Endeavouring to Find a Way Into the Past

Long, long ago now I found myself at the old Soviet Space Launch centre at Tyuratam in Central Asia, a part of the world that is so sad, so desolate and yet so captivating that half of me always wants to go back (while the other, more sensible half tells me not to be so silly). The names alone are enough to stoke the romantic part of me. The Syr Daria river, half dead, slipping through the dry yellow landscape, the hot, exciting winds, the bewitching domes of Samarkand (closer in spirit to its lovelier twin, Isfahan, not far away in Persia, than to anywhere in the old Russian empire). Flying over the Aral Sea, visibly shrunken from a  height of 30,000 feet, with its former size made visible by the darkness of the soil from which the water has now withdrawn. The hills outside Samarkand, plainly not far from Afghanistan, with many of the people dressed as they might be in Peshawar, and looking as if they have checked their Kalashnikovs in at the bus station. Then there is the pleasant oasis feel of any garden or shady place.

 

Well, there at Tyuratam (it’s not Baikonur, by the way. That’s hundreds of miles away, a ruse to deceive Western intelligence in Cold War Days), I found myself in a building that must  have hosted Yuri Gagarin as he prepared for his epoch-making journey into space in April 1961. It was modern in an old-fashioned way, streamlined and ornamented with rounded gadgets, like something from the film ‘Things to Come’ . It was an outdated, obsolete idea of the future.

 

I watched a space launch, an impressively noisy moment but nothing like as spectacular as I believe American lift-offs are, as the cloud-base at Tyuratam is almost always low, and we saw the rocket for a very short time before it vanished. Earlier I had got close enough to the launch-pad to see that it appeared to have a graveyard next to it, but I could get no explanation of this (I suspect it had something to do with a terrible accident there in 1960, when 120 people were killed when an ICBM ignited prematurely, an incident kept secret for the next 30 years).

 

The launch rocket I saw take off safely was carrying Helen Sharman,  the only British cosmonaut, and it was more or less identical to the one which had taken Gagarin into space. Soviet space rockets are the Morris Minor 1000s of the cosmos, simple, crude, dependable and cheap to make and run.

 

But I also had a strange feeling that I had wandered into my own childhood by a back way. I remembered, quite clearly, the sunny April day in 1961 in South Street, Chichester, in Sussex, when I had seen the newspaper headlines announcing Gagarin’s orbit of the earth. This took place on 12th April, so must have been announced on the 13th, my brother’s birthday, when I think my mother must have taken us both out for fish and chips in a mock-Tudor café that we used to like (I now suspect she loathed it) . And now here I was, where that great event had actually happened.

 

I had an absurd feeling that if I could somehow slip out of this place by a back door, I could make my way back to that lost world of Nikita Krushchev, Harold Macmillan and the hypnotic, faintly horrible ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ playing (yet again) on two-way family favourites, on the radiogram.   

 

Nonsensical, of course. No such door exists.  But I had a similar sensation when I learned that the makers of the TV detective dramas ‘Morse’ and ‘Lewis’ , having mined these characters to the limit, were going ahead with a series called ‘Endeavour’ about the young Inspector Morse, making his way as a constable in the Oxford of the 1960s.

 

I imagined that some effort would be made to reproduce the Oxford of that era, the years when I first got to know the city. Silly of me. How many people , who watched the programme as a Sunday evening diversion, would know or care?

 

There were enjoyable flashes of the past as it might have been anywhere, ten bob notes, postal orders, National Savings stamps, Post Office savings books, Ritz crackers, the usual old cars and rather tentative attempts to reproduce the male styles in hair and clothes of the time. I don’t think any self-respecting actor of today would submit to the reality of either. The women, by contrast,  were absurdly over-glamorised, as is the way with period drama. The general appearance of the world was never quite shabby enough. As for Oxford itself, it barely featured.

 

The shots that were taken couldn’t really do much about the fact that in 1965, the great work of refacing the blistered, blackened stone of the colleges was not yet finished,  that the famous bearded heads of so-called ‘Emperors’ outside the Sheldonian Theatre had by then crumbled into almost total ruin, and were about to be replaced (starting in 1970, by the brilliant, witty Michael Black) with clean, new versions.  Nor could they recreate the vast clanging car factories which then still existed, or the Pressed Steel works, or Morrell’s Brewery (now flats) or the sign that greeted surprised new arrivals at the ancient, sagging railway station ‘Welcome to Oxford – Home of Pressed Steel’.

 

Actually we saw little of Oxford.  The 1966 city, free of tourism,  beset with industry, with its light traffic, buses with conductors, uncloned shops, plummy department stores, shabby and affordable houses in North Oxford, scruffy pubs, butchers, fishmongers, gowned, predominantly male undergraduates, tweedy dons, unguarded, open college buildings (though their walls were spiked to stop their junior members breaking the strict curfews of the time) ,  and Direct Grant schools is as lost as Atlantis and would cost millions to replicate.

 

So Godstow wasn’t Godstow,  Cowley wasn’t recognisably Cowley, the Bus Station certainly wasn’t the Bus Station (it was the Covered Market), the Police Station wasn’t the Police Station and the featured Church wasn’t anywhere in Oxford I’ve ever seen. I thought they might have tried to recreate Maxwell’s bookshop, a brilliant idea before its time, owned by the horrible Robert Maxwell. It was a bookshop with its own café, a cheerful steamy refuge approached down a spiral staircase, and serving khaki frothy coffee in glass cups and saucers. It didn’t catch on, not then. People preferred Fuller’s , or the Cadena, and couldn’t see why anyone would want to buy a book and have coffee in the same place.

 

But oh dear , why can’t anyone get the simplest things right?  The Reverend John Blenkinsop should not, even now,  be referred to or addressed as ‘Reverend Blenkinsop’, but as ‘Mr Blenkinsop’.  This ugly American formula wasn’t even thought of in 1965, especially in Oxford. You don’t get married at a ‘registry office’. It’s a ‘register office’, as any copper would have known.  And no English person crossed his sevens in 1965 (in fact, in that odd film ‘Went the Day Well?’,  it’s that self-same strange continental habit that alerts the villagers to the fact that the soldiers in their midst are Nazi impostors). I don’t think people said ‘there you go’ , either,  or wore pearls while pinning the laundry on the line. And they didn’t take ‘medication’ . They took their medicine, or perhaps their pills or tablets.

 

I’m just waiting for someone to start talking about ‘train stations’ or to ‘commit’ to something without using a reflexive pronoun. I think I almost spotted an instance of ‘rolling out’ and I’m watching for a use of ‘going forward’, a use of ‘convince’ to mean ‘persuade’,  of ‘reticent’ when they mean ‘reluctant’ and of ‘may’ where ‘might’ would be better. And then, sooner or later, there are going to be some metres.  Amazing how quickly we forget our own past, and become the slaves of the present.

 

There’s certainly no way back, though sometimes a half-second exposure to a forgotten smell can transport me, with total recall, into a scene of 40 or 50 years ago. Why is it that no other sense has quite the same power?  TV will never be able to convey it, I’m pleased to say.