Going Back

Ireland of the Welcomes, Jul/Aug, 1993
It was the same. There at the roadway a pair of granite gate-posts; the crumbling sides of the arched bridge; the stream beneath.

It was different though. The gate-posts lacked the granite caps of old, prised off to add a touch to some bungalow's modern splendour; the crumbling bridge sides had been pointed and plastered to keep out the rain and frost; the stone-filled stream seemed no longer a hundred feet below the road.

We looked up the lane -- that lane I tramped from school with a burgeoning load of school-books; where a tin bread-bin would sit in a nook with a warm loaf inside (the lane being too long and rough for deliverymen to traverse in comfort); where envelopes or milk bottles nestled in an old, bird-proof, electricity-meter box on a post -- and there was the iron gate into the field.

Somehow, the white, new Nissan car didn't seem the match of the ancient lane, so we got out and walked -- picking our steps; (As my mother used to remind me on the way to school in the morning -- 'Pick your steps, now' she'd say, and I'd always wonder, as children wonder, what the words meant); picking our steps across the rutted lane where a small rivulet now ran ('That wasn't there before'); up the lane where cattle grazed in the fenced-off field ('The old hedgerow has grown neglected'); and where two horses ('horses!') eyed us solemnly from afar.

It was fifteen years or more since leaving. Brig had never been there, but had listened to my tales of roaming the fields, playing in the river, all the childish things I'd done when it was still possible to be a child, and still okay to play.

There was the house, or what was left. The windows were gone, the roof removed, and all the slates taken. The garden, overgrown even in the past, was levelled. The sheds still stood, but likewise were roofless. Everything of childhood was swept up and tidyed, put into some cardboard box in a back-room and backwater of local history.

'The Walshes lived there.' Who could doubt it? I stood at the iron gate looking up towards the yard. There was the lone tree of old -- a Fairy Tree, we were told -- the cattle track they used to and from the river; the green sweep of the field rising towards the furthest hedgerows; the woods beyond. Nearer to hand and down the bank, the boulder Dad dug out of the farmyard and dumped in the river; the green, wet bog (not a real bog, but soft enough to get your boot stuck in if you weren't careful); the briars -- now long, straggling, and barren -- where thumbnail-sized blackberries had grown.

'Shall we go in?' Brig said, looking at the cattle in the field, meaning that we might climb over the gate and walk towards the buildings. I didn't think so.

There were ghosts in that house. Not the familiar ghosts that kept us company day in and out, knocking secret knocks on the front door; standing in the windows during the day; creeping up behind at night.

They were other ghosts, the ghosts of childhood things that were better left undisturbed unless, like the deep-remembered drop to the river from my schoolboy bridge, they would diminish in adulthood to insignificance.

Once I had known every bush and tree; every twist and turn; each stone and pebble. Now, everything was subtly different. I decided it was better to stand here, some hundred yards from the house ('Was it a mere hundred yards? It seemed such a long way before') and just look. It grew cold and we didn't stay long.

Things large in memory look too small up close. Some times and some places you can never go back . But you can still visit -- and remember...