SCHOOL'S OUT FOR EVER (REPRISE)...

My old school on a brighter evening a year or two back

I took a walk along to one of my childhood neighbourhoods earlier this evening, just as twilight was beginning to fall and house and street lights were starting to pop on in not quite perfect unison.  My old primary school, which had recently housed the pupils from another area while their new building was being constructed (which it now is), lay before me in the gathering gloom.

Lights were on in the hall and a car was parked inside the grounds, so I approached and pressed the door buzzer.  A night watchman, who was looking after the place to deter thieves from breaking in and stealing anything of value (as had happened elsewhere), opened the door, but was unable to say when the structure would be demolished.  If it doesn't happen before the end of the year, it won't be too far into the next.

From a distance.  Soon it will be beyond reach

I sat on a park bench across from the school where, in retrospect, I'd spent many a happy childhood moment (though doubtless it didn't seem so at the time) and quaffed a can of Coke, while memories of the 6 years, 7 months I had lived in the area over 40 years before vied for my attention.  Then, with one more look at the school and my old house, I made my way home to my current abode - the one my family had flitted to back in 1972.

I've often felt that I could live again in my old neck of the woods, until I consider all that's changed since I left.  (Mostly in the last 20 years or so.)  As mentioned in previous posts, when we moved away from the place, at first I didn't miss it because I still attended the local secondary school, and would return after teatime to hang about with my pals in the neighbourhood shopping precinct.  When I repaired to my new home at the end of the evening, the ambience of my previous house (and the two before it) was preserved, on account of us still having the exact same furniture as before.  Because of this continuity of mood and atmosphere, it sometimes seemed to me that we had never moved at all.



The new school, with the old one in the background

However, back to my school, which, in its final fading days upon this earth, has been robbed of its identity and had it supplanted by another.  Its original appellation now adorns its own replacement in a far corner of the grounds, while the name of the school for which it temporarily filled in remains on the sign at the front gates.  Sadly, it will meet its fate under an alias, but, to me, it will always be itself, its true persona as apparent and unchangeable as when I first walked its hallowed halls and capacious corridors in the heady days of my youth.