Carshalton

I hadn’t thought about Carshalton for ages.  The town in which I grew up.  But I went looking for a picture to post with the words on my previous blog post and stumbled into a time warp. So many memories crowding in, one after another. 

Carshalton – a small suburban town in what was once Surrey (now Greater London). Nothing special. 

My family had drifted there from southern London – I’m not sure how or why.  A curious place to be.  But as good as any other, I suppose, and far better than many.  When I look at the pictures gleaned from an idle Google search I am amazed at how green it was/is, and how much water there was/is. 

I’d forgotten it was a place built around springs.  Yet, now I ponder it, I remember that as a child, I spent swathes of time poking around Carshalton Park, around The Grove, the Ponds (oh how I wanted to row out and camp on the tiny island), Beddington Park (The Grange) and the Wandle river as it wandled its down from Carshalton Park to the High Street.  My mother said she remembered when the water even ran alongside the High Street. There’s even a well – Anne Boleyn’s Well. 

Yup...did a lot of that... 

Carshalton Park is interesting.  All kinds of odd earthworks and concavities. As children we called them, variously, The Frying Pan, The Saucepan (aka the Little Dip) and the Big Dip. Water seeped out of springs into the Big Dip and I spent hours doing…what?  I can’t remember really – just that the emerging water was an endless source of imagination and wonder. I could spend hours there. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.

So much water here when I was small. :(

The river had once been presided over by a Victorian pseudo-grotto – with a largeish cave and two smaller ‘sentry boxes’ either side.  Once there had been statues there, or so I’m told but they had long been removed and, when we were small, the place had a sinister air – we thought it the home of vampires and never turned our backs on its black interior.

My grandmother is buried in the churchyard of All Saints.  Originally outside the hallowed ground (she had converted to Plymouth Brethren so was considered outside the remit of the Church of England).  

Next to the church sits The Greyhound, one of my father’s favourite pubs. When I was small, very small, I’d go with him and sit in the little tiny back bar.  When I was a teenager I came back, with friends, and graduated to the main bar, overlooking the ponds.

And this (below) was the somewhat hideous Methodist church to which I shamelessly switched allegiance at an early age, on the promise of a free book of Bible stories and a chocolate bar.  My brownie and girl guide hall was around the side and, the moment I type that, I can smell the musty tarpaulins and tents underneath the stage.

I used to walk to school (we had no car and, anyhow, everyone walked everywhere then). First to Stanley Park Infants and then a short hop over the playground to the Junior school.  Next to Stanley Park (obviously) – a somewhat inferior affair with only the small saving graces of a lacklustre playground and a cut where the railway passed.  Distinctly lacking in water. 

Yes, we had green buses, as well as the red London ones.  This one would take me all the way to my senior school in Cheam, if I let it. 

And this was the pub I hated, with drunks falling out of it, men leering…I used to cross the road and walk swiftly by.  Now, apparently, it is quite different – a pukka beer pub, beloved of men like Adrian.

Anyhow, enough of all that. The past.  Funny old place, huh?  

But it makes me wonder...do they affect us, these early places. Would we be different people if we grew up elsewhere?  What do you think? Where did you spend your childhood and did it affect the person you are now?  

The Circle of Stuff

So I went to London, to help my friend move house.  It seemed like such a good idea – I would help her but also lose myself in cleaning and packing, in lugging stuff around and then reversing the process at the other end. Pass the parcel. Pack, unpack. A circle of stuff.

I even took my running kit, thinking I’d jog round the streets and parks of North London. But instead I sort of came undone. I unravelled.  I became more and more unreal.  And, as if to compensate, in a vain desperate attempt to pull me back to the here and now, my body started to hurt…badly. 

I hadn’t quite realized where she was moving to, hadn’t clocked it was nearly back where I used to live, twenty years ago or more. And past and present collided and left me winded. Neither here nor there.  A nobody person lost in nowhen nowhere.

And I was reading this amazing book, by Sandie Dent (don’t bother Googling it – the few agents she tried couldn’t see the gemstone glittering in their darkness), and that just compounded the schism somehow. A woman, around middle-age, goes back to her teenage home and clashes into old friendships, past loves and remembers/dismembers the past.  Dis – the Roman god of the underworld, of course, fell Hades.  And I, such a wan Persephone, always in love with darkness.

‘Do you like pomegranates?’ said my friend as she flung stuff into a trolley at Waitrose.

‘Not any more,’ I replied. Maybe I never did. 

Nothing makes any sense.  Maybe it never did.  Ain't life funny?  

I thought I’d go out, once the boxes were unpacked, once things were transferred to corners, in piles, trying to adjust to their new spaces.  I thought I’d wander down Church Street, maybe have a drink in a café, bob in and out of a few shops, trace my fingers over the gravestones in the cemetery.  But I felt too alien. It would all have felt fake. I walked past my old house, past the places where I lived and loved and laughed and cried.  And none of it felt like it belonged to me.  Now even my memories have turned tail and run run away. You gotta laugh, right?  

So I walked back, to the place that wasn't the place I loved, across the wide space of the park and came across an enclosure of deer.  My memory has no deer.  Were they always there and I didn’t know?  Or maybe I didn’t notice. Maybe their entrapment didn’t bother me then, when I had no fences around me.  Back then, when I thought I wanted to be encircled.

And there was a goat too.  It looked at me incuriously. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have a cliff or a mountain or even a tree on a beach to climb?’ I said.  It turned away.  Either it didn’t care or it knew that it didn't make any difference. Wherever you go, there you are.   

I limped back to the new place.  Worked on through the pain.  Because every muscle and joint in my body was/is hurting.  It feels like I’m being pulled apart at the seams, bone by bone, cell by cell.  I think I would like to crawl away now, into that hole in the forest where hurt animals go to lick their wounds.  It would be…peaceful. Piece fall?