The UEA is not how I remember it. Sure I remember the brutalist architecture, the concrete square and steps. Mum came here in the 80s, during the Cold War to do an intensive short course in Russian. She had to give it up because her eyes swelled up and started weeping.
In 1988 she travelled to Russia to visit her penpal Irina. I remember her telling me how restful it was to take the tram because there were absolutely no adverts anywhere. Books were ridiculously cheap (20p or 50p) and there were no homeless people. There were queues to buy electrical goods but tickets to the opera were so cheap, anyone could go. She was blown away by a young man she met in the street. He asked her this,
‘Who do you trust more, Tony Blair or Neil Kinnock?’
Good question.
Mum queued for hours to visit Lenin’s tomb. She drank cold kvass (black bread lemonade) in Moscow’s central square under the blazing summer sun. She took photos of collective farms and dachas. She took photos of obscure pieces of Russian horse harness. She took photos of unsmiling little girls in homemade dresses wearing enormous stiff white bows in their hair.
Together with a childhood friend of hers, a farmer’s wife we called aunty and her husband, my late mother drove to Russia all the way from Nottinghamshire. Mum was adventurous and brave. Always interested in befriending the ‘enemy’, she spent a decade protesting for peace and ‘denuclearisation’. She resented the US occupation of her country. She hated Margaret Thatcher and despised Ronald Regan.
This is what I remember of the UEA: peace protests in the park. I found this photo by Doris Norch online. It encapsulates a time now gone. Some kids in Earlham Park throwing balls at nukes. I spent most of the 80s going on anti nuclear demonstrations. Vast swathes of the UK were against nuclear proliferation and I lived in fear of someone “pressing the button”.
We knew someone who cleaned the toilets at the UEA. He told us that the students were assigned tracing paper bogroll and the lecturers soft bogroll, so he swapped them round. Liberal lefties wearing long hair and corduroys populated the brutalist concrete environs. Those were the days of student grants and free education. Those days are gone. Now we live in a culture of debt and mass globalisation.
I remember walking past these buildings as a kid. Square fish bowls. I was curious about the students I saw inside them. Most of the buildings are empty now, something up with the concrete I’m told. I bet they get hot in the summer months.
The Sainsbury Centre is just as I remember it. The ramp down to the glass doors always makes me smile. First boyfriend sprinted down and smacked into them, not realising they were there. His pride dented, my amusement poorly masked.
I almost got trapped in the brutalist library the other night. I couldn’t find the exit and ended up in an overheated widow-less basement. The bowels of brutalism. I love libraries, but preferably ones with one floor and a visible exit.
This afternoon I walked through the park to the nearest county library. Thanks to Norwich’s Labour council, it stays open until 7pm. Happily ensconced in one corner with my books and pen, I heard a baby cry and then laugh. A white haired man in a an indigo denim shirt arrived with a projector. He was presenting a talk on films from the British Film Archive and Anglia TV. Clips from the 50s to the late 70s. He brought some old vinyl records with him, one was Pink Floyd. We knew the man who made that pig.
The white haired man said young people were interested in watching films in community on big screens about young people of yore. I sidled up to the talk and took a pew amongst the oldies. We watched shoppers at the top of London Street being interviewed in 1975, what did they think about International Women’s Year. Who knew!
Imagine my surprise when some footage of the communes of East Anglia appeared. Snippets of BBC documentaries about my birth tribe: The Globs, The Old Rectory and Crow Hall... Was this serendipity or happenstance? Either way the project felt real. It felt connected, both to the past and the present.
Could these roots offer us wings? Or am I dreaming.
Reel Connections CIC - Connecting People Through Film and Music
Right place, right time. The universe is guiding you, Nancy.