Sentimental Journey Part 2.

Brighton is a palimpsest. I have been here, approximately, every ten years since I left at the age of 13. And I can never find anything that I found the last time barring the Old Steine, the Pier and the Pavilion. Oh, and the sea. The sea is usually there. And unlike everything else in Brighton the sea isn’t propped up by scaffolding, unless you count the West Pier, a charcoal spider on the horizon, like Stromberg’s sea-base after James Bond has had a go at it. But I can never find specific things: half-remembered and long dead shops in The Lanes, the whereabouts of Uncle Sam’s, the burger franchise that offered up “The Blue Cheese Burger”, and which was as a teenager my first glimpse of artery hardening heaven. Now there is not a trace of it.

Portslade is not Brighton. It remains almost exactly as it was 40 years ago. As soon as I reach Station Road I have my bearings. The shops in the High Street have changed beyond all recognition – there were not the endless flotillas of shabby looking, care-worn cafes then but the mood, the weather-beaten atmosphere of the place remains unchanged. There was an ice-cream shop staffed by a man in a crisp white lab-coat, a dead ringer for George Christie with his balding brilliantined head and the impenetrable whites of his granny glasses. My brother remembers a novelty shop that sold knock-off “Jim’ll Fix It” badges. There is no sign of either but they should be there – this is their natural habitat.

I think back to that man, a man who wore a tie to work in an ice cream shop, a man with shiny round head, who smoked in gloves so he wouldn’t stain his fingers with nicotine, and I think about how old I am. My childhood took place in a recognisably distant past. It took place in a world in which we no longer live; grim, grimy places, with little pockets of order, like this pristine man in his spotless shop. We used to laugh at people washing their doorsteps. It seems a Canute-like attempt at control. The world outside is howling chaos, but not here, not in this little Englishman’s castle. The portcullis is down; none shall pass. And take your shoes off!

The streets, the layout of Portslade has not changed. My stomach flips when Susan spots an alley-way snaking away from the high street and down towards my primary school. It was known locally as “The Twitten” and I am amazed that it is still there. The “Smile: You’re on CCTV” posters are new, but the snicket cuts along exactly as it did in my childhood, delivering me 200 yards from my school, of which I can see virtually nothing as it is surrounded by giant walls that were not there in the seventies, even though it seems now that we were far more likely to be molested in the seventies.

But maybe that’s because we didn’t have the big walls.

The little church next door – St Denis’ – is completely gone. There are, because of course there are, flats there now. But it is the small roundabout outside the school and the block of flats opposite, “Vale Court”, the name still picked out on the front in cobalt blue seventies font that are the real flavour, long steeped in the memory. Walking up Trafalgar Road I suddenly remember the cemetery that I walked through every day on my way to and from school. It is EXACTLY the same and my stomach takes another Proustian lurch: the same narrow, overgrown pathways, the same small stone building, the overgrown trees, roots snaking beneath the pathway, breaking up the stones of the graves. Only one or two shinier black grave-stones appear and I look at the dates and realise that the last time I walked here these people would have been alive, perhaps walking through the same cemetery.

We cross the road into Eastrop Park and it too is unchanged by the years. A slightly modern bunch of swings and slides has appeared, bunched together in a corner, as colourful and shifty as the teenagers currently smoking mean little fags on them, but elsewhere the shittiness and austerity of the park remains intact. A slab-like building, the pink of a wafer biscuit and of unknown utility, remains. The ground is rough and churned up as it was when I played abysmal rugby there; in the snow in my memory and almost certainly not in the snow in actuality. I’m not averse to romanticising the poverty of my childhood, though we often had shoes, if not fruit or Star Wars figures.

The enormous hill in Eastrop Park is not enormous. It was where my brother, Edward, attempted to ride on the back of a plastic puffin (citation needed – in my mind it was an odd yellow puffin with orange wheels – but this is the sort of detail that my family members are at pains to correct me on. It was a bird on wheels at any rate) Half way down the hill the wheels locked as the puffin was unused to reaching speeds in excess of two miles an hour and Edward was ejected from the beast and proceeded to bounce down the hill with the seriousness of a surprised child. It was as if Charlie Brown had had the football stolen from him once again.  It was, once we had ascertained he was still alive, one of the funniest things we had ever seen. Though Edward, as I recall, wasn't so keen.

The big/not big hill was also the scene of one of my first forays into becoming a human being. My mum was walking us to school – three of us and Edward in the pushchair – and she slipped going down the hill, hurting her leg. She sat there wincing in pain with me tugging on her sleeve and whining because I didn’t want to be late for school. I spend the rest of the day in a profound depression contemplating my priorities, having failed to live up to the ideals of my hero, Dennis the Menace. I was behaving like a softy! There was something else though. Somewhere at the back of my brain, there was the notion that I was more cowed by authority than I was concerned for my mother’s pain. There was something wrong there, something basically flawed. I vowed to change.

I still vow to change.

I didn’t believe that the Library at the end of our road would still be there but there it was, utterly unchanged: the post-bellum prefabricated building, the same three steps leading down from the entrance, the central reservation where the librarians lived (today a cheery chap in specs, in the past fierce women who checked you weren’t taking too many books as though the books were their personal possessions, stamping the book with real violenc, and jealously guarding the hairy blue tickets). The children’s books are still on your immediate right as you come in. Then there’s the smell. After forty years it smells identical: sawdust and damp with top notes of asbestos.

It was here that I discovered books (we didn’t have many in the house): Agaton Sax, The Eagle of the Ninth, the Narnia books, The Size Spies, Help! I’m a prisoner in a toothpaste factory, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Asterix books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. None of those books are there now. You’d struggle to find a Bobby Brewster book in a modern library. But the smell is the same.

The smell is exactly right.

The bloke opposite me on the train is trying to convince his girlfriend that he used to watch a TV programme called “Watch My Chops”, about a dog that was very intelligent but his owner is very stupid. She is taking some convincing but not as much as me. He has resorted to singing the theme tune. It’s a shit effort. He has lost both of us. “Watch My Chops” indeed!

We go up Foredown Drive to thirty two – the old Higgins home. It’s unrecognisable. The doors, windows, the garden wall, the garage have all gone. The only remnant is the loft extension that my Dad built. It still remains, amazingly. My dad built that, I think. That’s physical, tangible proof of his existence. Like myself, I suppose.

We head on up to a small bank of shops that I recall only ever being sent to on half day closing and having to come back empty handed. Amazingly they too are still there – the same general store where I would by the Beano and if I was flush, Marvel comics. Usually British Marvel because they were cheaper and black and white. I once got a couple of Conan the Barbarians there that were going cheap because they were stained with some sort of yellow liquid. What a lucky fellow, I thought. It was clearly rat's piss. I’m surprised I didn’t go blind.

The shop doesn’t sell comics now. Its sells crisps and chocolate and booze. If it wasn’t for a couple of tins of soup and a moist loaf of bread you’d think it an off licence. There is no natural light in the shop either, the windows covered in posters about bargain booze and CCTV, and it has the grim furtive quality of a sex shop or the sort of Northern Irish pub that used to have a punishment room.

We buy a couple of Lucozades and depart.

Outside a man has sat down on the ground and is drinking a Nesquik behind some bins. We head down to Easthill Park. Easthill Park features in my memory for two reasons: when I was about ten and playing in the park with Benedict Fearnes, some bigger boys threw a plastic bag full of snails at my head, and for the public toilets. I can still remember seeing the toilets in my childhood. They reeked in high dudgeon, putting me off fish for the first twenty years of my life, but on the outside wall someone had daubed a veiny, ten foot representation of a phallus, perforated at intervals by safety pins.  The whole bore the legend “Punk Cock”, dating it to perhaps my sixth or seventh year.

Punk Cock. Genius.

We wandered off down to Portslade High Street, then on to Hove, to see Cardinal Newman, my old school, which is not only done up like Fort Knox or a Belfast Police station but is now some sort of girls only academy. We made our way to Hove Station which remained, rather decently, exactly the same as in my street, though once again the little parade of shops had less in the line of sherbert dabs and mojos and far more artisan bread.  

(Later I look it up on my phone and find that it is real. Shit. What’s the point of writing anything, really? “Watch My Chops” has already been made. Where do we go from here?)