Memory as Rescue Dig - Cathy Butler

1985 is history. It’s almost thirty years ago, for goodness’ sake – hardly anyone alive today was even born then.

It was in that long-ago year that the children’s writer Robert Westall, who had made his name a decade earlier with his novel The Machine-Gunners, published Children of the Blitz. Children of the Blitzwas a collection of memories, the voices of Westall’s contemporaries who (like him) had been children during World War II. As Westall saw it, that generation was already dying out, and with it their memories of what had been the most dramatic years of many of their lives. He described the book as “a hurried, scattered rescue dig”, to preserve those memories for posterity.

It’s twenty-eight years later now, and Westall himself has been dead for twenty of them. My mother, five years older than him, had her 89^thbirthday a couple of days ago. She’s in good health considering, and her mind is sharp as a bodkin; but 89, as she is well aware, is a fair old age.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to her talk about her memories from the 1940s and before, though she’s tended to be a little reticent about them. “Young people’s eyes glaze over when I mention the War,” she told me a while ago. “Mine don’t glaze over!” I replied. “They light up!” I try to speak with her about those times, for a little while at least, whenever I see her – my own rescue dig, I suppose. Many of the things she remembers are the stuff of public history: doodlebugs, V2s, Myra Hess giving recitals at the National Gallery. Have you seen the pictures of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on VE day? One of those faces is my mother’s.

But I like better still the glimpses that I could find nowhere else. Like being a young child in Wrexham some time in the late 1920s, and seeing the lamplighter come down the road with his long pole. Or the little hiding place beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, nicknamed Togoland by her brother and sister. Sitting on back of her father’s Shire horse (he was a haulier at the time) and doing the splits. Or the way that nature came to take over the bombsites in London during the War, so that a woman accosted her in the street, exclaiming, “Willowherb in Bloomsbury – imagine!”

There are more rounded anecdotes, too, of course – lots of them, and many brought to a high polish through years of handling. (For example, there was the time she sent a friend who worked in the Palace a risqué poem about the Virgin Sturgeon only to have it intercepted by Princess Elizabeth, with the hilarious result that – ah, but we would be here all day...) But I value just as much the things that are fragmentary, more like memories themselves, in all their ephemerality and miraculous survival. They don’t just give insight into history, they become part of one’s own experience, to the point where I may even forget what happened to whom.

That doesn't happen with my mother alone. One of my earliest memories is of watching my great-aunt on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, jumping up and down on the bed, her long red hair braided with sunlight, crying, “I’ve got the key of the door!” Of course, that memory is not mine directly. It was my grandmother’s first – who died before I was born – and she passed it to my father, who handed it on down. I treasure it just as I would any other heirloom. It’s of no great value or interest to anyone else, perhaps, but precious to me. It’s history; it happened today.

Happy Birthday, Great-Aunt Suzie. Have a good 1901.

Snapshots

Recently I found myself thinking about my earliest memory. It is a snapshot from a time before I had much in the way of language and it has worked itself from the moorings of anything else I was experiencing at that time of my life and floats freely now in the stream of my imagination. As a writer, it is a scene I find interesting precisely because of its lack of moorings, because it throws up questions and starts me thinking of the possibilities of its context.

So much of the memory is clear and sharp. I can see, hear, feel and taste things as though I were experiencing them this instant. The first thing I see is bars – cot bars. This immediately throws up the first question: how old am I? I must be less than two, as I know that I had to vacate the cot for my younger sister who came along about two years after me. But I am sitting up, so I am not a small baby. As I let the scene run in my mind’s eye I realize I can hear crying, and that it is me making the noise. So, I have been left in my cot and I am crying. But why? I am still very small, arguably too small to be left crying like this. I then hear that the crying is not particularly convincing. It has in fact reached a point where I am simply moaning the word “Mummy” over and over again at a subdued pitch. So possibly I have given up hope on anyone coming to see what I am crying about. I then realize I have already cried too long and too much by this point. I have come to the memory at the point where I have almost cried myself out; my eyes are swimming with tears, and my nose and mouth are full of tear-snot, that liquid which is thicker than tears and which comes at the end of a particularly long bout of weeping. I have managed to produce so much of it by now that I am blowing bubbles with it every time I say the word “Mummy”. My crying is slowly giving way to the creation of these bubbles as I watch, intrigued at how big I can make them. 

And then the memory ends, switches itself off as though I were watching a short video clip which is now finished. Did my mother come and get me? Had she left me for a long time because she had fallen asleep, exhausted by looking after a toddler while she was pregnant with my sister? Or perhaps someone else was looking after me that day? If so, did they feel bad when they finally came to me and saw how much and how long I had cried? Or was I in reality only crying for a matter of minutes anyway, my sense of abandonment amplified by my lack of an understanding of the passage of time?

As I thought about this memory, I realized that my writing often starts like this, with a scene or a snapshot of a character, and then the whys and wherefores, the what ifs and how comes are what set the cogs whirring and thus the story into motion. Without an initial image or soundbite, I do not have a hook on which to hang my story.

My book Monkey Business started with a voice in my ear, that of the hippy uncle character, Zed. I heard him muttering one day, talking to his nephew, Felix, and explaining how Nature has its own rhythm without recourse to watches or clocks. Suddenly a scene was there, fully formed, and I could work outwards from that to create the rest of the book – a story essentially about a little boy who worships his uncle and shares his love of animals and how this, coupled with a large dollop of misunderstanding, gets the characters into some tricky situations. I had wanted to write about a boy like Felix for a while, but had not known how to start the story until Zed turned up.

My most recent book, I’m A Chicken Get Me Out of Here! had a similar beginning. After a night of anxiety when one of our chickens did not come home to roost (but did thankfully appear the next day unscathed) I began to wonder how she had survived. I was turning this over in my mind when my son's friend asked if he could bring his guinea pig round to our house to meet our chicken. This meeting sparked off a scene in my imagination where the fictional chicken arrives at her new home to find she is expected to share a hutch with an OCD guinea pig called Brian. Once I had scribbled down my imagined scenario, the rest of the story found its way, spreading its tentacles outwards from that snapshot.

Even though snapshots such as these kickstart a story, they rarely find their way on to page one of the finished story; more often than not they will worm their way into the middle of the book, and beginnings are often written once I have got to the end.

So I thought I would throw this out into the ABBA ether – how many of you start with a scene or an image? And how many prefer to work in a more linear way? Answers on the back of a snapshot, please.

www.annawilson.co.uk