Living in the Past by Tony Domaille, rum and coke

The last thing I’d expected was to be run over by an Austin Allegro. That’s the trouble with time travel; you forget things were different in the past, and I’d forgotten the High Street wasn’t pedestrianised in 1986.

Anyway, after I tumbled over the bonnet and fell into the carriageway, I wasn’t just worried about broken bones. It was the timeline. What if a road accident happens in the past that was never supposed to happen? Will it change the future?

An ashen looking Allegro driver got out of his car. ‘Oh, my God. You walked straight out in front of me.’

Then a crowd gathered, with people saying someone should run to the telephone box and call for an ambulance. 

The next thing I knew, I was in A&E, going in and out of consciousness, worrying that they might do blood tests. Being full of statins and other drugs that hadn’t yet been invented might have complicated things. The other worry was the portal home to 2026. It would close in a little over an hour, but every time I tried to get off the hospital trolly someone pushed me back down, telling me to lie still. 

I prayed they would be done with me quickly. NHS waiting times were much shorter back in the eighties, and I mumbled about needing to leave but they ignored me.

Everything hurt. My back, my legs, my head. But for all that, the biggest pain was in my heart. I’d travelled back in time because I wanted to see the girl I fell in love with in 1986 just once more. But I hadn’t seen her and now I wouldn’t get the chance before the time portal closed. I’d been in love more than once in my life, but she was the one. Hannah. The girl I’d never forgotten and never stopped loving.

Lying there I was feeling the consequences of breaking Time Travel Agency rules. No using portals for personal reasons. They’re strictly for historical research and the very occasional intervention to stop something that would prevent a future good. Wanting to see your ex-girlfriend again doesn’t qualify. I’d tried to find her in the present and failed. I shouldn’t have done, but I then started searching for her across time, but she just seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth. No digital footprint, no records, not a thing. I often wondered if she ever thought about me. I also wondered if she’d ever tried to find me, but the agency keeps its operatives very much under the radar. I hoped she sometimes thought about that all too brief year we were together before life took us in different directions. Before I realised too late that she had been the one. 

I winced as I tried to sit up on the hospital trolly, as much because I knew I’d have to leave this time without finding Hannah as for my injuries. But then my chance came. The nurses rushed off to deal with something more serious than my bruises and concussion, so I limped away. My watch face was cracked but I could see I had less than fifteen minutes to reach the portal before it closed.

I stumbled out of the hospital and down the road, attracting curious looks because of my bandaged head. My vision was blurred. My ears rang and my head and limbs hurt but, if I could stay on my feet, there was still time. In the distance I could see the gates to the park where the portal would still be open, deep in the bushes near the bandstand. But as I got closer, and my vision cleared, I saw the park entrance had a barrier: Police Line. Do Not Cross. There were armed officers ensuring no one did, and a crowd had gathered. There were TV crews and reporters with cameras. I asked a man smoking a pipe what was going on.

‘They’ve found something weird in the park, but they won’t say what.’

‘But I have to get in there,’ I said, too loudly.

My informant shook his head. ‘You’ve got no chance, mate.’

Though I knew it was pointless, I tried to push my way through the cordon, but a police officer grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

‘Can’t you read?’ he asked. ‘Police line. Look!’

And that’s when I knew I wasn’t ever going to get back to my own time. In moments the portal would close. There would be no sign of the weird thing they’d found, and I would be trapped in 1986.

I was still in a concussed daze as I walked back toward the town centre. In truth there wasn’t much for me in my own time.  I was twice divorced – both good women, but they weren’t Hannah. I was living alone. I had few friends and no family to speak of. But how was I going to deal with being trapped in the eighties? Maybe I would find Hannah, but now I wondered what I’d been thinking? She was twenty-two in this time. I was sixty-two. Realistically, I could only gaze at her from afar. Even that felt wrong now.

I stopped to cross the road, checking more than carefully to make sure I didn’t walk in front of another car. And then I saw her. Bathed in the orange light of a streetlamp, I recognised her straight away. Hannah. But it wasn’t the Hannah of 1986. She was older. As old as me, though I could see through all the years.

She raised a hand in a familiar wave and I crossed the road.

‘Hello, John,’ she said, and her bright blue eyes shone as I’d always remembered them.’

My words caught in my throat.’ Is it really you?’

She nodded. ‘This may be the year we last saw each other, but it’s been a long time.’

‘I tried to find you,’ I said. ‘It’s like you disappeared.’

And then she was in my arms, and the years just melted away.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How are you here, like this?’

‘You’re not the only time traveller,’ she whispered, and then I understood why I’d never been able to find her in my own time. 

‘Did they send you to find me?’ I asked.

‘They did.’

I sighed. ‘I suppose I’m in all kinds of trouble when you take me back.’

Hannah smiled. ‘If I take you back. But what if we just stayed here?’

All the years of wondering, searching, waiting, were over. People say we shouldn’t live in the past, but that’s what I’d been doing for forty years, whether I travelled in time or not. I didn’t know how it would work, but I didn’t care. I was with Hannah again. And as we walked hand in hand back into the town, just as we had done decades before, I knew we would never be apart again.

About the author

Tony is a playwright and his credits include the Derek Jacobi Award for New Playwriting and three-time winner of the UK CDFF Best Original Script Prize. He has also had many stories published in anthologies and magazines. You can follow him here -https://www.facebook.com/tonydomaillewriting/

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Living in the Past

by Jenny Palmer

Gluhwein

Taken out of her normal routine due to Covid 19 and with little daily contact, Sally found herself living in the past. She used Facebook to check in with friends and keep an eye on current thinking. You had to ignore the fake news and conspiracy theories and people who took up extreme positions. It was hard to steer a middle ground. There were those who thought the government's measures had gone too far and those who thought they hadn't gone far enough. Sally got into the habit of posting up photos without
comments. They were of flowers mainly, ones she saw on her countryside walks.

'Say it with flowers,' wasn't that what they said. Her flower pictures represented a kind of shorthand for 'Life is still worth living when there are such beautiful flowers to look at.'

She got more likes for her pictures than anything else. It was a good way of keeping in touch with people without having to fully engage. You could avoid those lengthy phone calls, which went over and over the same old stuff. They always started with 'What have you been doing?

'Not a lot. Going for walks mostly. How about you?

'The same.' and moved onto the latest statistics on the virus, the government's ineptitude at handling it and the horror of the American Presidential elections. People were free to respond to her flower posts. It was entirely up to them.  Some liked to correct her spelling or offer alternative names. Others inquired where she'd come across a particular variety. Periodically she'd type in a reply. It was no skin off her nose. She avoided getting into debates about flower genuses. That required research. She wasn't claiming to be an expert or anything. Time was precious. You didn't get it back.

Then out of the blue she had a 'like' from someone she hadn't clapped eyes on in fifty years. She recognised the name, but it wasn't until she saw the accompanying photo that the memories came flooding back. It was 1968. She'd been on her year abroad in Germany, as part of her degree course. She'd distanced herself from the other English students to give herself a chance of speaking the language and had ended up sharing a room with this French girl in an international student hostel.

1968 was the year of student revolt all around the world. In her English university there had been some attempts to get the exam system abolished, accompanied by some anti-authoritarian protests but not a lot else. She'd spent the summer term going to happenings, where women hung out in flowing robes and men in flared trousers and nothing much happened.  In Germany, the universities were plunged into activism. The students were demanding change, not just of the exam system but of the entire world.

Sally had looked forward to the year abroad. It was the reason she'd chosen the course in the first place. She'd never been abroad, apart from one trip walking in the Black Forest with her friend Anita. They'd ended up hitchhiking around Switzerland, Austria and Germany and stayed a few days in
the youth hostel in the sleepy, South German town of Tubingen where she'd hit upon the idea of spending her year there. 

Up until that point, Sally had never so much as uttered a word of German, apart from in oral exams at school, which she'd managed to get through by learning stock phrases off by heart and repeating them parrot fashion. The arrangement with this French roommate had worked out well enough. Neither of
them could speak the other's language, so they'd been forced to speak in German. There was the added advantage of not having to worry about being corrected, as there might have been with a native speaker

After a few weeks of term, the whole university had gone on strike. All lectures and seminars had been cancelled. The English students had duly written to their professor back home, who'd told them to stay put and speak as much German as they possibly could. So long as they turned in the five required essays by the end of the year, everything would be fine.  Sally hadn't been able to believe her luck and was only thankful she'd chosen the option of studying at a university rather than giving conversation lessons to German school children.

It had been a momentous year in many respects. Because of the lack of tuition, it was imperative to mingle with other students. Fortunately, the hostel had a bar downstairs. That was where everyone gathered of an evening, where alcohol flowed, and tongues loosened. She'd met students from all over
the world, sampled Fondu and Gluhwein for the first time and gone to cafes for Kaffee and Kuchen. She'd learnt to hold her own in conversations in German on a variety of topics and picked up a boyfriend cum travelling companion. They'd gone on trips to Italy and Austria and Hungary in the
holidays and spent a week on the shores of Lake Constance.  Forever after she'd cherished the memories of her year abroad. It was a time when she'd been free to do whatever she wanted, the equivalent of a gap year today.

During the two-month long mid-semester break, she'd got a job in a towelling factory.  She'd thought it would be a good way to improve her language skills and earn some money to supplement her grant. Unfortunately, people had spoken in the local Swabian dialect, which was nothing like the High
German she'd learnt at school and was virtually unintelligible to her.  It was boring work which entailed wandering around the factory floor all day, loading orders onto a trolley. The country was in the middle of The German Economic Miracle following the Second World War. Tea breaks were rare and
lasted barely ten minutes.

When the workers volunteered to do overtime, she felt duty-bound to join them. She got up at the crack of dawn to start at seven and came home in the dark. She was on her feet all day. It was the hardest job she'd ever done. The summer jobs in England working in offices and shops bore no comparison.
But she saved up enough money to spend a weekend skiing in the Black Forest, and go off on her travels around Europe.

She hadn't seen much of her roommate in all that time. They led separate lives. Mostly they used their shared room to sleep in and write their essays in. There was one occasion that stuck in her memory though. The night they'd gone to Fasching together, which was the German equivalent of Carnival.  At
the end of the year, they'd parted company. All too soon she was back in England doing her final year. Eventually she'd lost contact with everyone from that era.

Getting a message from the past was disconcerting.  She was thankful that the Messenger slot on Facebook allowed only a limited number of words. She was having to communicate in German again.  Perhaps she should take a refresher course.

'Was hast du die ganze Zeit gemacht? she asked, thinking she'd get a run-down of her friend's life over the intervening years. But her roommate just kept bringing up people from the past, people she was supposed to remember. There was this one young man that her roommate wanted to talk about.

'Es tut mir leid, aber ich kann mich an ihn gar nicht erinnern.' Sally wrote back.   

Apparently, her roommate had been broken-hearted, when the young man in question had ended their relationship on the grounds that he already had an English girlfriend, who was well-known to Sally. Sally had no recollection of either him or the girlfriend. She'd better consult the photos.  When her
travelling days were over, she'd arranged all her photos in chronological order and stashed them in a box on top of the wardrobe.

The German ones were easy enough to locate. They consisted of a set of tiny black and white snaps that she'd taken with her first camera and half a dozen larger, coloured ones that someone else had taken. Among the coloured ones, there was one was of herself and her roommate, their heads stuck in
books, looking untypically, studious. In the others they were in fancy dress. It must have been during Fasching.  She recognised her get-up. It was a combination of her formal ball gown from the previous year, incongruously worn over a dark-blue, long-sleeved blouse and she had a flower in her hair.
Her roommate had made more of an effort. She was in a traditional costume with a bonnet.  They were both engrossed in what appeared to be an animated discussion with a well turned-out, rather handsome, young man.

Something switched on in Sally's brain then. That was him. That was the man her roommate was going on about, the one who she claimed had ruined her life.  Still who was she to judge? She wasn't the one who'd been in love with him. She'd had her own heartache to contend with at the time. He really
was a fine-looking man, though. Funny she couldn't remember him or his supposed girlfriend. Perhaps the girlfriend had been a figment of his imagination. But how did you say that in German?

The conversations petered out after a while.   As the season turned into autumn, Sally continued posting her pictures on Facebook. By now the flowers had turned into berries. 

About the author

In June 2019, Jenny Palmer published her first collection of poetry called Pendle Poems. She has published two memoirs, called  Nowhere Better than Home and  Pastures New  and a family history book called Whipps, Watsonsand Bulcocks. They are available from the Pendle Heritage Centre,

Barrowford and from No 10 Literature and Lifestyle, Clitheroe.  Her collection of short stories Keepsake and Other Stories was published byBridge House in 2018 and is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle .Many of her stories are on the Cafelit website. A 59, Fatal Flaws and The

Visitors are in Best of Café Lit 3, 5 and 7. The Visitors is also in Citizens of Nowhere and Magnetism.