I spent most of May in London and on a holiday in Scotland. I flew to the city earlier than my partner to tie together some loose ends in my research on S. Rajaratnam, hoping for new leads but not finding them. I lived in London only four years in the early 1980s, but I’ve returned there regularly over the years. I still know how to get around. In my visits I do research at the British Library, National Archives, and other collections. I see friends from undergraduate days at University College London and remaining family. I and my partner take the train to Poole, Dorset, on what used to be visits to my parents’ house and are now visits to their shared grave in the local churchyard.
This visit was different, though, in that I had the chance to spend several days with a friend from that time in UCL, now over forty years ago. I’d seen her before in visits to London, but usually in the company of others — at meals, or in occasional get-togethers when friends were around. It was good to stay with her and to have time alone together to talk and look back on our lives. One afternoon when I wasn’t in the archives and she wasn’t working we walked together on the Parkland Walk, a disused railway line connecting Finsbury Park to Highgate. There’s a certain charm in such walks all over the world on old railway lines: the much shorter Seaview Walk in West Vancouver, the Rail Corridor in Singapore, or the footpath to Wimborne from Broadstone in Dorset. Walking is easy; old railways are wide, and have a gradual gradient. The surface is flat, and there’s nothing to stumble on: you can talk and listen intensely as you walk.
We looked back over forty years of our lives, and the very different paths we took. Our early years after graduating were quite similar. I travelled the world acquiring graduate degrees, with stints teaching and as a social worker; she’d had a similar experience as a TEFL teacher. Then, in her early thirties, she’d returned to the UK, married had a family, suffered loss. I’d moved to Singapore, where I’ve spent most of my adult life and all of my academic career. What struck us was the randomness of this: a job offer at the right time, a family death, and the whole of your life changed. You met a partner, your life branched, and you never could go back. Later in life you made a turn again, motivated by a crisis or profound loss in your life, back to something you loved, or felt was missing. For her it was music, both making music and teaching. For me, communities outside academia and writing in its various forms, above all as a process and not a product.
We walked up the path to Highgate. There’d been a little rain, and the new leaves were beautifully green. We passed over bridges and through the bare platforms of a former station. At Highgate we entered Queen’s Wood, and then Highgate Wood, into what seemed a quintessential English landscape. Great oaks with sweeping boughs, squirrels scuttling and then suddenly still, magpies gliding down from the canopy above. There was a clearing with a cricket pitch, and then a tiny cafe with a complicated series of gates to keep out dogs. We sat there for a little while and then walked back. A few days later I’d walk here with my partner, fighting jet lag in the afternoon.
In our conversations, in breakfasts over toast and coffee and scrambled eggs, I was trying to think of what was constant and what had changed. The early 1980s in Britain were also a dark time. Europe was divided, seemingly irrevocably so. Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, was ascendant, as was Reagan in the US. Many of the legacies of that post-War push towards social equality in Britain were being dismantled. There were differences from now: that post-war consensus would take years to fully demolish, and climate changes wasn’t the existential threat it is today.
Perhaps what was different was that we were young then. We had energy, and we hadn’t suffered disappointment. We were part of a select group: the percentage of the population going to university at the time we entered college was less than ten per cent. At the same time, this wasn’t simply an elite: student grants, with a means-assessed parental contribution, covered living expenses and fees. Most of my friends had been to state, rather than private schools. Many of my friends studied in the humanities and social sciences without having to think instrumentally about a career. There was time to explore, and to become involved in student activism beyond the classroom.
Now we are older. We’ve seen a lot and suffered many disappointments. There’s a sense in which, in the words of the narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s beautiful novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the world is a flower that has lost its petals. When you meet a friend like this you tend to look back, at all those paths that you didn’t take. How each of you entered and left a succession of communities that were both supportive and normalizing. New struggles now with ageing bodies and minds that don’t quite do your bidding. How in all this change something in both of us remained true.