Memory making
Time was, I began last week’s blog, when I would have walked down to Whitesands on my own from St David’s. And time also was, I’ve been thinking, when, during years before that, I’d cycle away from our house when we lived in Fishguard, finding roads I hadn’t been on before and carrying on. I don’t know how this passion for discovery began. But I did love it. For instance, you’d come across lovely views that made you stop and admire. Or you’d happen across sights that would make you wonder about the people who might be involved.
Some of those memories have been prompted by seeing my brother Richard and sister Ann in Mathri this week and the long talks we had. One that continues to return to mind – and I’m sure I’ve written about it here before – was when I cycled down into that little valley on a road near Fishguard where I hadn’t been before. At the bottom of the road was a small white house – or was it a pair of houses? – with a stream running across the bottom of the garden. Anyway, as I stopped for a bit of a rest, I saw the sight which imprinted itself on my mind and imagination and that no doubt will be there for the rest of my life. As I stood there, astride my bike but probably not in obvious view, a young man came out of the house. In his hand was a bunch of dead daffodils. And what did he do with these daffodils? Did he throw them into a dustbin or onto a heap for recycling? No. He continued to carry them as he got onto his bike, which was propped against one of the houses and, still carrying the daffodils, cycled out onto the road and rode away.
Now what do you make of that? I asked that very question on several different occasions during the years when I’d be going to schools to do storytelling sessions and workshops. And I was always fascinated by the variety of answers that young people would come up with. The young man would be taking the dead daffodils to put on the grave of his dead lover. Or he’d be taking them to his recycling heap which was elsewhere. Or they’d be going to his special daffodil-recycling heap. And so on.
And I suppose what has continued to fascinate me at some point in my mind is that I can’t know the answer and never will find out. Yet the situation returns to my mind, becoming one of those strange unknowable scenes that I suppose all of us harbour somewhere in our imaginations. Indeed Paul and I drove past the scene where it happened last week. I didn’t say anything about it at the time. But seeing the exact place where it had happened did make me feel aware of the huge pile of snippets of experience that can remain in the mind.
But then, it’s precisely those now unresolvable little scenes or incidents that stick in your mind. For instance, the two men that I saw kicking each other, fathers of friends of mine, on a quiet street in Fishguard when I was a child. I still think about the scene from time to time. Did they resolve their quarrel? Or did they just walk away from each other after a bit? Did someone else intervene?
These are just tiny little incidents in one small life. But the problem is universal. What will now be happening in the minds and memories of children in Ukraine today who are seeing unimaginably horrible things on what were previously peaceful streets? Scenes that linger in the mind can ferment questions or stay there like stones that trouble life’s streams. They’re the sort of stuff of which our lives, and hence our memories, are made. What happens to them is crucial.
PS: Top picture is of me and Richard and below Richard and Ann and her husband John.