Author's Note 3: 'Memory underpins imagination'

I was staring out the window at a flitting robin, copping out of writing this post about memory and playing with ideas for the title instead, when - eureka! – a line popped into my head: ‘the past is another country.’  

Great! The perfect title for a post about memory - maybe. Only I had misremembered it! The actual line is: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ My misremembering is not because I never read its source – The Go Between by L.P. Hartley. I did. I loved that book. And I also saw the film. And I have always associated those words with the wistful end of the film when we see Julie Christie’s intoxicatingly beautiful face made up to look old. Another memory slippage. In fact, the line comes right at the start of both the book and the film. I just checked.

Judging from my google search, I’m not the only one who misquotes that now-iconic line. I suspect that rather than ‘foreign country’ many people, like me, have remembered it as ‘another country’ because the gaze aligns more comfortably with our current sensibilities.

In The Drying Rooms, I am trying to go deep and honest into my flawed old hippocampus and locate not just episodes but, more importantly, the whole package of the experience: the at-the-time emotions of my child-self and their effects. But how can I really know the reliability of any of this? Because the fact is I am bringing my current sixty-eight-year-old self to those memories (and my current values and perspectives when it comes to boarding schools and children’s welfare in general). I am re-feeling my early childhood through an overlay of years and years of several other deeply affecting emotions and experiences. But then, of course, that lifetime of emotions and experiences will in turn have been shaped by those ‘unforgettable’ childhood memories which bear the imprint of Cruel Matron. This thinking has put me into an exhausting chicken and egg spin!

Another thing that keeps ruffling my chicken’s feathers and cracking the egg is coming across fragments of hard evidence from the time, or the sudden bolt of a fuck-me! question that I’ve never asked myself before. Examples:

The Captain Hook humiliation in Chapter Three

After I wrote about my memory of acting Captain Hook and failing to land on stage in one agile leap, I came across a letter I had written to my parents. This is a treasure as there are very few extant letters from that time. But this letter has completely thrown me. First, because the letter is evidence that I was older than my memory of myself. In the memory, I see a child of about nine. The letter was written on October 5^th 1967, a few days before my twelfth birthday. Second, I have always remembered the Captain Hook moment, but I have absolutely no memory of this piece of news that comes halfway through my long, chatty, barely-punctuated letter:

“In Peter Pan I did not get the part of Peter Pan and I was very upset because it was not done fairly so me and all my friends (I’ve got a lot of friends now) went on strike but it did not last long. I’m now trying to get the part of Captain Hook.”

The date of the letter (early in the Autumn term) has additional explosive significance (to me!) because I know (from other hard evidence) that Cruel Matron had left at the end of the previous summer term and I had finally stopped wetting the bed. No Cruel Matron. No urine soaked sheets. No fear.  Oh, the relief of it!

Washing my sheets in front of the other girls in Chapter Five

The thumbnail photo I use for these Author’s Notes is of an actual sheet I had at the time. If you look closely, you’ll see that the nametape is sewn on badly. (It makes me love my mother every time I look at it.) And, if I weren’t anonymising all the names in The Drying Rooms, I could also show you the other nametape on the sheet, the red machine-stitched one bearing the school’s name. Until writing about Cruel Matron punishing me for bed-wetting by making me wash my sheets in front of the other girls, I have never thought about the significance of this sheet.

Why do I have this sheet in the first place? Did we all have our own sheets? We had our own blankets, of that I’m pretty sure (I remember mine was green and vaguely tartan). But our own name-taped sheets! And if so, surely that’s ridiculous! It was a rich, privileged fee-paying school. And ensuring that each bed was made up with a child’s individual sheet must have been a feat of unnecessary organisation. Or was it something to do with me being a bed wetter? A way of identifying me? I have no idea. And how come I’ve still got it? Was it returned to me (or my parents?) when I left the school aged twelve, or when I left the senior school several years later?

And, what’s just as baffling to me, is that I am asking myself these questions about that sheet of sixty-odd years ago for the first time! Last night, I had a lengthy, forensic discussion with a dear old school friend about it. Did she also have a nametaped sheet? No, she said, absolutely not.

My memories are a mess of metaphors: flickers looming in fathoms-deep darkness; uncatchable web-threads floating and disappearing; fragments of landscapes and rooms.

And then there are the hard polished pebbles in a blurred void (Captain Hook; washing my sheets). These are absolute, unbreakable, my heavily guarded property. And yet, now, on close inspection, they wouldn’t stand up in court. Nevertheless, for me, the immovable truth of them still shines. Or so it seems …

P.S. I have been recommended a book about the science of memory by Charles Fernyhough. I’ve just started it, hence coming across the quote I eventually chose for the title of this piece. I love the title of his book: Pieces of Light. I wish I’d thought of the metaphor myself; for happy childhood memories maybe? I’ll let you know.

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In Author’s Note 4: What was home? I revisit memories of ‘home’ formed by living in several countries before I was sent to boarding school aged seven