There are many iconic first lines of novels. Among them is this one: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. It’s from L P Hartley’s novel The Go Between.
The photo above is from my past. It is from the 1970s, in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. It would be hard to dispute the age of the photo. Before digitization, it was doubtless taken on Kodak film. Or perhaps Agfa.
Who is the nerdy looking guy on the right of the photo? And who is the prim and proper looking woman on the left?
It’s hard for me to believe, but the guy is me and the woman my ex-wife. The girl child on the left in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt is my elder daughter, now Head of Cardiology at one of the major hospitals in Perth. My son, next to her, is a successful engineer with a company that sells security systems to commercial operatives. My other daughter, my youngest, balancing the beach ball on her head, is a vet with Greyhound Racing Victoria.
So, what could possibly be the connection between me in the 21st century and the guy in the 1970s photo? And likewise for the others held captive in the photo from the selfsame foreign country?
Well, we wouldn’t know our counterparts from Adam across the time gap, and possible wouldn’t want to. According to science, the molecular makeup of our bodies would be almost totally different, having undergone recycling many times over. But more importantly, our thinking priorities and passions would, I fear, be anathema to each other. Should we, through some bizarre set of circumstances, get to meet each other on some hypothetical neutral ground, we would, I imagine, be inclined to heap loads of scorn on each other.
Each of us might be inclined to say of the other, Who is this charlatan trying to masquerade as me?
What a strange set of circumstances the process of living out a life foists upon us! That foreign country, our very own past, is unlikely to be recognizable or palatable to us. How did this mystery come to be?
Another mystery: who is the unseen ghost, the unknown third person, who took the photograph?