47 Sanford Road

By Charlie Hill.

For a time last summer, I found myself at the confluence of a number of destabilising forces – not least of which was death – that forced me to reconsider my relationship with the past. The other day, feeling disconnected from what I had previously regarded as the certainties of this hinterland, I went back down to 47 Sandford Road.

I chose Sandford because of a photograph I once had. In it, I’m standing outside number 47 with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other; my attention has been taken by something out-of-shot and I’m looking to one side, at a cabbage white butterfly perhaps or neighbour sitting on her doorstep. I’m impossibly young, louche, invincible; I have the look of someone who has just struck an exclusive deal with the world that has left them impervious to the buffeting vicissitudes of life. I hadn’t seen the photo in years but that wasn’t the point: I’ll always remember it, just as I’ll always remember tying my partner to the futon in the red-bulbed attic at the top of 47’s narrow stairs or freewheeling past the mosque as we rode to feed the geese by the goose-shitty bandstand in the park; just as I’ll always remember buying handfuls of fruit and veg from the market on a Saturday morning – once we mashed a bowl of blackening avocados and had it on buttered toast – or visiting friends on afternoons that stretched round the earth like sun-warmed light or love.

I’ve visited these memories often, down the years. They’ve visited me, too. Each had many iterations. They came as caution or balm, fable or fairy story, meditation or pulp digression, they are rebuke or consolation. They caused everything from melancholy to joy but they had one thing in common: they were all recognisably part of me. It was this that stimulated my desire to revisit the physical space of number 47 Sandford Road, to reacquaint myself with the fixed material source of so many familiar narratives. To ground myself in a past whose moving parts had begun to string me out.

At first, my return went as I had hoped it might. It had been many years but the walk from the fraying boho of Moseley High Street towards inner-city Balsall Heath was much as I remembered it. There were more coffee shops of course, but only one of the pubs had changed its name. The mosque was still there, the fox and rat-ripped bin bags too. I was passed, as ever, by dark-windowed cars propelled by drum and bass or crawling to dub; halfway down the hill I saw strangers so familiar – striding, tottering, slouching – they might have moved through time to be there. As I walked on cracked paving slabs and patches of dusty tarmac I wondered how many times I had trodden this exact same route, from the bus stop to number 47, maybe even in these exact same footsteps; I reflected on my attachment to this concrete, this covering of dust, this late afternoon light, and the assuredness with which the physical and the once-removed commingled, considerations that made more intense the anticipation of my reconnection to the old house.

Then I turned the corner onto Sandford Road. And as I looked at a terraced row of frontages, I recognised none of them. Number 41 meant nothing to me, nor 43, nor 45. There was nothing on the street to which I felt the slightest psychological or emotional connection. I frowned at this. Told myself that it was understandable, that these buildings had never featured in my memories of the place, that this blank was less a portent than a happenstance that would put my soon-to-arrive rush of uniquely profound sensations into some sort of context. But this wasn’t the case. Arriving at last at number 47, the house was similarly alien. It had no familiar features. The windows were unrecognisable, the front door, the driveway. Nothing was as it had appeared for all those years in my constructions, there was no way these bricks and mortar, this roof, that colour scheme could possibly have contained the dim-lit attic or helped to frame my cherished photographic pose. There was no way that what I was looking at had ever been of my world.

Untethered again, I realised how naïve I’d been to invest so much in so direct an appeal to so volatile a potential source of psychic equilibrium. Worse, my renewed sense of disconnection now came with an irresistible undercurrent of violence. Just as number 47 Sandford Road now bore no resemblance to the place which had provided me with so many hours of succour, so the possibility existed that I had been misjudging my relationship to the past all along. That my constructions were not exaggerations or embellishments, but inventions. That I had never freewheeled to the park, or tied a woman to the bed, or sauntered, invincible, through implausibly long afternoons, that I had never done those things or felt that way.