Memory Lane

Imagine driving a car – that’s the easy part for most people reading this. Not for me. I can’t drive. The only time I’ve been behind the wheel of a car is in my dreams. Anxiety dreams where you find yourself driving in busy traffic and you’re fully aware that you don’t know how to drive. And then something in your subconscious forces you to wake up.

But I digress.

Imagine driving a car. You’re approaching a speed bump. And instead of slowing down you push hard on the accelerator. There’s a moment where it feels like you’re flying and then suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely.

Somewhen else.

Imagine.

Where we’ve come back to is a bus stop on Woodgrange Drive. A major artery leading out eastwards from the centre of the town of Southend-on-Sea (town then, now a city). At one end you’ll find posh, detached houses inhabited by rich city traders and at the other end the houses are run down and the owners are likely unemployed or working blue collar jobs. Somewhere between these two extremes are the middle class. Teachers. Civil servants. Librarians. You get the picture. Social geography.

There’s thick snow and the small car my dad drives has got stuck .I have to climb out at this point and help to push it over to the kerb. I have to take the bus into school that day. I remember stepping inside – it would’ve been a green number 2 or a blue number 25 bus - and almost slipping over in front of the driver.

On my first day at high school, I’m driven there by my dad. My brother’s in the car as well. He’s recently finished seven years at the same school and is shortly off to university. He’s here for moral support. When we get to the front gates I wonder if he has to fight off a Pavlovian reaction to carry on walking inside, to take just one more maths class.

I have to make my own way home at the end of that first day. It’s about 2 miles or more and involves catching a couple of buses. I walk out the wrong gate, become disoriented and stop at the wrong bus stop before realising my mistake. I make it home eventually, but I’m still not quite sure how. At some point in that first year I stop taking the bus and just walk the whole way home. I’m setting a pattern for the rest of my life. The path of least resistance.

We’re time lapsing now. At thirteen I start a job as a paper boy. Sunday deliveries. The newsagents is on the corner of a street opposite an imposing old church. Later on the church is abandoned. In time the church falls into disrepair. Eventually they put up fencing to stop people trespassing on the site. It’s unsafe. Then the entire structure is demolished. For a while there’s just rubble and then just an empty wasteland. In the final frame the church has been replaced by a modern block of flats.

Time is like the tide, weathering away at things. You don’t notice it in real time, but come back five years later and the coastline has changed, sometimes subtly and sometimes in a more tangible and profound way.

Mr Burles owned the newsagents. At some point he sold it and an Asian couple took over. He opened up a cycle shop next door. Eventually the cycle shop closed down. I stopped delivering newspapers on a Sunday. I left Southend.

*

Memory Lane was a card and gift shop. It was located just around the corner from the first house I ever lived in. I don’t remember that house. We moved out when I was two years old. Memories stretch back only so far and then there’s a void. However fast you accelerate across the speed bumps you can’t go back there. It’s one of the laws of physics. Einstein forbids it. If he sees Freud trying to find a cheat code, he’ll probably come round and beat him up. This might not be historically accurate, but no one is here for facts.

Memory Lane used to sell packs of Top Trumps. These were popular card games of the 1970s. I had a pack with sports cars in it. Ironically as a young child I was interested in cars. The different engine types. The horse power. Speed of acceleration from 0 to 60 mph. Top Trumps gave you all the stats and when you played your card you chose the best stat on the card you’d been dealt and hoped it would top that of your opponent. Once you’d collected all the cards, you were the winner.

Top Trumps didn’t just do cars. They did everything. Footballers. Wild animals. Existentialists. (You think I made that last one up, but I assure you Simone de Beauvoir was the best card to have if you wanted to win a game of that particular brand of Top Trumps).

I collected all the different packs and was always saving up pocket money to afford more. There must’ve been a particular pack I was desperate to own, because I have a clear memory of walking to Memory Lane (it was no longer just around the corner, but a fifteen minute walk away) with a handful of loose pennies and half pennies. I’d counted them up several times over and I knew I was still a half pence short of what I needed. But I went there anyway. I don’t think it was my intention to try and swindle the shop owner, I needed those cards the way you just need some things when you’re nine or ten years old.

I remember my heart rate speeding up as the lady behind the counter counted up the pile of coins I’d deposited in front of her. Maybe she mistook one of the half pence pieces for a penny or maybe she sensed that desperate need emanating from my face and took pity on me. Either way, she scooped up all the coins and put the pack of cards in to a brown paper bag and handed it over to me.

*

That childhood landscape was always evolving. Southend had the longest pleasure pier in the world. At one point a boat took out part of it when the captain who was steering the boat fell asleep at the wheel. At a different time – summer of 1976, while the Olympics were taking place in Montreal (I was to walk by the site of that Olympic stadium around 30 years later) – the pier caught fire. That summer was famous for a countrywide drought, so I suppose a fire back then feels appropriate. We could see the flames from the bottom of the road we lived on, some distance away from the pier.

So where are we really going in our imaginary car? Everything’s a graveyard of memories. I last visited Southend in 2004. I took Cath with me to revisit some of the sites of my childhood. Somewhere I have a photograph of me at nearly 40 years of age standing outside the house I’d grown up in. Subsequent owners had made some changes to the property, but it was substantially much as I remembered it.

If I’d been on my own I might have loitered by those flats to see if I could time lapse them back into a church. I would’ve retraced the route of my paper round, looking for my own footsteps sunk into the concrete. Or peered through the glass façade of the town’s central library to imagine myself shuffling to the rear of the building where the SF books were shelved. Opposite would’ve been the tax office where I worked for five years on the second floor, with a view looking across a roundabout towards a bus station and the nearby shopping centre.

None of this would’ve been of interest to Cath, which is why I took her to the pier and then to a café to buy fish and chips. (Chips and chips for me). Then we played crazy golf, which had been crazier in my youth, but seemingly a lot of the more elaborate structures had been removed from the course.

These memories are endless and meaningless in the grander scale of things. Which is why when you accelerate over the speed bumps all you’re really going to do is ruin the suspension of your car. Trust me, I know a lot about cars.