Return to Blandford Camp

Blandford Camp

Dorset, England
September 2010

When I returned to find Blandford Upper School gone in 2010, I also had to try and visit Blandford Camp.

That was where I lived from 14-18 - my prime teenage years. There were a lot of memories locked inside that mysterious place in the country, not all good.

We drove up the country lane lined as always with high green hedges. But somehow everything looked different. I was disoriented, despite having walked up that lane to the camp many times as a lanky, zitty teenager.

At Blandford I always felt kind of an outsider, living at the camp. Viewed with suspicion, justifiably. After all we weren't local people, but just passing through.

We reached the top of the hill and the sentry posts. Where I had passed many times before on foot when I didn't get the bus back home. Even back in the 80s as a kid I was sometimes stopped and asked questions, had to justify my entry by 'I live here' (I was never given a ID pass or something).

But now everything looked different. I stopped my car several metres away from the gate and decided to get out and enquire.

Because I knew the whole world had changed post 9/11. And a lone car parked away from the gates looked suspicious I was sure.

I got out and gingerly approached the gatehouse.

A brutish guard in his shiney black boots looked at me suspiciously.

I said I wanted to go inside to show my family the little end of terrace house where I onced lived. But I also desperately wanted to see it for myself.

But as I expected, the answer was no. Unless I visited the museum. But we didn't have time for that and I didn't even know if holding the ticket I would still be able to take a sneak peek at the houses down the other side of the hill.

So I turned back bitterly disappointed. We had come so far. And I couldn't even gaze upon the doorway where I once lived with my parents and younger brothers and sisters. Look up at my bedroom window.

Behind me, in there, I had woken up and gone to sleep for 4 years, walked across the fields and through the woods, bought sweets at the NAAFI shop, borrowed books from the library, jogged around the running track after watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, gone to church a few times, pushed my little sister in her pram and lain in my bedroom daydreaming.

That was now all in the past. Separated from me now by a modern wall of security.

We drove back down the lane.