In south London, was my memory fading, or was I merely living in the past?

A week or so ago, I was travelling by train between Bournemouth and London. As we swept through the New Forest I looked out and saw the woods and heathland that I had so often played in as a child, when my grandparents had lived on the fringes of this most ancient (and inappropriately named) of landscapes.

Nana and grandad resided in a village not far from Ringwood, seemingly full of retired people and bungalows. I called it up on Google maps and despite not having been there for nearly thirty years, I recognised immediately the birds-eye road layout. I clicked through to get the street level view and, sure enough, I had alighted on the correct road – Heather Close – just one junction along from my grandparents’ home.

The yellow trim on the bungalow’s garage door and fascia boards had gone, as had a pond and rockery in the back garden. But the little stone birdbath still stood in the gravel driveway and a large rock bearing the name of the house greeted visitors just as it had back in the 1980s, when I would regularly climb it like some sort of miniature mountain.

I clicked along the street, heading east, then turning to the north. As expected, there was Braeside Bowling Club, where my brother and I had been taught the rudiments of the game even when our hands were barely big enough to hold proper sized bowls. Beyond that lay the park – with new swings, but located just where it had always been. It all felt utterly familiar, everything in its place.

Later in the journey I had to change trains at Clapham Junction, in the capital’s south-west, the stomping ground of my twenties. With 25 minutes to spare I left the station – via an exit which hadn’t been in use when I was last there – and walked up St John’s Hill to see the flat I’d lived in for a year back in 2004.

On both sides of the bridge over the railway things seemed different. There were not only blocks of flats I didn’t recognise but road junctions were not laid out as I remembered them. The old telephone exchange was still there, but on the south side shops appeared to have sprung from nowhere – yet they must have been there before, given that they filled the lower floor of large Victorian mansion blocks.

Our flat itself was mostly unaltered from the outside, though I couldn’t help but notice the fresh coat of paint and the rather nicer furnishings just glimpsable through the window. A couple of nearby pubs were still in business, but none of the restaurants I had known were still operating – at least, not under the same names.

As I made my way back to the station, I felt bewildered that in a place I had lived for an entire year as an adult, I now had such little sense of recognition, while in one I had visited perhaps three times a year during my childhood, I felt complete familiarity (albeit through the window of a computer screen).

It must, I thought, be a product of that gut memory which so often seems to be associated with our earliest years, when instinct can overtake all else; whereas my recall of Clapham was evidently less impressive than I thought it would be.

But then I realised that in fact my recollections were not erroneous, it was simply that a sleepy village in Dorset had stood still for thirty years, whereas a bustling London suburb had been transformed in little more than a decade.

Sometimes our memories can appear to play tricks on us; but the deception doesn’t always lie in the past.