I was anticipating the visit of Sir Ch. or at least one of his family members. I wanted to show them everything I could that would have related to my childhood, so I went round the neighbourhood to see what was still there and what had disappeared.
I saw that they were digging the baseball field where I had played so many games. They had already developed all the greens around it, and now there was only that patch remaining next to the little house of cables. The workers could not tell me much more than, they were preparing for a big sporting event nearby, and they wanted this site to be an attraction to all visitors.
The mountain that had been cow pasture was now a developed neighbourhood, with various blocks of flats.
I then went to the train station where I would pick up a whole group of people who wanted to travel to B-river.
We had to take the train South. I wondered why we were taking the train, since it was so much more expensive and a lot slower, but then, there was something about it; maybe it was the smoothness of the movement, or maybe it was the spacious compartments, and the possibility to walk up and down without it being a struggle.
We were in one of the carriages in the middle of the train, and as usual I had attempted to change at the last minute. At the station, there had been people around us, but not all of them were travelling with me. I had a conversation with the station controller.
I settled in a seat towards the front of the carriage with another passenger next to me. Suddenly we realised that the carriages in front of us had been removed, and we could now see the whole journey in front of us; the rails, the tunnels, as opposed to when we were sitting in a middle carriages, that we could only see the mountains at the sides of the railway.
So it seemed we were now in the locomotive. I reasoned that they may have separated the train to two different destinations, but then no, that could not be the case. If anything, more carriages would need to be added in the next rail junction, from the train coming South from another Northern city, to then continue the journey South. I said this to my companion and he noticed that we had a control board in front of us. So this was indeed the locomotive, but we were not in command of the train; the dashboard was switched off and it didn’t matter what buttons we pressed; nothing happened.
We thought it must have worked like a double-decker bus, with the driver downstairs. But then, we were downstairs, and there was no upstairs. We thought there must have been some upstairs and the driver must have been there, or maybe the train was commanded from behind.
I checked with another passenger whether we had gone past the junction. They said we were approaching it. Of course. If we had, we would have noticed a stop of thirty minutes. I thought that in thirty minutes, I had the time to go to B-river, talk and relax with my family, and then get back to pick up my group. I attempted to do this but I procrastinate so much in the flat, Mary told me, look, it would have worked if you were here for ten minutes only, but you have been here at least for twenty minutes already. Now I could only pick them up in B-river, not at the junction where they had been waiting for thirty minutes. I went to the station and there they were, getting off a coach. They had not had the patience to wait for half an hour in a halted train and they had got on a coach.
One of the people in the group I was picking up was Sir Ch.’s nephew. I was very excited. There was no way I could get Sir Ch. to visit me, so his nephew was almost as good. I brought them to my place through the main road, explaining everything along the way: this is where I met my first love, this is where I played with the local kids. The nephew could not speak the language but a few kids did talk to him in the street. We stopped for them to play for a while. It was important for him, I thought, to meet people and make friends. They got remarkably well together and they asked us to promise that we would come again and play with them. I made a note to do this often, come to this part of town to meet these kids.
We then approached a street where I had myself played when I was little, but there were no kids in this part of town. So we walked past it. Then we arrived to my street. I wanted to walk more slowly so I could explain everything to him, but he wanted to take it all in in one go, without explanation. He had grown a bit older and more mature with all the walking and the explaining and I could tell him just how important this visit was for me, since I could not have Sir Ch. himself.
Instead of the beauties that remained from my childhood he wanted to know about the abominable building that had been built on the mountain that should have always been left undeveloped. I explained the story of incomprehension and greed that resulted in that monster put on the hillside.
Then we went to the little house full of cables. It was still standing, among the huge buildings that had appeared slowly, or quickly, all around it, including a footbridge next to it; the only spot where we could see it because it was so buried between all the architecture. The footbridge was not there to contemplate the little house of cables; it was to admire what they had done with the baseball pitch. I explained that I used to play here as a child, but the nephew was interested in the abomination below us. The reason why they had been digging the pitch was to fill it with water and make an aquarium. There there were, lots of different species of fish, big, small, medium, and maritime flora, under all those buildings. I could only explain so little about this new development. In my mind there was still a baseball pitch where I played, a little house next to which we would sit down, looking for shade in the summer, and around them both, all greenery where to roam freely first, then with our bicycles among all the thorns. All that was gone, but it didn’t matter much; at least I now had Sir Ch.’s nephew with me to whom I could tell a few of my tales.