Three Leaps In Time

My past is bothering me, but not because it's interesting and filled with potentially dangerous secrets like that of a Patrick Modiano character. I wish that was the case. I often find myself wishing for another life. A tragic burden. No, because it's the past, that's all.

Reading The Gravediggers' Bread (Pushkin Vertigo) by Frédéric Dard this morning reminded me of  A Fairy Tale of New York by J.P. Donleavy and how, reading the funeral parlour section aloud to LJ in bed at her place on Bloomsbury St made us laugh so much. Yesterday I carried a box of old photos into the garden where we sat going through them. One packet from contained shots taken at Bloomsbury St. How young we looked. It was over 30 years ago. We laughed at the clothes and expressions. LJ pointed out items of furniture, recalling the layout of the place. There was the white plaster head I rescued from a skip at the back of the hospital where I worked as a porter. A death's head!?

The photos are still in the packets they came in, over the counter at Boots, probably. It does seem like another world. We who span the pre and post-PC world have a heightened sense of how times and technology change. Today it would be impossible to take a blurred photo such as the one of me above. Annoying as they were at the time, they now have the same kind of charm as crackling recordings and old stapled zines.

Whether having read three Modiano novels in a row prompted me to look at my past or not I don't know. What's certain is the way I felt after going through a few packets (holidays in Gozo, the cycle tour of Normandy). Sadness, yes. But why? Were they such happy times? They were times, if not just like any other, at least in the sense of us being happy, sad or plain content. 

I think of seeing photos in the 70s of my mother in her youth...how long ago and far away they seemed...Dad with his arm around her tiny waist...post-war happiness in regaining normal lives. It was the war, ironically, that brought them together. He was a refugee from Latvia. She worked in the canteen at the brick factory where he would spend the rest of his life tending the kilns. But what struck me this morning was the fact that she was also looking back 30 years just as I have been doing. Did her past seem as distant as ours? I suppose it did.

Three leaps in time; from now to the 80s, then to the 70s and finally to the 50s. Time as a relay in stages marked by people and places. The worst experiences may be eradicated (I hated my hospital job). Perhaps it must be that way. A life marked by it's worst components would be a terrible thing to bear. Time marks us all, physically. Was my hair really that dark once? How it marks us psychologically is harder to fathom.