East Cowes is a little community on the Isle of Wight, where I went to live in April 1954, aged 12. This is what I wrote after a visit with Karleen in August, 2008. The piece was titled Coming Back to East Cowes.
Now that I’ve got a proper memory card in my camera, I could take hundreds of photos at one time. Yet it’s not my aim to produce a picture gallery or travelogue. It’s more to post letters recklessly addressed to the Universe, like anyone’s prayers to their unknowable God. And when those letters have been published, on paper, e‑book or the great wall of graffiti that we call the world-wide Web, they may be edited in “post-production”. Anything may end up on the “cutting-room floor”. Anything may be slightly tweaked, with new material added and the sequence of scenes shuffled to reveal a profounder sequence than the purely chronological. Meanwhile a real book remains one of those satisfying paper things with a hard binding, that sits on a shelf in all its physicality, and can be traded and preserved to Kingdom come. As for the Internet of virtual reality which floats almost beyond time and space, no one knows what will happen with it, or even, in a sense, what it is. Like God.
It’s literature that interests me. Letters, memoirs and diaries are literary forms, and here they are combined in a spontaneous and interactive medium. I love literature for its ability to capture something of soul; preserve the past; give public presence to the shadowy phenomenon called memory, that richest of treasures, especially to the elders who have stopped living for the future, but bask in the present and dream of the past.
I have not given up hopes and dreams but they dwell and have continued existence in the realm of that which has already come to pass. I couldn’t seize the moment then. I was too young to savour my own youth. I hadn’t learned to play my hand, sniff out my luck, eat the fruit—allowed and forbidden, both kinds. Now, that realm is stretched out before me and all I have to do is recreate it in this wonderful medium, more plastic than clay, more durable than gold.
I’ve previously written various pieces about my childhood in East Cowes, though I only lived there a few months. Coming back fifty-four years later, I understand more clearly its importance in my life. There will be more to say. I used to live in Powys House, on York Avenue. It hasn’t changed. In those days we took in lodgers. Today it’s a home for residents with learning difficulties.
I used to walk down the road to the Umbrella Tree to wait for the bus to school. It’s still there, ringed by the same circular wrought-iron bench, with the same bus-stop alongside. The tree has grown up, but then so have I.
7 thoughts on “Coming back to East Cowes”
ladybeth♥
I love the entire second paragraph, but in particular: “give public presence to the shadowy phenomenon called memory”. I think we can all measure our lives by the trees that have grown with us.
Tim
It’s interesting to see the things you take note of and find important enough to share. It paints a vivid landscape of the way you see things—not only the things you see. Thanks for sharing. It makes me want to get my camera out and go for a walk or a drive to share something similar from my perspective. But then I would feel like I was just copying you so I have refrained… so far. 🙂
Marc Lord
Good lord, Vincent, you decant your verbiage beautifully, even when you’re not trying: ”In those days we took in lodgers. Today it’s a home for residents with learning difficulties.” Parse that right and get a PhD, and I’d be poet laureate at several universities. Thanks for putting up the links to other stories of your boyhood, surely I’ll enjoy them.
Vincent
Yes, Beth, but if we have moved around a lot, as you and I have, it’s a special pilgrimage to revisit those trees. I didn’t yet mention the Cedar of Lebanon at Woodside House, full of cooing wood-pigeons. I tracked it down in a forest which has grown around it. The house itself, a fine piece of architecture, was accidentally burned down and there are no buildings left there, just paths and rubble. But still there is that tree.
Vincent
Tim, get your camera out – please! We all influence one another, nothing to be shy about there.I might copy your hairstyle next. If I do I will print the photo, shamelessly.
Vincent
Marc, I am so far from a PhD I am not sure whether you are damning with ironic praise or praising with ironic damnation. Are you saying my verbiage is logically unsound? If it helps you to become a university poet laureate, well and good. I hear they give you a little cottage—and pretty students beat a path to your door to pay homage. Better not tell that to Mrs Lord.
Hayden
your verbiage is lovely, intuitive and evocative, as always.
a wayfarer’s notes 