14 Oct. - Englefield

 Image: The village green nearby where I was born. My parents named our new-built home in Australia 'Englefield'

Weird alignments placed us in Chertsey, just a few kilometres from Englefield Green, with 24 hours to spare.

Do I not go?

It would seem perverse to not go.

So we went.

For me?, For Mum? For both? Certainly not for B.

It was perhaps a curious form of intellectual exercise as I have no intimate memories beyond those of stories told, photographs + cine-film spools viewed.

Everything was there + as you would expect after a half-century plus of passage of time, which I suppose made sense - but I'm not sure I felt more than a duty or obligation or compulsion met + fulfilled?

Still, lots of photos were taken ... 'I was here' ... And indeed I was there. Am I in denial as to its import or significance?

So many questions. Just 'be' perhaps?

I came. I saw. I photographed. I questioned.

Job done? A closed loop?

That was then, this is now - way too many branchings in-between to count.

Notes: As you may remember from the Introduction, I was just short of two years old when my family left England in 1963. I was born in the front room of our family home in a quiet backstreet of Englefield Green but of course my earliest memories are of Australia. I had never felt any compulsion to return to the place of my birth and we therefore never planned this day in our itinerary, but a confusion with the return date for our rental camper-van, occasioned by bookings made online from a different time-zone on the opposite side of the planet, meant that we goofed and ended up with a day to spare at our Chertsey campsite nearby the Heathrow vehicle drop-off. So we walked the streets of the village of Englefield Green and photographed the house I was born in ... Though I'm still unsure what it might have meant for me.