LOST WORLDS

I’ve always had a fondness for “lost worlds”, those places you’ve heard of, maybe even seen pictures of, but that can no longer ever be visited because they reside firmly in the past. They might have been demolished or still exist in some gaudy parody of their lost grandeur, but mostly they exist mostly in the mind and the memories of those to whom they have been lost forever. Such places have a wistful sense of loss and melancholy that is bittersweet but transports you to a place and time that only can now exist in the memory of a few and the imaginings of the rest.

As part of the great human condition of “desperately hunting for something to do to fill a few of those all-too-short long hours before the eternal darkness”, I was looking through an old book I have during a recent weekend.

It’s a collection of photographs showing the world of “Sherlock Holmes” as it looked at the time the stories were being written. Rather fabulous pictures of those famous streets in London as they were at the end of the Victorian era and the coming of the Edwardian one, a world that was shattered forever by the onset of the First World War.

Buildings and streets that were vital and vibrant cornerstones of the events and everyday lifestyles of the people living then that have since been knocked down and obliterated from where they stood so resolutely as the backbones of so many people’s daily lives.

We can never really know any more what those streets were like to walk down, or what they sounded like, or what odours there were to smell or tastes there were to taste, we can only imagine these things that made up a world truly lost forever, yet somewhere where real people once lived and breathed.

Even now, the last of those people for whom it was a “living memory” are fading away, and even they could only tell us about it and we can never really know for ourselves, no matter how much “early footage” gets discovered and resurrected, and even then we’ll probably believe that the entire world existed in shades of grey.

And that’s only from the era where photography and film cameras were actually invented. So much of ordinary, day-to-day life in earlier eras is almost impossible for us to imagine any more. Did the Tudors have a “600 Scrolls a Month” message limit, for example…? Or what did a cave dweller get up to first thing in the morning when they started to plan the day ahead…? How did we get through the 1970s without having computer games to fill the time and nobody knowing where we were for each and every minute of every day…? How was it that when I grew up we survived with only three TV channels and didn’t go completely mad at the lack of choice…?

This might be why I love old films so much. Plot aside, they can become a window we can look through and witness something of those lost moments in at least some of those worlds, a probing light shining onto a fragment of history that you can never actually touch.

One of my favourite films is “The Blue Lamp” which offers us a glimpse of London in the 1950s. There are fascinating visions of a city pulling itself out of the damage inflicted by the war less than a decade earlier, and wide, empty streets with a smattering of motor cars.

But it’s also the way of life that is a lost world too. The “bobby on the beat”, the notion of “honour amongst thieves” and, of course, those scenes of hardship and squalor that even now, a mere half century on, is difficult for many of us to picture.

These are times we have documentary evidence of. Go back another fifty years and we’ve only got photographs and etchings to tell the tale. D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was made many years closer to the American Civil War it depicts than we are to the film’s release date. In that sense the actual film has become a fascinating, if slightly distasteful, document in itself of attitudes that may have remained prevalent so long after the events it depicts.

Interestingly, it remains true that period drama and film can only really give a current interpretation of the period being depicted, which is why the various versions of a story like “Pride and Prejudice” look so very different from each other, and remain contemporary “takes” upon the story being told, and yet can look so very old within a decade. Still, at least the “bright young things” making movies nowadays haven’t got to the point where they assume that everyone’s always had a wristwatch, or that the Romans used to text each other as a matter of course…

Steam engines of various sorts are always almost guaranteed to trigger an emotional response and drag us back to bygone and, perhaps, better days. Many of us seem to absolutely love the things and wish that our world remained a steam-powered one, conveniently forgetting what nasty, smelly, dirty things they were, and what filth they used to chuck into the atmosphere, and have you seen what the poor buggers who used to have to stoker the boilers had to put up with...? I still love seeing a good steam train, though, so I’m as guilty of that as anyone, because sometimes its nice to let the rosy glow of nostalgia get in the way of a bit of harsh reality

Old – or as we now have to think of them, “classic” - cars can be a tangible link back to an earlier age. It seems that nothing dates a postcard, photograph or film more quickly than an Austin Healey being parked at the roadside, and, like all of our previous trousers, tank-tops and haircuts, our past cars do have a habit of catching up with us, and instantly transporting us back to a time when all you needed was a good adjustable spanner to attempt some diagnostics…

But then I still often find myself wondering how the world actually used to run without all of the things that I’ve grown up taking for granted like hot running water, central heating and refrigeration. When I went to Egypt a few years ago, I bought a book about what the day-to-day realities of Medieval life were like and it sounded ghastly. I suspect that I wouldn’t have survived for five minutes, but, of course, people did, and, looking up from the page from time-to-time, some of the places where people are living right now pretty much matched the squallid descriptions that I was reading about at the time.

So, whilst I do still profess to love old films and the glimpses of worlds forever lost to us that they give, I am left with ridiculous ideas like the fact that the entire Second World War should be in Black and White and nothing at all existed in colour during those years, and that somehow these worlds were “better” even though I know that much of it was far, far worse.

Then of course there are the other “lost worlds” like the life I thought I might have as opposed to the one I actually ended up with, or the youth that I will never rediscover, or the paths not chosen. All of these things can be dwelt upon far more than is necessarily good for you whilst reminding you of how crappy “real life” (whatever THAT is) can seem in comparison. Somehow reality bites and occasionally it feels “safer” to wallow, because we are all the sum of our memories and each one is precious to our sense of self, and the sense of loss when part of our history disappears can make us feel a little like we ought to grieve for it, or try to hang on to it for as long as possible to keep those worlds alive for a little longer.

It’s much the same when house you once lived in, or a building you used to work in, is finally demolished. A little piece of your life goes with it, and a world is lost, but, somehow it can exist just as vividly in your recollection as it ever did in the real world, if not even more so.