A single female voice sings a folk ballad, inspired by a song found in a Victorian song collector’s manuscript in a Plymouth, UK, museum archive. She sings of waiting, in her summer garden, for the return home of her love from the war. As she waits, three veterans pass, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you had left?” In reply to this, the veterans tell of their experiences of connecting with home during the conflicts in The Falklands, The Gulf and Afghanistan. These words are taken from interviews with UK ex-servicemen and their family members.

Accompanying the singing voice on two screens are Super 8mm shots of Plymouth summertime front garden gates, thresholds to the archetypal English plot, revealing through their repetition the quiet unpredictability of the ordinary. Each shot is split in two like the ‘broken token’ mentioned in the song (a gimmel ring split between the lovers before he left for war, to be re-united when, or if, he returns). The garden shots (and the voiceover) are disrupted by references to these interviews being recorded, and to the other means that have been used to construct the piece, means by which the past has been made to return anew: searching internet archives; attempting to decipher a manuscript in a museum collection; note taking by a Victorian song collector.

The garden images represent ‘home’, but they also stand in for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return, changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.” The ‘past’ that the veterans experienced, and it’s return to the present in a new form – the veterans’ recollections – are two different things: like the real and its representation, like home and elsewhere, like the two parts of a broken ring. There is a distance between our past and our memories of it now, but knowledge of this allows us to move between them, making the past active in the present, transforming both: “The shining, strange, veiled and broken past/Will upset our world any second now.”