Back when we took photographs with actual cameras and film and had the pictures printed at the chemist, we took a snap of our son on his first day of school.
He sat on the front steps of our then home, a terrace in London. He smiled awkwardly, barely managing to sit still for all of the excitement.
I don’t think of those London years very often. Life passes so quickly that living in the now feels imperative. But being back in London with time on my hands 22 years after returning permanently to Australia, the memories came upon me in a flood.
It was late spring. The milky light and warm days made me languorous and nostalgic about those few years we spent living there. Personal memories about people, I find, are very attached to place. I’ve written before about how I find it hard to visualise my long-dead parents because they never visited our current home.
So it has been with my boy (can I truly still call him my boy now that he’s a very much alive 27-year-old, 196cm-tall motorcycle-riding man?). What I mean is, I can’t readily remember the emotional sense I had of parenting him when he was the child in that first day of school photograph.
He was accident-prone – born wriggling and wanting to run. Always hitting his head. Falling. Getting up. Falling again. Running towards danger. A risk-taker. But recall of him in the London years – when we, his parents, were both travelling constantly and serving early-morning and late-evening Australian newspaper deadlines – sometimes lacks definition and detail.
One afternoon recently I hopped on the tube and headed to my old neighbourhood. I planned to visit what was our grungy though welcoming local for a drink. Alas it had transformed into a hyper-expensive steak joint and, even though it was empty, I couldn’t sit and order a drink without also paying extortionately for some Argentinian beef.
I wandered to the nearby common with its perilously steep bitumen path. I felt the trepidation I always experienced when watching the boy careen down it on his scooter always narrowly missing (except when he painfully collected it) the Victorian-era metal bollard at the bottom.
And then there we were, walking hand-in-hand along the high street in the sleet and wind while he fought to stay awake (he developed the weird ability as a four-year-old to sleep lightly while he walked holding my hand).
I walked past what we called the Billy Goat’s Gruff park where one of us would play the troll under the bridge while he traversed the little wooden bridge above. It’s how we met the “weather lady”, a kind woman, in her early 60s back then, who talked endless about the grim winter. She gave our boy a pair of mittens because she was worried about his cold antipodean hands.
I wandered down our old nearby street. Stopped opposite our former home, right about where someone was stabbed 20-something years ago while I cooked dinner inside.
There was the boy on the step, ready for school. And suddenly I could recall how it felt to be me back inside the house.
Memories, disjointed but vivid, competed for attention. That first real summer day when the boy’s desire to celebrate the season was so vivid he stripped off all his clothes, as he routinely did in Australia, and ran into the back yard. Later, him sitting on the back step, still buck naked, eating watermelon and spitting pips into the garden.
Next, him sitting on the carpeted bottom step of the internal staircase on the eve of his third birthday. He was weeping uncontrollably. Inconsolably. Had something terrible happened? Was he afraid?
No. He confided that he was devastated that this was his final day as a two-year-old and he would never ever be two again – and he wanted to remember, to cling on to forever, the “feeling of being two”.
He had few friends back then. We’d arrived on a bitterly cold New Year’s Day. We knew nobody in the neighbourhood. We made the most of his third birthday party: the neighbours and their kid from one side and the much older couple from the other (they were probably my age now at the time) came to sing Happy Birthday.
The kind weather lady came. With a present of course.
I left our old street and went to a cafe. Wrote this all down. I’ve never been cheaply sentimental or overly prone to nostalgia. But the feelings this day were a lot.
Snap out of it. I headed back to the tube. And there, on the other side of the road, hunched almost double over her shopping buggy, was the weather lady.
That’s when I really felt time’s arrow.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
