ONE LAST LOOK

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”
Edward Thomas, 1878-1917

At the Reunion I was keen to take the offered trip to the site of the old school, even though I knew I would find it disturbing. The experience is not one that I expected to have, for, until recently, I didn’t know about these reunions, nor did I imagine that I would ever talk again about school days with people who shared those times. Upon boarding the time machine for this excursion into the past, my one regret was that I’d left it too late, as the school was pulled down in 2005 and I had missed the target by just a couple of years.

The time machine takes the strange form of a 1950s Northampton Corporation bus, the old kind with the open platform at the rear so you could chase it and jump aboard. It’s a No.14 piloted by the owner, Mike Edmunds, and we are 43 passengers keen to venture aboard for a glimpse—and now it can be no more—of what the old school has become. Bill Rich provides an additional authentic and nostalgic touch as our conductor, complete with an old ticket machine and real tickets with ludicrously low fares. The scarlet time machine is transporting us to what is now the graveyard of our memories, not to Trinity High School itself but merely to its geographical coordinates. Something called Unity College, a Church of England Secondary School, now occupies the site.

We all know this, and we know that we are not going to see anything of the school itself, but there is still a sense of chatty anticipation and an eagerness to make this belated pilgrimage. I envy our lucky predecessors at previous reunions, who were able to tour the school, but today we must settle for what is left, the long shadows cast by what our combined memories can jigsaw together.

Mike lets us off on Trinity Avenue in front of Unity College, and already things are looking strange, and the street, though recognizable, looks distorted and diminished. We are introduced to Jane, our guide, the librarian at Unity College and keeper of the remaining THS archives, which have proven invaluable to help flesh out the school website. Jane immediately points out one of the two remaining landmarks that we might be familiar with, the row of trees that marked the south-eastern edge of the playground. From this orientation it is quite clear that the new buildings, and those under construction, sit squarely where our school used to be.

We move away from the street and around the side of one of the new buildings, and ears prick up when Jane announces that there remains just one more survivor from the old school, and she leads us to it. She stops and indicates a sloping stretch of asphalt, saying that this is the path that led from the playground down to the playing fields. We all stop and look down at the few yards of dirty blacktop as if it were a holy site, which in a way it is. Emotions surge as we step onto it and file down it once again, as we had done hundreds of times in the past, to and from the changing rooms, and I shudder as I hear again in my mind’s ear our hard boyish breaths and the ominous clatter of rugby boots.

At the bottom we emerge from the shrubbery and the view broadens. We see again the expanse of the sports ground, those higher and to the left quite changed, but the lower field to the right looks horribly familiar as the site of innumerable dismal sporting events and, most memorably, the dreaded rugby pitch. There is no sun, and the grey sky seems the right atmosphere for such a view down the tunnel of the past. It is a strange and unique moment, and my stomach feels hollow; I never expected to be standing in this place ever again, yet here I am, looking back across the decades.

We are separated from this grim view by a sharp metal fence, and David James, Graham Onley, and I cling to the bars and gaze pensively at this empty and now innocent stretch of grass, the scene of ancient trials and miseries in ice, drizzle, and low winter sun. As with so many past places revisited many years later, it now looks smaller, though the bushy pines around the Balfour Road and western edges have grown. As we chat and unearth our reminiscences, we all appear to have been in the “scraps” as far as rugger is concerned, the traditionally weak, the reluctant, and the last to be picked. We find it easy to nurse grim recollections of what took place in this arena, and we shake our heads and mutter imprecations against Grimshaw and others of our vanished tormentors. But for all the horrors that took place here, I find that I am enjoying the experience, the passage of half a century having, to some extent, softened the anguish. Clearly nostalgia is stronger nausea.

The now pleasurable memories of old pain are interrupted as the group reassembles and moves on, and we enter Unity College. We see the library, whose most interesting feature for me is the old school Bible from which we prefects used to read in morning assembly. We are also shown the college’s IT room, which offers a view of the ongoing construction as the college expands. Peering from this window I feel a sudden and surprising jolt of loss and anger. I know that if it were not for these new bricks and this fresh concrete I could be looking at the old school’s Tower block of classrooms. At that instant I can only see this new college as a terrible violation of Trinity High, and to even be here is an insult to the surviving memories I have of it. I ask myself why Jane thinks we are interested in seeing what replaced our school, and now I am wondering, too, why I thought I wanted to.

We continue the tour. A lot of people are rushing about for a chess tournament that’s taking place today. We traipse through corridors, go up and down staircases, and peek into rooms. I am unmoved; this place is nothing to do with me, and I am indifferent to it all. I had to come and see this usurper of a building, and perhaps catch a small hint here of the old school, but all these details of the thing that now stands in this place are not important, and I do not want to get to know it. My school is gone and its sad rubble lies beneath this new college. How perverse it is to expect that we should appreciate it, even admire it. I cannot share the pride in viewing what has flattened and taken the place of what used to be here, what our memories are striving to visualize. I am a supporter of the loser in this struggle, and I am being asked to approve of and celebrate with the winner! I feel as if my nose is being rubbed in someone else’s bitter triumph, as a captive Gaul might be paraded in chains through the alien splendour of conquering Rome!

Curiously though, I am here willingly enough. I have nodded and made appreciative noises, but that was politeness. What I really want is to tear this college down, brick by offending brick. I want that time machine to go back just a little farther, to unravel the last few years and show me when the Tower stood tall, allowing my memories to focus on something physical and present and not perpetually live on the thin nourishment of mere recollection. It cannot be, I get it, and it’s tactless to flaunt this impossibility to ex-pupils of THS. I am saddened and chastened; I have not been shown growth, I have been shown destruction disguised as progress. I was looking for some remnants of personal history and I don’t care about this college or someone else’s future in it. It is not a mistake to have come; I have had no bad surprises. It is a foreseeable challenge to bump the present up against the past like this, to see how Unity College now squats so uncaringly on my private archaeology. All along I knew it would be difficult. The tour ends and we take our leave of Jane and thank her, and my thanks are sincere, for it’s me and not her. She did what we asked—but, really, why did we ask for this?

We drift back to the No.14, exchanging reminiscences. It may be my imagination, but the group now seems a bit subdued, as I am myself, and the swapped remembrances are perhaps somewhat less buoyant. Less than when we arrived anyway. This seems normal; we have just seen how true it is that we can’t go back again. We have been given a tantalizing whiff of something we once knew well, and a whiff is all there is. If I’m dissatisfied it’s my fault, for I knew what I was coming to see, and what I could not see. We board the big red bus and return to The Old Bank, taking the long way back via Kingsley, the Golf House, and Wellingborough and Billing Roads, the sights of the journey familiar and yet overlaid with the unfamiliar, the remembered clashing with the changed in a thousand ways in a town of strangers. I am a ghost from the past, just passing through.

We rejoin the party upstairs in the pub. Surely a couple of beers will help as we tell our old tales and reconstruct the gossamer past, each recalling something different, something perhaps unshared until now, and it’s good to hear and relate the stories, the epic and the foolish, that until now were solely in our own heads. We alone can speak of these things; I think each of us is very aware of a unique shared legacy, one that few have and none can now acquire.

With the talk and the disclosing of school adventures, the beer goes down and the years peel away, and after a time I have the crazy idea that we have indeed entered a sort of time machine—or perhaps we ourselves have been performing the function of that machine, our own tales transporting us. It’s as if, although that Tower is gone forever, somewhere now, a few miles away across the darkening town, our meeting and our words today have managed to raise it again. Just for a little while.
 

Peter A. Douglas