Turning right out of the market square at the war memorial was familiar enough and the first few hundred meters went smoothly before doubt set in and navigation was handed over to GPS. 
A U-turn followed by a left took us out of Oundle and in little time sights gone from my mind for decades came streaming back. Intermittently at first but then in longer bursts connecting the dots of churches, villages, bends in the road and other hazy recollections of my youth. Finally, rounding a wooded bend we arrived.
This trip had been pending for some time, so with my sister Claire as accomplice and chauffeur on this foray down memory lane and her three young kids and my former partner as anchorage to the present, we made a day of it.
As if preparing one for arrival, Apethorpe opens up both gradually and pleasantly considering how small a village it is. Over a bridge, past the village sign and gently round to the church, the rest of the village is either a continuation of the main road or slightly tangential on either side. We pulled over by St Leonard’s church and got out. 
Our old two classroom school stood close by and looked no different at first glance to when we had attended. Probably responsible for generations of basic literacy and numeracy in the area, the school was long closed and now somebody’s home with a small sign testifying to its origins as ‘the old school house’. A short walk was all that was necessary to take in the full length of the village and it dusted off some memories, remastering them like an old film or record. As if in riposte to the old school house sign there appeared another denoting the site of ‘the old post office’ which in our time, like the school, had simply been the post office. About 75 miles from London, the village today had the look and feel of a bolthole or home to those who fancied a more sedate life within easy reach of the capital. Eerily quiet and with almost no sign of its inhabitants, Apethorpe had morphed into a museum and we traipsed around its exhibits having once briefly lived among them.
Many of the faces from our time there were probably long dead. Our headmistress Miss Ellingham, a middle-aged spinster who seemed fashioned from early 20thcentury English literature, made up half the staff in our school of two teachers and had probably risen to her rank as much through patience as by virtue. 
As we wandered the short length of Laundry Road guessing which house had been hers, my niece Bella broke into our musings in consternation that a car was parked on the double yellow lines. Voicing her thoughts rather loudly, the occupants of the car who’d pulled over for a bite to eat in this dead-end road, apologised in good humour. Who had lived where wasn’t that important after all and with Bella’s reminder of the present moment, we moved on.
Returning to the car we passed the old school again and seeing a man in the garden I enquired if he lived there. Replying that he did, he approached the fence to see what we wanted and I briefly explained. His wife came out to join him and before long had invited us in to look around. 
It was as unexpected for us as it was for them but a happy chance to be taken. Quite recently moved in, the couple were curious about the building’s history and Claire’s memory proved a good deal clearer than my own. Besides a few superficial things such as the artificial grass laid over the tarmac playground, the exterior bore few signs of change. The interior where we had learnt our times tables was on the other hand, quite different. The many alterations it had undergone obscured much of what had been familiar but enough remained to recognise it as having been our school. The upstairs was completely new and occupied the once lofty roof space my eyes often settled on in reverie. After showing us around their home, the woman told us they had kept the old hopscotch out the back but they had already been generous enough and not wishing to fetishize our personal history in their home, we thanked them and left.
Colour and background were plentiful in the village and piecing them back into place in my memory like some incomplete jigsaw was nice but the true business of the day still lay a mile or two up a narrow road by the old pub.
Turning up the hill that had been the start and finish line of our ride to and from school, we passed the once derelict dairy where we used to park our bicycles. It too had been converted into a dwelling with just the inscription
of ‘Dairy’ over the front door hinting at a previous life. As if to underline the physical changes that had taken place in our absence, there was a smooth tarmac surface over the potholed road we used to cycle; there are limits to how much the olden days need hammering home to even the most nostalgic. Lush hedgerows lined the road where the fields we knew had been open. The view through the windscreen gave it a cinematic feel which although interesting, wasn’t as emotional as I’d expected. The chatter of the three young kids in the back seats in place of the three young kids who had once called this home kept me from drifting too far from the present. As we headed up the final hill which was far less steep than my boyish memories had it, the road squeezed between two woods before revealing our home of forty years earlier.
I felt no surge of anything; no homecoming. The past was past and I had no wish to re-live it; digesting it was enough. Those days were guarded in photo albums I didn’t possess, interpreted by eyes that had never lived them and hearts that could never truly feel them. Much remained as it had been with just a new road diverting farm vehicles away from the houses. The oak tree that our rope swing had hung from was long dead and its sturdy boughs reduced to stumps. Bleached with neither bark nor foliage it stood as a memorial to another age.
We parked in front of our old house on a lay-by where we used to make roads in the dust for our die-cast toy tractors and trucks imitating the surrounding farm life in miniature. 
It was now grassed over. The houses had lost the wooden fence that demarcated the front of the garden and the tall pine trees that had provided a wind break were gone. The everyday scenes and dramas of childhood no longer fit the stage and I wondered if I might have felt more emotion had the houses been left to ruin. It just seemed well looked after, real and less sepia toned than I’d remembered it.
Claire who was far more actively engaged, lead us to a stile and path by the side of the houses that opened up onto fields we had crossed daily on our way to another school we attended. The blackberries were out and as we re-trod the boards of this childhood theatre the memories of the changing seasons flowed with some warmth. One sign I recalled of the arrival of spring was the aptly named cuckoo-spit which, rather than the work of oafish birds, is the spawn of a bug of some kind. We would walk trying not to get it on our clothing, single file along the perimeter of the fields occasionally climbing over low current electric fences and other modest obstacles before arriving in time for school. It was familiar but it was as if I was observing something that four decades earlier I had also been observing. I had the memories but it felt like someone else’s scrapbook.
On returning to the car a woman emerged from one of the houses to ask what we were up to. She may have been curtain twitching the entire time and curiosity had probably got the better of her so I related the bare bones of our story and in return she told us the current state of things. The farm had been sold to a holding company which rented out the land to farmers and the tied houses were also rented in the absence of a farm. The old farm itself was about a quarter of a mile further up the road but was now just a couple of large sheds and a big house. The pig units had gone and where once there had been a cluster of activity and machinery, it now looked windswept and bare.
In our time there as kids it had a different beauty; one that belonged to another age and people no longer there.
Moving on
