smell that lured me here – even on this late June day not a trace remains.
I look up at the sky, the one feature of every landscape and townscape that endures from generation to generation and century to century. Even the sky has changed. Once the war was written across it in a tangled scribble of heroic vapour trails. There were the upraised fingers of the searchlights at night, and the immense coloured palaces of falling flares. Now even the sky has become mild and bland.
I hesitate on the corner again. I’m beginning to feel rather foolish. Have I come all this way just to walk up the road and back, and smell the cypress hedges? I can’t think what else to do, though, or what else to feel. I’ve come to the end of my plans.
And then I bec
