A theme which runs through all of our lives – those endlessly grinding wheels of irreversible change.
We were all young and hopeful then, we could all live on a shilling a year and think ourselves well off, we could all sit in front of the lumbering horse ‘buses and chat confidentially with the omniscient driver, we could all see Dan Leno in Pantomime and watch Farren dance at the Empire, we could all rummage among those cobwebby streets at the back of the Strand where Aldwych now flaunts her shining bosom and imagine Pendennis and Warrington, Copperfield and Traddles cheek by jowl with ourselves, we could all wait in the shilling queue for hours to see Ellen Terry in Captain Brassbound and Forbes-Robertson in Hamlet, we could all cross the street without fear of imminent death, and above all we could all sink ourselves into that untidy, higgledy-piggledy, smoky and beery and gas-lampy London gone utterly and for ever.
Hugh Walpole - All Souls' Night (1933)
Walpole writes of the world he knew as a young man before the Great War, but it’s an experience we all know very well indeed. Often too well as the familiar slips into the past, never to be recovered - people, places, times.
Much of the world I grew up in, the myriad impressions, the fascinating, foolish texture of the times which made it the fifties and sixties, that has gone forever.
Even mundane physical details such as the farm along the lane where I cycled to buy eggs. The farm house and farmyard are long gone - vanished forever under a compact gaggle of houses.
9 comments:
In 1951 the world population was 2,543,130,380. This year it is 8,045,311,447. For the UK it was 50,271,904 in 1951 and 67,736,802 this year.
All those extra people, globally or locally, are a sharp increase over previous decades and centuries. So methods of obtaining food have necessarily changed, and why 'going organic' is not the easy answer.
I don't propose any 'final solution' but if we weather the demographic collapse predicted, there may be room enough to cycle to the farm and collect eggs.
We all should know and reflect on this, but it seems a lot of people don't. They just go along with the latest thing, driving the change with their demand for something new.
It's quite a melancholy process, pondering all that stuff which has passed by. It seems, deep down, there is the glimmer of hope that it hasn't really gone anywhere, that it is all intact still. Or maybe the essence of it, the tone, has been somehow preserved. We may need that hope in order to keep going.
I used to visit my great-grandmother after Sunday School. I found a recent photo of her house online. Her coachhouse has been demolished. (What it was used for in my lifetime I have no idea.)
Google street view shows a large gate in a wall where the coach house used to be: maybe the owner of ggm's house simply wanted more parking space without the expense of keeping an old building in good repair.
I've tried to find the house I grew up in on Google Streetview and Googlemaps. No joy. Maybe it's been demolished. Certainly our stable has been demolished: in my boyhood we used it for storing boats and sailing kit, and the hay loft was our "gang den".
One of my friends had a"gang den" that was an air raid shelter in his back garden. I wonder if whoever built it was mocked at the time: "the Germans would never bomb us". But they did bomb a nearby village: one bomb, thirty dead.
DJ - the numbers are quite scary, partly because huge numbers of people clearly don't intend to stay where they are. Might be worth trying pigeon eggs.
Sam - yes there does seem to be a glimmer of hope that it hasn't really gone anywhere, but I think that's mostly the effect of age. Yet the fundamentals can't go anywhere, we are what we were.
dearieme - maybe your old house was demolished for one of a number of reasons, although Google Streetview doesn't seem to penetrate everywhere. My wife's grandparents had a house quite near here which was demolished to make a car park because the land including the garden was big enough for what was required at the time.
@AKH: I eventually found a satellite view: there's a house in much the right position but I can't tell whether it's the original, albeit modified, or a replacement. Anyway, no longer is there a meadow over the garden fence and a pasture over the garden wall: it's now surrounded by town.
@AKH: I eventually found a satellite view: there's a house in much the right position but I can't tell whether it's the original, albeit modified, or a replacement. Anyway, no longer is there a meadow over the garden fence and a pasture over the garden wall: it's now surrounded by town. Boo hoo. At least the house's name has been adopted to name the new suburb. Slim consolation.
dearieme - satellite views of houses can be rather blurred, but some areas seem to have sharper images than others, something I've noticed when looking at houses for sale. It could possibly be worth looking again in a year to see if a new and better image is available.
The house where I grew up in the fifties didn't have a road frontage so I can't see it very well on Streetview. The privet hedge still seems to be there though.
Visited friends yesterday, they live in an old farmhouse. The farmland became a housing estate in the 1970s. So between the little boxes on new road numbered 20 and 24 there is no number 22, just a driveway leading to the farmhouse, its small garden surrounded by other back gardens.
djc - it's the kind of thing which leads me to think a NIMBY attitude makes sense. We aren't taking stock of where we are and what we should preserve, or at least avoid trashing.
Post a Comment