67. Memories

“After Harrods we went to Evita which was really good, we’ve been playing the record for ages. Not as colourful as I expected but that was quite a thrill to see the show. We had a lovely dinner at Le Bistro, a little French restaurant in Drury Lane, where the theatre was."

This excerpt from Mary's tape of our 1981-82 trip to Los Angeles and Europe reminds me of how few memories I have of the trip other than those that are on film or tape. Even some of those are a surprise to me – I had forgotten that we went to see Evita, just as I had forgotten that in Los Angeles we saw Elizabeth Taylor on stage in Little Foxes. Indeed I am racking my brain to see what I can remember other than what’s on record, and it’s very little. I remember Mary throwing up at the bottom of the Vicar’s Close in Wells and again outside the terminal at Charles de Gaulle when we are waiting for a taxi to take us into Paris. And I remember our visit to the L’Oreal head office, just before we visited the Paris Opera. It had been organised by a friend of Mary's, L’Oreal’s New Zealand managing director, and was the remnant of the month she originally arranged to work there as part of her leave from the tech. But we  were given the kind of frosty supercilious bum’s rush reception that some Parisians had so effortlessly turned into an art form for country cousins, and were in and out of the offices within twenty minutes – not even a cup of coffee. Mary was disappointed and I, knowing how much she had been looking forward to it, was disgusted but said nothing.

Beyond that I can remember little, no matter how hard I try. In fact the harder I try, the less it seems I can remember. Nor do the tapes and photographs prompt additional memories of our visit, though they do trigger amazing recall of other times spent in some of the places – happy memories of Covent Garden, for example, buying gifts to bring home, enjoying the buskers with Sharon, and of working at Harrods in my teens, right down to the name of the buyer in the fruit and vege department my second Christmas there (Mr. Croft) – but nothing about other things that Mary and I did that winter. It’s as though, beyond the recorded stories, there’s just a void.

No wonder archaeologists and historians have such difficulty reconstructing the past. There are so many stories that could be told just from the source materials that exist, source materials that are mere fragments of a larger whole. We take snapshots of the celebratory events in our lives for the public family record – Pat and my wedding, Ruth and Trevor's wedding, Stuart and Jutka's wedding, Robert as a newborn baby, Nicola on her third birthday, Mum and Dad’s Golden Wedding celebrations, Sharon and my honeymoon in Tahiti, our Mediterranean cruise, our holidays in all their variety – and we retell those narratives of the photograph album, happy narratives by and large, narratives of the good times. But we don’t generally take photographs at funerals. We didn’t line everyone up with a professional photographer for a picture of Grannie Deeks' funeral party, even though it was the largest family gathering for years and none of the giggling grandchildren would ever forget Aunty Molly, in her funereal black, slipping and falling into the grave as she threw in her piece of soil.

The trauma narratives, the narratives of the bad times, of accidents, illnesses and deaths, are stored off-record, repressed and hidden, to be dug up by counsellors and psychotherapists and rebirthers for clues to our inner selves. When Sacha was kicked by a horse, I only took a photograph of her smashed-up nose after the cosmetic surgeon had completed his beautiful reconstruction and you could only see two black eyes and a large piece of sticking plaster rather than the gooey mess that I had welcomed from the ambulance at Middlemore Hospital. Such events are generally ignored by the photographic record, which is why I was momentarily shocked when Mum sent me a photograph of an earless Dad, a photo that she, with the fascination of a wartime nurse for surgical procedures, had taken after his cancerous growth was removed and before his prosthetic ear was fitted. They were also glossed over in my letters to Mum and Dad, letters that told of the trivia of my everyday life, the ordinary repetitive routines, the narrative of the normal.

But we don’t necessarily construct our stories of ourselves, our lives, from the normal. We are more likely to try and make sense of ourselves from the special occasions, public or private, celebratory or traumatic, that are permanently imprinted in our consciousness. From the embroidered tale of boyhood heroism as I jump ashore to rescue the family lest they capsize and drown in the River Arun. From private personal events in which we disclose ourselves to ourselves - the care and tenderness I share with Mary after she comes home from her radium treatment full of tales from other patients about the loss of their love lives, the loss of the sensations of passion and arousal. And somewhere in between these public and private lives is the normality of who we are in our everyday selves.

Evita, Harrods.... what strange connections. Are all memories like some vast underground network in which, if you know the interchange points, you can travel to and fro through your personal universe, making connections between everything? Like some holistic Gaia world nestling in a simple geometry of circles and lines, a world where past, present and future share a single time zone?