A11 The Way Home

Three generations of my family have travelled along the single carriageway of the A11 through Thetford Forrest to various moments in their lives, some happy, some not.

 

The A11 smiles at my impatience. 

It squeezes itself down to narrow single lanes, hoping that as the traffic slows and halts, I might look up from the blurring monotone ahead and see around me at least the green of the forest.

My eyes remained frustrated, fixed on the speedometer as it slides down to 17mph.

The A11 tries another tack and starts to sing to me. 

It wants to sing a song about my family. The road duke box shuffles through time and I can hear my grandfather’s Morris, my father’s Jaguar and then Granada, my own Mini all riding on this same stretch of road. Eastwards. Flat.

Between the overlaid tones of each engine, the A11 finds hidden notes in each decade and forms harmonies that can only be heard in these brief few miles of forest-edged tarmac.   As I hum along, my memories splash words to the tune and the song begins.

A duet with the A11. A song I did not know I knew.

My grandparents are sunning themselves outside a tied cottage in Kilverstone, part of a Lord’s estate. Both beautiful and young, as I had never known them. My grandfather is still wet with the sweat of polishing his motorbike.

John is beaming in love with Katherine, who feigns chic indifference to his devotions from beneath her Marcel wave. John is brimful of his first year at St Martin’s and fresh home to Kath for the Summer. 

He does not yet know that upon his return to London, he will discover that that first year will be his last, family money not permitting. The smile he smiles here is one he lost and never found again.

Four decades later, my father needs all four litres of the Jaguar to get him to that same cottage anything like on time. 

Christmas morning and Roy’s been drinking since the day before Christmas Eve. Polos alternate with Benson & Hedges as he curses himself for having had another six for the road, that morning. His gifts are unwrapped presents that others people gave him. His charm, which is normally so velvety and fat, wears thinner with every phone box he uses to ask for the same directions again.

This day will be the second time that a pregnant Cynthia ends their relationship.

My first outing to Norwich past all of these pasts and into the 1980’s. A sixth-former, driven by his father in a metallic, lime green Granada to a university open day, everyone unsure how to behave.

Stephen wears a pinstripe suit bought for him as a totem of manhood to mark the occasion. The university that he will spend the day convincing himself to like, will reject him. His humiliation will be gift-wrapped.  And softened years later by success at the same place, in ways he could not picture then.

The song stops. 

The A11 smiles again, more faintly.

Dual carriageway. 

I pull-over, blinking and stunned. I stare back into the colours of the forest threaded together by this amazing, grey palimpsest.

April 2008

Reviews

[cyan blue]

road as palimpsest...great idea! it was so good that i registered just to review you!

[Steven Pottle]

Marlton- I love this. That the memories brought on by travelling down a familiar stretch of road seem like a song that you didn't know that you had been singing or knew the words, like you knew these roads:

"The A11 tries another tack and starts to sing to me.
It wants to sing a song about my family. The road duke box shuffles through time and shows me my grandfather's Morris, my father's Jaguar and then Granada, my own Mini all riding on this same stretch of road. Eastwards. Flat."

The words Eastwards and flat just hit home and explain so much about that journey- both in terms of actual, physical but also metaphorical, emotional.
Fantastic piece.