When I recall how I first knew about the past, I hear a medley of grownup voices telling stories, weaving in and out, like the soundtrack to some lost film, until one or other suddenly breaks through the hubbub to regale the audience, and the cacophony subsides into a chorus of 'well, of all the ...' or 'some people, I ask you!', or 'hang on a minute, and another thing ...', on and on, each vying for their turn like soloists in an unending improvisation. (Another fainter noise is heard in the background: the clatter of trays and teaspoons, cups settling in their saucers.) Stories weren't so much told as staged. My mother, for instance, would spring out of her seat, adopt a comic walk, eyebrows raised, her hands slicing the air for punctuation, and others would follow suit, striking attitudes or aping accents, gesticulating for effect. Timing had to be nicely judged since the aim was to embroider a tale without making too much of a palaver. The point of a good story was in how you told it. But the past, when I first heard of it, had no dates. There was 'when you were just a toddler' or 'not even a twinkle in your father's eye' or 'when your Dad's Dad was alive'. Time was measured in people, by their length and breadth, as it were, like hands for a horse, a physical spanning in which the listener's size was also gauged. (Recently, asking my mother which year my father's father died, she thought and said--'that was when you were still in your pram'.) Time flew backwards in generations, like a kite, leaving you a tiny figure, holding on, tethered. The past was an enormous, seamless stretch without horizon, as daunting as Southsea Common on our Sunday promenade, all that grass, reaching from the main road across to the beach, much too far for a small child to manage. Portsmouth, the city where we lived was saturated with the past but the different stories about different times had been plunged into one big wash in my mind, swirling round indiscriminately. The sailor biting on his rum-soaked handkerchief as the surgeon hacked off his leg with a handsaw (as told on a trip to Nelson's 'Victory', moored in the local dockyard) was as recent, and as remote, to me as the bedbugs which my mother said she used to pick off her bedroom wall with a bar of soap or singe off with a candle when she was a kid. One of the terrifying 'dares' of a Saturday morning, when I was being minded by my brother and sister, was edging our way across the glass-strewn windowsills of a bombed-out house: there was an old Andersen air-raid shelter in our garden, yet my sense of that war was confused with the litany of names on the stone anchors and obelisks along the seafront: Trafalgar, Inkermann, Passchendaele. My father's stories of close shaves during the Blitz--he and his mates safe in the front of the stalls at the Prince's while other boys had sneaked upstairs to the circle and been blown to smithereens--mingled with what he told me on family outings, bluebelling or 'wooding' on Portsdown Hill, high up overlooking the town. There were the forts out at sea shimmering in the distance and here was Fort Widley nearby on the Hill--all of them 'Palmerston's Follies' erected as a bulwark against a French invasion. I had no idea who--or when--Palmerston was. Before I went to the grammar school I played in the street and made up my own stories for my gang of friends to enact, tales from the past which were added to our store of dressing-up clothes, as we cut off each other's heads or escaped from concentration camps. We raided the past like a props department to supply us with imaginary sets, borrowing from whatever we had seen at the Gaumont Picture Club--Kenneth Moore in Reach for The Sky or Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride--furnished a few wartime scenarios, I remember--or from the BBC children's serials at Sunday teatime (Kenilworth and The Three Musketeers come to mind). When Doctor Who came on the television, I loved the idea of time-travelling, the Doctor collecting companions by chance from the centuries, the wild, kilted Jamie from the killing-fields of Culloden and Victoria, a prissy, crinolined Miss from her stuffy, upholstered home. …
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Jan 1, 2014
Monika Singh + 1
Open Access
