NEVER GO BACK 2013
It’s 2013, I am 65. It is 40 years since Fiona. The pain has faded slowly over the years, from a completely debilitating raw hole in my chest to just a dull tickle felt every month or two. She no longer consumes every waking moment with an agony of loss, I hardly think about her at all now - I am finally almost normal. I am strong enough to go back.
I start with her London flat in 5 Fawley Road, West Hampstead. All the time I have been in London I have avoided driving through West Hampstead, or going through the North London Line British Rail station. I drove to her road and parked within sight of her building - an Edwardian semi-detatched house converted into flats, Fiona’s was on the first floor front. She took it for a year in 1972 after her employer boy friend Timothy Cochrane refused to marry her on Leap Year’s Day. The building looks just the same, the two 7 foot red brick gate piers look just the same - I press my cheek to one in greeting. I still have the keys - they no longer fit. There are expensive ruched curtains to her windows, the flat has been re-converted from a bed-sit to a luxury flat. Only the gate piers are old friends. I don’t ever go back.
Then the big one - her parent’s house in Bourne End. Her parents had bought a plot on the boundary between the town and the fields and woods, and built a house for themselves well back from the road, and a house nearer the road to finance the whole development. A drive accessed the two houses from a turn-in off Kiln Lane with thick woodland on the opposite side, where I had walked Dana their Great Dane. A wrought iron scroll work sign proclaimed the name ‘Swallows Field’.
I parked on the turn-in - I didn’t dare drive down to the the house which was invisible. All was the same, except the sign had been replaced by a tasteless modern one. I was pretty sure no member of her family now lived there. I got out of the car, and found the wrought iron sign, rusty and concealed, lying in the grass to the left of the entrance. I contemplated taking it, it was clearly discarded and on the ‘public’ side of the fence, but it was rather large so I abandoned the idea.
At that moment a convertible Mini drove up the drive, and as I was blocking the exit was forced to stop. I got back into my car, but only moved it sufficiently to let it out, and got out to apologise to the driver - who was a beautiful, annoyed, 25 year old girl. I explained I was on a nostalgia trip and my first girl friend had lived in the far house 40 years previously, and she melted slightly; that was where she lived. “Is the swimming pool still there?”, (it was meaningful to me) I asked, “Yes – but we don’t use it”, and she drove off.
So, feeling slightly sick, I pondered the circularity of time and the terrible permanence of physical objects - 40 years ago 25 year old beautiful long blond hair blue-eyed Fiona lived there with her parents and had driven in and out of those gates in her Morris Minor convertible, and here in her place, all unknowing, was another beautiful 25 year old living with her parents in the same house and driving in and out of the same gates in a convertible Mini, and no doubt breaking hearts in her turn. Alan Garner expresses it better than I can in “Red Shift”; and A E Houseman:
‘Ay, yonder lads are yet
The fools that we were then;
For oh, the sons we get
Are still the sons of men.
The sumless tale of sorrow
Is all unrolled in vain:
May comes to-morrow
And Ludlow fair again’.
I never saw or heard from Fiona after 1972 and she died in 2019, my questions unanswered.
