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A minor neurological defect 15 October 2002 One of my earliest memories is of coming out of hospital when I was three and had just had my tonsils taken out. I ran towards my father who was waiting at the front door, his arms outstretched. I have another early memory, of being held in my mother's arms at the deathbed of my great-uncle, in the downstairs bedroom of the house where he lived with his sisters. And a third memory, three or four years old, ill enough to be in bed, but not too ill to pay attention to the young woman looking after me who was teaching me how to tell the time. The only problem with these memories is that one of them is definitely false and the other two are suspect. My father died before I was two years old and therefore before my tonsils were removed, and when I look around that memory, the entrance that I remember so clearly was not to a hospital, but to the post office in Broughty Ferry, the Dundee suburb where I spent much of my childhood. And although my mother's uncle died after I was born, she is convinced that she never took me into his bedroom. As for the young woman telling me the time - I was more likely to be taught that skill by the old woman who looked after me every afternoon while my mother worked. The reason I bring these up is because I have read yet another description of childhood in someone's recently published autobiography. More accurately... I have read yet another review praising someone's autobiography, in particular the way in which he evoked the life of a child in 1920s / 1930s /1940s / whatever Britain. And not for the first time I ask myself how accurate are these memories? Does everyone else have perfect recall while I suffer from some minor neurological defect that would interest Oliver Sacks in his younger days? Or is my faculty of recall typical of others and these autobiographies are, at least in their description of the early years, as much fiction as fact? I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. If I had were writing my autobiography, I'm sure that the process would bring back memories of events that actually occurred, as well as a few that I thought I witnessed but which were in fact hearsay. (One evening I came home and told my flatmate that I had seen a man with a gun in his hand at the door to a pub on Cambridge Circus. A few months later I heard him tell a group of friends how shocked he was to see a man standing with a gun at the door of a pub on Cambridge Circus....) In other words, I could probably remember quite a few events, and if I were scrupulous, could probably identify most of them as true. Give me a year and a respectable five-figure advance and somehow or other I'll give you a few hundred pages explaining how I evolved from a screaming brat into... whatever I am today. But the fact is, I don't want to remember. I'm pleased to point to a bookshelf and say that book is mine, as is that one and that one and that one (that's enough now: ed), and I can tell stories of the times when I lived in Rio or travelled in the States and I can describe the plots of films I saw several years ago, but all these are simple, because they are intellectual, not emotional memories. What I shy away from remembering is time spent with a lover, the first public speeches I made, the mood I was in when, particularly in my twenties and thirties, I first experienced a city, or a love-making or death. I do so because if the experience was unpleasant in some way - sad or embarrassing, frightening or angering - I don't want to relive it, and if it was positive - happiness, joy, love - I don't want to be reminded of something I have since lost. That reluctance to look backwards affects me in other ways. I went to a public school, and I have always resisted the invitation to return. It is partly because I do not want to see how the place has changed; although I was not happy there, I still prefer to remember it as a shadow of a Tom Brown's Schooldays than as the commercial education factory it has become. Nor do I want to meet my contemporaries, to be reminded of the intense emotions - mostly negative - that accompanied my adolescence there. Nor explain time and again to the current staff, middle-aged contemporaries and current pupils that I fulfilled no promise, I did not become a captain of commerce and industry, I do not earn a six-figure salary, and I am not married with two lovely children, one of which has just been awarded a first at Oxbridge. In other words, the past is a place I do not want to visit and I have lost the habit of doing so. When asked, I find it difficult enough to remember what I did last week, far less last year or ten years ago. And at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do, is, Tony Benn-like, to record my thoughts for my posterity. An ego I have, but an ego that I keep firmly locked in its cage. It is the moment that is interesting, that intrigues me, the now. What I am experiencing, seeing, feeling, touching this second. The past has gone; nothing can change it, nothing can bring it back, let it go. The future is a goal towards which we walk, but we never arrive. All we have, all we ever have, all that makes us alive, is the eternal everlasting now. Enjoy... Back to Opinion |
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