Speak, memory

by Vincent Guy

Photo by Kami on Unsplash

 My first memory, very clear, is of me cosy in my pram, being pushed along by Opa, my loving German grandfather. We’re passing the pub on the corner near home; up to the right is Harp Hill, round the corner the newsagents, a little further on the council estate known as Waddon, something of a no-go area for my resolutely middle-class parents. Just one thing is odd: the point of view is a few yards away, outside the pram and about eight feet up in the air.

Another pram journey comes to mind. My sister and I, aged 11 and 6, are at the Hunt Meet, held outside the Queen’s Hotel every Boxing Day. I had a passion for the hunt, not so much the extermination of foxes but the pageantry, the colour, the sounds. My mother even went so far as to embroider my bedroom curtains with hunting scenes. In the middle of the crowd there was a large fountain, its pool frozen over on that chilly winter’s day. Three or four boys were testing the ice, walking onto it. Nothing daunted, I too jumped on and went straight through. I can still feel my feet sliding down the curved side of the pool. A kind gentleman hauled me out, holding me aloft to the gawking crowd, ”Whose kid is this?” My sister had disappeared, chatting and exploring with a friend, who happened to be the sister of one of my classmates, Eric Lindsay. And it was the Lindsay family who stepped forward to claim me. They did their best to dry me off, wrapped me up, popped me into their baby’s pram and pushed me home; the infant quite happy to travel in its mother’s arms. My father’s comment on opening our front door “Went out a gentleman, came home a baby”. We’d passed the Lindsays’ house on the way to ours. No. 24 King’s Road. The only confusion in my head now: was No. 24 the house of Eric Lindsay or of Eric Yates, my history teacher ten years later?

As I write this, I happen to be staying with my sister. She mentions by chance that she’d written a poem about the young man in pram incident and recently shown it to me. I must confess, I have no recall whatsoever of her doing this.

They say people remember vividly where they were at certain world historical moments. I certainly do.

Where was I when I heard Kennedy had been shot? In my college room in front of a gas fire, the radio on for music, as I canoodled with my girlfriend, Belinda. Our affair was passionate if never fully consummated; eventually she felt obliged to go back to her fiancé. 

On hearing of the death of Princess Diana? In my London flat with a Cretan friend, Thalia. Breakfast time and she was just on the verge of leaving for Heathrow to get back home. She wanted to take a bunch of flowers to Kensington Palace, not that far away. Did I go alone after she’d left or did we go together? Not a typical thing for me to do, but several thousand others had done so. The palace gates were almost buried in blooms.

As the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, I was out walking in the Chilterns with yet another girlfriend, Susie. As we came back to her house, the TV was on. At first sight I thought, like many others, that it was a Hollywood movie, “Towering Inferno: the Remake”. But hearing the commentary brought home the truth. We watched, appalled.

The trick that memory played with me and Susie was not about world events but our first meeting. We were at a gathering of recent graduates in studies related to psychotherapy. She and I had completed the course in different years and now chatted trivia before practical sessions began.  An exercise was set up like this:

“Pick a partner. Now stand face-to-face and stare into each other’s eyes for three minutes. Keep blinking to a minimum.”

 Call us susceptible but by the end of three minutes we thought we were head over heels in love. At the end of the day, she drove me to the station where we sat talking before the train was due. Only then did we realise we’d met before. Not only met but worked together over several days on my dissertation project. I’d not been much taken with her then, but now was very different.

When I first met Tina, her stories fascinated me; they still do. One was this:

“Hitchhiking through Northern Greece, I’d got a lift from a travelling salesman with a boot cram-full of children’s dress-up rings. I politely declined his offer of one of these “diamond” rings in exchange for sex and we continued towards the Turkish border. At a lightly wooded area the driver stopped; he needed to stretch his legs and have a rest. He lay down and suggested if I wanted to get back on the road smartish, I should have sex with him. Or carry on hitching without him… but also without my luggage, which he’d locked in his car. He closed his eyes and feigned sleep. I tried snatching the car keys but to no avail. Should I try bashing him on the head?  Would it stun him, kill him or just make him bash me back? Would the murder squad catch me before I reached the border?  I remember picking up a nearby rock and carefully whacking him. He didn’t open his eyes. I took the key, grabbed my case and returned to the roadside, where a random soldier emerged from the trees and helped me flag down a lift. All the way I was sick with worry that I might have overdone my KO blow, to be apprehended by the Law just as my foot hovered over the border to freedom.”

To me it felt romantic, bohemian, daring, to enter a love affair with a murderess. Later I even married her.

Decades on, a friend came by collecting stories about hitchhiking adventures. As Tina told him this one in proper detail, she realised it was mostly in her imagination. Reality: she had found the wandering soldier and appealed to him for help. His firm military manner persuaded the driver to hand over the keys. Her feverish imagining of what might have happened if she’d killed the guy had blotted out the relatively simple reality. Murder had been just in Tina’s mind.

This shakiness of memory has implications for the procedures of the Law. While hearsay evidence is dismissed as irrelevant, eyewitness accounts are valued like gold. Perhaps a more nuanced view would be wiser. I’ve had some courtroom experience, fortunately not in the dock but as jury member or interested observer.

A young black man stands in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, London, accused of stealing a tape recorder from a private house. The police say they’d spotted him emerging and given chase. They’d lost sight of him but then come across him again at the top of a flight of stairs, trembling with fear. To some police all blacks look the same and trembling is an obvious sign of guilt; so they’d cuffed him and hauled him off. He’s been held on remand in prison since then, spending the time studying relevant law books, and he now feels able to defend his plea of innocence without a barrister. The coppers throw abusive insults across the courtroom at him, and he breaks down near tears. The judge calls a pause and clears the court to instruct him. It emerged that the police had cooked their notebooks to make them consistently point to him. The coppers did much to undermine my middleclass faith in their virtue and probity. But the judge bolstered my faith in the British justice system.

Like every case I’ve attended, this was enthralling. Events are examined in such detail, from so many points of view, unfolding in slow motion. They fix themselves on my memory, seeming in retrospect more vivid than things I might have experienced directly.

Where does memory live? For me it’s in the faces of people I love, in the pop songs of my adolescence, in the school poetry books on my shelves. For neuroscientists it’s distributed around the brain but most significantly in the hippocampus, a tiny unit so named for looking like a seahorse. I recently learned that we in fact have two of them, one on the right and one on the left. I find that somehow comforting. Lose half of your memories and, with luck, the other half might survive.