A few weeks ago my mother's neighbour died. Cyril had been ill for some while, getting treatment on and off from the hospital, but even so no one entirely expected it when he just keeled over and heamorraged. Mum was particularly upset, since Cyril's lodger called her over to try to help. She ran the hundred yards between the two houses faster than she'd ever run before, but she was still too late.
Cyril Weaver was an ordinary bloke, very good with his hands and with a practical eye towards Things That Needed Doing. He always treated myself and my brother as part of the family, despite having two sons of his own much older than us. In fact his grandchildren were of an age with my little sister, who got treated as another favoured grandchild. Cyril was forever over at our place through my childhood, fetching and delivering milk, newspapers and gossip, lending us his rotivator or borrowing some petrol. He was a constant presence, with his bald head and his evil-tempered Jack Russell terrier, a sort of favourite uncle to a family with no shortage of relatives at all.
Cyril lived in Preston Wynne for more years than I can remember. His wife died a couple of years ago, and his children had long flown the nest. Now he's gone, and thirty years of shared experience that anchored me to Herefordshire have gone with him. He was a neighbour in a quiet area of countryside where the houses were separated by fields, where being a neighbour meant something. Now I don't know my mother's neighbours any more, and it get harder and harder to call her house "Home." It was only after Cyril died that I realised apart from the Morgans, the farming family who own the fields around Mum's house, none of the people living down the lane were there when I was born. One by one, all of the others had died, retired from farming into town, or just moved away. There are two new houses down there now, plus one that was torn down and rebuilt from scratch. I don't know many of the people in the village any more, and it's not that large a place.
I used to think that I was the one who changed, not home, not my parent's house. I deliberately chose not to go back home after leaving university. Part of the decision was straightforward economics − I was looking for a job with computers, pretty much any job with computers, and my chances of finding one in the Border Marches would have been pretty much zero at the time. Cambridge, on the other hand, was even then the focal point of the Silicon Fen, and while computer jobs didn't actually fall out of the air onto you they did at least exist in some numbers. Besides, Cambridge is a lot nicer than London, the obvious alternative. I had been a country boy, and I really didn't want to have to live in a big city, especially not London.
The rest of my reasons I couldn't really articulate at the time, but they boil down to wanting my independence. Badly. I had lived all my life (while I wasn't in college) in one house at the end of an unmade lane on the edge of a tiny village where even the giddy social heights of going to the pub required a tramp across to the next village, and I wanted to be free of it. I wanted choose for myself, to make my own mistakes, to do my own things (not that I was clear as to what they were) without worrying whether my mother would approve or worse, drop in unannounced at a particularly inconvenient moment. Being on the opposite side of the country seemed like a good idea when you looked at it that way.
Best of all, if I was somewhere else then my parent's house would be a refuge, somewhere that I could retreat to if things got too bad. Nothing would have changed, because nothing ever did change in Preston Wynne…
Of course I was wrong. Places can change every bit as much as people can, if not more. While I have changed − I share very few interests with even my family these days − so has the village. It's not so much the physical changes, those seem slow and comfortable compared with Cambridge, where houses sometimes seem to spring up in the brown field sites like mushrooms after the rain. No, it's the people that have changed. Slowly, over the years, the people that I knew in my childhood have left, one way or another. They have been replaced by new people, people that my mother gets on with just fine but who are strange to me. Mum's home is no longer the same safe, unchanging place, for it is surrounded by aliens. I'd better not want to retreat any more, because my retreat isn't there.
And slowly, one by one, the adults that I looked up to as a child have died. Grandmother, father, neighbours, teachers, even the occasional schoolfriend, none of them have been immune to time except in our memories. Now, when I visit my mother, those memories come crashing down on me, reminding me that this isn't home any more, that these people that I shared it with have gone. You won't be surprised, I hope, when I say that I don't visit Mum all that often any more.
"Thy book of toil is read. The long day closes."
No, nowadays my living memories are of Cambridge, and of fandom. They may grow and change, but I have grown and changed with them these last ten years. I haven't grown or changed with Preston Wynne in that time, and I don't fit into it any more. Going back to Mum, I try to step into a past that simply isn't there any more. I've always known that stepping into the future was what I wanted to do, whether it was in reading or working, but it was only Cyril's death that really brought home to me that I've been doing it in living too. That's good. I just wish I could have found out some easier way.