I am possessed. No I don’t foam at the mouth for congress with the Devil. I grin in affectionate memory. But I am haunted. It often happens that, as you get older, more distant memories replay with sudden clarity. Why you didn’t buy that loaf this morning is inexplicable. My memory is as full of holes as Swiss cheese but the bits that are clear come back into sudden focus, often in shortlived flashes,
utterly vivid that makes me smile in recognition. This experience is not influenced by weather, the bank balance or the horrible headlines.
Teaching English to Pola (not her name, and actually imbuing her with the confidence to use the language as well as she soon did) I knew she loved her father. So I told her about seeing mine, in clothes I could detail down to the socks but in a room he didn’t know, in a chair he had never sat in. She said ”Anna, you are telling me you believe in ghosts.” I agreed. Most of mine are benign unto joy, though in expressing a certain kind of usually disapproving vim, my mother emerges from my mouth like a cartoon drawing. I can feel my face change – and there she is.
Conjured.
This morning, because her name occurred to me, I looked up the gospel singer Marion Williams whom I saw on tv, when I was 19 doing the ironing in Tenafly, New Jersey in – I discovered – what was a rare appearance on a folk revival music show called Hootenanny. I saw a white pointed satin shoe with a dizzy heel lay down the beat, the camera came up and we were off. Never to be forgotten.
My parents sang – not choir, not church, at home for the hell of it. Of course I joined in, I brought songs from school, bits from the movies. And the other morning, all these years later, there stood my father in the hall, singing a little song called “River, stay ‘way from my door.” Music travels
the same way speech does so I don’t know where the song came from. What I remembered after all these years, was the lyric, like words unscrolled.
In a recent conversation my son asked had I read any Russian history ? Where did that come from ? But it rang a bell. I fished up the name Orlando from the depths of memory and found the last name Figes. And I read a primer on its history called The Story of Russia, up to and including Putin which I recommend to anybody. And remembered Natasha’s Dance which I always thought was a very clever title for the cultural history of Russia which I am currently reading. And what you get in both books is a profound sense of how ideas travel over time, are subsumed and re-invented. So you hear what you think is a folk song and it was written in Nashville. Like one of the few songs my voice will still accommodate.
One of the great successes of High Country (Australian policier on BBC ) is the integration of the impact of unknown wild country
the land has a memory
with two story strands – a man who has visions and the First Nations history. Australia isn’t a relatively new country, it is a very old one. They have their unquiet ghosts because of the many years they were there, and then targeted by European settler policies against the indigenous people. Cal Flyn wrote about this in Thicker than Water and how she could not sleep overnight on the site of a massacre.
For years I thought that Pop’s reference to death – he often called it “the veil” – was a late Victorian/Edwardian nicety. But it wasn’t. It was a very old idea indeed. That’s what love transcends – it transcends time. Love is – that view, this occasion, those people, laughter and tears and my mother’s voice when I complimented her on the wonderful singing violet of a dress she had had made by Mrs. Greenwell – “Of course, darling, it’s your father’s favourite colour.”
Annalog 