Return of A Native

The Jolly Farmer 1906
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Camberley, where it all began. Where I lived half of my life so far.

In your head you never leave the place you were born and raised. On a wet un-comforting day I found myself revisiting the town of my past. I was cast into memories of wartime school in School Lane, street play, places where I worked, courted, laughed and cried. I recalled the early life, its geography of fixed points. The past cracked open like an egg. It's no longer the place of my growing up, marrying, building a house, having a practice, knowing Grace Reynolds, the Morris Brothers, Chancellor, Fox and Smallbone, Mr Rowlinson at Sadler & Baker, Verran, Pages, architects Cox, Bob Cole and Harry Barton, Herrington & Carmichael, Mr Keil and so on. To look back only emphasised an awful fragility.

From my knowledge stored in a mental attic I was resurrected in a time warp.
There was old man Roberts and his Park Street shop, replete with his pince-nez, bushy moustache, boater, white apron and his flannels turned up to cool his white ankles, when summers were summers then.  Next door Mr Piper, the cobbler, where I came and went with the family footwear, including my black boots - despite the studded soles.

Opposite was a small orchard where I had scrumped - now a Pizza Parlour. Wells Bakery with their threepenny Hovis loaves and Mr Guard out back baking amongst the mice. Stoke's for milk, Garret's for fish and chips, Gillings and Mrs Newman for liquorice sherbet, Weston's newsagent, where for seven and sixpence I sorted the paper rounds before 6 am. And my trips to the Co-op with our ration books, where I admired the overhead encapsulated money whizzing around on wires.  

Enforced Sunday School at St George's, roller-skating down the empty London Road and after school viewing all the cars of the gentry in wartime storage at Whites Park Street, where my dad was their guardian. Skating on the College lakes, the Blue Pool, Arcade Cinema, Regal Cinema where I won a fifteen shilling saving certitificate in a drawing competition. Tolley's, Darracots, Mandarin, Betty Brown's tea shop and the cadets, Crooks and Panks Emporium where I bought an Ostrich egg.

All these places with their nostalgic memories and associations, all gone now. Replaced by a banal town centre, amorphous offices, soulless car parks, so haunted with the ghosts of people gone from my life. Just eddying fragments of memories half lodged in the minds of me and others; and soon that would be gone. My home town is just another place overburdened with cars and faceless people, who all come from someplace else, crowding around, not caring that my town is being transformed into a nightmare metropolis. They wallow in the the slow and certain destruction of life in the commuter belt. I am exiled from it by the years that have gone by in reality, but not in mind.