Laurence Inman went to Birmingham and discovered that something was missing.
It’s been a week of emotional moments, the kind you know will last in the memory. I’m now sixty-two and have become quite a canny hand at recognising them as they happen, instead of realising their significance two or three decades later.
On Saturday I was with my wife and our two children in Swansea. We walked on the beach, flat for miles as the tide was out. I find I enjoy these occasions more and more now that they’ve both left home and are making their own way. I am reassured that things have, after all, worked out just right. Our daughter drives us back to her place. Our son is next to her. We sit in the back.
On the way home to Birmingham there is a bright silver full moon. I could hardly take my eyes off it. I think this is another of the portents and signs that are suited to this time of my life: what was familiar and expected is now special and surprising. The moon, the seasons, weathers, even simple times of the day. Everything, in fact, that Wordsworth mentions in the Immortality Ode.
For some time I’ve been learning by heart poems which carry a particular meaning for me or which are just perfect technically. This week it’s been Hardy’s At Castle Boterel. It covers both criteria. As we thread along the M5 I play various lines in my head. Was there ever a time of such quality….Though Time’s unflinching rigour, in mindless rote…..I look back at it amid the rain for the very last time.
Yesterday I was walking through town to do an audition for a film. At the junction of New Street and Corporation Street, which I regard as the centre of the city, I looked down Stephenson Place. I always do this because the sight of the plane tree there pleases me.
It had gone. There was a foot-high stump. This is on the route of the Metro. The Council have put some weasly announcement up online; thirty trees have been taken, ‘none of them of any real historical importance’ since they have been there for only twenty years or so. This may apply to some of the ones in Corporation Street, but I know that the one in Stephenson Place had been there for decades.
It was there when the Queens Hotel, soot-stained and stolid, faced it across the street, and I spent whole days train-spotting at the station; when Hudsons bookshop was on the opposite corner; when the bodies from the explosion at The Tavern in the Town in 1974 were laid out in the foyer of the Midland Hotel.
I took a small piece of bark from the base of the stump. It now lives in my greenhouse.
