In ‘The world with love’, a woman bumps into an old schoolmate and her three children, fifteen years after school is over. Smith’s “you” shows little nostalgia for the days of old (just as well: beware of adults who miss high school, or university … ), but the old schoolmate “reminds you so much of the girl you knew that your head fills with the time she smashed someone’s guitar by throwing it out of the art room window”. Then, she says something that brings back a flood of memories, of French class, of a dark-haired girl, of words that “flashed through your head in other tongues, their undersides glinting like quicksilver”. I first read ‘The world with love’ in the common room in Whitstead, a place that doesn’t exist anymore, since the house was renovated. Smith’s story knows that the past is always a place you can’t go back to.
First published in Free Love, Virago, 1995
A Personal Anthology 