8" x 10" C-type prints

I Remember, I Remember

      by Philip Larkin (1954)

Coming up England by a different line 
For once, early in the cold new year, 
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates 
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, 
"Why, Coventry!" I exclaimed. "I was born here."

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign 
That this was still the town that had been 'mine' 
So long, but found I wasn't even clear 
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates 
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went: 
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots. 
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?' 
No, only where my childhood was unspent, 
I wanted to retort, just where I started

​

Returning to my hometown of Coventry, navigating my memories, I visited the places I often played as a young child. Trees once climbed. Dens built in the days when our imaginations were uncontainable.

 

To go back years later and not feel the uncontrollable excitement I once felt for these unconventionally special places affirmed my adulthood. A phase we enter quietly, often signifying our loss of play.

 

The diptychs resonate my eternal presence, and present absence, from these places that I have come so far away from.