Revisiting Past Haunts

This green lozenge is one of the landscapes of my childhood, Turbary Common on the north side of Bournemouth. Today I was visiting my mother and after a bit of garden tidying went out to drop off a prescription form at the doctor and then buy fish and chips at the new-ish shop on Kinson Road, and the 'top path' over the Common was the quickest, and most interesting, way. The Common was a fun and slightly foreboding place where, Mum always reminds me, I once mis-stepped and sank into mud over the top of my boots. A fair would visit over the summer; in later years there was a model car racing track there, succeeded by horses grazing after the Council declared the Common a Nature Reserve and grubbed up the hard standing. The change in the Common's legal status was the beginning of its regeneration. It was a scrappy, disorganised landscape once, but is now ringed with trees and the bewildering network of tracks which crossed it have been resolved into a few major ones from which it's now virtually impossible to deviate. 

The Common was a world in itself, and though it looks much better than it once did, it has shrunk! So have the surrounding streets which once stretched away in my mind, connecting places whose geographical relationship with each other I wasn't really aware of. At the end of the row of businesses containing the fish-and-chip shop used to be a second-hand shop where I used to pick up copies of Dr Who novelisations which shouldn't have been as battered as they were given their age. On the corner opposite was a detached house which an even younger version of me always found forbidding: it was surrounded by trees but for a drive in and another out, each leading onto a different road, and only the gables of the building looming over the top of the vegetation. The trees have long been cut back, revealing a very modest and not at all Gothic Edwardian dwelling. Today there were even children's drawings of rainbows in the windows. How much more friendly could it be? Unless the residents are lulling us into a false sense of security.