JAMAICA? NO, SHE WENT OF HER OWN ACCORD...

Or: A Winter's Tale...

Suddenly October by Les Lambson

You may recall me mentioning in this post a while back about one of my old classmates putting the house that he and his family moved into around 55 years ago up for sale a few months back.  Well, the house is now sold, and I managed to visit another three times since last Friday, the final such occasion being on Monday when it legally became the property of the new owners.  My pal lives down in England, so I'd been going up to his empty house here in Scotland to turn the heating on every so often, but he came up on Thursday to remove the remnants of whatever possessions of his still remained, and I was present on his last afternoon there (December 7th) when he crossed the threshold on his way out for the final time.  (As did I.)

Strangely, I'm probably more affected than he is by this 'ending of an era', as he's lived in Gloucester for around the last 20 years with his wife and son, and - occasional stays with his mother and father aside - hasn't actually lived in the house for any lengthy duration since his 20s or thereabouts, having bought it for his parents around the early '90s.  I was in the house once in around 1969 and maybe two or three times in the late '80s and early '90s, but I've now been in it so often over the last few months since April (my pal was up intermittently, getting it ready to sell) that I've now lost count.  The fact that my last visit to the house was also his means we closed that particular 55 year chapter in our lives simultaneously.  ('Physically' that is; mentally, I suspect he closed it - though leaving it partially ajar perhaps - many years back.)

I've known him since 1965, and although we didn't really hang about together as kids or teenagers (though we'd chat briefly whenever we ran into one another), we became reacquainted around the mid-'80s when he gave me his copy of an old class photograph I'd once owned but had lost in the intervening years.  Although I'm sure he's a little sad to see one door to his past closed forever, he's not one to dwell on things and will doubtless be too busy continuing the 'new' life he's been living for many a long year now to be much troubled by 'what was'.

I'm a different bag of spiders though, and, selfishly, I tended to view his house as a 'connection' to my own childhood, so not being able to enter its interiors again feels like I can no longer access a portal to a cherished period of my past which has now slipped further beyond my reach, except, of course, in memory.  (It was a way of returning to 1969 you see, and everything in my life at the time that went with it.)  Don't get me wrong - memories are great things, but to also have a tangible 'entry point' into the past is even better.

I was once given a book containing the letters of C.S. Lewis and one (or maybe two) of his pals.  One of their friends had died, but the others continued to visit his mother in her old house they'd known since they were kids.  When the mother eventually passed away, the thought of never being able to visit the house again was probably the thing that most grieved them.  It represented their youth, you see, and now that aspect of it was forever denied them.  That's a bit like how I feel now.  Anyone else ever felt the same?

What's that?  The title?  Jamaica is part of the street name.  Makes sense now, eh?  And in case you were wondering, the picture at the top of the post is one that hung in the hall of my pal's house for many a year.  I snapped a photo of it on the last day as he wasn't taking it with him.  Shame, really, as it'll probably be junked.  Still, at least it lives on in this post.  However, it's so faded that I thought it was a winter scene, but it's actually an autumn one.  It should look more like the version below, culled from the Internet.