Published September 2017 by Merlin Unwin Books Ltd

Over the hills and far away

Marvellous Country

Helen’s Story

 

………..

 

We start to climb up a steep set of lovely grassy fields.  The grass is blowing in the wind- Bob says it’s the closest we get to seeing the wind.  It’s beautiful.  There are dandelions and even the buttercups are coming.  The views all round are of a beautiful rolling, spring green England.  We are under the flight path for Bristol Airport to the west and it’s very exciting because big jets keep coming directly over us.  Mostly they are Easyjet!  Finally we reach the top at Dundry Beacon and get our first view of Bristol in the distance.  Here the Monarch’s Way lets us down a bit and we bumble about across unpathed and unwaymarked fields trying to find our way, but we get there in the end!  We stop in a small field for a very late coffee and spray of feet and then, as Bob puts it, sneak into Bristol “the back way” like some aliens or terrorists, by following a path next to a reclaimed tip.  It’s actually lovely.  The trees are beautiful and the birds are singing and it does actually feel like a secret place. We walk on into Bristol through Ashton and a beautiful park called Greville Smyth Park which even Bob doesn’t know about, and then from there we cross the harbours into the Cumberland Basin and we are in the centre of Bristol!

Bob’s story

 

Starting out from Northwich…

…..finally dropping down the hill into Altrincham’s main through road.

 

Altrincham was my first town.  Nearly every Saturday morning was spent there shopping, going to the market, meeting people and getting very bored indeed.  So bored was I that I dreamed of being poorly in hospital just so that I could have one of the drawing, writing, puzzle kits on the market toy stall.  It was promised to me, but thank goodness I never needed one!

 

I grew up very near to Altrincham, in Timperley, but it was a full on experience.  The place is sandblasted onto my memory.  Heading into Altrincham today I could feel all those memories pressing against me.  I was anything from 8 to 18.  A heady mix.

 

It felt as though everyone was looking at me, saying to themselves, “don’t I know that guy from way back?”  I looked at everyone too, just in case one of those old crocks was someone I went to school with.  But it was the places which made the most impact.  Just the shape of roads, a glimpse up a hill where the car park used to be, (and maybe still was), the ‘look and feel’ of the place.  All of these co-ordinates told my brain this was a very special place.  Not for the first time on this trip my parents were very close, but just out of sight.  Every building, office and shop front was scrutinised.  Was it new?  Did I remember it?  Did it have a memory association?  Once I passed by this spot, where would I be?  The answer was further into my own brain, or at least into my own memory.  The roads and buildings were the constructed internal passages down which I had to pass.  You can’t go home, once you’ve left, without experiencing such a vivid array of emotions.  The bricks, mortar and asphalt had captured faces, dreams, fears and passions.  I glided through them very happy, but almost tearful.  Even the way the sun and shadows lit up the surroundings let me know who I was and that I was home.

 

Snippets of events passed before me, passed through me even, so I felt them again, just as tactile, just as emotional, made stronger by this second surge.  The veins pulsed.  The headlong flight up and down passageways in my head surged onwards lapping up the sights and sounds.  I was so alive.  To touch one’s childhood and adolescence, to see it and feel those emotions in all their glory was gripping and uplifting and they shook me to my very foundations, as indeed they were.

 

The videos of my life, (I hope you get it as good as this just before you die!), will bore you rigid, so I’ll give you just a few scattered vignettes.  Just imagine though what it might be like walking through your own past, walking forward to your polished future having safely consigned dozens of your own ‘significant’ events, your raisons d’être, back into the freshest of memories right at the front of your head.  Buzz!  I’ll say.

 

We passed a shop which used to be an Italian restaurant.  Not really very dramatic I hear you say, but a bunch of us used to visit, after work in a local hotel, and we never left in that summer of ’74 until it got light.  There’s something magical about dawn, but dawn, drunk and 17 is the best!

 

The station is being revamped (again!), but they’ve left the clock tower just as I remember it.  Directly opposite was the swimming baths, now gone, but I can remember the fear, the smell and finally being boss.

 

A short distance away used to be a small bus station.  From here, on the midnight bus, a great friend and I left for Andorra-la-Vella, between France and Spain.  It took forever by packed bus and train, but back then it didn’t really get any better than that.

 

A hundred yards north of the station there used to be a really busy road/railway crossing.  Again it’s gone, now replaced by a new vast road bridge, but you can still cross the railway by a pedestrian bridge.  Just a little further on, where the massive road bridge starts to land back on earth is one of my launch pads.  From here I shot off into the cosmos and even now am still travelling at 1,000s of miles an hour.  Walking back from the restaurant, a girl from the hotel we worked at, who was going out with a chef at the time, told me very secretively that she’d lied that she’d had enough of him and told him she was going out with me instead!.  I blithely suggested that it didn’t need to be a lie.  She giggled, looked askance, but agreed it didn’t need to be a lie.  Like I say, I’ve not landed yet.  A girl didn’t say no.  She didn’t say yes either, but………..The following night I left for Andorra…….

 

For the next hour or so it got more and more exhilarating.  Poor Helen was trying to get me to talk what was going through my head into her mobile phone by way of recording my feelings.  There were so many and they came so thick and fast that it was impossible.  Just a paving stone on my old newspaper round was sending me on memory lane trips and the memories got more and more intense until round another corner from the (newly knocked down) pub I was home.  Woodhouse Lane East.  Cradle.  Family home that is.  Nobody there now though, so we passed on.