A few weeks ago, I tried to go home again.
To my childhood home, in the bayside suburb of Chelsea. I thought that I was prepared for the changes wrought in 35 years (it’s that long since I’ve been there) but I wasn’t. Even though I’d even had a sneaking look at my old street on Google and knew that our house had been pulled down, I guess on some level I thought there’d be something left. Maybe the back gate, or the ti-trees along the boundary fence. But no. Nothing. And the phrase ‘You can’t go home again’ got stuck in my mind.
Ignorant me, I didn’t know where I’d got it from. So to Google and then Wikipedia. It was Thomas Wolfe, from a novel of the same name, published posthumously in 1940.
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
I’m currently reading The Address Book, by Jane Clifton, where she revisits all 32 of her former homes, with varying degrees of success, nostalgia and pain. It’s a fascinating exercise, so this post chimed with me!