I was nearby anyway, so I had every excuse to do it, to ignore the old adage and do something I'd been thinking of doing for many years. "Never go back. Never go back." Those warning words kept repeating themselves in my head ... [p. 1]
Read via Internet Archive: I hadn't previously been aware of this children's book set in Bradwell-on-Sea, near where I grew up. The framing narrative is that of a middle-aged man, 'Michael', returning to the village in which he lived as a child, and revisiting his memories of the 1950s. He remembers the friendship of the mysterious Mrs Pettigrew, who lived in a railway carriage out on the marsh. Mrs Pettigrew loved nature, and had a donkey (named Donkey) and three greyhounds: she was the widow of a botanist, and grew up in Thailand.
Michael's childhood was idyllic, until men in suits came from London to present a plan to the villagers: a nuclear power station, to be built on the marshes where Mrs Pettigrew lives. The plan divided the village, with Michael, his mother and Mrs Pettigrew all being firmly opposed. Some of the villagers welcomed the benefits that the power station would bring: jobs, money, investment.
As a child I often swam at Bradwell beach (the water was always warmer there) and I remember the science-fictional hum of the power station. It was decommissioned in 2002, though there are plans for a second power station. Meanwhile, the remains of the reactors loom over the fields: the older, present-day version of Morpurgo's narrator sees the 'monstrous complex' and feels as though his memories have been trampled.
Homecoming is a melancholy book, very evocative of the salt-marsh landscape and its vibrant ecology, but also of loss, death, defeat. Understandably negative about nuclear power, too: the power station was built only 12 years after Hiroshima was bombed, and the perils of radiation were very much in the public imagination. Mrs Pettigrew, who'd researched the risks, claimed that even after the power station had ceased operation, it would need to be entombed in concrete for centuries to be anything like safe. Turns out it's 80-90 years, which is quite bad enough.
Lovely watercolour illustrations by Peter Bailey, which were the reason I read the scanned Internet Archive version rather than the ebook.
Never go back, never go back: your memories will be trampled.
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