Senses of Perspective
I’m back in Norwich for a couple of nights to catch up with my mum (I’ve hardly had time to visit for the whole of the academic year, barring two quick trips to teach on Open University day schools) and a few friends. It’s strange to visit in such a concentrated fashion; one’s home town still very familiar (I was born and brought up here and lived here for ten years or so before my return to London) and yet always slightly changed – people look subtly different; the city itself undergoes developments and deteriorations.
Coming from the vastness and busyness of London, Norwich is a small place. Mum lives out in the suburbs, in the same bungalow I have always known since I was a child. I’m long since past the stage where the spaces and furniture have shrunk from my childhood perspective of course, but even so, this first home and domicile I knew for so long seems to have a hinterland of remembered proportions which are bigger than the measurements in actuality. A sort of luminous autobiographical shadow.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has a particular affinity to the poetic resonances of house and home; especially of one’s first remembered home, the childhood home. He remarks (In the 1957 Poetics of Space) that it’s this early, implanted-in-the-memory space with all its nooks and crannies that resurfaces throughout one’s life in dreams, and to an extent my experience confirms this (rather oddly, I’m quite often running for the bus to school too, but perhaps that’s another sort of neurosis altogether).
According to Bachelard’s thinking, which he classified as ‘topoanalysis’: ‘Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.’ And we do. This is just a small bungalow with a big garden, but because it was all I knew as home until I was eighteen it feels like a domestic archetype, and I am still, on some non-conscious, non-intellectual level, aware of it as a basic imprint of living space, of dwelling.
Still, everything changes. Mum has shifted and exchanged furniture and layouts considerably in the past few years. The latest acquisition is a fabulously large flatscreen TV. We’re watching Holby City even as I type. Earlier we watched the local news – headlining is news that the new labour candidate for Norwich North has been diagnosed with probable swine flu. ‘That was lucky,’ said Mum. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Well he’s been round here canvassing – knocked on my door twice, but I never saw him; first time I was out mowing and the second time I was in the bath.’ Under the circumstances, this was indeed lucky. His diagnosis not the best publicity campaign for him really either.
Back in the bungalow, I remember vaguely, many decades ago, doing all the things that toddlers and young children do in an accommodating home – trampolining on the beds, clambering over innocuous looking furniture…I guess my memories have been triggered by watching Jack and Gwen engage in their kittenish gymnastics in our London flat. K- has the pleasure of supervising them tonight. And how strange after two weeks with little kittens to be reacquainted with Mum’s visiting cat Wellington, a longstanding daily caller, who appeared to me this evening to be the most massive Tom cat I’ve ever seen; knee-high and stocky; impossibly huge in fact, with my hand barely covering his warm wide brow. As usual he greeted me serenely in the kitchen, then, satisfied I was an acceptable visitor myself, padded off on his rounds.
Coming from the vastness and busyness of London, Norwich is a small place. Mum lives out in the suburbs, in the same bungalow I have always known since I was a child. I’m long since past the stage where the spaces and furniture have shrunk from my childhood perspective of course, but even so, this first home and domicile I knew for so long seems to have a hinterland of remembered proportions which are bigger than the measurements in actuality. A sort of luminous autobiographical shadow.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has a particular affinity to the poetic resonances of house and home; especially of one’s first remembered home, the childhood home. He remarks (In the 1957 Poetics of Space) that it’s this early, implanted-in-the-memory space with all its nooks and crannies that resurfaces throughout one’s life in dreams, and to an extent my experience confirms this (rather oddly, I’m quite often running for the bus to school too, but perhaps that’s another sort of neurosis altogether).
According to Bachelard’s thinking, which he classified as ‘topoanalysis’: ‘Thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.’ And we do. This is just a small bungalow with a big garden, but because it was all I knew as home until I was eighteen it feels like a domestic archetype, and I am still, on some non-conscious, non-intellectual level, aware of it as a basic imprint of living space, of dwelling.
Still, everything changes. Mum has shifted and exchanged furniture and layouts considerably in the past few years. The latest acquisition is a fabulously large flatscreen TV. We’re watching Holby City even as I type. Earlier we watched the local news – headlining is news that the new labour candidate for Norwich North has been diagnosed with probable swine flu. ‘That was lucky,’ said Mum. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Well he’s been round here canvassing – knocked on my door twice, but I never saw him; first time I was out mowing and the second time I was in the bath.’ Under the circumstances, this was indeed lucky. His diagnosis not the best publicity campaign for him really either.
Back in the bungalow, I remember vaguely, many decades ago, doing all the things that toddlers and young children do in an accommodating home – trampolining on the beds, clambering over innocuous looking furniture…I guess my memories have been triggered by watching Jack and Gwen engage in their kittenish gymnastics in our London flat. K- has the pleasure of supervising them tonight. And how strange after two weeks with little kittens to be reacquainted with Mum’s visiting cat Wellington, a longstanding daily caller, who appeared to me this evening to be the most massive Tom cat I’ve ever seen; knee-high and stocky; impossibly huge in fact, with my hand barely covering his warm wide brow. As usual he greeted me serenely in the kitchen, then, satisfied I was an acceptable visitor myself, padded off on his rounds.
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