If my life prior to February 15, 2012, had been a song, it might have been “Hey Jude,” a simple piano tune, taking my sad and sorry adolescence and making it better. In the middle, it would pick up—better and better—for a few moments foreshadowing something extraordinary. And then: just na-na-na-na, over and over, pleasant enough, but mainly because it evoked what had gone before.
A day that began in my childhood bedroom in Manchester, boxed in by photograph albums and records, was always going to evoke the past.
My walk to the station, through streets gray with drizzle and commuters huddled into their coats and plugged into their phones, did not so much remind me of days gone by as stir a longing for them, for a summer under blue skies half a world away, where the music of boom boxes competed with the laughter of carelessly dressed drinkers spilling from the pub onto the footpath.
The route took me past the Radisson Hotel, once the Free Trade Hall and scene of a seminal moment in popular music. May 17, 1966. A heckler shouts “Judas!” to the young Bob Dylan, who has returned after the interval with an electric guitar, and he responds with a blistering rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone.” My father was there, in the audience, eyewitness to music history.
And on the station concourse, a teenage girl in a light blue anorak and a beanie like mine was singing Adele’s “Someone Like You,” a song about glory days, regrets, and the passing of time. It might have been just a pretty tune had there not been the memory of another young woman, twenty-two years ago now, to give substance to the observation that love only sometimes lasts.
I leaned against the wall opposite the busker. Passengers passed between us, a few of them tossing coins into her keyboard case. She was singing without a microphone, leaving it to the acoustics of the enclosed space to do the work. Her playing was basic but she had a good voice and a feeling for the song.
I allowed it to wash over me, letting music and performance take the simple sentiments to a higher plane, indulging for a few minutes in the sweet sadness of nostalgia, so different from the everyday gloom I had woken to in my mother’s house.
I tossed in a two-pound coin and earned a smile. There was a time when I might have done more: put a tenner in to get her attention, offered to accompany her so she could stand up to sing, made a little personal history. That time was gone. These days I was taking more from my bank of memories than I was putting in.
The day might come when I had nothing but memories, and the choice of whether to indulge my romantic side and wallow in them, or my cynical side and reflect on their reliability.
Had I painted the Australian skies a deeper blue because they were the backdrop to my Great Lost Love?
Did they really jeer Dylan at the Free Trade Hall? A month ago, I had pulled the bootleg from my dad’s vinyl collection, and my mother had thrown her own handful of mud into time’s ever-rolling stream.
“Your father had a ticket to that concert. But he didn’t go. He had his own job to do and a family to look after.”
I would have backed the original version. My mother was constantly recasting my wayward dad as a responsible breadwinner and role model, more so lately since I did not have “a proper job.” Which was why I was able to travel halfway across England in the middle of the week to take her to medical appointments.
No matter now. I would soon have more immediate matters to occupy my mind. Later that day, as I continued my engagement with the past, scouring the Internet for music trivia in the hope of a moment of appreciation at the pub quiz, a cosmic DJ—perhaps the ghost of my father—would lift the needle on the na-na-na-nas of “Hey Jude,” say, “Nothing new happening here,” and turn it to the flip side.
“Revolution.”