Mutable Time

Time seems to be such an elastic thing. I've been reading about it for years now, fiction and non-fiction, and trying to understand the various theories surrounding it. It seems as though it may, on a quantum level, be mutable enough that some travel within it may be possible. Of course, the quantum level and our level are very different, but sometimes, I've felt I might have managed it, might have had a glimpse of the past.

Like my ghosts, my glimpses have tended to be audio. I stood under an archway of the London Wall, at Tower Hill, and I heard the tramp tramp tramp of feet above me, and the clatter of something metal on stone. Only for a moment, but it was very clear.

I stood on a flat square patch of tarmac on part of Clapham Common, without any idea of why I suddenly heard planes overhead. Some three weeks later an elderly lady I met on my walk from the Tube told me that the tarmac covered the old air raid shelters, which had been filled in some years previously. She remembered being rushed out of her house by her father, and carried down into them. She remembered the noise of the planes.

When I was a child, we stopped once on a trip from Johannesburg to Durban at the wall where Piet Retief's daughter wrote his name on an overhanging rock while she and his party of trekkers waited for him to return from the meeting with Dingaan. He never did return. As I stood there I clearly heard the snorting and blowing of horses, and the rattle of their bridles. But when I climbed over the rocks looking for them, there were none there.

So perhaps the quantum bleeds into the reality we live in every now and then. At an old racetrack in Surrey, near Woking, I was struck with this thought; what if those people from the Roaring Twenties, racing round their track on glorious Spring days and Summer mornings, glanced up and saw, not the Surrey countryside gleaming before them, but the Services, stretching over acres of space, full of cars and people and tarmac and trucks. Would they have driven off the track, thrown completely by the brief vision of that space occupied by its future time?

Perhaps, though, they would only have heard it. Like me.