When will I see you again?

There’s nothing quite like a song for placing waymarks in your past, is there? And there’s nothing quite like You Tube for porting yourself back to them. To be sure, You Tube is a dangerous place for nostalgia junkies. I can be innocently chasing down a vaguely remembered song and suddenly I’ll discover, not only the song, but video of the exact same T.V. show I watched it on twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago. And suddenly, there I am, helplessly time warped while the memories come flooding back at me like it was all yesterday.

 So,…  I’ve been reliving the summer of 1974 today, and one waymark in particular. It’s August, I’m thirteen years old and I’m driving home with my family from a holiday in Benllech bay, on the Isle of Angelsey. We’re travelling north in a pea green MK 1 Cortina, me, my younger sister, Mum and Dad, crossing the infamous Thelwall Viaduct on the M6. The sun’s shining and I’m looking out of the window at the play of light on the dark waters of the Manchester ship canal, hundreds of feet below, and this song is playing on the radio:

Soul was pretty big that year. I also recall Sad Sweet Dreamer and Barry White’s immortal “My Everything” – but “When will I see you again?” stands out. It made it to number one in August and lingered in the charts for the rest of ‘74, to become a bitter-sweet backing track to a lot of dark stuff that was to happen later on.

Unknown to any of us, as we drove home that day my father was ill. By the winter he was in a bad way, and by February he’d gone. I didn’t know as we crossed Thelwall in August ‘74, with that song playing, we were never to share another summer together. My father’s death crushed me. It made me feel atom sized, and it made the world feel suddenly cold and vast and cruel.

I still think of my father most days and wish with all my heart we’d had more time. Driving north over Thelwall even now is a reliable trigger for such feelings, but it’s only in more recent times I’ve realised it was another event, one that happened in the autumn, while that song was still in the charts, and my father was still alive, that probably saved me from drowning in the pit of grief I’d yet to experience.

 I fell in love.

She was a girl at my school. When I look at pictures of her now I wonder how she managed to so completely capture me. There were other girls from that time I remember as being more overtly good looking and blatantly sexual, but Rachel had a style and a class all her own – at least in my imagination – and that made her the real thing for me. I still feel a shiver when I think of her.

Of course, young love rarely makes for happy endings, and,… well,… she never did find out about me.

Grief is an uncompromising emotion and it changes you. I guess on the surface, after my father’s passing, nothing seemed to change at all, at least in the way I went about my life; I went on being a mostly average student, but I managed not to go off the rails and make my mother’s life hell. Indeed my memory of that time is one of trying to swallow down the rage and trying to hang on in there at school because I felt it was what my father would have wanted me to do, not to ruin myself, I suppose. But something had to give, and I dealt with it by falling deep inside of myself, becoming withdrawn and ever more introverted. I think I might have drowned there, except for that other uncompromising emotion, love, which threw me a rope and hauled me out, whether I liked it or not, to a different kind of future.

It seems odd that such a hopeless thing could restore a will to live. Coming out of grief, it was like swapping one emptiness for another but, unlike grief, unrequited love is a thing built on hope and if nothing else it gets you out of bed in the morning, it plants your feet firmly on the ground and sends you into the day full of expectation of your mistress’ favour, even though the humiliation and the shot expectations of yesterday’s hopes are still hanging in tatters around your neck.

To be sure, Rachel was a very powerful projection of something I hadn’t a hope in hell of getting  a handle on. She was a goddess, quite literally so, in the classical sense, and not altogether benign. Later on, my hopeless infatuation was better summed up by the Carpenters and “Goodbye to Love”, but the goddess wanted me to live, and live I did. It was to be thirty years later, when writing “Langholm Avenue”, before I was finally able to look her in the eye and make my peace with her.

As I chase down the decades on You Tube now, I realise there are so many other songs I’d like to share with you, and most of them make “When will I see you” sound a bit corny. It’s a sad reflection but I suspect that trio of gorgeous girls and their lovely song would probably be booed off X Factor now, but they were innocent times, and none the worse for that.

 In conclusion, I raise a glass to the memory of my father. Also to the memory of Rachel.

 When will I see them again? Are you kidding me? I see them every day.