There are those who say you can never go back. There are others who ask if I would ever move back north. My answer is ‘no’ – because every time I go up North, I reinforce that idea that you can't go back, and the more important belief that East Anglia has become my ‘home’ in the deepest sense of the word.
I still hear myself say “I am going up home” and hear in it the echo of Mam, the way she used to talk about “down home” meaning, in her case Slough, and in mine Aycliffe. I have no idea how tightly she held to ‘home’ or whether it was just a turn of phrase. Until recently I had no idea how tightly I did. Now I know that for me – in terms of the North-East – it is just that turn of phrase. The North-East might be my heritage, but it isn’t home.
Coming home on the train last weekend – I finally fully understood: this is home, and has been so for a long time. I have put down my roots into boggy Norfolk clay, and they stretch out to the wild coastline along the north of the county, they work down through the cracks of the old chalk workings beneath the city, and if my roots put forth spores they soar with the peregrines that nest on the
cathedral, the geese that fly in for the Winter, and call us away again come Spring.
The old man on Nevis decades ago was right in that part of me will always belong to the hills, I will always want to go to the wilder, uninhabited highlands of any country I find myself in, but I have also been seduced into being a flat-lander. My L-shaped route to the North East takes me west first, and then north. It’s a rail journey I have been doing with less and less frequency for decades. Much changes along it; much does not.
Sometimes I think that the thread of my life might be mapped in railway lines and stations. The ones I have travelled repeatedly. The ones I remember from a single journey. The lines I have sped along, the ones I have meandered. The stations I have sat in, long and often, often in the cold and the dark, and the ones I have run through with a backpack trying to make the only connection of the day and the ones where I wasn’t entirely convinced trains still ran. I wonder if I could write my life story in railway journeys.
Sometimes I think that would be sad.
Sometimes I think that I would not mind.
Sometimes I remember that I once (or several times in fact) had a plan to travel all of the lines in our little island. Get off at all the stations. It will never happen. I have another plan now, based on walks rather than train rides – but they will feature – I am a resolute non-driver. Train lines are my lifelines, my adventure lines, my lines of destiny or at least of destination.
When travelling back towards my childhood home, I have always felt the ‘yes’ of returning into the gently rolling land, where pseudo-prairies give way to actual fields and the veins of ripped out
boundaries transmute into the tattoos of living hedges and dry stone walls, where the shape of the land is accentuated by plough-lines or echoes of ancient selions, the ridges and furrow of mediaeval strip farming.
I have always felt the ‘yes’ of returning as the harder, more industrial landscapes gain hold over market towns, churches become smaller, chimneys taller. Power ceases to be feudal and becomes electric as the train carries me North, carries me back into memory.
This time I felt it at a remove. I felt it as memory, rather than homecoming. I wasn’t going back. I was merely visiting. There was a purpose to this visit – part of it was about reconnection, with family, with childhood, with places I hadn’t been since I was at school – part of it was about really just about wanting to go see the lights.
When someone wondered aloud if I would ever move back, I struggled to wonder why they ever thought I might. My brother’s closest school friends scattered, but many of the wider circle remained or returned. Mine did not. We dispersed.
There were moments during the weekend, when I knew I would have to visit again, there are places I want to spend more time in, to get to know as they are now, as I am now, which is not about going back at all, but more a curiosity of paths taken. The point of personal illumination was on the train back south and east. Leaving Peterborough we head into the rich dark loam of the fens, and the grey-light fields holding water, the washes that were designed to do so and the arable bogs that weren’t. The soil black as jet.
The sight is not new. This too has been part of those decades of back and forth, at all times of year, and Winter always my favourite time to do the journey – when I knew there would be water, and if I was really lucky, frozen water. This time I exhaled deeply into the flatlands, felt myself welcomed back by them. I set my book aside to simply look out of the window.
I was rewarded with a flock of heron. Herons are solitary birds, my favourite bird, always the epitome of patience, waiting, focussed. It was an odd delight to spot seven or so of them milling about together in a partly flooded field, flamingo-like in their sociability.
After a while I start looking out for the ship of the Fens that is Ely Cathedral, the isle of Ely, rising from the watery land just as Glastonbury does in the west, and for much the same reason.
Beyond Ely, through the wetlands and Thetford Forest there is no mobile signal. During my working days, I referred to this as ‘the dead zone’. Now I see it differently…I see and seek the life in it. I peer among the trees and opens spaces for deer and fox and people walking their dogs. I watch how the light falls and is turned.
Later, much closer to home, I catch a fleeting glimpse of an otter mid-stream swimming purposefully up the Yare near Keswick Mill. My second otter sighting of the year. Both mere glimpses that bring me more joy than you would imagine.
Then there is the rattling welcome of the bridge over the Wensum as we pull into the station. Home. I cannot tell how many times over the decades I have stood by the door as we crossed that bridge. I remember doing it back in the days when you could open the windows. I have done so in the heat of summer and the freezing depths of winter, at the end of long journeys and of short day-trips, and it is a sound I will always remember, when all other sounds fade away.
I won’t move back north. I am embedded here. In the marshlands. On the sands of the Norfolkcoast. In the woods and the river beds.
And yet… there is a call to revisit.
We cannot go back in time, but we can go back to places. Perhaps it is important that we do. To reconnect with the people and the space, the townscapes, the landscape (not just family, but the kinship of our birthplaces, the ancestors if you will) who may or may not have made us who we
are, but who most definitely laid out the original framework that we had to work with, and the wider templates that we started working from. It is part of our self-connection to understand our current relationship with those places and their people.
Perhaps they will call us back. Perhaps they will make us even more gratefulto be where we are now.
While the purpose of this trip north was Lumiere, in many other respects it was a trip down memory lane. When I was little, Seaton Carew was our nearest seaside, the one we went to most often, when Dad was on the right shift, when there wasn’t anything too pressing on the allotment. We might go for day, for half a day, even for a surprise few hours after school. We’d go on Club Trips, sometimes. Sometimes they would take us further afield.
I remember the beach as being silver-sandy. It isn’t now. There is sand, but much less of it. A wreck not seen for many years prior to 1996 is now regularly exposed. There are mudflats. Otherwise much of the town seems as I remember. Then again, we never did do much in the town. Park up, sit on the beach. Sometimes we might cross the road to the fish & chip shop, but more often there would be sandwiches and primus-brewed tea. There would be swimming and sandcastles and the pointless digging of holes.
I don’t remember coming in winter as a child. Now, I wonder what a summer visit will be like.
This time, we walked a loop along the beach to the harbour wall, up over the dunes, and back through the reserves. A few scattered geese, a lone curlew calling. No seal sightings today. Weeks of rain lying undrained. The rare bright day had brought the golfers out in force. I wanted to linger. I wanted to walk the whole length of that beach from wall to wall. I wanted to pick up stones and take pictures and sit and write. I wanted to do the kind of things best done alone.
I may come back in late Spring / early Summer of next yearand do those things. This time, I walked with my brother talking about things we remembered…and people he knows, friends whose names mean nothing to me now, though once they might have done. He expects me to remember all the children from my school-days, and I don’t. I remember a few, a very few. Some names rise but I cannot put faces to them. Some faces without names. I left all that behind.
And then we left the coast behind. I fell quiet as he drove back through the industrial heartland of Teesside, looking at the chemical plants, refineries, factories, whatever… The words that came to me were grim...unreal...dystopian. It reminded me of sci-fi movies, foretellings of a post-apocalyptic world. Perhaps we are already living in it and just have not noticed yet. I wondered aloud what it might have looked like a hundred years ago. “Bleak,” he said.
There it was. The difference between us. However this landscape looked a hundred years ago, it cannot have been more bleak than this. My next thought was: I’m so glad I live in Norfolk.
