More than a memory

At least a couple of times a year, my husband, my daughter and I leave our home in Somerset and hop over the border into Dorset. We particularly like to spend some time in the coastal town of Swanage; a place that holds fond and happy memories for all of us.  

In the late Seventies, my nan and grandad uprooted themselves, leaving London to spend their retirement years near the sea in Dorset. As soon as the school holidays came around, my brother and I and my mum could hardly wait to pack our bags, climb in the back of the old Escort Estate and head south. The best thing was taking it in turns to choose a day out. Not that we needed to take it in turns because for the first day, either one of us would always choose Corfe Castle in the morning and Swanage for the afternoon.  

Meanwhile, another family headed south to spend part of the school holiday in Swanage. This was of course before we knew each other, but we were highly likely to have been there at the same time, right? I have a romantic notion that once we passed in the street; two cute little kids with no knowledge of the future. If this was a film of our lives, meaningful music would play. Perhaps I would drop my Hollie Hobbie purse, and he would pick it up and pass it to me. Our hands would lock for a second and at that moment the meaningful music would become more meaningful. Then we would move on with our lives, forgetting about each other until that fateful day on the Summer Solstice of the year 2000 … I do tend to get carried away with these things. 

Reader, I married him; the cute kid who did, or probably didn’t, pass me my Holly Hobbie purse. One of our first trips away together as a couple was to Swanage and then we had a child and we just kept on going as if nothing had changed. As soon as we pull up in the car park, we spin our memories of the times that went before, as if long-gone family members are still by our side. Those memories have become so a part of the fabric of the place that it no longer matters which memory originated with whom. Even if we tried to unravel the threads, they would still keep the shape of the whole. 

I speak of the time (perhaps many times) Grandad sat watching an amateur game of cricket on the green, while the rest of us went off and did our thing. I have pointed it out so many times that I don’t even need to voice the memory anymore. It is Grandad’s Green, even to the two who never got to meet him in person. There was the time my husband stayed with his mum in a hotel with a turret like a castle, or in the chalets up by Ballard Down. Once on his birthday when our daughter was about eight, we walked from Swanage to Poole and rode the ferry across the harbour. Then we took the double-decker open-topped bus back, by which time the sun was setting and our daughter started to shiver but was so excited she refused to go down into the warmer section of the bus, which led to a hyperactive bout of giggles all the way back to Swanage. How we all laughed! 

My nan loved the 2p slot machines in the Amusement Arcade. She pretended to be rubbish at it, yet always won more than the rest of us put together. Not that she ever counted her winnings. She’d just keep sharing the little bronze coins between us and we’d all keep going until she ran out.  

Also, there was an obelisk; my husband swore there was an obelisk, up on Ballard Down. For many of our trips we searched in vain for the elusive obelisk, to the point that we teased him and told him he imagined it. He swore there was a photo of him next to the obelisk and he would dig it out and prove it to us – but he never found that photo. At one point he found the word OBELISK on the Ordnance Survey map and plotted a whole walk around it. Guess what? We got distracted by some horses and we somehow bypassed the obelisk. Later we tried the same walk again, this time climbing a little further and higher than before and, after all those years, a great big obelisk appeared. How could we have missed it before? Perhaps he snuck up in the night and built it. Even today we refer to it as the Obelisk That Doesn’t Exist. 

 

And the great thing about Swanage is that it changes, but only a little. The beach huts get a lick of paint every now and then; once in a while they overhaul the technology in the amusement arcade; the record shop is no longer a record shop; but the architecture of the town remains, so we are prompted to talk about the record shop whenever we walk past.  

And it is not just our memories that stay in Swanage. I once watched a documentary about forensics. It showed how they brought a killer to justice decades after a murder because they found an almost invisible drop of his blood still on the wall in the rented flat where the incident took place. That speck of DNA survived several inhabitants, a range of cleaning materials and at least three coats of paint. In another part of the documentary, they demonstrated the particles you share when you hug someone, or brush past them in the street, and how you shed pieces of you in a little unique trail as you leave a place. This information blew my mind, not because I regularly make a habit of running from a crime scene, but because I’ve always believed you are the places you love and the places you love are you. And now I know it is actually scientifically true. 

One of the saddest things for me has been that Nan and Grandad never got to meet my husband and child, because they would have loved each other very much. My cricket obsessed husband says he would have forgone the record shop to share the game on Grandad’s Green with the man himself. And yet I know it’s okay because no amount of rain, or grass mowing, not even death itself can wash Grandad away from this place. Likewise Nan lives on in the jangling of the 2p slot machines, the cheer in the air as someone wins back a fraction of what they spent. Outside my mother-in-law waits for her teenage son, outside the record shop and thinks about where to go for dinner.  

And isn’t it good to know that though we are home now, going about our everyday lives, we are in Swanage too, microscopic grains of sand on the beach, fragments floating in the air above Grandad’s Green, the amusement arcade and the Record Shop That is No Longer a Record Shop. We are up at the Obelisk that Doesn’t Exist looking down on the town. And in the summer, when the open-topped bus circles its way between Poole, Corfe and Swanage, an eight-year-old girl laughs and laughs.