Sat in my stuffy English classroom, with its chipped yellow wallpaper and alarmingly stained carpets, I read Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Never Go Back’ for the first time. The name might ring a bell—most of us remember the onion metaphor, perhaps not so fondly, but there’s more to it than just “a moon wrapped in brown paper.” What first struck me about the poem wasn’t actually the poem at all. It was my teacher, as the rhythmic tones of her scouse twang wrapped around the ‘ack’ of “cracked voice,” and she tried desperately to feign an air of detachment.

For those of us who’ve grown up on streets littered with used needles and empty cans, Duffy’s poem speaks to the soul. In a sort of whisper, it echoes the thoughts lodged quietly at the back of your brain for years. Once you leave your hometown, for those lucky few that do, you risk becoming a poster child for working-class aspiration. A mention in the local paper, an Instagram post—maybe even a picture on your school’s website if you really were a ‘high achiever.’ Leave and ‘Never Go Back.’ Though you might not fit in at first amidst a glistening sea of signet rings, or at a Varsity ski trip you can only watch through your peers’ photos, but it’s got to be better than going back, surely? ‘Never Go Back’—but I do go back, and I have to, and I want to.

In the bar where the living dead drink all day

And a jukebox reminisces in a cracked voice

There is nothing to say. You talk for hours

My local pub had its window smashed through years ago and no one ever bothered fixing it. The chill was ‘just how it is.’ No one had the money for double glazing anyway, so the newly established draft made very little difference. My friends and I made the spot next to the window, or lack thereof, our regular meeting place and sat there in our coats and scarves, drinking pints that only cost £2.50. We were content. We recycled the same small talk, cracked the same jokes, and reminisced over the same school memories we’d discussed more times than I could count. We didn’t have to aspire to ‘better.’ It was enough. It was our local, it was ours. Besides, it was my round—it’d be rude to leave early.

Your ghost buys a round for the parched

Old faces of the past. Never return 

To the space where you left time pining till it died

After my first term at Oxford, my ghost went ‘back’ for the first time. It walked past the same run-down, worn-out, battered old pub I had frequented in my teenage years. Note the window, still broken. Note my pang of guilt. Carol Ann Duffy gets this right—I had left. Who was I to expect anything to have waited for me? It’s so easy to become enveloped by the Oxford bubble of ball gowns and sub-fusc, punting and prelims. I was enamoured with that new world, almost letting it eclipse my memories of home. But still, that ‘awful place’ was my local. It was mine. 

God, this is an awful place

Says the friend, the alcoholic, whose head is a 

Negative of itself

The few friends I’ve kept over the turbulent years of female adolescence echo this constantly. They’re all still there, walking the streets I ran from. If I didn’t know them so well, comments about how ‘posh’ I now sound might sting a little more. I’ve become a negative of myself, just about recognisable. Yet I’m starting to grow a sort of retroactive fondness for those streets covered in fragments of Lambrini bottles. For the uninitiated, Lambrini is a cider of sorts (consumed mostly by Northern 14-year-olds) and while it’s no Dom Pérignon, it tastes like laughter. Perhaps absence does make the heart grow fonder, or perhaps I’ve just forgotten how much I hated the taste of Lambrini. All I know is that the debt I owe to that place, as Duffy says, is unpayable.

All the lies told here, and all the cries of love,

Suddenly swarm in the room, sting you,

Disappear.

When you spend 19 years in the same place, every streetlight illuminates a memory. The alleyway behind my high school: I smoked my first cigarette there, desperately trying to look cool (I absolutely didn’t). The town square: my friends and I would sit, in the pouring rain, blasting Soundcloud songs from a Poundland speaker. The abandoned factory: we’d go to take pictures of each other, blissfully ignorant of the amount of asbestos we were inhaling by the minute (I’m sure this will come back to get me later in life). The overwhelming scent of Charli XCX body spray I convinced myself could disguise the smell of smoke, the techno beats I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to these days, the lies I told my mother when she asked me where I was. Duffy got this one right too—when I went back, they swarmed and stung me, but vanished as quickly as they’d come by the time I’d reached the next memory checkpoint.

            You lived here only to stand here now

            And half-believe that you did

Sometimes, when I overhear conversations at my college bar about whatever European country everyone ‘summered’ in, I am reminded that they don’t know how I grew up, or that I think I’d take soft play areas and slides over the sweet serenity of Monte Carlo any day. When you move out for university, you fall into a purgatory between your old home and your new one, while still not fully feeling at home in either of them. The concept of home itself is strange. It suggests a belonging, a permanence, that I don’t think you ever get back once you leave. Or at least I haven’t got it back yet. When I trace the footsteps of my childhood self, I know this was once my home. Sometimes it’s difficult to more than half-believe that.

            Released by a journey into nowhere, nowhen,

            And all the way home you forget. Forget.

            Already the fires and lights come on wherever you live.

On the journey back to Oxford, after every vacation, my old stomping ground fades into a hazy blur before I’ve even passed Birmingham. By the time I’m making my way up Banbury Road, my thoughts lie with my room, more spacious than my bedroom at home, with a view overlooking the daffodils. I’m making an effort to keep the chilly old pub in my thoughts, along with the half-demolished factory, the multitude of vape shops, and the takeaways that blow Oxford out of the water. I suppose what I am trying to do is change the way I look at things. The places a worse version of me might scoff at are full of fond memories. Once you wade through the debris, through the dereliction, you can begin to clean off the memories again. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to Duffy. Maybe it’s because she captures the innermost workings of my mind in six short stanzas, maybe it’s the sheer coincidence that she went to university in Liverpool. Either way, upon reflection, I’ve decided that ‘Never Go Back’ might be a little too harsh, I will go back. Perhaps rarely, perhaps infrequently, perhaps briefly, but I will go back. After all, it’s my home. It’s mine.

Words by Charlotte Wild. Art by Seirian Bladon.