Memory Lane

 For our ‘Freedom Thursday’ trip this week we decided to take a walk down memory lane. 

As you get older, it gets more and more comforting to retreat into the past. This seems especially true at the moment, where the future is so uncertain and unknowable. Once you get to an age where you have less to look forward to than you’ve already done, the past seems a particularly attractive place. This is especially true as you can adapt past memories to suit your own narrative. 

You might have noticed this phenomenons  on Twitter, as people rush to say how terrible their school was. 

“Look at me,” says the famous singer, “I wasn’t even allowed in the choir at school and look at me now. Believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.”

You might not be suspicious about this but I knew famous singer’s music teacher, who told me that she was one to watch. She had ‘something’: ‘something unusual but something’. 

I think it was the talk of how the exam grades had been adjusted to reflect, where people were from that made us want to revisit the town where we grew up. The Long Suffering Husband grew up on the council estate and I grew up in a house that firmly placed me in the middle of the town. Because I was in top sets my friends lived in the huge houses that backed onto the park. 

We decided to take a walk to see if our memories matched up. 

As we walked, we told each other stories. We remembered people from the past. We tried not to do this with rose tinted specs.

The LSH showed me the place where he got his one and only speeding fine.

“You must be careful on this bend because there was a fatal accident here,” the policeman told him.

“Oh really?” he replied, “Was anyone hurt?” 

We went to the field where we first met and talked about open air discos and carnivals. 

We saw all the places where we had mis-spent our youth. He was really pleased that there were locks on the gates to the railway tracks where he used to play and I was sad that there were no longer boats on the lake in the park. We were both thrilled that you could still queue for half an hour for a cider barrel lolly.

Most of the memories that came back were those that we told ourselves repeatedly anyway, however there were a few that were specifically triggered by a place.

“That’s where I was when Elvis died,” I told him, pointing at a church hall next to the fire station.

I have not thought about this before, or even why my brain has stored it as an important memory. 

I was at a party on a hot August evening. I have no idea who it was for but I know that both my sister and my mum were there. Dad isn’t in the memory. I have a suspicion that the party was for someone from my mum’s babysitting circle. A woman with a loud hearty laugh, stout legs, a love of white wine, wearing Scholl flip-flops, as if they were the best fashion accessory ever invented (I suppose they were an early Birkenstock).

The food was served on long trestle tables, covered with white paper cloths. There were bowls of salad, crisps and buns and you walked to the kitchen hatch to get your sausage and burger. This was a revolutionary way of catering a party to me and is probably why it has stuck in my head. I particularly remember the relish, which was yellow and had sweet corn kernels in it. Drinks, for children, were dispensed via a self-service soda stream. It really was the most modern party in a church hall.

I was wearing a jumpsuit: a pale blue, all in one affair, with flared trousers and a silver zip with a d-ring up the front. It was a nightmare to go to the toilet. I remember coming out of the toilets, feeling slightly worried that I might have a damp patch on the back of my outfit and walking into a group of distraught boys. Their quiffs bounced as they held back the tears.

“Have you heard?” one of them said, “Elvis is dead. He died in the toilet.”

I wondered which of their friends had been called Elvis but was very grateful that I had just been using the girls toilets. How much harder would navigating a jumpsuit have been if someone had been dying in the next door cubicle? It was only when I returned to the party and Blue Suede Shoes was playing that I realised what had really happened.

Do you remember where you were on August the 16th 1977, when Elvis died? If not, a walk around memory lane might help.