What If We Could Go Back?

This weekend, I finally got round to watching All Of Us Strangers. It is a brilliant film that I thoroughly recommend and open to interpretations. But the bit that resonated with me was the fact that Andrew Scott’s character, a writer, was trying through his work to reconnect with his past.

I have been feeling this a lot recently, very nostalgic for those past days, in fact, I even wrote a post about it that you can find here.

I’ve been thinking ‘if only I could go back and live that time all over again’. I guess we all think this from time to time, but why now? Well, one answer I have from reading Sharon Blackie’s excellent Hagitude — Reimagining the Second Half of Life, is that it is perhaps a necessary part of this crossroads of life we find ourselves standing in front of at midlife. It is a fact that we can’t go back, that we can only go forward, and perhaps to do that we have to let go of a lot of things from the past, or at least, leave them where they belong — in the past.

In All Of Us Strangers, Andrew Scott’s character revisits his childhood home and finds his parents, who had been killed in a car crash when he was 12, still living, still listening to the same records, still inhabiting the same decor, the same clothes. It is 1987 and the only thing that has changed is him, he has grown and they have stayed… stuck.

In recent weeks I have had the pleasure of joining

Dr Lily Dunn

’s memoir writing course. I am a firm believer that learning from other writers, joining their courses, advancing our own writing is an enormously important part of practicing our own craft, and I’ve really enjoyed the exercises that she has set for everyone. But I was surprised, what I initially joined thinking I would use this course as a structure to explore has not been what I have been drawn to in my writing. In fact, like the protagonist in All Of Us Strangers, I have been drawn back, to the ghosts of the past. I have wanted to bring my childhood back to life through my writing, and this has surprised me, it has also made me feel quite emotional.

What if we could go back? What would it be like to step into an old photograph, to relive that moment all over again but this time through the adult eye? That was the task that we were asked to do by Lily.

I chose a photograph, just because it was the nicest one I happened to lay my hands on first, and I was so surprised by what came out, particularly the handbrake turn it took towards the end. So I’m sharing it here with you with the hope you might try the same exercise. Find a childhood photograph and step back into it with your adult eye. I’d love to hear in the comments how you get on…

It is a sunny day in 1983, although in all honesty, all of those days felt sunny. We are standing in the back garden of our red-brick council house, posing for a photograph, me and my stepfather. I am wearing a floppy straw hat and towelling dress. I remember that dress well – a sage green colour that tied at the front, it had something appliquéd on it, I’m not sure what now but then those are not the details I want to focus on here.

​My stepfather is looking smart, a shirt tucked into his slacks, all beige and cream, a palette for summer. He is wearing a trilby hat and a gold necklace that catches the light, and his face, hardly visible under the brim of his hat as he looks down at me, is shaped somehow to make me laugh. I gaze up at him in delight.

My small hand is in his, but my other hand is wrapped around his wrist, over his watch strap, as if I could stop the time, as if I didn’t want that moment to end, as if he is all mine.

Which he was then, in 1983.

​My mum and I had moved into that council house the year before. It was brand new: putty-coloured tiled floors downstairs; bare floorboards upstairs; and in that back garden (where we would pose for that photograph a year later) a lawn we hoped would grow from seed.

This blank canvas was all ours. Mum and I went to Sheltons in the city, a smart department store buried in the backstreets, and chose mugs and eggcups with pictures of animals on them – I still have one now. At night we slept together in her double bed, even though she had gone to pains to bring something of my old bedroom with her, the brass-effect headboard my dad had shaped by hand, I can’t remember anything else now but I’m sure each item had been chosen with such importance to her at the time.

​It had been just us for a while. Mum made friends with Kate, the single mother who lived next door and I played with her children while Kate stirred a pot on the stove that she would feed to mum when she came home after an evening spent canvassing, going door-to-door with her team in not so sunny days, in fact freezing ones, selling double glazing. That’s how she afforded me brand new Clark’s school shoes, or even that sage green dress.

​Mum said the night she had met David, he had been wearing that trilby. He had entered the pub where she was sitting at the bar with Kate, and from the door he had thrown it and it had landed on the hatstand. A cool move. I don’t know how long later she had brought him home to me but I was equally smitten.

I have a memory of skipping by his side as we left the fancy new shopping centre, Queensgate, which was all smoked glass and shiny floors, more like somewhere you might imagine in America, not Peterborough, or at least not then, in 1983. In that same memory, Dai is carrying a present so big for me – a plastic aeroplane and the picture on box promised I could serve food to my passengers – and Mum was parked outside waiting for us in our dark blue Ford Cortina. She would have scolded him when we clambered inside for another big present.

​‘She’s not used to being spoilt.’

​But I was then, in 1983.

The trips to Queensgate for a giant present each weekend became a Sunday morning walk to Readwells, a newsagent in the new modern centre of our village, where I could have the run of the place, picking up any soft toy or magazine I wanted.

​The way to a six-year-old heart is through your wallet.

​But it wasn’t only that, it was the cardboard castle he helped me build for a school project, it was wrestling in front of the television on a Saturday afternoon while Big Daddy did the same on the screen. It was falling asleep curled up in the armchair to the hum of the TV in the corner of the lounge, and waking only enough to see my fleecy peach sleepsuit-covered legs reaching up to the ceiling as he carried me to bed once I’d drifted off.

​He was all mine, and I was all his.

​Is that what we were thinking as we posed for that photograph?

​I didn’t know then of the other child he had swapped to be with me. A four-year-old boy who must have been ten by then. Was he thinking of him when he smiled down at me? Was he making reparations to him when he lavished attention on me? Did it ease the pain of his guilt? Perhaps he felt none at all, this family man who had repaired us and made me and Mum whole again.

​By the time I saw that child he would be a man. I would be sat, not in sage green, but in all black on the front row of a pew in a crematorium. I would turn from my stepfather’s coffin to look at the crowd behind me, and among them I would pick out a grown man — crying like a four-year-old boy.

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