Another Return to Woodstock Drive

London trip yesterday.
Em was visiting friends in Cambridge, so we parted ways at London Victoria. Went to Notting Hill Gate, where in the second hand shops there I bought an Of the Wand and the Moon album, and two compilations of old EC crime comics. I sat in Starbucks and wrote my Nan a birthday card, drinking coffee and watching the passers by on the cool, dry autumn day outside.
Headed back to Ickenham of course. Another entry in these odd rituals of mine, where I revisit places I once lived in, hoping to charge their near-mythic presence in my memory, or to somehow gain some sense of closure on them. My relationship with the past is an odd one - no point in my history seems any further back than a year or two back, and usually the present day is often overlaid with the resonances (the feel or identity) of other times - specific years, or periods in my own history. Sometimes, two or more time periods will be experienced on top of the present moment. I can be walking down Western Road back from work, and I will suddenly, without any doubt, experience, for instance, February of 1987 (white days fading out, cool and empty) as well as the autumn of 1995 (dark rooms full of angles and rain, shallow streets, wine cold as drizzly days).
The past is a constant presence for me, which goes someway to explaining my need for these journeys into the physical locations of the past.
Since leaving Ickenham / Uxbridge in Septenber 1994, when I was 22, I have returned once in the summer of 1996, then in the January of 2006, last year at the end of November and yesterday.
I caught the tube to West Ruislip, and walked down to Ickenham from there. From Swakeleys Road, I slipped into Swakeleys Park, the sign on the gate warning that this was a 'controlled drinking area'.

The path through the park was more tangled than I remember, the trees more ancient and primal looking. There was an odd serenity here, a consolatory kindness in the air that reminded me of sleep and old age.
I used to walk through here on Sunday mornings with Edward when I was 18 / 19, heading into Ickenham (I can't remember what for). As I walked I became aware of another time overlaying itself. This time from autumn 1986, and being here with my then best friend Leighton, my sister, and her friend Nicola, who lived opposite us. In this memory, one of us was wearing red. I do not remember anything else about this memory - which is probably more a collection of memories rather than a single event - nor where the colour red came from, if anywhere.

There was an odd melancholy about the trees, a kind of emptiness, as if the air around the branches was mourning something they couldn't really remember.

The River Pinn runs through the park, a secretive thing that flows through all the hidden places of Ickenham (and beyond). Lost corners where rope swings would be built, a bridge where we were once trapped by older kids, the false bank that turned out to be nothing but a shallow layer of leaves (I plunged in up to my waist). I dream of the river sometimes, and in my dreams it is a huge and primal force, vast and deadly, but somehow still as dark and secret.

...and so after you cross the main space of the park, you turn right into Woodstock Drive. The last two times I have returned here have been at night. This is the first time I have seen Woodstock Drive in daylight since the summer of 1996. Woodstock Drive, when seen at night, is a dark road - something to do with the spacing of the street lamps perhaps. During the day it has a comforting ragged quality, something daydream-y about it, like a day off school when mildly ill as a child. Woodstock Drive always looks as if it is another time - never part of the present. There is an old fashioned taste to the air, as if something here is always slightly out-of-date.

. 
My old house on Woodstock Drive, lived here from when I was 13 to when I had just turned 21. I've written about this house and its alleged haunting before. My old bedroom is the one on the top left of the picture. There is a different window frame than the one I had, and the front of the house wasn't painted white.

Another shot (not a very good one - these were taken surreptitiously remember) of my bedroom window, and below it the dining room window, hidden behind the posts of a fence that wasn't there when I lived there.

I left Woodstock Drive behind, crossed over Western Avenue, and passed by the Middlesex Fields. I took a right and headed across Uxbridge Common, where the wide open sky, brooding and beautiful, was already edging toward an early twilight. This was the place where I saw that huge sun over the December of 1992.

I looked around Uxbridge for a while, then caught the tube back into London, headed to 30th Century Comics at Putney where I bought too many old horror comics before meeting Em again at London Victoria.

We walked around St James Park, and headed up to Oxford Street where we got a bite to eat, before finally heading back home about 10:00pm. 

A twelve hour journey all together, but one which spanned nearly 30 years.

The past is never far behind us.