The Shape of Home

Unpicking the conflict between nostalgia and the ever humbling passage of time

Hometown is a bit of a loaded term, isn't it? A piece of archaic nomenclature that seems to insist upon itself; a selfish demand for nostalgia from a space anthropomorphized. 

It's not real, is it? Not really. Those feelings come from somewhere else. An act, a moment, a person. It's never really about the town itself that the seat of such misty eyes and longing thoughts is situated. But nevertheless it’s hard to put into words what feelings get dredged up whenever you return to somewhere after being away for so long.

My home town is a little place in the South East of England called Woodbridge. Quaint is probably a word many would use to describe it. Idyllic. Serene. A quiet place by the river Deben, tousled streets interlacing boutique urbanism with rural sensibilities. Suffolk is a farm county, after all. A flat disc pressed perfectly against the side of the country. The lower third of East Anglia's pregnant bump. 

It's sort of in the wrong place. You don't see somewhere like Woodbridge unless you're intent on going there. You don’t travel through it to get anywhere else, and that I think is why it's such an attractive destination for the kind of people who want to be left alone.

The thing about Woodbridge, for me, is that it wasn't a generational bastion for my family. My mother moved us here specifically because she saw it for what it was: a great place to raise children. Her lot were from Dorset, and while originally from the region, the past few generations my father's side were from Essex. The first nineteen years of my life I lived here, I took a sabbatical to attend university, then returned for five more before finally making the decision to move away for good. In all that time I came to know the place with a well worn intimacy.

I knew the people who lived here. They were weird, and often ugly in a sort of charming, funny way. Not to sugar coat things of course, many of these people were racist and homophobic too. I’ve endured many a conversation where some poor bugger or other was the punchline to a bad taste joke or the source of unearned ire.

In the past I would chalk this up to that archetypal small town mentality, but having spent a decade now in the Midlands and still hearing and seeing this very same chat, sometimes even from folk you would not expect, I now feel that this is a very unfair brush to tar an entire community with. They weren't all like that. I was just unlucky with the circles I existed in.

I thought about the people of Old Woodbridge a lot during my time there recently. The Woodbridge of the past. The place in my mind forever stalled at the turn of the new millennium. How many of those old residents were still alive? Who stayed and who moved away like I did? Who had no choice but to undergo metamorphosis when the world itself changed.

Returning to this place, wandering listlessly down the central thoroughfare, I found myself enveloped in a confusing fog of nostalgia and anxiety. I saw places that were there when I was a child sat cosily aside gleaming new monstrosities.

Some of these places probably shouldn't have survived the recession.

Many definitely should not have survived the pandemic.

In one particularly messy moment of eye glistening reminiscence I caught sight of my old barber, Boo, a woman who is absolutely shit hot at cutting hair, operating still out of that same hut squeezed between a wanky ornaments shop and the big Co-Op that used to be a Budgens when I once worked there some 20 years ago. 

It was comforting to know that Boo had survived…well…everything that had happened in the past decade since I left Suffolk for good. She outlasted my hairline anyway, if nothing else, and was the only person I recognized in my brief time cavorting about town.

Journeying into the past in a place like Woodbridge is like navigating white water rapids. Taking your mind off the task at hand but for a moment leaves you fresh cheeked and ready to be dashed against the jagged rocks and dendrolic detritus that is the harrowing passage of time.

Didn't that coffee shop used to be a bookshop? Oh! The bookshop has moved up the street, but what did it replace? What previously inhabited the space now taken up by a tidy and uniform communal gallery? Why does it feel like the entire town has been replaced wholesale, save for strong, resilient Boo and a few choice businesses no doubt held together by the good will of the community?

I don't remember the accents being this aggressively posh. I'm sure there were more young people here last time I came? Granted it was early afternoon on a school day, perhaps a stronger attachment to the Woodbridge of old could be found on the weekend. Perhaps should I revisit my old drinking spots I would find everyone I once knew, right where I left them.

No one seemed to leave this place, that was my memory of events at least. When I lived here, it felt like there were 'the people of Woodbridge' and that's it. Most of my schoolmates ended up in stasis for a good decade since we all did our GCSEs. Part of why I left was because I was fed up with the unchanging wind. I wanted something new, something that would push me, challenge me to evolve beyond the larval pup I once was.

But again, I think maybe my less enlightened scowl of yesteryear was a tad harsh. It doesn't take much to realise, given what the last ten years have thrown at us, that this is a place that priced a lot of its residents out. They’re probably all still here, just tucked neatly away into the various satellite towns in the area.

Properties here regularly reach seven figures. London house prices without London wages. Everyone wants a piece of paradise, but it eventually only became possible for very specific types of people. Strangely though, it was not those very specific types of people that have such a formative space in my memory.

I remember back in the day we had a traveller community that settled in Rendlesham forest. Because I was callous and not very well versed in any alternative lifestyles to my own I wasn’t very kind in my thoughts about this group, even if I still chose to greet them with a uniform civility to which I was commonly known.

I think it’s the primary curse of the middle classes that politeness and decorum were akin to godliness and that any kind of behavioural texture resulted in an egregious othering that I now know to be evil. As i’ve gotten older, and spending a great deal of time in an acute healthcare setting for my day job, its become easier to recognise the things that I couldn’t see before. The invisible strings that bind us and define the paths we take. The ways we react to the world around us in part a logical response to how the world reacts to us.

Working in that Budgens that is now a Co-Op, and later in the Lloyds Pharmacy that sacked me (for which I’m still pissed off about), this was my only tangible lifeline to the rest of the town. That was the truth of my relationship with Woodbridge, and with the people who have engendered such a complicated struggle to come to terms with the past. It meant that I didn’t really know any these people beyond interacting with them in this service capacity. I remember their faces but not their names. Some with perfect, crystal clarity, others as little more than a blurred smudge on the dashboard of my mind.

I wonder if I should be more upset at this alienation from this place that once was home, but I've never been one for nostalgia. Lamenting the golden years of the past doesn't do anything to help make the future any better, so I've always stubbornly sworn it off.

I guess the strongest feeling I experienced returning here was remembering that there were people here that I once cared about, and people I probably should have cared about more. No amount of gentrification and transformation will change that fact, and in spite of my rallying against the social class of my own upbringing, I cannot truly hide from who I once was and what that fragment of the past represents.

You should not feel obliged to be kind to the places you come to despise. Sometimes your ire is fully justified. Sometimes those communities really are just very cruel. For me, for my past and my relationship to that community I was brought up in, however, maybe I was too naive to fully appreciate it. Now it's gone, and home is nowhere, I feel a profound sadness wash over me.

One day I will visit this place for the last time, and I will never have fully learned from it.