A recollection of what each had meant to me came back

I posted about the opening line of The Go Between by L.P. Hartley the other day.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there

Famous as this is, the next paragraph is wonderfully evocative and curious in that perhaps you have to be of a certain age to truly relate to it as a real experience.

When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets' power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us; the almost mystical thrill of early ownership - feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.