Nostalgia Tour

“Daddy, ple...ase don’t mow the daisies!” As a child I loved flowers. I loved nature. I loved anything beautiful. I would get myself up on summer nights after I had been put to bed and climb up on the windowsill, staring out, spellbound at the fiery, crimson and yellow, pollution-induced colours of the sunset above the local reservoir at the bottom of our road. I loved the bright, tall gladioli that grew against the wall in our garden and the tall wigwams of runner beans with their scarlet flowers that my father grew. Looking back, beauty of all kinds was of paramount importance to me, and especially colour.

 

Yesterday we went on a nostalgia tour: on a trip back in time to the country town where my husband was born. He pointed out the stream where he had played as a child, repeated stories of the hop fields through which he had walked on his way to school, pointed out the road where his junior school was and showed me, with a mix of pride and regret, the prestigious school whose entrance examination he had failed years ago. We walked together past black and white half-timbered buildings, a relic of the past still present in the busy modern-day shopping centre, past little rows of Georgian houses, tucked away down side turnings, past the old green, the castle and the river, recalling his childhood. The town nestled amongst green fields, country houses and picturesque oast houses. It was a very different childhood to mine. “You can see why I grew up the way I did, can’t you?” he said. It explained his abiding love for the countryside.

 

It didn’t explain mine. Brought up in a fairly ordinary London suburb, the most beautiful thing I remember in my past was the sunsets and they were probably the product of the dirty smoke belched from factory chimneys, the fumes from the already growing traffic problem and the coal fires that were lit every night by thousands of Londoners, in the days before smokeless fuel. But looking back, I remember the daisies on the lawn and my sorrow each time my father got the lawnmower out of the garage and brought their short, beautiful lives to a premature end. I remember the vivid pink cherry blossom in the front garden and my horror when the tree had to be cut down because its roots were undermining the garden wall. I remember the huge clump of brown daisies growing beside the garage door, permanently surrounded by a cloud of buzzing bees. I remember the tall green poplars that grew on the other side of the railings around the tarmacked playground of our junior school.

 

Despite my urban upbringing, I was an admirer of beauty and a lover of nature. Where did these longings come from? I have no idea. But they are as strong in me today as in my husband. I never played beside a stream as a child. I never walked through hop fields. My early environment was full of city streets, shops, gasometers and blocks of flats. Nowadays I shun most of this and head for countryside and the sea. My mother was a country girl, from a rural Somerset village. Maybe these family memories are buried deep in my genes and I am simply a product of my inheritance, not my upbringing. How do these things work? I don’t know. But I seem to have a peculiar, nostalgic connection with a past existence that never happened to me.