See that boy sitting on the rockery of his front garden, enjoying the cavernous delights of his nostril with an index finger on this temperate, cloud-scented evening, the sun sweeping the suburb like a searchlight?And the teenagers on Ridgeback BMXs peddling so hard that their bikes wag like metronome needles as they head for the tree-fringed cycle path, the same one with the bridge under which a friend and I, twenty years ago, once placed a copy of Playboy attached to a thread and hid behind a bush and played Fishing for Perverts?
See the girl in the window of that house on the corner of Hodnett Avenue, chewing a pencil and designing a dress to make on her Singer, while her younger brother, looking sheepish but somewhat self-fascinated, stands in front of her with his arms spread, modeling a yellow and peach curtain?
None of these young people will grow up with any haste, not around here.
Like quality cheeses and some if not all turtles, people who grow up in this giant Berkshire development, the biggest of its kind in England, mature at a leisurely pace. Why? Probably because quality of life is high here, and the kind of suffering that matures a person is so rare that you have to go out actively looking for it. Also, the houses are all the same, so wherever you go and whoever you visit you always feel at home, and when you feel at home you relax, and certain things, including growing up, seem less urgent.
And maybe the street layout is a factor. The street layout appears to have been modeled on a design that someone made by flinging cooked spaghetti at a drawing board. As a result, whenever anyone around here looks out of their window, they never see anything so boring as a row of houses - they see up to four roads colliding outside their window, roads zooming uphill and downhill and coming at each other from reckless angles; they see streets looping like barnstormers, houses balancing breathless along their sides like wing-walkers – and when you live not on a road but on a racy convergence of boxed lives, you tend never to feel lonely or isolated, and you avoid the kind of glum introspection that leaves a person wondering where the last three hours or years went. The estate coddles and mothers you; and so it keeps you in perpetual childhood.
Back in 1988 I too was maturing at a comically slow pace. Though I had turned thirteen that year, I still thought of myself as being about nine or ten, and was nowhere near ready to be a teenager. I felt like a Barbie being shipped out of the factory with no eyebrows. At the time it felt like I was trapped in a prolonged spasm of awkwardness; in retrospect, as I walk through my old estate as an adult, it looks rather like a rhapsody. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to go back and experience it all again.
My religion is centered on God’s desire to establish a new heaven and a new earth; but I can’t see how I could love any world more than I suddenly love the world I grew up in. Much as the prospect of endless bliss appeals to me (of course), the thing I’m feeling most right now is vast nostalgia, an appetite for the way things used to be, an appetite for which heaven could not, frankly, cater. An appetite for the ecstasy of fumbling that made up my childhood: for vampire movies, and desperate last-minute homework in front of the television, and trying too hard to impress certain girls, and not trying hard enough to impress other girls, and the smell of floor polish in school assemblies. My fellow Christians can keep their New Jerusalem; I just want to go back to how things were.
Onwards, towards an evening meeting at my old church, which convenes in a primary school hall.
A melodic warm wind carries me past the Asda Superstore. Past its car park, and the new toll-booths in which, these days, otherwise unemployable teenagers are hired to sit and given strict instructions to look confused. Then, crossing the road, I slip into the curious quadrant of the housing development where most of my childhood friends lived. The streets here are straight treeless corridors, all traces of nature erased - not like the rest of the development, which for at least half the year is dripping with green and with berry bushes that exhale clouds of gnats, and in which it is still fashionable to give your house a shaggy skirt of vines that make it look like a hula dancer. Lots of garages around this part of the estate have designs painted on them - Jamaican flags, bullseyes, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club insignias - giving you the impression of walking through a giant tattooist’s studio. The houses themselves are less glamorous, with their peeling pastel-colored wood overlays from the waist-up, and their protruding porches, mostly made of window, containing shoes, cheeseplants, welcome mats.
I reach the gates of the primary school, in the heart of the labyrinth. Enthusiastic rainy vapor is now fizzling through the air’s pores. It’s evening, and the school exerts a simple gravity.
A lit school in the dark is a hypnotic thing, especially when the windows are glowing with religiosity of a familiar flavor. This is the place where I first encountered Christianity; the place where I learned about heaven and how to get there. Back then, heaven was the most exciting idea in the world. I look through the gates, and two nostalgias collide – nostalgia for the world I grew up in, and nostalgia for the way I used to feel about the world to come.
It’s a strange collision - not least because the two nostalgias seem, to my surprise, compatible. And I am comforted by a new suspicion: perhaps every pang of earthly nostalgia is a tiny foretaste of the feeling we’ll get when we look through heaven’s gates: an immense sensation of coming home, of returning to the way things used to be. Perhaps all of the odd delights of earth - even ghost stories and the smell of school corridors in winter - are cryptic hints at delights presently unimaginable.
I go through the gates and the building’s gravity draws me across the car park with its wet indigo gloss, and I pass beneath the porch and am gulped into the school. I’m late, and the singing has already started.
