Not one to sentimentalise when it comes to old memories, I was reminded the other day of the power recall can hold over us. Over the weekend we visited Canterbury where 65 years ago I was a schoolboy. Gloria had booked us in for a couple of nights at the Victoria hotel right at the top of London Road meaning a half-mile walk into the city which coincided with the route where my pal John and I would wend on our way home from school every week day. Gloria and I have strolled this route many times before and I doubt if I have ever missed out on the opportunity to reminisce on any of those previous occasions. I pointed out the old school allotment, the old school, the tuck shop, each time filling the narrative with fragrant memories of the special place each one held in my life. Reliving my time in short trousers, blazer and school cap. Turning into St Dunstan’s Street we were confronted in the middle distance with the old city wall and the ancient edifice of the West Gate towers, a view which has greeted travellers and schoolboys alike to the city for hundreds of years including luminaries such as Chaucer and Dickens, and in the foreground the level crossing gates arresting the flow of traffic whilst a train passed through on its way down from London to the coast.
Abruptly I was thrown back to 1955 when confronted with the same view John and I would run the last few yards to the gates - then they were manually operated and made from huge oak beams – and clamber up to hang over the top anticipating the arrival of a huge locomotive, one of the Squadrons, or perhaps the Sir Winston Churchill of the Battle of Britain class if we were lucky. Its arrival would be heralded by an earthquake - like sensation as the hundreds of tons of metal and coal came hurtling down the track hidden from us by an adjacent building only to burst upon our senses in a cacophony of screeching steel as the driver applied to brakes for Canterbury West station a short way to our left, steam hissing in clouds from the cylinders as reverse braking was applies and clouds of wonderfully choking smoke were unleashed upon us. We would straddle the top bar of the gates, foolishly reaching out to brush the flashing silver wheels and polished green flanks of this mighty leviathan thundering inches from our fingertips. Once more, I stood at the gates, a schoolboy engulfed in the anticipation of the approaching moment.
The moment came and from behind that same building slid a sleek, blue high-speed train, no earthquake, no thunder, no steam heat, no pungent smoke, almost no sound as it slid silently, unctuously towards platform 2. The moment was shattered and dumped rudely back into 2019 I reflected on the wonderfully poignant experiences of my life that were no more. How many more slumber in my memory awaiting, perhaps in vain to be triggered by some circumstance mirrored from the past? When I am gone people will look at pictures of these monsters, but nowhere will they find the true sensation of the beast in that moment and I have no way of recording it except in my words which can do no justice to the experience.
