Dolce Domum

There’s the hill on which, fifty years past,
I crashed my bike, swerving — said the driver
Who put us both in the back of his car —
Towards the road. Towards the trees! — I lied,
Nursing my grazed elbows and knees. My dad
Didn’t listen, and grounded me for a week
For the challenge to his authority
And the injury, I suppose, to his pride.

And there’s the tree he planted in our front
Garden — was it the year that I was born?
Dividing in two the tiny square of grass
So our neighbour knew when to stop mowing.
Grown tall now but crooked, separated
In its youth into two unequal trunks,
Its fallen leaves, this early autumn,
Cover both sides of the no-wider lawn.

There’s the infant school across whose tarmac
We threw worms at the hair of screaming girls
On our forever-raining lunchtime breaks.
Now a day-care centre for the elderly,
The children, who once played on every
Hop-scotch pavement and roly-poly hill,
Have grown up and moved away, leaving
Not an echo of our laughter and cries.

The parade of shops has changed names and wares:
Patisserie for laundromat, Tesco
For Co-op, and a Chinese takeaway.
And the sweetshop from which I was caught lifting
Is run now by a family of Asians.
The Fabs and Rockets they still sell have shrunk
With everything else, so I buy a copy
Of the Times Literary Supplement.

The playground from whose monkey bars I hung
Upside down, wet from the sprinklers
And paddling pools of the endless summer
Of 1976, has been removed.
And search as I might among the tussocks
Of grass, I cannot find its foundations,
Only a half-imagined circle for
An igloo, a seesaw and a roundabout.

The swing from the willow by the river,
Hung, so local legend went, by a stuntman,
And to which I clung, terrified of falling,
As the ball of fear gathered new children,
Is still there; but around the one strong rope
Cling tangled threads in garish colours.
And the trunk, penknife-carved with our initials,
Is graffitied now with sprays of blue paint.

The woods are still there, no longer a wasteland
Threatened by development but, at last,
A nature reserve protected by law,
The shadows of their copses wider now
But still filled with the same sylvan magic.
We, on the other hand, who hid there once
And walk here still, have changed in something more
Than the circumference of our waistlines.

The mothers still wear headscarves, but not like
Those my mother wore, brightly-coloured and
Decorated with flowers, tied under
Her chin to keep the wind from unwinding
Her rolled and pinned and aerosol-sprayed hair,
But black and unadorned, a pall of shame
From the Caliphate, framing unsmiling
Faces that do not return my greeting.

And although I stand on the tiny square
Of cobbled stones beneath its one street lamp,
And walk the lanes between back-yard fences,
And try to recall the precipitous rides
Down grass knolls no higher now than my hip,
And picture myself, hiding in the hedges
Where I loved to hide with the ladybirds,
It is too much for me to remember:

Like a cool wind swallowed on a river bank
By lungs accustomed to shallow panting
In the city. And so I exhale,
Turn my back and walk away. Because
I must live in what remains to me here
In the brief world of now, which grows smaller
As I near my end, carrying in my eyes
The burdening years of my memory.

Nostalgia is the longing for something
We never had, and once all this was mine.
Better to believe I never had it
Than to know that I lost it all to time,
In whose eddies every boat must sink,
Washed up, at last, on the muddy bank,
A backbone of ribless keel from which
The rudder has rotted, the oars have fallen.

— London, September 2024

• • • • •

The Latin title, meaning ‘Sweet Home’ — or, more accurately, ‘Sweetly Homeward’ (domum being the accusative case of the motion towards) — is the title of a chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the re-reading of which, in the summer of 2024, led me to revisit my childhood home in London before I returned to Hong Kong.