Going Back

My mother has a saying about going back. She says that when you move on, don’t go back. She has never fully explained this wisdom, other than to say that things are never the same.

Yesterday, I had to go to Machynlleth to carry out an assessment. I lived not far from there in a village called Corris Uchaf (Upper Corris) from 1973 to 1976. When we moved there from Maidstone, I was 15 and entering the study regime for what was then CSE and subsequently GSE exams. I didn’t want to go. Indeed, my fears were well founded, I could not easily carry on the subjects I had chosen to follow and the mismatch between a city comprehensive and a rural grammar currently going through the process of becoming one disrupted my education; something from which it never fully recovered. Much of my education has been self-taught as an adult.

Teenagers tend to go through a “fish out of water” phase. For me, that three years was a permanent state of feeling out of place. I wasn’t Welsh at a time of rising national awareness in the heart of north Wales. I didn’t fit and I knew it. I spent that three years longing for a return to England and when my father secured a job in Bristol in the summer of 1976, I left without a backward glance.

Thirty years on I met the signalling manager at Machynlleth and realised that I knew him. His colleague on finding out my history told me that his father used to own the local pub and I knew immediately who he was – I used to go to school with his older brother. We spent about a hour chewing the fat as he filled me in on people who were distant memories, people who I’d thought I’d forgotten and came unbidden from their thirty year slumber. People who were children when I knew them suddenly left the childhood of my memories behind and became adults with familes, children and in some cases, grandchildren. Some have achieved their ambitions, some have not – the mix of life in a microcosm of village life, that, for a brief while, I shared. Talking to him was like stepping back in time for most of these people were still living in the village as their parents had done through generations.

I rode to Corris after our chat and took a couple of photographs of the village and our house; Bronfynnon. It was fitting that the day was overcast and damp; just as I recalled it that day in 1973 when as an unhappy teenager I realised that this was my home. Yesterday, though, I was looking at it with different eyes. As Mrs Longrider commented when she looked at the pictures later, this is a beautiful location and how wonderful it must be to live there. What my parents saw then became all too apparent. The pull of a rural environment is what made us buy a similar property in a small village in the south of France in 2003. Now, I understand. It didn’t work out for my parents in the 1970s, so they returned to the city and they tried again when they moved to their current location in Devon following retirement.

To wake up and look across green mountains and fields, to hear nothing louder than the sound of sheep, cattle or cockerels and the trickling of the brook at the bottom of the garden. To experience a pace of life that sees no need to rush. Yes, now I understand.

I felt a pang of sadness yesterday. Thirty years ago I didn’t understand and did not value what it was we had. When I saw people who still live there, who have changed little in the intervening time, I realised. Yesterday restimulated some bitter-sweet memories, and I understand why my mother says don’t go back. You can’t change what was, so why revisit it? She is probably right.