I Have Lived many Lives – 1

Saturday 11th November

As I look back over the years, with still a few more to come hopefully, I realise that I have lived many lives already.  And each one seems almost independent of the others, existing like insects in amber, frozen in time and trapped in their glassy smooth shells; fossils of a former species of me.  Memory is a strange thing.  Why is it that we remember clearly some things and others are lost to us, impossible to recall at all?  And I am never sure if I am really remembering the event itself, or the fact that I have remembered it many times before, and I may simply be remembering the memory of remembrance.  Like a hall of mirrors when you see a recurring mirror image getting smaller and smaller with each reflection, or a TV image of the TV itself and the screen begins to break up as the density of lines coalesce., so our memory may wear itself out, or dim with each dredging up of the wreckage.  And why when we try to remember specific events, like the retelling of a story, things get exaggerated, conversations less remembered, more invented and yet, we cling on to the memory, or maybe the memory of a memory – because that is all we have to remind us that we maybe once existed at all.

My mother has a photo of me, aged maybe four or five.  I look angelic, which is a bit of a surprise to me.  Maybe I once was.  This life is the hardest for me to recall.  Apparently, I was fostered for part of the week until I was maybe four.  A long story, suffice to say that I do not remember this other possible mother at all.  Or maybe I do.  Sometimes I have the memory of a woman, my mother or the other woman (who knows), saying that I had to go back to my mummy now.  And I am not even sure that this memory is real, or one I made up when I discovered that I was sort of fostered during those very early years; years which everyone tells us are so important to our development.  So, this photo – the earliest of me I think.  I am wearing tartan trousers which look a bit big for me, (but for years I know I was small, smallest boy in the class until I was about fourteen when I shot up, so maybe all my clothes looked too big for me) and I am seated on a stool.  The photo was taken in the house next door to my Nana’s where we were living, in Mrs Chenery’s house.  Her daughter Grace had a box Brownie camera and I think that she took the picture.  It is in black and white of course, but I have a feeling that the trousers were green.  All the photos of me as a young child, and there aren’t that many, show me as smiling ecstatically.  So, was I really ever that happy-go-lucky child?  I don’t think so.  Maybe having your photo taken was such a rare event that you were conditioned to smile like a loon.  Actually, my own grandchildren do that even now, so maybe it is something deeper, a desire to please the adult with the camera.  Or am I thinking things through too much – usual problem.  So, despite my complicated parentage I appeared to be idyllically happy as a young child.  I was doted on by my parents, and my Nana and Grandad.  I was taught to read and write and tell the time before school at five.

The only event to blot my horizon was the arrival of my sister.  I knew my mother was going to have a baby, but I don’t think I ever associated her large tummy with the event.  I can remember going to Ipswich hospital to collect both Mummy and my sister.  Long green painted corridors which seemed to go on forever and slightly downhill too.  Then the taxi ride home. I can still smell the leather seats. My Mummy holding a white shawl which contained my sister.  I ran out of the taxi and up the path to the front steps where Nana, Grandad, uncle Raymond and even maybe the Chenery’s were waiting.  I was so excited, I wanted to tell them, to show them my sister. But they completely ignored me.  As they cooed and hands pawed the white shawl I drifted behind their backs and sulkily into the house.  Life would never be the same again.