SL2 4NZ – Joe Spence

The hot Summer of ’76 –
         I remember, I remember

A bookish teenager –
A literary pilgrimage

He boards at Clapham –
Alights at Windsor

He crosses the River –
Meanders the High St

He peeps at the College –
Skirts Slough

         Arrives not a moment too soon
         Finding the place satisfactory

He recites and imagines –
Surveys the narrow cells

         Albeit no curfew tolls the knell
         Although no plowman homeward plods

         I remember, I remember
The hot Summer of ’76

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The moment I heard about the 26 Postcodes project I knew the place about which I wanted to write. I’ve made many literary pilgrimages over the last 50 years, but the first was to St Giles’s Church in Buckinghamshire, the place Thomas Gray brought to mind when he wrote “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). 

My clipped reflections in a poem of 18 lines capture, I hope, something of the sense of wonder in uniting writer and place that I felt, as a 16-year-old, when I boarded a train in London, alighted in Windsor and walked four miles through Eton and Slough to the village of Stoke Poges. 

I may have had more intense experiences in Joyce’s Dublin, Yeats’ Sligo or around Brian Friel’s Kinlochbervie (see Faith Healer); on Scott Fitzgerald’s Long Island Sound and even approaching Philip Larkin’s Coventry, but the clearest memory I have of a literary pilgrimage is of those moments captured in my contribution to 26 postcodes. I  vividly recall crossing the Thames at Windsor Bridge, a first view of a closed Eton College (Thomas Gray’s old school, where I was later to spend 15 happy years as a teacher and House Master,) the walk-through semi-industrial Slough (did I already know John Betjeman’s ‘Slough’ and recite ‘Come pretty bombs…’?) and the smell of the countryside as I made my way on to Stoke Poges. The village was already more built-up than I’d expected but reading and reciting Gray’s poem where it is memorialised still gave me that frisson one experiences whenever one reunites a poem or story with where it was set or written.

The summer of ‘76 remains for many people of my generation the summer of our childhood. It seemed to go on and on, a Sun-kissed summer and a wonderful one into which to come into young adulthood as a 16-year-old with one’s first public examinations behind one and one’s whole scholastic, literary, professional and personal life ahead of one.

The literary references in “SL2 4NZ” taken from other poets I began reading around this time – T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin – paint the literary landscape of the mind of a bookish teenager, one of whose first memories is of bursting into tears of wonder as he finished reading his first “proper” novel, Jack London’s White Fang, at the age of seven. The joy of reading led to the joy of writing and continues to inspire thoughts about the sacredness of places where art and literature has been conceived. And so, I urge you now towards Grantchester, Brighton, Lampedusa’s Sicily or Joan Lindsay’s Hanging Rock. May the blessings of reuniting place and poet give you as much pleasure as they have given me over the last 50 years.