Love Sunshine

Et in Suburbia Ego

The heatwave (the glorious, glorious heatwave, which is only just petering out) has allowed me to open a door I've been itching to unlatch for 2 years now. I wanted to go somewhere special when researching my chapter on Memory. But, as Joni put it, clouds got in the way. This is what I wrote anyway:

"The past is indeed a foreign country. They have much better weather there.

My earliest fully-formed memory: I was four, and supposed to be meeting my mother outside the school gates. She was a few minutes late, and I took the opportunity to sneak into the allotment next door. Strictly out of bounds. But the door was ajar, and the temptation strong. I can still recall the ecstasy of tearing through the sun-drenched groves of sky-high scarlet beans and lavender, chasing cabbage whites that tumbled from my grasp into the impossible blue beyond. Most of all, I recall the sensation of being energized by the sun. A photosynthetic surge that intoxicated me then, and ever since.

I don’t remember how I got out. Maybe an angel with a flaming sword expelled me and shut fast the door; for, on being retrieved, I apparently declared to my frantic mother that what I had found there was ‘paradise’. I stand by that claim. For I must have felt instinctively the transformative power of sunshine. Its alchemical ability to turn the humblest patch of suburban verdure into the Elysian Fields, and how it can preserve and sanctify moments from our pasts. If I didn’t know it then, I certainly know it now, and can view this moment as formative in my heliotropic quest. A version of the oldest journey of all – to get back to the Garden".

And that's exactly what I did, the scorcher finally allowing me to unlock this sensual time capsule, and see if it was still there. I'd fully expected a George Orwell coming up for air, and down to earth, experience of discovering my paradise had been paved over long ago. With good reason. What used to be a hospital right next to the allotment had just become 'des res' apartments as even Thornton Heath near Croydon pretends it's part of London. So maybe my bid to get back to the Garden was just in time. The door was shut this time, and I couldn't see a soul working there through the chainlink fence. I prowled the perimeter, and was ready to frame the the phrases that made a poetic virtue of this disappointing necessity. But then I spotted an amiable looking old cove sweating towards the gate with a bunch of recently unearthed onions. I think he could see on my face that I was telling the truth about why I wanted to be there. And so he let me in. To rove through the dusty tracks of lost time, searching for the gold I had buried long ago.

And it was there. Miraculously and sunnily still there, just as I'd left it almost 40 years ago. I suppose it's not all that surprising that the allotment remained unchanged. That's sort of what they, and nature and stuff are for. Bucolic oases, whose cyclical continuity defy the flux and sprawl of 'progress' beyond their borders. And I'd come at the same time of year (high summer, but still term time), same time of day (home time), and under a scorching sky. The sun did its unique magic, in creating, preserving and restoring this very first memory. The earliest experience, exposed brilliantly on the photographic plate of memory, had left the truest deepest trace.