on memory and childhood and memories of childhood
hilary mantel, c.s lewis, john locke, and lorde walk into a bar (the bar is in my head, and it is also a forest)
I came home, last week, to the house where I grew up.
A few nights before, I burst into tears. Halfway down Queen Street in the sort of torrential rain that gets under your skin, and halfway through my own outpouring, I realised what I was really crying about. This would be the last time I left Oxford for the vacation with a plan to return the following term. The city feels full of ghosts to me — shadowy impressions of lives lived and not-lived that I struggle to leave behind. Outside it, everything feels more and less real at once. The idea of leaving — properly, truly, fully leaving — feels impossible, like one of my heartstrings is tied to Oxford’s spires, for better or for worse. I have invested too much memory in the place.
As I dwell on my impending graduation (round two! older and no wiser), the third anniversary of lockdown, and the realisation that I’m considerably closer to 25 than 15, I find my life reflecting back to me through memory’s fragmented mirror. In her memoir of childhood, Giving Up The Ghost, the late and much-mourned Hilary Mantel writes of memory that:
‘We talk about buried parts of our past and assume the most distant in time are the hardest to reach: that one has to prospect for them with the help of a hypnotist, or psychotherapist. I don't think memory is like that: rather that it is like St Augustine's 'spreading limitless room'. Or a great plain, a steppe, where all the memories are laid side by side, at the same depth, like seeds under the soil.’1
Seeds under the soil to be stumbled across by mistake, stuck to the underside of bare feet like pollen on a bee, or picked out the grit with fingernails ten years on. Lying dark and dormant then suddenly flourishing, urged into life by — by God knows what — the sudden fairy-dance of light on water, a particular smell like a flat you once lived in — I suppose sometimes it is a madeleine, even for those of us who can’t quite be bothered with Proust. That dance of light, the splintering shimmer of reflected sun on the swell by the prow of a ship in motion — memory is like that, for me. Mostly shaded in darker hues, then suddenly brightly illuminated, but only for a second, and constantly in flux like wings, Proteus-slippery and hard to grab.
The day after leaving Oxford for London, I go for a walk, the circuit of streets and park I’ve been walking all my life. It’s a blustery day, brisk but bright, and it finally feels like spring. I tread paths I could walk with my eyes shut, and do, then open them to be blinded by daffodils and the insolent heads of purple croci, a smattering of bluebells blown open in shock by the wind. Children hide behind a camellia bush just coming into flower, their voices serious in secret counsel. Their parents stand watching on, unseen guardians conversing quietly about nursery places. Mantel’s childhood ambition was to gallantry, knighthood, the Round Table. At four, she does not want or need to grow up; each day is busy with ‘guarding, knight errantry, camel training. Why should I want to move on in life?’.2 My own was similar though perhaps less sophisticated, moulded by Narnia, the Hobbit, each and every children’s book I could get my hands on. My sister was born when I was four and I would play in this garden with my father, waiting for the baby to come back from the hospital, defending the fortress as dusk crept in, from the dangers of big cats and other such predators. (I named my sister after a mouse in Angelina Ballerina, however, which is not quite as Arthurian as Mantel might have provided).
As I rounded the corner — beyond where my mother and I escaped to eat hot, salty chips one night during my GCSE revision, a year when nothing went quite right — four boys ran out from the forest of white-winged umbrellas, their flaps coasting in the breeze and bases solid as deep rooted columns. (Writing this now another memory; another park, the ruins behind a garden of dead roses — or perhaps they were built as ruins, some Victorian flight of fancy — playing hide and seek behind the columns. The first visit that we were too large to be hidden.). As the boys raced around and passed me the smallest paused for just a second and met my eyes. Wariness flitted across his face before he set off again, at a slower pace. I had punctured his children’s world, the world of play and something deeper than play; where everything is in the moment yet everything seems momentous.
Anyone who knows me knows I struggle with grammar, with imposing stoppered sense on otherwise paragraph-encompassing sentences, with avoiding the allure of the semicolon and em-dash. Passed - past - passed is such a struggle. I passed the columns. The columns were past me — the columns were in the past to me. They passed me a snippet, a moment, a memory. The past passed us, we cannot pass the past. What is past is passed — what would you pass the past you, if you could? A wary, fleeting gaze; a pinprick of adulthood; the solidarity of the child within?
How do children look on adults? I have a memory — I must have been six or seven, the age that I think looking back I was probably happiest — of sitting by the playing field at school, watching a group of Year Sixes arranged like elegant statues around a picnic table. They were adults — the coolest, tallest, oldest people around, the far-off suggestion of the ‘big school’ a solid reality already crystallising around them. Then suddenly I was one myself, then leaving, and then the big school itself, and each footing I sought unstable — girls went on dates rather than playing prehistoric man, girls cared about boys, and Ask FM, and posing like the Kardashians to take selfies on brand new phones, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t bothered, or didn’t care, it was that no one had told me that I should or taught me how. And it was the end of the world for seven years but then all that was gone again anyway. It lasted forever, but looking back, time folds like a concertina and I have twelve again.
I have never reached that picnic table with the Year Sixes, that elusive emblem of adulthood. The adults just kept getting older.
Seen like this, a life rocks and jolts forwards, carelessly swinging through time. It sheds the pretence of linearity imposed to make it make sense, the clarity of purpose implied by New Year’s resolutions and graduation dates and summer vacations. Not a neatly laid out timeline but a stack of notecards, occasionally scattered, reshuffled, or mislaid. John Locke wrote that personhood relies on reason and reflection, that consciousness and memory build up over time to form personal identity. Without memory, there is no identity. I don’t know about this. It’s too clear, too easy in its linearity. I have heard a family friend with dementia slip into the Polish of his childhood, seen my father’s face change as he recognised a person in the street, only to realise they would have been years older, and god-knows-where besides. The cards of memory shuffle, are spilt. Mantel’s seeds wither or spring into life; for a moment the steppes of the mind become a green and golden forest, filled with welling portals like C. S. Lewis’s Wood Between The Worlds. These pools are beautiful, dangerous, whole worlds / memories opening up at the traveller’s feet, to dip a toe or fall headlong into. When Lewis’s child-adventurers travel between worlds through the Wood, they must mark deep scratches in the lush green grass, the chocolate-scented soil, to find their way home. A wardrobe is far safer, though more temperamental. Though time errs, wobbles there too; there is passed and past tied up in Narnia, whole life-times passing whilst a bluebottle crawls across a windowsill and the kettle boils for tea. And children grow up twice in Narnia; once in fantasy, to become kings and queens only to be jerked back to childhood, then brutally, violently, to the point of exclusion from the riches of the mind and from life itself — there is no makeup nor boyfriend for Susan in Narnia; she cannot remember, nor return, yet she is the only Pevensie to survive the series. Like Locke’s reflecting subject, she has forgotten Narnia, and thus it is not a part of her self. The singer Lorde, in Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen it All): ‘Couldn’t wait to turn fifteen / Then you blink and it's been ten years / Growing up a little at a time, then all at once’.
Like Susan I grew into dates, and makeup, and selfies, eventually. I stopped checking the back of every wardrobe; I cannot remember how it felt to have that certainty, that one day the wood would give way and a new world open up before me. My memories never take narrative form, I struggle to recall more than sensory snippets of startling vividness with little interior dialogue. There’s a trend on Instagram which seeks to evoke the liminal quality of ‘summer in the noughties’; distant music soundtracks box-sized tellies showing CBBC, Winnie The Pooh bedsheets and the bottom shelves of a corner store, dripping lime callipos and plastic sandpits probably full of earwigs, all photographed on digital cameras and filtered through a gritty haze. There’s something ghostly about it, something unheimlich: the hazy feeling endemic to a childhood summer recaptured by a technology that did not exist at the time, that sense of perpetual dusk on a midsummer’s day, of a child and the sun united to challenge the regularity of bedtime and the march forwards of the days, months, years. People remember childhood as edenic, rosy-tinted, yet there is always the snake in the garden. Mantel recalls a moment her life changed, rubbing up aged seven against some unformed, unexpressed evil, with ‘no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless’, which disturbs her in the ‘secret garden’ of her early years.3 It is not a revelation of assault or violence, it is just something, or the suggestion of something. The fact is that children grow up.
The thing about being old, my father tells me, is that you know both what it is to be young and old. You can remember; the young can only imagine. Like Mantel, he was born in the early fifties. There is such a lot of life between then and now, such a lot of change and wonder and horror to be stumbled upon or illuminated, fleetingly, by memory, by a face in the street or the taste of a cake. I wonder if my own generation will have this experience, this uniquely human experience, of growing old and looking not back but around at a world filled with ghosts. Mantel’s memoir is populated by ghosts — it begins with her stepfather hovering on the stairs of a house she, as an adult, is about to sell. She died last September, leaving a profound literary legacy which has arguably shaped this country’s understanding of its past in a way the four-year old Arthurian might appreciate. Does she then live on through her work, a trite cliché bearing some form of fruit? Is a true ghost just a memory untethered from the rememberer? Is it a part of the self, a memory displaced from the body and onto the world?
Sometimes you close your eyes to the sun and let it warm your face, let the world pass by for a moment before you gaze upon the bright flowers of the present spring. Sometimes what’s past is passed, or vice versa. Sometimes it comes back. Either way we carry it with us, close to our chest, a bundle in the arms of a traveller passing through the steppes, across the illuminated ocean, the woodland, slipping and falling sometimes as they go.
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up The Ghost, p. 25
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up The Ghost, p. 44
Hilary Mantel, Giving Up The Ghost, p. 106