Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ (Part I)
If forgetfulness gave us simply the pleasant things to remember memories would be a consolation and an advantage.
There is something to be said, however, for unpleasant memories as they can be a reminder to avoid certain people or places or situations found previously to have been difficult, unprofitable and unrewarding.
Over the years the same memories remain vivid and follow the same reminders. Images once created and stored do not change.
There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall…
The same hill comes to mind every time this hymn is sung or heard. For the child, while singing the hymn, the hill seems to be unfortunate in not having a wall round it. For the adult, the hill should be in the landscape suitably outside the city wall; but it is interesting to note that, when questioned, most adults still have in mind the lonely hill without a wall round it, instead of an image that suggests the real state of hill and wall.
In spite of an increasing forgetfulness, as if the part of the brain responsible for memory is too crowded with thoughts and information and especially daily things that must be remembered, it is amazing how much can be stored in one small head. And especially when it is realised that the adult brain is well packed, layer upon layer, with images and perceptions and attempted explanations from early childhood onwards.
And even more amazing is the way in which one small event or half-remembered scene or word can lead to a dozen others. No wonder then that elderly people forget that they have told an anecdote several times. An old lady, in a restaurant recently, complained about a telephone ringing persistently and it was then discovered she had her own phone in her handbag but had forgotten this – even while it was ringing.
Someone wise said that it is not wise to make an arrangement with the mind that the body cannot keep. That is good advice. And it could be said too that the mind should remind the mind of the arrangement. If the mind can no longer be trusted – then a note in a conspicuous place, perhaps the kitchen table.
Memories of places and people are a tremendous gift, a wealth that should not be taken for granted. Another gift arrives in the form of memories belonging to someone else and given or lent by that other person. My father gave me many of his memories. I have no idea how these memories, the given ones, can come rushing into my mind just when they are needed to create more depths in an imagined character. Often the rich inheritance is not expected and a certain excitement accompanies the receiving. I have never asked for or expected the particular memories to surface. I am always deeply grateful for the enrichment.
Near my kitchen door there is an enormous tree (it drops leaves and twigs into the gutters and into the swimming pool next door); its branches creak and strain even in the slightest wind. To hear this creaking is to recall vividly the idea of the timbers of a great ship crossing one immense ocean after another. Whenever I am within hearing of these creaking branches I think of the incredible progress a ship makes, her rail moving gently up and persistently down, above the horizon and below the horizon.
During the first journey we made to Australia, I remember standing on the deck one evening and being overwhelmed with admiration at the sight of the massive construction and the complication of ropes and pulleys, which were only a part of the whole plan, being in themselves necessary for the transporting of the ship across the oceans.
Because of this tree, in the garden near my door, I remember the rolling of the ship and the pulse of hidden well-cared-for engines. The ship had seemed, in spite of the rolling, steady in the ring of water. She had not risen to answer the waves, and the monsoon had not broken. Most of the passengers were, I remember, huddled out of the wind. I have used the image (because of the reminder from the tree) in some of my fiction; the story ‘The Fellow Passenger’ is one place and possibly there is a suggestion of it in The Georges’ Wife.
The stairs on the ship were brass-bound, well polished, and the echoing footfalls of the passengers, hurrying down to the dining rooms, reminded me of my school and the stampede down the stairs (lead-covered to protect the worn treads) to breakfast in the mornings.
The voyage, brought back to me daily by the tree, remains as a physical and emotional experience that cannot be erased.
At some point in the long journey the migrant (the voluntary exile) is hit by the irrevocable nature of the decision that was made a whole year previously. Even if the migrant, on reaching his destination, starts back immediately, he or she will never be the same again.
In my own journey, years ago, there was suddenly the realisation that the world is enormous. During a day when the ship was waiting, as if becalmed, in the Great Bitter Lake, before entering the Suez Canal, the quiet expanse of colourless water, with its apparent lack of concern for human life, caused a sense of desolation more acute and painful than anything experienced during the first term at boarding school. The strangest thing of all was the vision of my father walking alongside the ship waving farewell as he used to walk and wave alongside the train every time I left to go back to school after the holidays. And, ridiculous as it was, I wanted to rush back to him, to hear his voice once more. But which of us can walk on water, I mean long-distance?
The creaking tree brings memories whether I want them or not. Mostly they are very useful and often, surprisingly, they emerge just at the right time to become part of a background for one of my characters. An example is the memory of the bluebell woods of my childhood, I gave the woods to Professor Edwin Page in the novel The Sugar Mother. In the story, Edwin Page thinks of the long sea voyage and he remembers the bluebell woods he went to as a child. At the right time of the year whole families, he remembers, would make for the woods. They would, as if by special agreement, leave the cramped dirty streets of the industrial town and spend whole days bent down in the misty blue fragrance industriously gathering… These flowers, Edwin remembers, have to be pulled and not snapped off or picked as many flowers are. He remembers the happy shoutings of children ringing through the quiet woods. He remembers, as well, the bundles of flowers, their blue heads darkening with dying, their long, slippery, unbroken stalks gleaming white, the bunches being tied on the backs of many different sorts of bicycles as the pickers pedalled homewards after a day of unaccustomed fresh air and the delight of being, for some hours, in the middle of a mass of flowers.
Remembering the bluebells, Edwin recalls the little paths, the hollows and the groups of distinguished-looking trees that remained the same from one year to the next. The woods, in a sense, were recaptured during every visit. Edwin realises later that the flowers were being greedily taken back to places where it was impossible to grow flowers. The houses, in front, opened straight on to the streets. Behind these houses were other houses opening on to narrow yards and alleys paved with blue bricks. Flowers could not grow there.
Because, at the right moment, the memory came back to me, I was able to give Professor Edwin Page my Railway Goods Yard, the whole of it. It was a wooden engine I had, not very big, with wagons which could be loaded with bits of coal, ‘timber’, sand – and some animals from the toy farm; but no wheat. I had no knowledge then of great paddocks full of wheat. (And, of course, Edwin Page does not think of wheat.)
Using my own remembered game, Edwin Page as a boy makes a railway yard in the sandy soil at the end of a garden. He banks up the earth into slopes and tunnels. He makes platforms and sheds and a passenger station decorated with flowers. He has lights and signals and pens for animals. He makes fences and plants bits of broken-off bushes. When it rains realistic puddles lie in the hollows and he sets about correcting the drainage problems…
In Euripides’ play Medea the chorus discuss the advantages and disadvantages of having children:
Have no means of knowing whether children are
A blessing or a burden; but being without them
They live exempt from many troubles
While those who have growing up in their homes
The sweet gift of children I see always
Burdened and worn with incessant worry…
These different attitudes towards the bearing and rearing of children are presented in the play immediately before Medea, whose destiny it is to kill her own children, murders them. The audience is captured in cathartic emotional involvement. Their thoughts are compelled towards childhood and the needs of children.
Edwin Page is also thinking about children. He is anticipating his own baby being carried by Leila, a surrogate mother, as a surprise for his childless wife, Cecilia, who is away for a year on academic study leave. He becomes obsessed with thoughts about babies and young children. He likens his well-ordered present situation (Leila’s mother being a good cook and housekeeper) to the well-ordered Goods Yard of his childhood game.
He thinks that it is possible that every place or person or thing, once created during childhood, persists for ever. It is possible, he thinks, that every person, walking in the street or catching a bus or sitting down to a meal, has been sketched or traced and coloured in with crayons or paints by some diligent child at some time.
Perhaps this was why some individuals had no necks or were completely bald or devoid of teeth or, if they had teeth, seemed to have a mouthful of pickets. Some people had long legs and others had legs that did not match. And some, mainly women, had legs that came out of the edges of their skirts and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit at the tops of their thighs to their bodies. The legs, if you took a line upwards, would pass by each side of the body unrelated and useless. It was an idea held by the Ancient Greeks, he thought; they believed that an animal or a person, an idea or a vision, a vision in particular, if written about could be brought into existence.
St Augustine in his Confessions (Book X) writes about the ways in which he can distinguish the scent of lilies from the scent of violets even when he has not recently breathed in their scent, but simply from the memory of these scents. Similarly he writes that he likes honey better than wine, judging them from memory. Smooth things he prefers rather than rough – all from memory. He writes:
All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth and the sea, ready at my summons, together with everything that I have ever perceived… In it I meet myself.
In our memories we meet ourselves.