This was my playground

19/07/2007

Where have they all gone, the people I mean. Sherwood Place, Rhondda Fawr....returning to my childhood street after a long absence, I thought it would be the same as I left it all those years ago.  I stood looking up the street and could hardly recognize it. 

 

Gone were the telegraph posts that dotted up and down each side of the street, especially the one outside number nine, our home. Gone were the iron gas lamps us children, particularly the girls would swing around on skipping ropes. Full of life it was in those days. 

 

Neighbours sat outside the front doors on summer evenings gossiping and exchanging notes on sundry subjects, mostly illnesses whilst the children played hopscotch in the middle of the road.  The adults watched everything and everybody that moved.

Now the street had the air of an affluent middle class area.  Cars were parked neatly one behind the other, all beautifully clean and gleaming and it seemed to my observant eye, a kind of competition had taken place to see who had the most expensive porch and bay windows. In my day, the whole street had bay windows; every house was the same size. 

 

I walked up to number nine, my old home, and minus the telegraph post that was a street mark, I had difficulty finding it. Bedded in the stonework beside the left hand side of the front door was the name ‘Llwynon’ – at least that could not be erased, it was part of the frontage.

Even the tiny front garden appeared to have been landscaped whilst the iron railings were painted in brown and gold.  The gate I noticed had been re hung and balanced.  I always knew when someone was coming through the gate because it dragged on the concrete floor making a scraping noise when opened.  I looked up at the two bedroom windows and noticed they too had been replaced with polished wood and a lattice opening top half. As a child I recall watching the wind blowing through the ill fitting frames billowing the curtains like sails on a boat. Oh it was so cold in that bedroom in the winter.

I must have stood outside looking at my old home for ten minutes or so and realised suddenly that not one human being had walked past or even a child for that matter.  Surely the residents must have watched me from inside, but not a movement anywhere.  In my childhood if such a person stood looking at a house, half a dozen people would enquire if they could help them.  Where have all the people gone?  Do they not communicate to neighbours anymore I wondered.

I moved up the street and turned right into a public lane.  This lane ran straight down to the bottom of the street; it was a busy thoroughfare in my day for the coalman, dustman or refuse collectors as they are called today and the horse and cart selling fruit and vegetables. 

 

This was my playground, in fact all the children gathered in this lane.  Children squabbled; tears flowed shortly followed by laughter and resumed friendship. We fell on the uneven surface, cutting hands and knees, we learned to cycle whilst holding onto a wall, we were told off by neighbours for some misdemeanour but it was always taken with respect.  Now so quiet, no humanity, no animals even, where are the people gone.

Do they live in the houses?  I suppose they must do – it seemed like an imprisonment state compared to my childhood memory.  Do they not communicate with each other; do they even know their neighbours, I mused - so different to an era past.

Maybe I do not belong here any more – maybe if I had stayed and lived in one of these houses, I too would be living this alien street grieving like many old people do about the good old days of their childhood.  There must be an upside to this – yes I know what it is now.

When we move away, we have to adapt to new surroundings, dropping old attitudes and learning new ones so to enable us to fit in with wherever we choose to habit.  Of course people are the biggest influence in opening our minds to another world from the old. We are constantly learning from them, strangers, foreigners, different cultures and beliefs in our new world – or perhaps it should be worlds, as people move around so much.

On reflection, it is a good thing to visit our childhood domain; it makes me realise how fortunate I have been by being forced for economic reasons to move in my early twenties to this other world. If I hadn’t, how could I write this piece today - I would have nothing to compare life with, would I?