Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

ON THE PAST- WALES AND BEYOND

Who was it that said ‘you can’t relive the past’? That’s right, I remember. It was Nick Carraway talking to Jay Gatsby, telling him more or less that it would be foolish to try and reincarnate a situation from the past with Daisy Buchanan. Did Nick mean it only in a romantic sense? Or a more general one? Another reference. Van Morrison and Them sing a song called Don’t Look Back, also about how you cannot recall or relive the past- done, I think, originally by John Lee Hooker:

‘Don't look back to the days of yesteryear,
You cannot live on in the past,
Don't look back.

And I've known so many people
That still try to live on in the past,
Don't look back, oh no.’

So what does Van do when he’s older? Well, maybe a bit older, but not much more, he starts singing about the neighbourhood he grew up in, East Belfast. Writes songs like Cypress Avenue, for instance. And when he’s much, much older, songs like Memory Lane:

‘I stop a while and ask some strangers
Is this the place that was once called Memory Lane
I don't know where I am, don't know what I'm after
I'm stuck here back on Memory Lane’

And it gets me to thinking about the past, about childhood and a little beyond, and I think about whether or not it’s a good thing, and at what age do you have to be before it’s all ok to do this, like Van Morrison does all the time, and Paul McCartney probably does, and people like Justin Hayward, looking out of his boyhood bedroom window at the spirits in the sky that led him to the USA and his future dreams:

‘Out on the horizon

The west wind sighs

A beautiful adventure

Waiting there

In the western sky.’

So I get to thinking again, is it ok to think about the past somewhat, not to dwell in it, but to think about regrets and accomplishments, and good times and bad, and think less about the uncertain future, to see my father in that nursing home and the rest of the family growing old, and me changing as well, and trying to stay young, spirited, but preferring, at times, to think about the glorious and not so glorious past, to good times and missed opportunities, and times when you were bold and achieved something, and times when you were hesitant, or shy, or stumbled, or made a pretty bad error which even now doesn’t exactly haunt you but you think it might have turned out better.

All those relationships, and people you might have been better not hooking up with, and others where you might have but missed that chance, and times you look back when you were stumbling along with somebody and you think back ‘man, what was I doing?, and other times where relationships did occur and you got a lot of out of them and you remember they weren’t a waste of time.  Then there are those others, slightly regrettable, that went too long and you became stuck, or you took things way too seriously and you were naïve, or looking back, it wasn’t ever going to go anywhere.

And I guess looking back isn’t all about relationships. It’s also about other crossroads of a different type, like where you were living, and who with, and what you read or where you went out and how something did or didn’t work out.

There are many good things about the present but I still find myself thinking a lot about memory lane. About what things used to be like way back when and how it have turned out quite good in some ways but not so good, if I am going to be totally honest, in others. How much of life can be an adventure? I envy those people whose life is one long adventure, from when they were little and way into middle-age and beyond. In a way it can be like this for many of us. We can just take off if we feel we are up to a risk enough. There’s no need to leave everyone behind, but an adventure for me is a change in almost everything. Sometimes we need to feel rejuvenated. Otherwise we are marking time. Eventually we might have this epitaph on our tombstone:

‘ He was born in….

He died in….

In between he lived a mostly sedentary life.’

Perhaps the two places are a matter of a short amount of miles or kilometres apart. Perhaps the in between places took you to far away distant lands. Perhaps you might add, on the tombstone, he took this risk, or he took that risk, or this is where he stumbled and fell, because he was under confident, or too hesitant, or too shy, or he was trapped in some way, or those bricks and mortar were jammed way too solidly around him.

I’m wandering around those streets sometimes, searching for memory lane. I’m thinking about what I did when I left school and chose the safer, narrower option for what was available to me. I’m thinking about some of the risks I eventually did take and how the memories are mixed, but are all important ones, and then I’m thinking again about how I found safety and security, and how life became satisfying in lots of ways, but also sometimes predictable and cocooned in this web of security, sitting like a smug, self-satisfied spider, except dreaming rather than looking for adventurous options. Sometimes you can be ‘retired’ for years, creating this personal mosaic or knitted jumper where the pattern keeps repeating as you keep pulling along the wool.

‘Take me back, take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford Street
Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven
On long summer nights…’

sings Van Morrison on another track.

So where do I want to be taken back to? I will choose this sunny one week holiday I had in Wales. Farm stays, meeting Welsh people, seeing lambs in green meadows, walking along old, ancient streets, marvelling at ancient rocky harbours and rows and rows of old Georgian townhouses, climbing Mt Snowdon in Snowdonia, seeing all the old little Welsh villages along the way, the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons, Abervagenny, and then further up to Gwynned, Conwy, even the place names make you shiver, and the little towns of Betws-y-Coed and Llandudno and the Conwy River flowing through the glorious towns of Trefriw and Llanrwst, and on and on and on…

In my dreams and imagination I go back there and regain the sense of freedom and beauty and an intoxicating sense of adventure and security at the same time… and healing. And the pattern changes. New colours for the mosaic thrown into the mix. New wool and new patterns and different outcomes.

‘And we walked the pagan streams
And searched for white horses on surrounding hills
We lived where dusk had meaning
And repaired to quiet sleep, where noise abated
In touch with the silence
On Honey Street, on Honey Street

What happened to a sense of wonder
On yonder hillside, getting dim
Why didn't they leave us, alone
Why couldn't we just be ourselves
We could dream, and keep bees
And live on Honey Street

And we walked the pagan streams
In meditation and contemplation
And we didn't need anybody, or anything
Then, no concepts, being free
And I want to climb that hillside again, with you
One more time

As the great, great, great, great, great, great, great
Being watches over
And we repair, repair, repair, shh, repair, shh, we repair
To Honey Street, to Honey Street.’

Van Morrison, Pagan Streams.