Waking Up in Winchester: J E R E M Y
DUNS
The 1986 science fiction novel, Replay,
by the American writer Ken Grimwood,
opens with its middle-aged protagonist dying
of a heart attack, only to reawaken in bed
in his old college dorm, aged 18 again.
H
He walked the whole class
from Flint Court up to
my bedsit in Edgar Road,
where he then carried out
the double lesson.
12 The Wykeham Journal 2018
e now has the chance to ‘replay’ his life
from that point on, but with all the
knowledge he gained the first time around.
I re-read this novel every few years, as the premise
(now familiar from several other books and films)
soon gives way to a poignant rumination on the
paths we take in life, and what we value in both
those we choose and those we have thrust on us.
It is also, of course, a metaphor for fiction itself:
for readers and writers, novels are an opportunity
to explore lives we haven’t lived.
If I were to have my own replay, I think
I know exactly when and where I’d be cast back
to: mid-morning on a Monday in 1991, in my bed
at Cook’s. In my penultimate year at Winchester,
my weeks began with a double bookschˉa followed
by double English. As I was a lazy good-for-
nothing teenager, I not only regularly slept through
the first two hours but also took the opportunity
to shirk English, allowing me to doze all the way
through to lunch.
My grand plan to sleep more than anyone
else in history was going well until one morning
when I was woken by a gentle shake of the shoulder.
Bleary-eyed, I gazed up from my pillow to see the
face of my English don, Simon Taylor, peering down
at me. Behind him were my classmates. Irritated
by my constant shirking, Mr Taylor had walked the
whole class from Flint Court up to my bedsit in Edgar
Road, where he then carried out the double lesson.
The incident still makes me blush. What a
selfish, self-indulgent brat I was! And yet how
patiently and wisely my act of teenage rebellion
was cut down to size. This would surely be the
starting point of my time-travel adventure. Like
the protagonist of Replay, I would start afresh,
avoiding all the mistakes of youth.