Roads that were once familiar

There are journeys you make over and over again - to work, to visit family, to go to favoured places. You get to know every turn and feature, the best places to stop for a coffee, a rest or a view, the faces you recognise. The journey becomes so familiar that time becomes abbreviated. And then, you make the journey no more.

From the age of 11, I took buses to school and then to college. These familiar journeys stopped at 19, when I went to university in London and a more complicated life began. But the family home in Shirley, Solihull always provided comfort and continuity. Memories become selective with age, and grow warm in nostalgia. My most nostalgic memories are of my brother and I playing on the mat in front of the fire on a Sunday morning. I also had the job of polishing the collection of brass ornaments. My mother would make the only cup of coffee we drank in the week - made with instant Nescafé and milk. There would be the smell of the Sunday roast from the kitchen. The Sunday sequence of radio programmes would begin.

There are other such nostalgias. My father cooking lunch (we called it ‘dinner’) for my brother and me on the alternate Saturdays when my mother was working at a nearby shop. This was always the same meal: fried gammon steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. It was followed by treacle pudding (from a tin and heated in boiling water) covered in custard.

These are warm memories because my mother and father were kind and loving people, taking great pride in how well my brother and I did in our education and careers. 

The family home remained the destination for my familiar journeys after I went to university. I lived in ten different houses between then and 1983, when my wife and I moved to the home we still live in. From then on, the familiar journey would be through country lanes to the M5, onto the M42, the A435, and then country and suburban roads to the semi-detached family home in Shirley. My father died in 2000, many years after cancer of the throat had taken away his warm speaking voice. My mother lived another 18 years as a widow. Over time, her friends and siblings died, and she was not able to access the networks and friendship groups of the kind that provide support for widows in a village such as my own. A botched eye operation deprived her of much of her sight. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until the last two years of her life.

Today (June 6th) is my father’s birthday, and I visited my parents’ grave in Widney Manor in Solihull. I did not go to the old family home in Shirley, a once-familiar road I will never travel again.