Childhood Archives - Nicholas Hedges

The Putting Green

January 24, 2015 by Nicholas Hedges

When I was a child, we would often go as a family to Swanage for our holidays, usually accompanied by my Nan and Grandad. I have wonderful memories of those times; sudden storms on the beach, the amusement arcade (from which my Nan was asked to leave after a mild-mannered contretemps with the change machine), evening milkshakes in Fortes, preceded by putting on the putting green (pictured below).

Putting in Swanage c1980

I loved putting and it was during a conversation in the office about Swanage that I wondered where exactly the putting green was. So often with memories, an event’s location slips anchor and drifts away, bumping up against other unassociated memories.

Using Google Streetview, I ‘went for a walk’ through the town centre, past the amusement arcade and what had been Fortes and, using the house in the background of the above photograph, arrived at what had been the putting green.

It was a putting green no more.

Google Streetview showing the location of the putting green today

It’s disconcerting, coming face to face with your past in the form of a ruin, or covered – as above – in tarmac. Suddenly, the way in which I visualise the far-distant past becomes the means by which I see my own.

I found the same on a visit to my first school, when I saw how the swimming pool had become an overgrown ruin.

John Wesley (1703-1791)

December 17, 2014 by Nicholas Hedges

Every Sunday, from when I was born to the age of 16, I went to church. It was in many respects – and still is, even though I no longer attend – the hub of family life, having played a central part in the life of my extended family from the moment my mum moved to Oxford with her family in 1952. I was christened there in 1971; my mum and dad were married there, as were my aunts and uncles and several cousins. Many members of my family met their partners in the Youth Club and of course we have said goodbye to family members; my Grandad in 1984, my Nan in 2010 and step-father in 2008.

I doubt there is any place in the world that harbours so many memories for me, but the one I want to recall today isn’t a specific memory as such but rather a recollection. I recall how as a young boy, I used – when singing hymns – to look at the dates of birth and death of the authors, in particular John Wesley. It’s hard to say what I thought while looking at his dates (1703-1791); I can, as an adult, only interpret what that child was thinking. (Thinking about this now, it could be that it was Charles Wesley’s hymns we sang, in which case the dates would be (1707-1788). It could of course have been both). I remember too a plaque on the wall, dedicated to the memory of a man killed in the Second World War. Again there was something about the dates that captivated me – a date from a time – and a place – before I was born.

The dates of someone’s birth and death delineate a space, much as a boundary on a map, a place that existed but doesn’t anymore. They are coordinates for the beginning and end of a journey.

Childhood Landscapes

October 15, 2014 by Nicholas Hedges

‘I can see him now,’ my Nana told me, talking about her dad, ‘because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us, and if we went out to play, our Mam would say, “you can go up the mountain to play…” but every now and then our Mam would come out in the garden and we had to wave to her to know that we were alright you know… always remember going up the mountain…’

Nana’s mountain

I interviewed my Nana in 2007, the year before she died. What she was describing was a scene from her childhood landscape in the years after the First World War. During the Second World War, a young boy called Otto Dov Kulka was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He recalls his childhood landscape thus:

“The colour is blue: clear blue skies of summer. Silver-coloured toy aeroplanes carrying greetings from distant worlds pass slowly across the azure skies while around them explode what look like white bubbles. The aeroplanes pass by and the skies remain blue and lovely, and far off, far off on that clear summer day, distant blue hills as though not of this world make their presence felt.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau

In previous blogs I have described my childhood landscapes, both real and imagined; most recently in the context of childhood landscapes pre World War I, this time of two girls who lived in what is now Bury Knowle Park in Headington, Oxford.

My childhood landscapes are bound up with journeys to and from my grandparents’ houses and in particular, my Nan’s garden (pictured below) also in Headington.

I have walked in all these places; in my grandparents’ garden; in Bury Knowle Park, on the ‘mountain’ in Wales and in Auschwitz. I spent many happy years in the garden of my childhood home (which has all but disappeared under a vast extension to the house).

Beneath the floor

May 5, 2013 by Nicholas Hedges

I’ve always found it amazing, when, on a programme like Time Team, an apparently empty field is shown to have once been the site of some vast Roman villa; how something so grand and seemingly permanent can one day be lost to both memory and the landscape; a memento mori of inscribed lines on quite an epic scale. The recent discovery of the tomb of Richard III is perhaps the most vivid illustration of this; how the grave of so eminent a man could be buried (albeit hastily) in the choir of a friary, only for all trace (of both the grave and the friary) to be lost beneath the tarmac of a nondescript car park. In Urne Burial (1658), Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

“There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” In the garden of the house in which I grew up, there was an oak tree – now lost; a victim of the relentless drive to build flats and houses on every scrap of space ‘available’.

In the shade of that tree (visible above on the right hand side) and the lawn beyond its reach, I spent many childhood days, playing football, high-jumping (badly), playing at being ‘The Professionals’ and, on one occasion, holding a sale to raise money for charity. But in the last year, a few years since my dad sold up and left, half the house has been pulled down (including most of my bedroom) and a new one built alongside, covering most of the garden.

The lawn on which we had picnics, over which the rabbit – Patch – thundered, chasing Sammy the cat – and the beds beneath which those same animals, amongst many others, were interred, is now itself buried beneath new concrete floors and builder’s rubble.

It’s strange to think of someone standing in a kitchen, or sitting in a living room, on the exact same space where we once played.

And that’s what made me think of those Roman villas lost to the past beneath the ground; all those memories attached to those buildings which have soaked away like water, into the ground over the course of two millennia.

The garage is now a particularly mournful sight. Here, I spent many hours (often with enormous hair as evidenced by the photograph) on the drive, playing football with my brother and friends – or sometimes by myself (I can still hear the sound of the plastic ball skitting across the concrete and the bash of the blue metal door which was sometimes the goal). The sounds too at night of my dad arriving home in the car, the radio blaring as the wooden gates were opened; the whoosh of the garage door being lifted, are memories more permanent than the concrete drive itself. Now the garage is a sorry looking creature, whose full demise is certain, along with the shed tucked away behind (in which we sometimes slept on warm summer nights).

The photo below of me and my cousins (on my dad’s side) was taken when I was a baby in the summer of 1971.

The patch of grass on which we’re sitting would soon become the garage….

The Answer

March 8, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

For years the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself has been staring me in the face. Its own face is a big ugly one on the cover of a book which I used to have and which I loved to read and play as a child.

I won’t say anymore for now, so again this entry is one that will, for the time being, make sense only to me.

Before Demolition

July 19, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

On Friday last week I paid a visit to my old school (Northway Midddle) which is due to be demolished in the next few weeks to make room for houses. I left the school in 1984, the year that it was closed, and even then it was clear that the preferred option of many was to pull it down and make room for houses. Ever since, the building has remained standing in a kind of limbo, part community centre, part office space and having heard the decision last week to finally put the place out of its misery – a decision which seems absurd given its potential (potential which the council couldn’t see if it picked up a football and did six hours of keepy-ups) – I decided to try and gain entry and take a few photographs before it’s lost forever.

Granted, Northway School is not the most beautiful of buildings, but with its gym and playing fields, art room (including a walk-in kiln) and stage it could have been turned into a first class sports and cultural centre. Of course the council were as unimaginative in 1984 as they are today and instead it became a wasted space. And whatever the merits – or otherwise – of the building itself, it’s nonetheless a piece of the area’s heritage. It’s played a major part in the lives of many people and deserves to be recorded.

Therefore with my camera I endeavoured to do just that. I had been warned that the interior of the building had been altered a great deal after 1984 but even so I wanted to find something, one image that encapuslated what the place meant to me and many others. Standing inside the building for the first time in 25 years I could see just how much it had changed (rather like myself), and as I walked around in the company of the caretaker, I found that my memories were somehow scrambled as if by by the stud walls and altered layouts of the rooms. Nevertheless I started taking pictures, attempting to jump start my memory, as if the camera was a defribulator for my brain.

The stairwell hadn’t changed a bit and I could almost hear the sound of the school bell and voices chattering. But in most parts of the school’s trashed interior it was as if I was walking in a place I’d never been to before. Even the view through the windows had changed almost beyond recognition. The John Radcliffe hospital loomed ever larger and the playground had already been turned into houses. Only the imposing tower block on the estate anchored the view in the past, and catching a glimpse of it through a few of the windows started the memories coming.

After about half an hour and having walked around the school from top to bottom, I began at last to recall things, to see memories much more clearly. I was able to remove the stud walls and new corridors and reimagine how the place had looked when I was there. I remembered the maths room and Mr Smith. I could recall how he’d turn on the lights before appearing. In looking out the window, I could also remember that I’d been in this room when my grandad had died on January 13th 1984. It was around 2.15pm when he passed away.

Perhaps the room I remembered most clearly and that which was the most recognisable was Mrs. Bantam’s. She was my teacher in the first year and even though the room was just a shell, I could easily recall how things had looked, what it was like to move around inside. The way we move around a given space and the way memories are ‘attached’ to such a movement became very apparent here. Whereas before (except on the stairwell) familiar paths through the building had been blocked by ‘new’ partitions and so on (particularly in the third year area), here those paths remained intact. Memory isn’t only triggered by what we see and hear and what we smell, but the way we move through a space. Memory is kinaesthetic.

After about an hour I had to leave, finishing with photographs of the windowsills into which some pupils had scratched their names.

As I think back to my visit, I don’t so much see the things I saw then, the images which you can see on the photographs, but rather my memories, which despite the altered condition of the interior have become sharper – at least in places.

The above picture was once the science room, the domain of Mr. Hipkiss. The room I remember as being dark. There were high wooden desks, a blackboard in the corner and the strange lingering smell of chemicals which were kept in a room at the front of the class. We had to cover our books in wallpaper (woodchip in my case) and it was in this room that I first heard the word Google. In fact, I now recall how Mr. Hipkiss had written the number (a Googleplex, one comprising umpteen noughts) on a long sheet of paper. I can see it now on the wall. I seem to remember black blinds which might account for the fuliginous aspect of my memory and the faces Mr. Hipkiss drew of eminent scientists which were always photocopied so the text and drawings were pink. They weren’t true likenesses, he told us. He had made them all up.

The above picture shows the old art room and at the back was where we had cookery lessons with Mrs. Braybrooke.

This room was a basic woodworking room and general craft area which had a walk-in kiln. So which photograph encapsulates my time at the school? Well it would have to be the second photograph in this blog, that which I reproduced below.

Memories are, as I said kinaesthetic and nowhere are the paths through the school better preserved than on the stairwell. How many times did I walk up and down them? Impossible to say. All I know now is that I won’t ever again and soon no-one ever will.

Back to my First School

June 20, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

Today, my brother Simon and I took a trip down memory lane and visited New Marston First School which had opened its doors as part of its anniversary celebrations. The school had opened in 1949 and 27 years later, in 1976 I began my time there, leaving four years later to attend Northway Middle school. Simon had started three years earlier than me and it was hard to believe that some 30 years and more had passed since that time. I can still recall quite clearly my time at nursery (a stone’s throw away) and my first visit to the school when I was four years old. I’d made a picture of a lamb with polystyrene balls – or rather out of polystyrene balls I should perhaps say. And so there I was today, almost ten times the age I’d be when I first walked through the gates; if I was to return ten times my current age I’d be getting on for 400; dead in other words and a little upsetting for the children of 2409.

Almost straight away, as soon as we walked through the gates I began to feel a wave of nostalgia flooding not so much over me, but within me; ‘welling within me’ would perhaps be a better phrase for I could sense the place physically; I could recall walking there as a child. Much of it looks much the same, although of course things have changed, a few new doors, a new bicycle shed (or is it shelter now?) and so on, but essentially little else had been altered. However, after 30 years or more things are bound to be different and nowhere was this more evident than at what had been the swimming pool; a place beloved by my nostalgic mind, but loathed at the time by my feeble little body.

The changing rooms were always, to say the least, basic; sheds (or were they shelters?) comprising holes, breezeblocks and a corrugated roof. They were insubstantial then and just about standing in their decrepitude now, but the pool itself, if anything does remain is now lost in a jungle of trees, brambles and weeds. I couldn’t imagine a scene more different from what I could remember; indeed, if the whole plot had been cleared and a new block built in its place it wouldn’t have seemed as changed. It was shocking to see that part of my childhood had already become in part a ruin – but not just a ruin, rather, one undiscovered in the midst of sprawling vegetation. The swimming pool had become the equivalent – albeit less dramatic – of a Mayan temple lost in a Mexican jungle.

Nature was reclaiming a part of my childhood, much as it had recovered the graves I’d seen at Highgate cemetery and I was reminded of the words of Walter Benjamin and his concept of ‘Natural History’ which is not, as we might suppose, the history of nature, but rather a term to describe the manner in which the ‘artefacts of human history acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life.’ I’d always thought about this definition in respect to ruins and other monuments of the past, and yet here it was, perfectly illustrated at the remains of a pool in which I used to swim (and in which I’d gained my 10 metre swimming badge).
Standing at the back of the pool and looking into the undergrowth, I could almost hear the sound of the water; I could remember the grey clouds which always seemed to gather whenever it was swim-day. And looking at the backs of the changing rooms, I could see in my mind’s eye, the board on which the temperature was always chalked and which was never above 16^oC.

Inside, the school had changed very little. The main hall straight in front was everything I remembered it being – although there was a new floor (the old floor was a brown tiled one with a tennis court marked – for some reason – in tape) but before we could go inside we were greeted and taken to the ‘anniversary display’ in what was, in our day at least, the east-end of the school and a very different place to the west. It has to be said that the display left something to be desired. There were a few documents from the 1950s and 90s, but very little from the 70s which rather surprised me. Still, I was rather more interested in looking around and walking the length of the ‘east-end’ corridor the memories soon returned. But these memories were not so much of specific things but rather a general sense of having been there before a long time ago. They were memories insofar as I could recall images, albeit vague, and could recognise differences (it’s in the differences – what’s not there and what has been added – that memories are perhaps most clearly defined), but these memories were as much physical as cerebral; they were sensations rather than impressions. Now this may not be the time to begin discussing the kinaesthetic nature of memory or the notion of consciousness as corporeal (embodied mind as opposed to a mind/body dualism) but I was interested in how my visit to the school would help me in my recent work with phenomenological perception… but more of that later.

At the end of the east-end corridor is a small incline on which we used to stand in line to get our dinner. The canteen itself has now been moved (to what was a cloakroom) but looking at the room from the outside I couldn’t get over how small it was. My memories of the canteen have always been of a large room, full of echoes in which hundreds of children sat and ate their food. Looking at it today I could see how my memory had ‘grown’ the interior to match my body in the years that had passed. It was a fraction of the size I’d remembered.

Looking at what is now called the sports hall – opposite what was the canteen – I could see that something was different but couldn’t tell exactly what that something was. Initially, and consciously at least, I thought that nothing much had changed, but a change had been registered somewhere, because when we went outside, I could see straight away that most of the old large windows had been blocked off which answered the question ‘what’s different?’ that had been there all the time.
The more we walked through the school, so more changes became apparent. Where the school had previously been one long corridor, there were now several doors dividing it up. This, I would imagine, has as much to do with fire safety as anything else and called to mind how when we were at school the fire alarm was the headmaster, Mr. Norris, who during drills walked through the school ringing a bell. In the event of a real fire, one imagines he might well have run rather than walked and shouted ‘Fire! Get out! Get out!’ just to be sure.

In the main hall, which we’d glimpsed when we first arrived, things – apart from the floor and a scattering of technology – had changed very little. The wall-bars still stood against one of the walls and the stage still stood musing upon my past successes.

Boy in dressing gown was one notable part. A snake-charmer in Little Mookra another. But the crowning achievement was Prince Florenzel in Snow White. When I was meant to be proclaiming to the audience of my love for Snow White I was indisposed in the toilet. The stone steps leading to the stage (from the toilet) are still as they were; as clear and as sparkly as the memory itself. Indeed, along with these steps, there was a lot that was quite unchanged.

The clothes pegs, benches and shoe-baskets of one of the old cloakrooms were still in place. But it wasn’t so much things still in situ or things that had changed which prompted a rush of memories, as the line we were walking.

What was most familiar to me as we walked through the school was the shape of the corridor, the shape of the ‘line’ we followed. Therefore, the nostalgia pangs (for want of a better way of putting it) weren’t so much the result of a mental response to the school but also a physical one. Or, to take the argument I alluded to previously, the response was that of an embodied mind; in other words, we don’t remember things in the mind and as a consequence feel a physical response, but rather they are one and the same thing. The recollection isn’t only triggered through our senses (in this case our vision) but by our physical position in a place, by our being in that place; we sense and think with our bodies.

I felt this particularly strongly in the playground in which there was a notable absence of climbing frames – proper climbing frames that is, with metal bars and concrete underneath. As I walked across the playground to the door which led back into the west-end corridor I found myself ‘physically thinking’ of times associated with my being at the school; my nan’s garden, summer holidays and our house in Coniston Avenue. It wasn’t so much just recalling memories but somehow experiencing them.
After 40 minutes or so we left, and it was a very strange feeling to walk back through the gates, doing something so clearly connected with going home, to where we lived as children. The view up the hill only served to pull the body in that direction.

Instead however we turned left and walked towards our old Middle School – Northway, which is now something of a community centre; I say something, as from the outside it looks more than a little care-worn. Again, the same pangs of nostalgia took a hold as I walked through the gate, and again these sensations came about as a result of being in that particular place. Seeing a photograph brings back memories, but that is very different to feeling them. In looking at a images of something as it was may bring about visual memories. But being in a place makes them physical
Like the swimming pool at New Marston, I haven’t seen something so fundamentally altered (and which has made such an impact on me) as the playground – or rather, the place where the playground used to be. The whole area including a large piece of land surrounding what was the second year area has now become a small housing development. The problem is that part of the school or community centre or whatever it’s meant to be now appears utterly incongruous.

To have a school gym abutting a bungalow is odd at the very least; in terms of my remembering the past and how things used to be it was utterly absurd. Of course things change, but one would have thought that planners could have been a little more imaginative in how the school was incorporated into the development and how in turn the development was incorporated into the school.

The gym and the second year classrooms, of which I have very fond memories, looked like a limb tied off from the body of the school, and as a result they appeared lifeless and in need of removal

Having left the school and returned to the car we drove past our childhood home in Coniston Avenue. All roads from the two schools we’d visited seemed to take us there but when we drove past we saw clearly how the passage of time could change things, again for the worse. Since my dad left a few years back the house has gradually fallen into a state of disrepair, but this has become a whole lot worse and the house looks on its way to becoming derelict. The fences have gone, the garage is boarded up and most shockingly of all, the large oak tree which played such a part in my childhood, being feature of the small world that I knew and fuelling my imagination has been cut down. We drove past quickly so I didn’t have time to take it all in, but in that split second I found a gap which couldn’t be filled by a hundred years of looking.

A to B

February 24, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

As part of a new project, I took a walk to Headington, going via the house where I grew up. I haven’t walked around that area for many years and was quite surprised at how run down it appeared to be, particularly my old house. Of course places change – it’s only natural, but many houses and gardens in what was once a very well maintained street looked – for want of a better word – shabby. Like a lot of places nowadays, the front gardens have been abandoned, either to cars or, through apathy, to the weeds. Walls and fences have been torn down. They’ve collapsed or been removed. There’s a profusion of signs too – a common complaint for many – which litter the streets; a far cry from the 1970s and 80s.

I was also aware as I walked of the huge increase in traffic in the area, at least since I’d lived there, particularly towards Old Headington which, I assume has something to do with the ever expanding John Radcliffe Hospital.

It was on my way to Old Headington that I became aware of two different qualities of memory – not specific ones as such, but those accumulated memories which help us know where we are. I’ve walked thousands of times up and down the streets where I lived (to and from school; to and from the shops), but on the road towards Old Headington my memories are much more of being driven, usually on my way to my Nan’s in the back of Dad’s car. Walking the street today, I noticed things that I’d never seen before whereas walking down the street on which I lived everything was much more familiar (even though they’d changed). This difference is due to the way memories of these places were formed. Of the street on which I lived they were formed, in the main, through walking. On the road to Old Headington, they were formed, again in the main, through a window in the back of the car.

As we walk, we accumulate a sense of place through the memories which are stored in the mind. These images are stronger and clearer when taken in through walking, and indeed when recalled through walking. The slower the pace (although not to the point of a standstill) the more we absorb of the world and thereby the better our sense of place.

The world today, or rather our interaction with and indeed within it is very ‘nodal’. We travel from A to B, usually (but not always) as quickly as we can. The bit in between A and B is taken up, in the case of the car, with looking at the road ahead of us. I should point out that I am in no way anti-car, anti-train or anti-plane; I rely on them as anyone does; my point is that we rely on them far too much at the expense of our engagement with the world around us.

When we walk from A to B however, we don’t ‘get’ just A and B but everything in between. The act of walking ‘anchors’ our destination and the place from which we travel, positioning them in the world. We have time to think, to see and to accumulate a sense of place. We have time to engage with the world and thereby position ourselves within it.

Whilst studying the Old London Road for another project, I began to get an understanding of how slowing our life down helps us to engage with the world around us. I also became aware of how roads today are much different to those in the past. Journeys were slower and roads were very much more a connection between two places. This may sound like a truism, but what I mean is that today, one could travel for mile after mile on roads without actually getting anywhere at all. Destination is not something built into the fabric of the road – something which I felt was very much the case on the Old London Road. Again I should point out that I am not in favour (were it possible) of a return to bumpy, uncomfortable, 16 hour journeys to London.

When the pace of life was slower, when people walked more than they did, I wonder whether their sense of place in the world was different (physical as opposed to social). Again I don’t want to sound as if I’m being naively romantic about the past – it was often grim and difficult to say the very least, but I do think it must have been the case that the world was perceived very differently, not because of the lack of technologies such as the camera, the internet, film or television per se, but because of the pace. Technology of course is a contributing factor to the increased pace of life (and not just through transport). Increasingly we use our mobile phones or email to contact one another (and a great thing both of them are too). But again, this form of contact reduces the world to nodes, to A and B. In the days before such technologies (even when phones were abundant – this applies to a time not so long ago) if we wanted to speak with someone, we would go to meet them, or write them a letter. Either way, our words were physical; they had a place in the world; it wasn’t just about A to B but, as with walking, A through to B.

I think what I’ve gleaned through my ramblings – both physical and verbal – is that we are missing the bits in between. Everything is being reduced to A, B and C. Where there are bit in between, they are little more than a hinterland, glimpses of which we snatch as we travel along roads, motorways, train tracks or even through the air. This brings me back to the houses of which I spoke earlier. They have the appearance, even to the walker, of something that is seen in transit, at speed. Even if one looks for a period of time at one of the houses I saw today (again by no means all of them) it’s as if one is looking through the window of a passing car.

Maps

January 8, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

As a child I spent many hours drawing maps of imaginary lands to which in my mind I would often escape. Over time these worlds – and one in particular (see image below) – became a very real part of my existence; I knew its towns, forests, plains and mountains; I knew the seas by which it was surrounded, the lakes and rivers and potted histories of each location. I created characters and can still to this day remember them along with the geography of the world they inhabited.

As well as being a means of navigating my imagination, the maps were also guides to the real world. Whilst out walking, I would just as likely find myself walking in my fictional landscape and as such parallels between the real and the imagined were established. To some extent these parallels still exist but it wasn’t until I started researching trench maps of the area in which my great-great-uncle Jonah Rogers was killed (near Ypres) that I was again reminded of my fictional world.

I was interested in pinpointing the place in which Jonah Rogers was killed; to see what the terrain was like and thereby understand, at least in part, something of the world he would have known. One can often imagine that the trenches were more or less just rudimentary ditches cut into the ground in which soliders lived as best they could, just a matter of yards away from the enemy, and of course, in many respects that’s precisley what they were; but the trench system was actually very complex. Far from being two lines gouged into the ground, the trenches of the opposing armies were labyrinthine as the image below reveals.

This map shows an area just outside Ypres. One can see precisely how complex the system of trenches were and yet of course the map can only tell us so much. Sanctuary Wood (shown on the left of the detail above) was described in the diary of one officer as follows:

“Of the terrible and horrible scenes I have seen in the war, Sanctuary Wood is the worst… Sanctuary Wood in 1914 was a sanctuary, but today, Dante in his wildest imaginings never conceived a like.”

It’s hard to imagine Dante’s image of hell as being in any way less horrific than anything on earth, particularly when looking at the map above.

What one can also see on another part of this map are some of the names which soldiers gave to the trenches and the areas in which they were fighting. Often names that were difficult to pronnounce were changed so that, for example, Ploegsteert became Plug Street. However, in some cases, areas were given names that made sense in terms of their being familiar names from home.

On this image one can clearly see a place called Clapham Junction. Of course there was no Clapham Junction in Belgium before the war, but by naming unfamiliar (and often utterly destroyed areas) with familiar names, soldiers and officers could, one assumes, navigate areas more easily, whether physically or in terms of reconaissance and planning. To plan attacks on places which have become muddied wastelands (to put it mildly) with few features remaining (the woods on the maps, shown as collections of lollypop trees were of course little more than burned splinters) one would need names, just as one would need names for the complex network of trenches. Could it be that by naming places with names from home, such reduced and barren landscapes (the ‘topography of Golgotha’ as Wilfred Owen called the Western Front) would appear as belonging in some way to the soldiers who fought there – was it a way of inspiring them?

The closest map – in terms of date – I could find relating to my great-great-uncle’s war, was one of St. Julien which dates from July 1915, just two months after his death in the Second Battle of Ypres. I’d wanted to get an idea of the trench system he would have been known at first hand and as I looked at the trenches shown (only German trenches were shown on this map) I found a road named after my home town; Oxford Road. Ironically, alongside this road was a cottage (one must assume there was little left of it at the time) which had been dubbed Monmouth Cottage – my great-great-uncle was from Monmouthshire.

I couldn’t help but think there was something in this naming of unfamiliar places with more familiar names which paralleled thoughts I’d had as regards my family heritage and in particular how researching it has helped me relate more easily to the past.

History is of course full of gaps. If we try and picture a place as it appeared at a given date we have to use our imaginations to fill in the holes where, for example, buildings have been razed. If we read reports or stories about events in the past we have to use our imaginations to understand the moment as fully as possible, to understand how the average person responded at the time. In doing so, we project a part of ourselves onto the past, something which is of course familiar (see ‘From Dinosaurs to Human Beings,’ OVADA Residency Blog, 2007).

Like my childhood maps of invented places, my family tree is in many ways a map of a fictional landscape, or rather a route through it. That is not to say of course that my family’s past is itself a fiction, but rather that history, in terms of how we see it in our minds is. History is in many ways a wasteland having been obliterated by time and yet there are parts of its landscape which still remain standing despite the tumult. Extant buildings, contemporaneous documents all act as pointers to a disappeared world, a world which also hides untold numbers of anonymous people. To help me navigate this landscape , I can invent my own names just as I did as a child, only this time the names will relate to, or be those of my ancestors; they will refer to dates and facts I have gleaned about their lives. In this sense I am labelling an unfamiliar, temporal landscape with familiar names, a landscape that like the battlefields of the Front has been all but destroyed. I’m filling in the gaps, mapping myself not only onto the physical world but also the past.

The worlds I invented as a child were in many ways idealised views of the real world with unspoilt forests, mediaeval cities and unpolluted seas. What faced the man at the Front was the opposite, a terrible vision of what the world could be or had become. Labelling such a world with names like Piccadilly, Buckingham Palace Road, Marylebone Road, Liverpool Street, Trafalgar Square and so on, in some ways gave it a more human face; where there were gaps, such names would fill them in perhaps with memories of home.

In the end maps are there to guide us, to reveal something about a place or perhaps a person; it all depends of course on what the map represents. We might be looking at maps of countries or maps of the brain – Katherine Harmon’s book ‘Personal Geographies and other Maps of the Imagination‘ is a great resource in this respect. When I look at the map of my invented world, I am not so much presented with a means of navigating a fictional world but rather a map of my own childhood. Looking at the place names I can in fact see the real world as it was at the time. The map therefore becomes a representation of something entirely different. The same could be said of the Trench Maps. They are maps of something quite unimaginable; if we took one and stood on a battlefield today it might offer us a hint of the way things were. But with the names of the trenches, roads, farms and cottages, they become maps of somewhere entirely different – a fictional place built only from memories. But those memories conjured by the names listed above – Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square etc. – are our memories, we can only imagine Trafalgar Square as it is today or as it is within our own minds. What we can establish, with the help of these maps, is an understanding of a sense of dislocation, between the solider in the trenches and his life back home. They serve to make those who fought and died in the war much more real.

With regards a map of my family tree I can place my ancestors in different parts of the country but of course none of them lived their lives standing still. Again there are gaps to be filled and whereas to fill in the gaps of history one can use one’s imagination, with regards the mapping of my ancestry and individual people, it is through walking around the places that they inhabited that these gaps can be filled. To close, I return to the blog entry I made during a residency at OVADA. In it I wrote:

“These invented worlds became, as I grew up, the ‘invented’ or imagined landscapes of Oxford’s past; landscapes that were – just as they still are – created from fragments, parts of the past which are still extant in the city; old buildings, walls, objects and so on. Between these structures, these fragments, I would fill the gaps, with my own imagination, with thoughts derived from my own experience. The city’s past and the past in general, as it exists within my mind, is then, to use the metaphor of cloning in Jurassic Park, a cloned dinosaur. The extant buildings, structures and objects within museums, are like the mosquitoes trapped inside the amber. They are broken strands of DNA. All that is required is for me to fill the gaps, and this I can do with my own DNA. I am in effect, the frog.
This metaphor is interesting in that DNA patterns are, of course, unique to everyone. My DNA is different to everybody else’s as there’s is to mine. Therefore, using my imagination to plug in the gaps of the past, means that the ‘past’ will comprise large parts of my own experience; my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being. (See ‘Postcard 1906’). But although my DNA is unique, it is nonetheless derived from my own past, elements have been passed down by my ancestors from time immemorial. The code which makes me who I am, comprises parts of people I know now (parents and grandmothers), people I knew (grandfathers and great-grandmother) and people lost to the past altogether (great-great grandparents and so on). What interests me about this, is that, through stating above how ‘my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being’ I can now see that ‘my dinosaur’ will contain elements of my own being, which is itself comprised of elements of hundreds – thousands – of people, the majority of whom I will of course never know and who have been dead for centuries. I like to think therefore, that ‘my dinosaur’ and my imagination aren’t entirely unique.”

In the traditional diagram of the family tree each individual is isolated, joined to others by means of a single line, almost as if they appeared at one point, moved a bit and passed the baton on to the next in line. Of course things are much more complex than this; individuals overlap in terms of the length of their lives and if we were to try and represent an individual’s journey through life, the line would be impossibly complex. Inevitably there are gaps which as I’ve said I can fill (at least, in part) by walking in the places they would have walked. In Wales, where my Grandmother grew up I found it incredible to think that this place I’d never been to and the streets, lanes and hills I had never walked, had all played a part in my existence. Without them I would not be here, or indeed there. I was then filling in the gaps, like the frog DNA in Jurassic Park, but the dinosaur I spoke of in the extract above was not so much History in this case, but me.

Random Memories: The 1983 General Election

June 26, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

I have recently started to think more about my memories and how I should start writing them down, not because as a collection they would amount to a great memoir, but because it’s often the small snippets which come to us for no apparent reason that are amongst the most interesting. Reading the work of W.G Sebald has certainly precipitated this idea and so, here I am with a memory which came to me a few moments ago. I should point out that these memories are not stories or anecdotes; they do not have a punchline or cast new light on momentous moments of the past, but rather they are fragments which remind me of how life really was. Incidentally, I took delivery today of a copy of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcade Project’, a large tome, made up of quotes, thoughts, ruminations etc. on the Parisian Arcades of the Nineteenth Century. To borrow, or rather steal, from the translators’ notes:

“Benjamin’s intention from the first, it would seem, was to grasp such diverse material under the general category of Urgeschichte signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century. This was something that could be realized only indirectly, through ‘cunning’: it was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history, the half concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of ‘the collective,’ that was to be the object of study [my italics], and with the aid of methods more akin – above all, in their dependence of chance – to the methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or indeed to the methods of the nineteenth-century ragpicker, than to those of the modern historian. Not conceptual analysis but something like dream interpretation was the model.”

It’s often the case, that these small pieces of memory, these apparently inconsequential fragments, often build to give a much clearer, more defined image of a time, than a particular event or traditional historiography, and, as such, I will write as many that spring to mind over the coming months.

The first of these fragments concerns me riding my bike (I was going to write ‘cycling’ but ‘cycling’ wasn’t what I did when I was a boy. I ‘rode my bike’ as all boys did). I was ‘riding my bike’ up Ambleside Drive (one of the roads around where I grew up) at a time approaching an election. I’m not entirely sure as to which election it was, but given my age, I can only assume it was the General Election of 1983. Ambleside Drive itself was a very pleasant road which rose from the bottom of a hill (where was my old school) to the top – Eden Drive – where one would find a small collection of four shops, all of which have since disappeared: Kendal’s (groceries), Tucker’s (butcher), Shepherd’s (greengrocer) and the Post Office. I have many memories of this small parade which would fill several pages in themselves, but for the moment, here are just a few.

I remember buying sweets in Kendal’s (when this shop closed, the purchase of sweets was transferred to the Post Office opposite or Mallows at the bottom of the hill) and being amazed by the slicing machine with its circular blade. Here we purchased our sweets prior to going to the cinema up in Headington; they were a type of sweet I can’t quite put my finger on, although mint and lemon seems to ring a bell. The cinema was at the top of the road where my grandparents lived and it was here I saw Benji and Grizzly among many others. I remember little else about Kendal’s, apart from the slices of ham falling from the machine, the cheese slicer, the jars of sweets (a ‘quarter of pear drops’) up on the left, ‘Wavy Line’ and the path outside, which ran by the side of the shop to join the road. When the shop closed and became a house, I couldn’t quite believe I wasn’t able to walk on that path anymore, and the whole idea of a shop becoming a house seemed to go against the whole nature of things – just as it does today. In fact, there is something still quite ghostly and not a little sad about this small parade.
Mr Tucker the butcher (adjacent to Kendal’s) was a cheerful man, always in his dirty white coat, bald head, black-rimmed glasses and sporting large sideburns. I can see him now taking the pencil from behind his ears and writing the price on the paper packet, containing whatever meat Mum was cooking that week. I remember the beaded curtain to the back, the way he wrote his prices in deformed numerals, in the window display and on the board outside. And the handles of the doors – I remember them, along with the front wall, which, I believe is still there today.

Mr Shepherd, the greengrocer (opposite Tucker’s) was was a cheerful man. He too would always have a pen behind his ear and would wear a coat that was either green or grey. I seem to recall an orange biro, or even a collection of biros in his top pocket. Like Mr Tucker, his prices comprised deformed numerals, and whatever was requested, he would measure it into the bowl of his scales, which were without doubt the most formidable I have ever seen – the mass of numbers which made up the chart would however, be read in an instant – take the pen from behind his ear and write the product and price on the order pad. I can see his writing now, black biro, almost illegible, slanting to the right. In a deft manoeuvre, the bowl of the scales would be tipped up, the contents emptied into a brown paper bag, the open corners gripped and the bag swung over itself so as to close it, all done as if a conjurer on a stage.

Outside the shop was a figure of eight path which ran around two patches of grass. We would ride around these on our bikes or tricycles whilst Mum carried on with the shop inside. I vaguely remember Mr Shepherd’s brother. He too worked in the shop until one day he disappeared. I later learnt he’d hanged himself.

The Post Office was pretty much that, and was the last of the four shops to close.

Returning to the election, I must admit that I cannot remember much about it. Of course now I know the result (Conservative landslide) and its place in history, but in terms of my contemporary thoughts there are none – all except for the fact that even at that young age (I would have just turned 12) I couldn’t understand why anyone would be voting Conservative. Conservative? Quite where my disdain originated I don’t really know; one assumes it was at home, but my parents were never what I would call political. All I can remember is looking in bewilderment at the small blue posters in the windows of a few houses up the road. The posters were particularly neat and quite unlike the posters one sees displayed in windows these days; certainly, the current vogue of nailing one’s colours to huge boards in the front garden (as if one were selling the house) didn’t, as far as I recall, exist back then. No luminous-green posters with the red font of Labour (back then the liveries were simple; blue or red) , and certainly not the bright orange diamonds of the LibDems (who were then the SDP Liberal Alliance). In fact, there is something about Liberal Democrat posters which belie their power in parliament; perhaps the smaller a party’s tally of seats, the louder they have to ‘shout’ in the hustings. At the last election, some LibDem posters I saw were large to the point of obscene. Back then however, the conservative posters (which were actually more like postcards) were well mannered – much like those who looked out from behind the windows in which they were displayed. They didn’t shout but rather stated their allegiance as if introducing themselves at a wake.

And so I cycled on. Perhaps to post a letter or to just to go to the shops.

Corfe Castle. Taken in 1983.

On Old Photographs

June 13, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Over the course of the past week, I’ve been scanning in what amounts to almost my entire collection of family photographs. I started, initially, a while ago with just a few that I particularly liked, but after a time, began to think of scanning all those contained in various old albums, a plastic bag and a dilapidated cardboard box. The possibility that one day they would be lost was as good a reason as any; that and the fact it would be easier to view them and to organise them (through the joys of Flickr) were my principal motives.

So, staying up late into the night, I have, over the last few days become somewhat obsessive, and scanned in a few hundred photographs, covering a period of time between c.1946 to c.1997. And, although at first this was a purely practical exericse, it soon became much more than this. It was, and still is, a journey of discovery, for in these small, ‘chemical annexations’, I can see again faces long since lost to the past; revisit once familiar places, and perhaps most poignantly of all, find long lost objects as if I were rummaging through the contents of an attic.

I will write about this experience at length, but will conclude with a summary of what I’ve been thinking when looking at these images. Firstly, I’ve come to realise how drawn I am to ‘bad’ photographs such as the one below:

There is something about this photograph (and many others like it) which I find particulary haunting; something about its amateurishness, which makes it seem somehow more genuine. It has the freshness of a sketch as opposed to a finished painting and contains references to an experience which is both direct and profound. Perhaps it is the footprints in the sand, long since washed away which I find so affecting? Or maybe the unknown swimmers and the water-skiier: distant then, and as just as unknown to me now. What course did they take through life after this picture was taken? Did they yet survive the sea, in which, in time, we all will come to be drowned?
As Barthes said:

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

The photograph above seems to illustrate this perfectly, as do many ‘bad photographs’ I have found. Perhaps it’s because they contain this reference to the less than falable human holding the camera (a difference between chemical and digital).

Following on from this, I’ve become very interested in the peripheral parts of photographs, particularly in relation to images taken near the sea (distant swimmers, ships and so on). I have already written about windows in relation to other photographs, but having recently scanned and observed so many images, I’ve come to realise that it’s these areas which are the most ‘genuine’, perhaps because those inhabiting the distance are freed from the artifice of a pose, or because at the moment the picture was taken (just as they were for the rest of their lives) they were oblivious to the photograph’s principal subject and the one taking the picture.

This obliviousness is something I find quite compelling, particularly in relation to my work on the Holocaust, whose victims were by and large anonymous, both in life and now in death. Although I wasn’t living at the time, many members of my family were; they were the ones on the periphery, the specks in the distance, oblivious to what was going on behind them.

This is a photograph taken in c.1976. It shows my brother in the foreground playing tennis, a lovely image of a fondly remembered family holiday. But what interests me, in relation to my thinking, is the distance.

Looking out to sea we can see a ship, a tanker, sailing under the direction of more (and no doubt large numbers of) human beings, hidden away and quite unknowable. Yet for a time we shared the same stretch of the planet. Those onboard would have had no idea as to our existence, they would have seen at best a mass of coloured dots on the horizon. Yet this degree of separation does not make us any less human, any less feeling. Distance does not negate our hopes and our ambitions. Those few unknowable dots, in the eyes of the ship’s crew, were my family, and have in the years that followed, seen more members come and go. And whether the distance between us is measured in years or miles, we must never forget, that what we see as specs on the horizon, or dots that make the picture on the TV screen, are, in the end, the same people as us.

For more on this subject, click here.