The Museum of Me

When I began writing this book, I went home to see if my mum had kept some of my old stuff. What I found was that she hadn’t kept some of it. She had kept all of it – every bus ticket, stub, programme, letter, postcard and picture, every school report, essay, poem and painting – all filed. From the moment I was born to the moment I was able to have the confidence to turn round and say, ‘Why is our house full of all this shit?’

It’s fair to say, Mum’s ‘collecting’ (hoarding) has become a problem. She’s probably only one back copy of the National Trust Magazine away from being the subject of a Channel 4 documentary. Every trip home I try to help out by bringing a skip with me. I’m best friends with the regional managers of at least four civic amenity sites, and I can separate paper, plastic and glass quicker than anyone I know.

We realized things had got out of control when, whilst helping her with a recent house move, we discovered that she had washed, and packed, over a hundred margarine cartons and taken them with her.

Me:	[eating a Müller Light] Mum, why do you need these?
Mum:	To put things in.
Me:	What things?
Mum:	Just, you know … things.
Me:	Do you think collecting tubs to put things in might be encouraging you to collect yet more things to put in them?
Mum:	No. Yes. Maybe. [Pause] Have you finished with that yoghurt carton?

And so there is this museum – a museum of me. It’s not a museum I’d pay to enter. Or one with artefacts of any interest – not even, in many cases, to the very person to whom they relate. The exhibits aren’t pretty. They aren’t even exhibited; they lie in countless large plastic tubs, stacked four feet high. Endless boxes full of bone-dry papers that hurt my fingers almost as much as they hurt my heart to go through. Because it is painful – it has been painful – to go back and see in such forensic detail and with such unimaginable clarity the person I was, trying to become the person I wanted to be.

Sometimes we don’t want to be tethered to yesterday. It’s nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it’s so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays. Surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn’t going the way we want it, we can stand back and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring.

I don’t have that luxury. I have it all laid out in front of me. No magic. No mystery. No possibility that I was ever fun or dynamic. The mundanity of me writ large in endless lever-arch files and black bin bags.

Sometimes, when searching, I have come across things which cut deep. An innocuous cardboard box with ‘I love you’ scribbled on it in the carefree scrawl of an old boyfriend. A sorry note from a little girl to her parents, a little girl who hadn’t yet done anything to be sorry for. There were so many sorry notes in fact that nowadays, in arguments, when I’m being intractable and defensive, I wonder if I didn’t use up all my apologies as a kid, leaving me nothing left to use in adulthood.

I started going through everything a few months ago in preparation for writing this. I became my own curator. I picked key pieces that I could display in this Museum of Me, arranged them and put them in a bag for safekeeping. The rest I stuffed into bin liners ready for recycling.

‘Are these bags to go?’ shouted my mum from the top of the stairs.

‘Yep,’ I shouted, idly, back.

Two days later my bag of treasures was no longer there.

It didn’t take me long to realize that my mum had misunderstood me and taken the wrong bag. She had left countless sheaves of junk** and dumped the gems. If that doesn’t sum up my family, I don’t know what does. Good intentions – annoying outcomes.

Even though I hadn’t seen any of it for nearly forty years, it felt like a bereavement – like something had been taken from me. It was good stuff. Funny stuff. Meaningful. I felt emotional and wobbly.

Mum, on discovering what she’d done, cried for two hours non-stop. ‘I’ve ruined everything,’ she bawled.

Me:	No, you haven’t. Besides, there’s loads of other stuff. I can turn my attention to the remaining forty-two boxes …
Mum:	I have! It’s ruined! The book is ruined!
Me:	No, it’s not. I’m just going to have to … well, I’m now going to have to actually write it.

In truth, she’d done me a favour. A memoir, after all, is as much about what you don’t shine the light on as what you do. It’s about judicious choices and edited picks. With that much primary and secondary source material, it would feel more like I was writing a biography than an autobiography. A biography of a shy person with limited social skills who collected pebbles and wrote bad poems and, bewilderingly, was obsessed with wearing kilts. That person was documented in so much detail, it didn’t feel like me any more. I’ve outgrown me. I keep on outgrowing me.

Onwards …

If Mum makes herself feel safe by hoarding things, then Dad gets his sense of security from shedding them. For Mum the endless documents and pictures she keeps are like keys, keys which unlock emotional memories in extreme and dizzying detail. Dad’s idea of hell is an emotional memory – for him life needs to be stripped bare of anything and everything extraneous. Dad experiences life through the prism of one thing – DATA.

Data is safe. Data does not lie. Data can be controlled. And that’s why the world of patterns, information and numbers is the world my dad is happiest in.

Dad is basically the Matrix in human form. Every morning he wakes up, notes and logs the time of his waking, the atmospheric pressure on his barometer and the rainfall radar as indicated on the Met Office’s website. Whereas I might be captivated by the skeins of pink in the heavens at dusk, he will be looking at his watch to check the exact moment the sun leaves the horizon. Whereas I’ll be entranced by the sight of a woodpecker boring into the ash tree in the garden, he’ll be counting the exact number of pecks per minute.

It’s not that Dad is emotionless. Quite the opposite. He is overwhelmed by emotion. He feels too much. And the thought of being overcome by sensation is so frightening that structures need to be put in place to stem and control the flow.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve watched Dad codify his surroundings, obsessing over numbers and patterns, using stats and facts as a way of self-soothing. Nailing his life down to a series of fixed points gives him a sense of calm. It’s perhaps inevitable that his eldest responded by being rule averse, disinterested in boundaries and perpetually chaotic.

Since he first learned to write, Dad has kept a diary. He prefers a five-year diary as he doesn’t need a great deal of space for his entries, which are, in essence, factual one-liners about events, climactic conditions and his children’s height. When he turned seventy-five, he collected the data from the assembled diaries and boiled it all down into one single Mega-Journal. Finally, his life has been reduced to a series of clear, simple stats: 30 degrees, David born, Gerbil died, got cancer.

But more of that later.

I don’t say all this to judge him; I say it (and he’d love this) as a matter of fact. I love him whatever. We all have our peccadilloes. But the saddest thing is it doesn’t matter whether I say that I love him or not as he will never read this book. Why? Well, certainly not because he’s unsupportive. I can’t think of anyone who has allowed me to be myself more. No. The fact is, reading this would make him uncomfortable. Squeamish even. He doesn’t know how I’m going to tell the story, how many surprises the pages might contain. There would be too much emotion, too many twists and turns; the journey would make him anxious. He prefers Science Fiction. He likes his stories comfortably displaced to another galaxy.**

So there you have it. My parents. I grew up with the Hoarder Indoors and Rain Man.