If you put siblings in a room and ask them to remember a certain incident from their childhood, you can bet your bottom dollar that each one of them will have a different recollection of events. This indeed happened to dear friend who had a conversation with her brothers, all of them now adults, about the time their parents announced they were getting divorced. All these years later, everyone had a vivid memory of how it happened, where they were, who said what, but interestingly each version was slightly different, even down to the exact year it happened. And every one of them was convinced that they remembered it as it actually was, and that the others were mistaken.
It’s difficult to distinguish fact from folklore, sometimes because memories like stories, get handed down through families through the years and like Chinese whispers get embellished with a pinch of this and a pinch of that so that the end product is a soup of a story with many ingredients.
I am completely convinced that while sleeping in a tent when I was about ten I heard a lion roar. This is obviously complete nonsense because as far as I know the only lions in London are in the zoo, and not anywhere near Dulwich, but there is a part of me that would still swear on my life that this really happened. I definitely do remember though the sinking feeling I would get in my stomach as the car approached the Vale of Cherhill with its chalk white horse at the start of every term, which meant we were only ten minutes away , the holidays were over and we were back to the world of boarding school , itchy grey jumpers, freezing games pitches, lino corridors and the smell of disinfectant. I also vividly recall the day I learnt to whistle and when the fat boy fell into the fish farm tank when we were at lake Chuzenji. I would like to think my recollection of the round glass jar with the red lid that held toffees at my nursery school is real but I am not sure. Someone told me they could remember lying in their pram looking up at the patterns made by the leaves in the tree above them. I heard a man on the radio the other day claiming he could remember being born, but there may be a hefty pinch of salt involved and an amount of wishful thinking. Then again, who am I to say?
Some people have difficulty remembering anything, some remember less as they get older, for others it has always been so. For example T has always had trouble remembering things but has devised strategies ( always putting things back in the same place, same order, writing things down) for every day life which is cunning but not foolproof. This is the man who made Jane Fonda a cup of tea and invited her into his projection suite for a jolly good chat, because despite her being at the height of her fame, he simply couldn’t for the life of him remember where he knew her from, though he thought she looked vaguely familiar.
And then there are others like our old and much loved school friend who had a brain tumour and whose memory turned itself upside down and inside out in her last year of life. We would go and visit her in hospital and she was totally convinced we were all still at school, even though we were all in our thirties by then. She could recall events that we had long forgotten, the names of everyone’s guinea pigs, nicknames, things that happened on school trips ( like when we went to Longleat and our music teacher ate a bag of crisps with a knife and fork), who was in the swimming team, who had the best fancy dress costume at our 6th form party, the colour of my favourite coat, and so on. It was tragic yet funny, and extraordinary that the association her brain made on seeing us triggered all this detailed information that the rest of us hadn’t thought about for years.
Smells can evoke very strong memories. Patchouli oil ( which luckily I don’t come across that often these days) reminds me of being seventeen when we doused ourselves in it, while wearing our flared jeans with hand sewn inserts with Laura Ashley material , making them even more flared. The cold larder at my grandparents house had a particular smell that is difficult to describe, cold probably sums it up, if cold can indeed be a smell. The study smelt of leather and woodsmoke and the whole house had a faint air of what I now know to be damp, but then felt soft and warm and comforting. Ripe figs and coffee yoghurt remind me of heat and Israel and there is a particular type of beeswax polish that makes me think of my mums cottage in Wiltshire. My other grandad always had a tin of golden Virginia with apple peel mixed with it to keep it moist and that and the smell of creosote in his shed bring him back to me. When we head off to North Devon in August and I open up the back of my van for the first time there is a smell of holidays , of surf boards and cooking pots, fishing lines and buckets and spades, of damp ropes, waterproofs and love. Our house smells of woodsmoke and toast, of hot coffee and family. And Hartland smells of rain, proper drippy drenching rain, soft damp peaty earth and wet waterproofs, sun cream and barbecued sausages, damp towels and freshly cut hay.
Yesterday I came across a box of old photos, of holidays and small children, birthday parties, outings, evenings with friends, old pets and housemates, babies and school concerts. It reminded me of the car boot sale we went to a couple of weekends ago. One of the stalls had a pile of photograph albums crammed with family snaps that looked as if they were taken in the 50’s , each photo carefully stuck in place,with tissue paper in between each page, each labelled in spidery neat handwriting, ” Auntie Marge at Bexhill” and so on. The stall holder said he had found them in an old suitcase he had bought in a charity shop. There was something very sad about someone else’s memories and family history ending up in a box on a chilly Sunday morning to be rifled through by strangers. I came home wondering what Auntie Marge would have had to say about it all.
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