whether the cinema I was looking at was the original one. It felt wrong.
There were surely some new buildings.
‘It’s
all change in Harlow It changes every day They’re taking the market out,’ he
told me.
I was
surprised. It seemed the only life in the town.
In one
of those corners had been the Chinese restaurant, an utter foreign novelty when
it arrived, but, unlike Marvel comics, one which our family took up — because
my father loved the nursery, sup-sup food, I expect.
Perhaps
it was after The Wrong Arm of the Law (Norman played a would-be copper
too short to get on the force) that I shook the soy sauce over my helping of
egg fried rice and the top came off, drenching the plate in salty black liquid.
I can vividly recall my despair, and then my parents laughing it off and
salvaging my meal, sharing everything out again. Ironically, there seems to be
no Chinese restaurant in the centre of Harlow now. Now that they are
everywhere.
But,
standing facing the cinema, I knew that the swimming pool was somewhere near.
I turned on my heels. It was over there, wasn’t it? I set off towards an
underpass. Harlow was supposed to be a bicycle city. But you couldn’t make the
British into the Dutch. There was no danger walking along the cycle lanes now
because no one was riding a bicycle. The cycle storage area, with a corrugated
roof covering at least fifty cycle supports, was being used as a car park.
As I
passed underneath a wing of flats, towards ‘The Hides’, I was feeling
increasingly like some cat, dropped miles away from home, that manages,
somehow, to find its way back unaided. I ignored the fact that I had not the
faintest idea where I was going and allowed little subconscious clues to press
me onwards. And then I stopped.
What
was the emotion here? The French must have a word for it. It is not nostalgia.
Synapses that had been dormant for decades were suddenly fizzing. Not for the
little houses, with their new mock-Georgian doors, not for the street signs,
though I certainly remembered ‘The Dashes’. No, I stopped dead in the underpass
itself because on either side there were large lumps of flint laid into render
at the top of the wall, just some black pieces of irregularly shaped stone,
and, like a face spotted in a crowd, I knew this place exactly This dip under
the flat bridge had had some huge significance to me as a nine-year-old. It
must have done, because it affected me now so tangibly, like nothing else in
Harlow.
I
wanted my sister to be with me, to feel it too. I wanted her to rack her brain
and put the connecting bits in place, as if, like that set of Christmas lights
that used to infuriate my father with the conical screw-in bulbs we could
replace the missing dead lamp and the whole chain would light up.
As soon
as I walked on, all the electricity evaporated. The rest of the street meant
nothing. And if I tell you that I didn’t recognize a single bit of it, you’ll
have to agree that it was peculiar to turn left suddenly, as if on mere
impulse, and find myself facing Harlow swimming pool.
It was
the familiar, handsome facility built in 119611 and opened by Christopher
Mayhew The manager, Mr Fidget, had expected to be overwhelmed on that first day
He had organized a secret entrance so that ‘local big-wigs’ could come and have
a look without having to queue. When he threw open the plate-glass doors it was
to a single swimmer from Royston.
Business
soon picked up. In order to get the same experience as that Royston swimmer
(the huge thirty-three-metre length with its four-metre deep end, a
shimmering, empty three-dimensional playground) we had had to come here very
early Sometimes we left our bikes out there in the asphalt car park at the
bottom of the bank at seven-thirty in the morning and waited for the pool to
open and to be first in.
If we
were very lucky we had the place to ourselves. The white-trousered attendants
marched across to take up their languid positions, over by the
There were surely some new buildings.
‘It’s
all change in Harlow It changes every day They’re taking the market out,’ he
told me.
I was
surprised. It seemed the only life in the town.
In one
of those corners had been the Chinese restaurant, an utter foreign novelty when
it arrived, but, unlike Marvel comics, one which our family took up — because
my father loved the nursery, sup-sup food, I expect.
Perhaps
it was after The Wrong Arm of the Law (Norman played a would-be copper
too short to get on the force) that I shook the soy sauce over my helping of
egg fried rice and the top came off, drenching the plate in salty black liquid.
I can vividly recall my despair, and then my parents laughing it off and
salvaging my meal, sharing everything out again. Ironically, there seems to be
no Chinese restaurant in the centre of Harlow now. Now that they are
everywhere.
But,
standing facing the cinema, I knew that the swimming pool was somewhere near.
I turned on my heels. It was over there, wasn’t it? I set off towards an
underpass. Harlow was supposed to be a bicycle city. But you couldn’t make the
British into the Dutch. There was no danger walking along the cycle lanes now
because no one was riding a bicycle. The cycle storage area, with a corrugated
roof covering at least fifty cycle supports, was being used as a car park.
As I
passed underneath a wing of flats, towards ‘The Hides’, I was feeling
increasingly like some cat, dropped miles away from home, that manages,
somehow, to find its way back unaided. I ignored the fact that I had not the
faintest idea where I was going and allowed little subconscious clues to press
me onwards. And then I stopped.
What
was the emotion here? The French must have a word for it. It is not nostalgia.
Synapses that had been dormant for decades were suddenly fizzing. Not for the
little houses, with their new mock-Georgian doors, not for the street signs,
though I certainly remembered ‘The Dashes’. No, I stopped dead in the underpass
itself because on either side there were large lumps of flint laid into render
at the top of the wall, just some black pieces of irregularly shaped stone,
and, like a face spotted in a crowd, I knew this place exactly This dip under
the flat bridge had had some huge significance to me as a nine-year-old. It
must have done, because it affected me now so tangibly, like nothing else in
Harlow.
I
wanted my sister to be with me, to feel it too. I wanted her to rack her brain
and put the connecting bits in place, as if, like that set of Christmas lights
that used to infuriate my father with the conical screw-in bulbs we could
replace the missing dead lamp and the whole chain would light up.
As soon
as I walked on, all the electricity evaporated. The rest of the street meant
nothing. And if I tell you that I didn’t recognize a single bit of it, you’ll
have to agree that it was peculiar to turn left suddenly, as if on mere
impulse, and find myself facing Harlow swimming pool.
It was
the familiar, handsome facility built in 119611 and opened by Christopher
Mayhew The manager, Mr Fidget, had expected to be overwhelmed on that first day
He had organized a secret entrance so that ‘local big-wigs’ could come and have
a look without having to queue. When he threw open the plate-glass doors it was
to a single swimmer from Royston.
Business
soon picked up. In order to get the same experience as that Royston swimmer
(the huge thirty-three-metre length with its four-metre deep end, a
shimmering, empty three-dimensional playground) we had had to come here very
early Sometimes we left our bikes out there in the asphalt car park at the
bottom of the bank at seven-thirty in the morning and waited for the pool to
open and to be first in.
If we
were very lucky we had the place to ourselves. The white-trousered attendants
marched across to take up their languid positions, over by the
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