Nostalgia Regained, Gillian

I have always thought myself blessed; I can live the time and place where my nostalgia takes me any time I want. There are countless books, and especially movies, about Britain during World War Two - the time and place of my early years. There are not as many of the later 1940's, or the '50's and '60's, but there are enough. If I want to return to my childhood amongst remote farms, I can watch and re-watch the old PBS/BBC series, All Creatures Great and Small, which feels to me to be an almost exact replica of my childhood environment.

If I want to feel that stirring patriotism of the war years, emotions which I think I recall but in fact was probably too young, I can watch the old black-and-white movies of the time, many of which are cloyingly sentimental, such as, In Which We Serve, The First of the Few, or the unabashed propaganda of Mrs. Miniver.

In the '50's and '60's came an era of more realistic movies dealing with the many issues remaining after the war: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Billy Liar, and Georgy Girl.

 

Or those films whose only purpose was to make us laugh, like the wonderful selection starring Alec Guinness.  

And then, along came The Beatles with It's a Hard Day's Night, which appeared in 1964, a year after I graduated from college. A nostalgic ride if ever there was one. 

In the year of my birth alone, 1942, Britain produced over 50 movies set in Britain. Yes, it is easy for me to take that trip down memory lane any time I feel so inclined; which I did quite frequently over the  years. Opportunities for nostalgic trips via the movies are even more plentiful, of course for Americans. But most other first-generation immigrants like me are not offered this escape; at least it is not immediately available from the local library, and probably not even these days from Netflix and the like. How many movies are there that would have you jump aboard and be immediately transported back in time to 1940's Latvia or 1950's Guatemala?

But in later years something seemed to go wrong. I no longer delighted in this armchair time-travel the way I used to. In fact, rather the opposite. Movies, either fiction or documentaries, depicting my time and place of nostalgia, whether made back then or current depictions of it, tended rather to depress and anger me. They make me cry. They are sexist, classist, xenophobic, homophobic; all the ists and ics you can think of. They are bigoted, 100% white and 100% heterosexual. They are all about the unthinking, unquestioning, superiority of men and equally unquestioningly subservient women. They made me question not only my memory but my very sanity. This is the piece of history upon which I gaze with such affection? It has been said that nostalgia is a longing for a time and place which never existed. I fear that must be what I suffered from for much of my life. Sadly, I began to see it more clearly for what really did exist, and did not particularly like it.

I rather blamed my efforts, over the last few years, to become a more spiritual person. This has, as indeed it is part of it's purpose, raised my consciousness; allowed me to see things more clearly, as they are, rather than as a blurred concoction of my own designing. But I hated that I was robbed of my nostalgia; my place of escape on a bad day.

More recently I have turned yet another corner. I can still take that magic carpet ride. I can still enjoy depictions of my past. It is simply that I have lost those tinted lenses through which I once gazed with love and longing.

I wouldn't go back there if you paid me!

In 1952, when Alan Turin was arrested for his homosexuality, I was an English schoolgirl of 12. What hope was there for me to deal with, or even acknowledge, my own homosexuality? Not that anyone knew anything of Turin at the time, all he had done for the Allied war effort was kept under the secure wraps of the Official Secrets Act for decades, but his terrible story is emblematic of the attitudes of the times.

So now I again enjoy movies and books portraying that life I once lived. They no longer make me angry. They simply offer pictures of a past which, thankfully, no longer exists. They remind me of the many ways in which we have moved forward, for all that at times it seems that we have not. I can recognize that past of which I was a part, with at least a modicum of objectivity. I neither hate it nor love it. It once was, and now it's gone. Those spiritual teachers/guides would be proud of me. I am truly, at least in this one instance, living in THE NOW!

© May 2016 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.