Denise, Denise (In Memory of My Childhood Sweetheart)

Neil Levenson wasn't the only one to have a childhood sweetheart called Denise. My primary object of affection also went by this name and although I didn't write a doo-wop song in her honour, I've never forgotten the happy days we spent together, as here, feeding the deer at Bedford's Park in the summer of '69.

Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.

But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.

Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...                

The Present is a Foreign Country

The Bower, Bedford's Park, Collier Row, Essex

© Copyright John Winfield and licensed for reuse under the CCL

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Hartley's famous opening line to his 1953 novel, The Go-Between, remains profoundly true; although, of course, it would be equally true to say the same of the future and it's that recognition which so excites the imagination of writers of science fiction.

Indeed, one might also argue that, thanks to the rapidity of cultural, social, and technological change, even the present can suddenly become unfamiliar and alienating, even threatening. Mass immigration, for example, changes an area completely. The newcomers not only do everyday things differently to the native population (eat different foods, wear different clothes, pray to different gods), but they are themselves different; perhaps not radically other, but distinctly foreign-looking and foreign-sounding.

I have experienced this recently after spending time back in the town (and indeed the house) where I was born and grew up. And, I have to admit, it's disconcerting; not to feel cut off from the past or from my childhood, but from what remains and what has replaced the world and the people I knew.

Further, without wanting to sound like a middle-aged Tory, I also have to confess that it's those bits of the past that have stayed pretty much the same - or at least offered the best illusion of sameness, such as landscapes - that provide most comfort and a reactionary though nevertheless joyful feeling of nostalgia.