The University of Birmingham used to invite its graduates to join for a reunion after 25 or in my case 50 years, They use the American term these days to call us Alumni. The OED says this means former student, but I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t make the grade coming along. Furthermore, I just enquired and had to chat with an AI-bot, if that’s the expression. See bottom of this post.
I’ve been wondering why I didn’t make this post, originally published on an obscure site, more public. But it speaks of a recurring dream, and in the last paragraph says “it’s unfinished, unedited.” It remains so, but tells me to write more.
If you have reached this far, let me say that this is not a post that will ever be published on A Wayfarer’s Notes.
I’ve no idea why I said it would never be published here.
For the last fifty years, I’ve had a recurring dream, never quite the same, of being a newcomer in a vast public space, where anonymous throngs pass back and forth and I don’t know what’s going on. There are halls and corridors, and I don’t know where I belong. I’m usually in a cafeteria, sitting at a table, waiting for someone who might or might not show up. At other times, I’m explicitly back at university, freshly enrolled. Am I eighteen again, or have I returned as a mature student, to do a different course, or even the same one again? It’s never quite clear, nor am I sure which mood predominates: hope or fear. A mute disquiet results.
In one sense I’ve never really left that place, the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham. Like ghosts still haunting the scene of some ancient horror, parts of me have been held back by a sense of unfinished business. The idea of an actual revisit first hit me a year ago, when Karleen & I went to Birmingham for her aunt’s 75th birthday. It was the other side of town, but armed with our miraculous SatNav and its calming Australian voice of James, we beat a path across the city, and wandered around for half an hour or so. I wrote a piece about it, trying to capture various fugitive impressions, but it remained unfinished. It prompted me to recall a friend from those days, and make yet another attempt to track him down. I’ve written it up here: In Memoriam Derek Hellman. As in that little tale, any attempt to summon up the past confronts you, in one way or another, with death. Yesterday is irretrievably gone. It lives on only in selective fantasy, that we like to call memory. Or in art, which owes its existence to reality; but makes its own rules.
I conceived the idea of a daytrip to Edgbaston, on my own, preferably in October or November, trying to capture the atmosphere of my first weeks. Just as in the dream, I’d be a stranger in the throng, invisible to others as they would be to me. Everything new in the last fifty years would be filtered out from my vision, for only the past held any interest. For in that half hour last August, I’d encountered a few ghosts of my past. In one unchanged spot, the memory of a fifty-year conversation wafted like a scent, but like a dream too. It was intricate but the details themselves were blurred. And in the Arts Building which had housed the faculty I attended, the very smell seemed unchanged. In my mind’s eye, I could see a few sparkling molecules suspended in the air which might have lain hidden behind the skirting boards till my return. Some were microscopic particles shed by people I had known, including fragments of my own skin. Other places where I’ve lived—shockingly many, I still have two address books of my mother, in which she recorded them—have been demolished, or would not today open their doors to welcome my curiosity. But that one building retained a comfortable smell of home.
My memory as ever makes its own selection of snapshots out of that three years on campus: a disreputable collection for the most part, without triumphs or glories, only a few pleasures, a vast expanse of apparent idleness, a gnawing angst. My state was complicated but describable in a single word: alienation. I found the teaching staff tedious. Not a single one was inspiring. When I first arrived my role models were from the Fifties (Birmingham engineering students who lodged in my stepfather’s house, when I was twelve). I remember the day I changed my image from blazer and cavalry twills to drainpipe trousers and Italian pullover. Spencer Davis and I took a bus into town and did our shopping. If I’d had the gift of friendship we might have stayed in touch. He went on to worldwide renown when he formed the Spencer Davis Group, which he still runs, though three years older than I. I can only say that he was cool. I met few others like that, but found new inspiration in Henry Miller, the Beat Poets and Jack Kerouac. Alienation became thus my defiant armour against a place which overall didn’t accept me for what I was. Whatever that was. I’m still learning.
If you have reached this far, let me say that this is not a post that will ever be published on A Wayfarer’s Notes. It’s unfinished & unedited. I had intended to write one there, but the impetus has gone off the boil. I was going to say that the reunion visit had made a profound and permanent difference, that over several weeks a re-evaluation has been taking place within me. And so forth. At some point I was going to predict that the recurrent dream would now stop. It came back last night, but was no longer disquieting. A buffet meal is being laid out on tables. I want to start the queue to eat, but don’t want to be on my own. A friend (identified later as Francis Hunt, a fellow blogger) says he’ll come along too. I check my watch. It’s 12:30, the advertised time for the meal. It looks delicious. I wake up.
in the Ashley Building (Languages)
in my new suit
