I felt it today, walking around the fields between Jeziorki and Dawidy Bankowe; I felt it intensely on Saturday walking around the fields between Dawidy and Jeziorki. The exact sense of being elsewhere, at another time. A precise fit of subjective experience, a congruence, a coming together.
Over the decades I have trained myself to analyse these experiences rigorously, not just dismissing them as some vague sense of deja vu, but to pinpoint the time and place where I first felt that self-same subjective experience, and to do so before they melt in the mind like a snowflake on the palm of your hand.
What was it that brought it up, so suddenly and sharply to mind? Why was I transported back nearly half a century to a late Saturday afternoon in Gloucestershire?
Three things - light, temperature and smell.
The Easter holidays, 1973, St Briavels - the Polish Scouts' stanica, (literally, watchtower; hostel, base) and a four-day biwak (bivouac). I am 15, in the fourth year at grammar school. We arrived from London on Thursday evening by coach, older scouts from Polish troops across London. By mid-morning on Saturday, loaded with full rucksacks, we were set off for a long route march. Our destination was Yorkley, a small village on the edge of the Forest of Dean. There we were to enter the forest, pitch camp and sleep the night before returning to St Briavels.
The weather was cold. It had snowed on our first day in St Briavels, though on the day of our march, the snow had melted. The sky was overcast, milky-white, rather than leaden grey. By the time we'd reached Yorkley, it was early evening. It was not a prosperous village. The terraced houses - workmen's cottages - had no front gardens, they were built right out to the pavement. Inside, behind the chintz curtains, fires were being stoked, and electric lights switched on. It was that magic time of the week in England, as families gathered around the telly for tea and Grandstand, Final Score, Early Evening News, followed by Dr Who and an evening's light entertainment. Such comforts were not for us. In the light drizzle, we'd have have to march on, into the forest, and set up our bivouac. The air smelt of coal fires - something I'd never experienced in London (the Clean Air Act had been passed in 1955) - struck me as immediately familiar. It was a smell I knew well - and yet didn't. Edwardian England was in my nostrils.
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| Yorkley, 1961 Ordnance Survey map, our guide to the land |
An added frisson was the rumour that the Hells Angels of the Forest of Dean Chapter were out looking for us (this was the time of the New English Library series of paperbacks about violent gangs from skinheads to greasers). Every time we heard the distant roar of a motorbike engine, we'd assume that the Chapter was scouring the byways of rural Gloucestershire for Polish scouts.
Jumping forward 48 years in a flash, that sky, the feel of that unseasonably cold air on my face, the smell of coal smoke from the older houses along ulica Baletowa - and indeed the sense of vigilance (the security patrol in its white Dacia Duster 4x4 is on the look out for trespassers on the S7 construction site) recreated the self-same qualia that I had experienced that evening in Yorkley. I got home to check it on Google Maps. The atmosphere had all but evaporated. The Street View photos were taken on a sunny summer's day; the kerbs were lined with modern cars; whole new housing estates have sprung up on the edge of the village. A once poor community has experienced nearly five decades of enrichment - good for the people that live there, but I'm no longer sensing any connection with the place I'd experienced. The Ordnance Survey map brought the memories tumbling back.
This time last year:
Lent 2020 - the summing up
This time two years ago:
Strength in numbers
This time five years ago:
Cultural differences: distance to power
This time nine years ago:
Painting the Forum Orange
This time 12 years ago:
That's what I like about the North
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