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Glazed bricks and Mick
By nealejames | January 30, 2009
I went back to the town I grew up in today, Hertford. My mother still lives there, but on the outskirts, so I usually just brush by the place via the town’s ringroad. Today though I was there upon the request of the secondary school I’d spent seven years at, to take some photographs for the new business manager, a post I don’t recall from my youth in education. Adding up the years, it’s easily two decades since I last visited my old school, there, age me if you will. Plenty has changed in Hertford as a town. It will sound a little cliche, but Barclays where my father had banked all his life has become a fancy wine bar. The town’s established newspaper that had graced my Friday paper round bag each week during my teens with hugely over paginated copies that felt like a leaden weight, has turned into an hotel. Woolworths has gone, obviously. The Addis toothbrush and bucket factory has turned into flats and offices. The penny sweet shop is some kind of fancy kiddie boutique. The stationery shop is now a tanning centre. The smelly pet shop has turned into a Toni and Guy’s. The town’s department store called Gravesons, there since money had been invented I’m sure (every town has one) has become Accessorize. Many an hour had been spent with my mother in the habadashary department there, pulling at her handbag to move on to a far more exciting shop. But yes equally, there were small pockets of the town where I truly believe Father Time had forgotten to visit. I remember a barber’s shop called Mick’s which my late father used to take me to; kind of place where the adults would exchange jokes and knowing winks while their offspring wondered what was funny and why grown ups seemed so weird. That’s still there. And when I peeked in through the shop window, there was Mick. Mick as I remembered him. Mick hadn’t changed. And so it was with my old school. It was lunchtime when I turned into the driveway and there were blue blazered boys playing football and knocking lumps out of each other with hockey sticks. It’s odd, but I felt a sense of melancholic nostalgia. It was as if I was watching a scene from my youth on a telly. The only thing that didn’t fit, were the cars. The car park was full of new metal, double parked new metal. Not a Cortina in sight. I was itching to walk the old corridors. They too, didn’t disappoint. The sight of reddish brown glazed brick, which seems to be a feature of pre-war school hallway construction hit me like the proverbial, well, brick. And you must remember exam halls? Rows and rows of uniformly spaced single occupancy desks? My first photographic task was to photograph from the back, a hall full of boys about to start their written music exam. As I focused for my primary shot, I felt transferred back into the 80s, with all the noises, the smells, and the ambiance about one’s past school life. For that moment, I longed to be back in a blazer with all the dreams, hopes and naive expectations of a young man who hadn’t yet met the weekly shopping bill, slower metabolism and self assessment. I’ll return next decade and the decade after. I hope Mick will still be cutting hair in the town. I hope he’s found a pocket of Hertford that will continue to remain unaltered. Glazed bricks.
Topics: Blog journal | 1 Comment »
February 1st, 2009 at 9:08 pm
You are such an amazing writer Neale! I would buy the book…