Coincidence - Deja Vu by Elizabeth Obadina

“We think it’s perfect.”

My new sister in law was in full flood, extolling the virtues of the perfect little town she and my brother had found and wanted to move to. City life was dirty, crowded and noisy and the newly-weds were looking to set up home in greener pastures. I’d had my fill of beautiful green and oh-so-quiet places growing up in Dorset and whilst I wanted to keep one foot in the country and to be able to weekend at my parents place, I loved city life and would always parrot Dr Johnson’s  maxim ‘When a man – or woman in my case – is tired of London, he is tired of life” whenever a family member suggested a return to the countryside. The pleas to bring my family away from city sins had become much more frequent since we’d set up home in West Africa’s  megalopolis, Lagos. Every moment my mother prayed that we would not be gunned down by armed robbers, nor poisoned by typhoid nor require any form whatsoever of hospitalisation.

I was on my summer holiday back home and to appease everybody and to show due interest I agreed on a family outing to this ‘perfect place’. My first impression was that it was dinky; Toy Town, to be precise where the scandal of the day, writ large on a news billboard was,

’Flowering baskets shock! – vandals strike again.”

 Bad as that was, it was criminal activity that I wasn’t going to lose sleep over.

In true Toy Town fashion there was one of everything; one police station, one fire station, one sports centre, one cinema, one town hall, one hospital, one high street, a few more churches and a lot more pubs. Vandals notwithstanding there was a profusion of flowers sticking out of and hanging off anything and everything that could support a hanging basket. Driving out to the house my brother had his eye on, the main road took a sweep around a majestic bend and I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. But no,  it couldn’t be possible, I’d never visited hanging-basket-land before and was in an alien part of my own country where everyone spoke with a strong accent I found hard to understand.

It was 1986 and as planned my brother and his little family moved into their ‘perfect’ town. My newly widowed mother followed two years later and my centre of gravity shifted from the quietness of Dorset (not to mention the hurly burly of multiple city existences) to this pretty microcosm of Midlands urban life. In due course we returned to England and through circumstances too convoluted to explain here, set up home in my re-located southern family’s ‘perfect place’ and we too fell prey to the charms of our new hometown.

A year or so later I was sorting through my old school exercise books and diaries which had also made the journey northwards. A green field notebook from 1967 caught my eye; my geography class had spent a week in the slate lands of North Wales. Not much remained in my memory but as I read on and re-lived my half-a-century-plus old trip north the final entry pole-axed me;

“Last day ---- we got caught in a terrible traffic jam, coach didn’t move for ages. Luckily we were stuck in a very, very pretty place all black and white houses and an ancient black and white covered market place. When we came out of the town there was a big bend going downhill to a huge river and we could see that the town was perched on a high red sandstone cliff . Shame the coach wouldn’t stop I’d like to have seen more of the place. On the way out we saw the name of the place, BRIDGENORTH,"  - which I’d mis-spelled with an ‘e’. 

So not so much déjà-vu, but a real memory, a coincidence, - and yah boo sucks to my family  -  I’d actually discovered their ‘perfect place’ twenty years before they came wandering north from Dorset via Wolverhampton. I just hadn't remembered it!