Denis: his aside about memory…{placement?}

It’s funny how I can remember so much from that time, and yet I can barely remember what I did yesterday. Whenever I watch a detective thing on the TV and the police officers ask somebody what they were doing on a particular day six months ago, I realise how far-fetched these whole things are, they way that they always ask the same questions. It’s not like real life.

I can remember things best from when I was a boy – less than ten – and then again when I was a young man, starting to go to work, from fourteen [?] to eighteen. And then some things from the war, and the early times with Julianne, and when we lived in the attic rooms after we got married. There’s lots of things from there that are very clear and fresh for me.

But then there are whole stretches of time when it’s all grey and blurred together, when nothing stands out. Things from the clearer times come back when I smell a smell or see a colour, of hear a sound or a piece of music maybe. And if one little memory starts off, sometimes a whole stream of others will follow straight along with it, like a line of dominoes all falling down when you click the first one over. That’s nice. Sometimes it happens at night, when Julianne is asleep and there’s just me awake, with the green light from the electric clock-radio glowing on the wallpaper by my bedside table, and the old alarm clock with the metal bells on top ticking away on the chest of drawers by the window. All it might take is for the edge of the eiderdown or the scratchy woollen blanket to tickle my cheek in a particular way when I pull it up to cover myself, and in my head I’ll be back in my childhood bed or lying next to Julianne or out in the field somewhere in my army days.

Sometimes it will happen that I’ll start thinking about the old days and I will just keep thinking about things and they’ll be going round and round in my head, and then I’ll get that horrible feeling when I know that I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep for ages, so I’ll stop trying and get out of bed and go downstairs and make myself a cup of hot chocolate and sit in the kitchen, on the high stool, facing the wall and listening to radio, turned down very low so that it won’t wake Julianne or Jos and [daughter’s name], so low that most of the time I can’t even hear the words that the presenter is saying between the music. But you have to have it low, otherwise the music blares out. (Years ago, there wasn’t even any music on the proper radio in the small hours – all the radio programmes closed down, and all you could hear if you listened in the dark was hissing and whistling and pops and crackles, and, if you were lucky, you might catch the sound of some foreign station for a while, and try and make out what someone was saying in English, or French, or Russian, or maybe even Chinese or whatnot. Nowadays there are all sorts of different stations on at night, but none of them ever seem to play the kind of music that our generation like; things with proper tunes and words that you can hear, and not all sung by singers who sound like they’re trying to sound like an American. The music’s all sex now, for the young people.)

It’s good when we go to a wedding and meet up with the old families – mine and Julianne’s. More likely it will be a funeral now, though. All those people that we grew up with…nearly all of our aunts and uncles have gone now. We’ve seen them when we were children, all smart in their suits that they only wore twice a year, the men with their hair all oiled down, and the women with earrings shaped like the middle of fried eggs (but a different colour) and pearls around their necks. And we’ve seen them get older and disappear…some in the war, when the city was bombed, others moved away for jobs, some we just drifted away from and didn’t get to see for years and then we heard that they were dead and it was too late, and we’d worry about whether we should go to the funeral as we hadn’t seen them or even sent a Christmas card for years, but in the end we’d usually go and there would be the old faces, with whiter hair or no hair, and grown fatter or all gaunt, and the older ones bent over or deaf, with the brown spots creeping down the skin on the back of their hands that was thin and greasy so that you could see the tendons through it, and the veins all ridged and blue. But even the youngsters – the dead one’s children – would be pleased to see you always, and after the funeral you’d all get together at the house or at the church hall or the Soldier’s Union, and after the sandwiches and the pies and a couple of drinks, people would start to reminisce about the dead one and the old stories would come out and people would start to get over their sadness a bit and start to laugh, which seemed wrong at first, but gradually the laughter would seem all right, and the talk and the food and the laughter would all seem to be more about the people who were left, and not about the dead one (though you’d mention their name in the story you were telling, and everyone in your little circle near the bar would stop talking and look down at the floor for a little while, and then someone would say, “Ah well,” and you’d go on.

And it was at these get-togethers that you could start talking about some little thing that you remembered from the old days – a certain shop, or a relative who died long ago, or a place that you all used to go to on a charabanc trip one day in the summer when all the factories were shut for the holiday week – and that one little thing would remind you of something else, and that would jog someone else’s memory, and all these “yes, and what about…” and “I remember that!” memories would all merge into each other and you’d all end up wiping your eyes with laughter, remembering all that shared history and the all the lost colours and places and friends that you’d known. All those things that you wouldn't have been able to remember on your own, as if they only exist when all of you are trying to think about them at once.

And at the end of the evening, when you’d been to the toilet for the last time so that you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable on the bus home, you’d step out of the warmth of the hall and into the night (usually it would have been raining, and the air would be starting to get colder), and the smell of the men’s beer and the ladies’ face powder and eau de cologne would be on your face and clothes from the round of kisses and handshakes that you’d made just before you left. Just you and your wife, facing the journey home in the dark, in the city that now belonged to younger, ruder, noisier people, and as you walked down the tarmac path between the wet bushes and down to the road, leaving behind the glow of your shared memories and the yellow electric lights, you’d pull you coats closed and take each other’s hands for comfort and security as the cars sloosh past on the hard black tarmac and the shouts of yobboes echo around the streets.