Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (11 page)

Spatial memories are stored in that area of the brain called the hippocampus, specifically the right hippocampus. My eight/nine/ten-year-old hippocampus was at work back then, it would seem. Today, I often watch a couple of young men on motorbikes, consulting clipboards, outside my window. They are trainee taxi drivers, who have teamed up to do the Knowledge together, the repertoire of three hundred and twenty main routes within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, covering twenty-five thousand streets, on which they will be examined before receiving their licence as a black-cab driver. The square on which I live is the end point of the first “run” in the Knowledge. A study done in 2000 at University College London of sixteen black-cab drivers who had spent two years doing the Knowledge, showed that all had a larger right hippocampus than control subjects, and the longer they had been on the job, the larger the hippocampus. I find this fascinating – the thought that the intricate maps of the city crammed into these heads could actually alter the brain. And I am amazed that my own young brain could operate in the same way, storing spatial memory that I still have.

The hippocampus for spatial memory. Is there some site in the brain dedicated to language, to sign systems? It can certainly feel as though there is, some memory cabinet in which certain knowledge is stashed away, seldom or never used, its contents not in good shape, but somehow easily available. When I went back to Egypt for the first time, as an adult, I found that words and phrases of Arabic came swimming up, that I must once have known and had not forgotten but had put away somewhere, ignored for decades. Equally, I never speak French now, but because once, when I was young, I spent a long time in France and emerged with good French, I still have the language, after a fashion; I wouldn’t be able to speak it as I once did, but the ghost of it is there in my head – I know how you say this, say that. Unused equipment, but not defunct. And because I learned Latin at school, I can make a bit of sense of a Latin text, not absolute sense, but some understanding comes smoking up – a word I know, and that is a noun, and that a verb, and also I can recognize all those connections to the language that I speak, the ancestral sounds and meanings. I wish I had some shreds of Anglo-Saxon as well.

More oddly, I have this system of shapes, too – Pitman’s shorthand, if you please. I could write this sentence in shorthand – ponderously and pointlessly. I learned typing and shorthand for a few months well over fifty years ago; typing proficiency has been invaluable, my shorthand never got anywhere near the point where anyone would have employed me to use it, but there it still lies, in my head, indestructible and rather irritating.

*

When did I first become interested in the operation of memory? Slowly, I think, gradually – noticing its various manifestations. My daughter, aged three, referred to a place we had been to “a long time ago not as long as all that.” The visit had been about a month before; I liked her first attempt to marshal time, to put it in context, to pin memory to time. Children under five remember all right, there seems to be no question of that, but at some later point most or all of these memories disappear – childhood amnesia, this is called, a phenomenon that has fascinated psychologists since Freud’s obsession with it. Nabokov saw his own “awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” The “flash” of his that I most relish is his memory of crawling through a tunnel behind a divan and emerging at the end “to be welcomed by a mesh of sunshine on the parquet under the cane work of a Viennese chair and two game-some flies settling by turn.” Reading that, you realize that you are seeing through the eyes of a four-year-old in St. Petersburg before the Russian revolution.

The psychology of childhood memory is complex and strewn with different theories – why we remember this, forget that. Fear and shock seem to play a part – most of us remember something nasty to do with a dog, or one’s gruesome injury to a knee. But many childhood memories are simple and visual – a frozen moment that has for some reason become hardwired into the mind, there forever. And this surely is related to the pristine experience of childhood, when everything is seen for the first time – those game-some St. Petersburg flies, Wordsworth’s glory in the flower. Spring is still a marvel, when you are eighty, but it does not have the electric impact of novelty. What happens, it seems to me – my own diffident theory of memory development – is that the laying down of vivid visual experience in early childhood shifts to the accumulation of scenes from life as lived, the patchy collection of what has been seen and heard and felt that will add up to autobiographical memory. Quite a bit still that is sharply visual, but with added soundtrack, and a freight of significance. The great stockpile on which we depend, perched upon that initial fragile structure of uncomplicated observation.

My own earliest childhood memories – those that have survived childhood amnesia – are either visual or tactile. I don’t much remember what anyone said, or what I felt. Lucy, who looked after me, was admirable at creative play. There was little acquisition of toys or games; we
made
things. So I have the memory of what making papier-mâché feels like: the shredding of newspaper, the mixing of squeaky, tacky starch with water to make a paste in which you soak the shredded paper, the careful layering of the result into a relief map – we were particularly keen on maps – which could then be painted: brown hills, green valleys, blue rivers. We made Christmas wrapping paper with potato cuts: a halved potato cut into a star shape, or a holly leaf, a Christmas tree, then dipped in poster paint and stamped on a sheet of brown paper. Enjoyably messy – poster paint everywhere. For dolls’ tea parties a thimble was used to cut tiny tarts out of orange peel, with a eucalyptus seed stuck in the center. The dolls themselves were made of card, drawn by Lucy, and then provided with a paper wardrobe made by me, extravagant creations that clipped on with tabs at shoulders and waist. Hours of intense application – the sleeve to go thus, the skirt like this, cut it out, and then reach for the paintbox and the final flourish of creativity. These memories of absorbed involvement are different from uncomplicated observation, but seem to me equally pristine, equally a part of the distant fragile structure of childhood in the mind.

*

There is individual memory and there is collective memory; our own locked cupboard and the open shelf available to all. What only I know, and what is known – or can be known – to anyone. This startling apposition between a myriad memories, available only to the owner, and the immense record of the collective past, which is incomplete, argued over, but of which a vast amount is indisputable and familiar to millions. Only I know that once I spoke certain words, misguidedly, and am sorry now; everyone knows that men once landed on the moon. The huge collective hoard is impersonal; certain items may prompt dismay, distress, sympathy, but the emotions are detached – there is not the creep of intimacy, that I did this and should not have done, that this was done to me and it still hurts.

There is the further apposition that personal memory is the same extensive larder for each of us, unless we are given to denial, or otherwise affected in some way, but collective memory is unevenly distributed: some people have a rich and deep resource, for others it is minimal. A matter of education, and also of inclination. But however minimal, however threadbare, it is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.

That is why history should be taught in school, to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

*

I have been reading history all my life, and am sharply aware that I know very little. I have an exaggerated respect for historians – certain historians; they seem to me grounded in a way that most of us are not, possessed of an extra sense by virtue of access to times and places when things were done differently. They have – can have – heightened perception.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication – much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But . . . the past is real. This is simplistic but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence. Archaeology appeals to me precisely because it offers tacit but tangible evidence – the pots, the weapons, the bones, the stones. Jack, as a political theorist, needed the legacy of thought – he needed the minds of Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hobbes. I am fired more by the eloquence of objects – the pieces of seventeenth-century salt-glaze I used to dig up in our Oxfordshire garden that said: a person made this dish, people used this (and broke it), they were here, and that time actually happened.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors – from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

For me, interest in the past segued into an interest in the operation of memory, which turned into subject matter for fiction. I wanted to write novels that would explore the ways in which memory works and what it can do to people, to see if it is the crutch on which we lean, or the albatross around the neck. It is both, of course, depending on circumstance, depending on the person concerned. In
The Photograph
, Glyn’s memory of his dead young wife is distorted and perverted by the discovery of a challenging photograph. In
Moon Tiger
, Claudia’s version of her past is questioned by the conflicting evidence of others. I have learned to be suspicious of memory – my own, anyone’s – but to accord it considerable respect. Whether accurate or not, it can subvert a life. And for a novelist, the whole concept of memory is fascinating and fertile.

In a novel, the narrative moves from start to finish, from beginning to end. But within that framework time can be juggled, treated with careless disregard – the story can progress, can dip backward, fold up, expand. What matters is the satisfactory whole defined by Frank Kermode: “All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning.” For a novel to work, you want to come away from reading it with a sense that everything has gathered towards a convincing conclusion – not one that necessarily ties up every loose end, but one that feels an integral part of what has gone before. It must make sense of the space between the beginning and the end. You start reading a novel with no idea where this thing is going to go; you should finish it feeling that it could have gone no other way.

The novelist would like the writing process to be thus; it is not – or at least not for me. I do need to have a good idea where the thing is going – I won’t have started at all until a notebook is full of ideas and instructions to myself. And I will have achieved the finishing line only after pursuing various options, wondering if this would work better than that. The reader should have an easy ride at the expense of the writer’s accumulated hours of inspiration and rejection and certainty and doubt.

The novelist’s problem is infinity of choice. It is also the privilege, of course. Time can be manipulated; so also can the operation of memory. You can make lavish use of it, allowing it to direct what happens, or simply evoke what has once happened in order to flesh out a character, or give added meaning to what a person does or thinks. It is the essential secret weapon, for a novelist. The novel itself occupies a particular framework in time – the period of the action – but there is also the hidden seven-eighths of the iceberg, known only to the novelist, which is everything that went before, that happened to the characters before the story began. In fact, I don’t exactly know all of it – rather like personal autobiographical memory, the antechamber of the novel I am writing seems a murky place in which I can rummage around and pounce upon promising fragments: character A can suddenly remember this event, character B can challenge character A by evoking some long-ago behavior. The infinity of choice is at work; I don’t actually need to know everything that went before, just the things that are pertinent to the narrative in hand, that may affect it in the way that memory affects real life.

What does memory do to us? It depends on you, of course – what has happened to you, how you are disposed, whether you sublimate, foster, manipulate, reinvent, enjoy, regret, deny, do any of the stuff we all spend time doing. I imagine my own memory behavior is pretty standard. I don’t know about the sublimation because I have never been in analysis – the rest is familiar. There are memories that induce shame, guilt, where I wish I could tweak the record – behave differently; there are memories about which I am dubious – maybe I have invented or elaborated this; there are those that I return to, savor, but with a certain melancholy – gone, gone, that moment; there are those that I wish I didn’t have. A mixed bag – much what anyone has. Some are highly polished, in frequent use; others are vestigial, surfacing only occasionally, and surprising me. Collectively, they tell me who I am and what has happened to me – or rather, they tell me an essential part of that, leaving much in the mysterious dark cavern of what has been forgotten.