Desperately seeking the way we were

past.

WHEN I was a child, in the 1950s and 60s, people hurtled towards the

future as if they couldn't shake the dust of the past from their feet

fast enough. They flush-panelled old doors, heaved out old fireplaces,

slapped cream gloss paint on old dark wood. ''Modern'' meant good,

bright, alive, ''old-fashioned'' meant dark, dingy, dirty; and every

year you went to the Ideal Homes Exhibition in the Kelvin Hall to see

what the latest ''modern'' looked like.

I don't know when, exactly, it all changed, when ''modern'' came to

mean cold, sinister, bleak, and ''old-fashioned'' cosy, pretty,

reasurring. But I know that that shift more or less accounts for the

reactionary political climate we live in now; having junked and

demolished the past for a solid quarter-century, without admitting to a

pang, people suddenly became ill with future-shock, and ceased to

believe in ''progress''. So now conscientious writers sit among the

wreckage, trying to recover the material that was lost or undervalued in

the hectic forward rush, trying to get back in touch with lost times

without succumbing to the disease of indiscriminate nostalgia.

On Tuesday evening, for example, Radio 4's poetry programme Stanza on

Stage came to the Pleasance Theatre on the Edinburgh fringe, to hear

readings by Liz Lochhead, Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay. They span 15

years in age, and come from widely different backgrounds. Yet somehow,

their style was noticeably similar for its loving resurrection of the

lost detail of past lives; Lochhead remembering the precise texture of

life ''after the war'', Kay revisiting her parents' house, somehow

unable to believe that her childhood really happened there.

But the strongest poem of all, in this vein, was a half-comic piece by

Duffy called ''The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team'', which

literally reeked of the strange, telly-driven, intensely ''British''

atmosphere of that decade, and of longing for old certainties about what

mattered, what you should learn; but all encased in a powerful

understanding that those certainties went with a kind of male

sensibility which now seems ridiculous. Small wonder, with poetry as

rich and accessible as this being written, that live poetry readings

like this one, superbly captured by the BBC, have become one of the

surprise success stories of the last decade.

There was more loving attention to the past, too, in this week's

Celtic Horizons on Radio Scotland, in which writer and critic Joy Hendry

pieced together the story of her own musical education, starting from

the penchant of her mother's middle-class Perth family for Victorian

drawing-room ballads (some Scottish, but not too broad, of course) and

English kitsch like ''We'll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again''.

The story then proceeded through intimations of a different kind of

''Scottish song'' gleaned from her father's Dundee working-class family

(this Perth-Dundee dichotomy clearly imprinted itself eloquently on

Hendry's infant mind) to the gradual dawning of enlightenment through

the international folk music revival -- and the Perth Folk Club -- of

the 60s. This programme had a more hopeful atmosphere than the three

poets could manage; there was a powerful sense that for Hendry, a

present in which she has come into full possession of her heritage of

Scottish song is better than a childhood in which she was substantially

deprived of it.

But still, there's a loss, somewhere. Like Jackie Kay, whose

astonishing half-sung poem about a Communist Party social in her

parents' house was a highlight of the poetry reading -- Hendry seems to

have had her initial feeling for music and poetry stirred by hearing the

important adults in her life singing and reciting at home, however

questionable their taste; and I was left wondering whether almost any

culture owned and enacted by people themselves -- even a kitsch and

oppressive one -- is not better than no culture at all, or one passively

received from a video screen.

Meanwhile, Radio 3 has been re-running a series of fascinating

programmes, made last year by Christopher Hope, about new writing in

South Africa. As Natalie Wheen pointed out a few weeks ago, in a

memorable Kaleidoscope special called We Will Shame The Devil, artists

in South Africa are now facing a rare and astonishing set of challenges,

escaping from the rigid confrontations of apartheid into a world utterly

changed, but at the same time not so ruthlessly commercialised and

robbed of ideals as post 1989 eastern Europe.

And what was striking in Hope's programmes was the extent to which

South African writers, too, are finding themselves impelled to write

autobiography, painstaking memoirs of the myriad tiny ways in which the

apartheid state moulded their lives. The danger with this kind of

attention to the past, of course, is that it becomes stuck and

reactionary, crystallises into an obsession with ''getting back'' to

some point where injustice or irreparable damage was done. But so long

as artists remain truthful about past pain as well as past pleasure,

this end of century reclaiming of lost realities cannot be bad.

As the Booker prizewinner J. M. Coetzee said to Hope, of the South

African government's intention, as part of the ''reconciliation''

process, to destroy all files on crimes committed by the security forces

during apartheid: ''We as artists must absolutely reject that. You can

forgive; but you can't found your future on forgetting and lies.''