Backwards Into The Future, Forwards Into The Past

A VISIT TO CAMBRIDGE AND A TRIP BACK IN TIME

My wife and I have recently returned from a short two-night stay in Cambridge. Just over 40 years ago, in December 1977, our first child had been born there. We were actually living in Huntingdon, where I was coming to the end of my first year of teaching. I was 26, my wife 22. We had been married just over 4 years.

We didn't particularly like living in Huntingdon, mainly because the surrounding countryside held so little of interest compared with our native Sussex. But visiting Cambridge a couple of times each month made things bearable.

After our daughter was born we spent one more year in the area before we managed to move back to the south coast.

I had found myself in Cambridge briefly a couple of times in the intervening years - once when I was working on my biography of Tennyson and another time when driving through with a work colleague - but this was the first time we had been back there together.

The trip hadn't been made purely with nostalgia in mind. We spent time in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Sedgwick Museum and the Botanical Gardens. But our first and essential port of call was to The Eagle, where we had spent so many a Saturday evening during 1977, listening to undergraduates and academics from the university chatting and socialising.

The outside of The Eagle wasn't much changed but the bar we had usually frequented was packed full with a group of young Asians having a meal. We walked through to other areas of the pub that we had never ventured into all those years ago. It was hard to find a table that wasn't already being used by people eating food, or had a reserved sign on it. Back in the 1970s bar meals were only just beginning to feature as part of pub fare and even then you were unlikely to find more than ploughman's and scampi & chips on offer. I don't remember food featuring at all at The Eagle in those days.

But times change. We found somewhere to sit, had a couple of drinks, and returned again on our second night, at a later hour.

It's strange what things jump out at you when returning to a place after such a lapse of time. I immediately recognised the steps up to a door of what had been our preferred coffee shop in those days - memorable for all the lifting of our daughter's buggy up and down them on our way in and out. It was no longer a cafe, but the steps were unmistakeable.

Though it was cold, the sun was shining and the shadows looked lovely on the college walls. As I'm sure they did on such days forty years before. What a significant chunk of time those two score years represent. A whole career. A passage from youth to age. And throughout those years a constant, true and loving companionship with a wife who is still the only person with whom I can be truly myself.

They say the past has weight. It hangs heavy. But I've always been very much taken with the thought that it is the future that lies behind us, unseen, and that we are drawn backwards into it with the past that we have lived through receding in front of our eyes. Which is why I like to sit in a rear-facing seat on trains, just as I am doing now while writing this.

The Egyptian and other ancient displays at the Fitzwilliam are extraordinary. I can't remember ever experiencing before quite how exactly like us the men and women of 4000 years ago were. But thinking about it, 4000 is only a hundred times the amount of years I have been talking about above. A hundred careers, a hundred passages from youth to age. Not even a hundred lifetimes. The distant past is not so far away as we commonly believe.

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences is on a different scale. "A walk through the museum will take you on a 4.5 billion journey through time," is the promise. It is at once mind-boggling and yet strangely reassuring to see all those seashells and imprints of leaves looking just as exactly like shells and leaves look today as the people of ancient Egypt look like us now.

We are often led to believe that change and flux are the natural state of things. But most change and most events are driven by human influence while underlying the keynotes in our everyday timelines (the job changes, the car purchases, the birthdays, house moves) there is that awesome and unchanging constancy that, once recognised and acknowledged, can give us confidence and buoyancy.

What fun it would have been to timeslip into a springtime Saturday one weekend in 1978 and to meet up with our youthful early-parenting selves. Fun for us now, but would it have been fun for us then? Probably emphatically not, which is why I say once again it is best to travel backward into the future unaware of where we are being led.