I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by the way I remember some things vividly, and others not so well or not at all. There are big chunks of my childhood I can’t remember. Things like birthday parties in Menzieshill, which I did not know I had until a friend told me about them. There’s not a crumb of birthday cake left in my mind from those days. Other folk perhaps are still wandering around with children squealing in their minds and candles being blown out, and a very small roundish me. But there’s no memory of any of that in my head.
Maybe, some of my memories got knocked out during one of my various head injuries. Like the night I got hit by a car on the way to a youth club. I was sent flying through the air, with one of my shoes flying off in a different direction. My sister thought it was my foot and screamed. Or maybe it was a much later event that zapped my memories. Maybe the damage was done when I was attacked by a few thugs on the Hilltown. I had to get my nose rebuilt after that.
Or, maybe, it didn’t need any kind of jolt for my memories to fall out of my mind. Perhaps, they just fell out, the way you lose money from a coat pocket when a hole develops, and you don’t notice a trail of cash on the grass or on a pavement.
Other things, I remember well. My mum is still in my head, demolishing a wall in our house. She is covered in grey dust, a determined and slightly psychotic look on her face, clutching a sledgehammer. With her sudden idea to restructure part of the house, my mum was unaware the wall she was happily demolishing was a supporting wall. Luckily, my dad got home quickly enough to stop the world from crashing down on top of us.
Every Saturday for a while when I was around 10 or 11, I went with my dad to the YMCA in Dundee. He played for their football team. I remember lifts in a variety of small cars, crammed in with a bunch of giants with giant knees, and a reek of oranges, which football players in those days seem to consume in vast quantities. I’d be taken to the games, but I never watched much. Me and a few other kids would go exploring or have our own games on the open grass beside the pitch, making goals with piles of coats or jerseys.
One of my strongest set of memories from those Saturdays contained Matchbox cars. A bright green Jaguar, a shiny black taxi, a metallic red sports car, and many others. Every Saturday my dad would buy me a new toy car in a bright yellow box. If you shook the box, it made a very satisfying pocka pocka sound.
Nowadays, at special times when I am very calm and happy, some of the memories I mislaid reappear to amuse or amaze me. I’ll be sitting with Nergal in my lap, and she is purring so deeply it sounds like an old plane, and my gaze is floating around my bookshelves, but I’m not focusing long on any particular book. My breathing slows and the soft sunlight in the room becomes sharper sunlight, outdoors in a grey housing estate, and it is 1977, and I am cycling up a narrow road to a concrete playground. I speed up so I can ride up to the top of a steep artificial hill, covered in tarmac, where a long silver slide is gleaming in the sun. And, as my leg muscles strain to get me to the top, I look up and see a vast luminous blue. And I know I’m going to make it up the very steep hill, and I do. I become invincible – because I’ve cycled all the way up to the sky.
From her purring perch on my chest, Nergal stares up at me with her large amber-green eyes, apparently aware that I was thinking of something that wasn’t her, and she frowns at the cheek of me. Luckily, Nergal lets me off for my lapses in manners, and she keeps on purring.
It is good to be able to summon up memories when you need them, and maybe we all need to see bits of our lives reappear to remind us how far we’ve come and the wonders we’ve seen along the way.
When I was at secondary school, there were a few crazes which swept through our young lives. One was buying and eating chocolate dog treats. A head teacher got so worried about this craze that he made an announcement at assembly for us to stop our dog-like habits. There was some vague health warning, but I’ve always wondered if teachers thought we’d turn into dogs if we kept eating canine treats, and maybe we’d start howling or barking during class. Some of our teachers were certainly boring enough to cause such a result, with or without us devouring dog treats. I thought the treats didn’t taste good, but I joined in the craze anyway. It soon fizzled out. I was glad – chocolate buttons tasted better. And cream eggs, cream bears, and Pink Panther chocolate.
Another craze involved electronic pagers. These little black boxes could send simple messages to friends. This was around the mid-1970s, long before mobile phones ruled the teenage universe. With a pager, you could buzz a friend in another class, and send a short message, using a few symbols. It wasn’t as advanced as mobile phone text, so a long chat wasn’t possible. It was however considered cool to be able to say ‘Hi’ electronically and receive a simple message back. That tiny pleasure has gone. Some wonders in life get rusty quickly and fade away.
The wonders which persist are generally of a non-craze variety. Some arise from technology – like space travel, movies, or Harley Davidson’s. Many other wonders have been around aeons before there was any technology. Generally, they are called natural wonders. Animals, birds, fossils, meteorites, stars. The great thing about keeping memories of such wonders alive is there are so many opportunities to refresh and renew them. Even in the drabbest corners of our cities there are bright-eyed sparrows, thrushes, and blackbirds and their twittering and darting is fascinating for anyone who has the patience to look and listen. Stars too are there to wonder at, whenever we can find somewhere free of streetlamps. And fossils aren’t hard to come by. I’ve got a Stromatolite, originally from Peru, which is more than 2 billion years old.
In my working life – helping people, as a youth worker, community activist, and as a welfare rights officer, I often met folk whose lives were made harder because of sad or scary memories. People don’t want to remember these things, but their minds force them to replay more reruns than Mary Poppins on Christmas TV, and with much less entertainment. That is the nature of trauma. Such events leave scars, and they can alter the way we view the world. Every new challenge or setback encountered by a traumatised person can be magnified because it gets tied up with memories of helplessness.
A good way to assist people who suffer because of traumatic memories is to help them to build better, stronger memories. Walking, talking, visiting a park or an art gallery – many things can help. It’s never easy to escape from bad memories, but it can be done at any age. Sometimes, through counselling, and sometimes, through powerful acts of solidarity and kindness.
When I was a young man working at an art college, I was briefly bullied by a lecturer. I was astonished when he apologised to me as if his life depended on it. A large class of his students had told him they would boycott his lectures until he said sorry to me. Without this huge act of kindness and solidarity by students, I could have become traumatised by the cruelty of one middle class thug. Instead, I recovered quickly.
Another thing about memories I find interesting is when long forgotten events return suddenly in full technicolour, through hearing a song on the radio, or smelling strong coffee in a cafe. And it’s not just images and sounds which return; it’s also – how you felt. It’s how I felt when I lay on my bedroom floor in 1979, my head close to the speaker of a light blue record player. I was listening to Bob Dylan singing Baby Stop Crying, and there’s a faint crackling sound on the record that feels as if time is inscribing each moment. I look up at sprinkled stars outside, seemingly higher than time itself, and I think: this is now but this ‘now’ will always be with me. I’m lying on the floor of a bedroom but I’m also somewhere in the spaces between the stars and somewhere in the words of the song Bob Dylan is singing, and I think – as long as I live, I’ll do my best to value moments like this. Or moments like another ‘now’ – listening in a café to the sound of rain pattering lightly on the window. It’s such a gentle sound: moments telling me they’re here and also, they’re passing away. I use them as background music for writing about remembering.
A lot of what makes us human, for good or bad, grows out of memory. There’s the joy and sometimes the sadness of remembering souls no longer with us. More and more, those kinds of memories are part of us as we get older, and people close to us or sometimes faraway but famous pass. Yet in our memories they return. Listening to Sinead O’Connor singing and being astonished that sadness could sound so beautiful. Or, sitting with Isobel in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh one night, far from the stage but enthralled as the tiny figure of Rodriguez filled the world with a love of lost and lonely people.
Hardest to remember, but best to remember, are those people we knew and cherished. This year all my monthly RAINSHINE posts are dedicated to the memory of Phil Welsh who passed away recently. I can see him clearly now, turning to one and then another visitor to a picket line, and saying: “Thanks for coming”, as if we had brought all the gold in the world.
Regular readers of RAINSHINE may have noticed that I’ve written about a few of these memories before. So, there are memories of things that happened in my life and memories of writing about them. Memories are often like that: there are reflections within a memory of other things. Like looking at a shining red bauble on a Christmas tree, and then you notice tiny stars from blue and red lights, and then your focus shifts a little, and you notice that in the same shining surface there is a reflection of the room, people, and a piano. A bigger world inside a tiny world.
Whenever I recall my strongest memories – remembering remembering – I have a sense of how powerful some moments were, and how strange and fragile it is that they only live on in a few thoughts in my mind. Like absorbing a vast night sky and the richness of Bob Dylan’s voice. Or, decades later strolling along the Fife coastal path, watching rounded stones turn into seals with huge, gazing eyes. Or, many other moments, trying to touch the music between the world out there and the world in my head.
Being aware of memories has always struck me as essential to who I am. Living and noticing moments, and almost becoming a part of the scent of the Firth of Forth, or the high call of seagulls, or the orange-pink glow of a distant sky.
HARVEY DUKE 