Pitfalls of Memory
Peter Milward S.J.
Copyright © 2013 Peter Milward S.J.
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2013-04-02
I Remember, I Remember
It fell on a twelfth of October, long, long ago – as all fairy tales begin. That was the very day Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. And that was the day I discovered the Old World. Only, on his discovery Columbus found his world already peopled with natives. And on my discovery I also found my world already peopled with natives – including my parents. It has even inspired a poem. Not that I composed it then. Then I was too bewildered for poetic composition. Then it might have been said of me, as if in my own words, “All day I lie ruminating,/ Supine, in no Buddha pose,/ Nonchalantly contemplating,/ Not my navel but my toes.” And again, it might have continued in the same vein, “If within the even flowing/ Of my mind there enters ought,/ Tis no dark cloud of unknowing/ But a white celestial thought.”
Is that a poem? Yes, it is. But no, it isn’t the poem I intended to compose. That was composed many years ago. It was composed when I really was lying on my bed. But now I have another poem to add. It has been inspired by two other poems. One is that of Thomas Hood, “I remember, I remember”, which continues – if you remember – “The house where I was born.” Only, I often remember it as “The day when I was born” – presumably as an infant prodigy. The other isn’t really a poem, but just a piece of advice in a rough rhyme, “Remember, remember,/ The fifth of November.” It is the old exhortation to the English people never to forget the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which didn’t happen. Anyhow, my new-old poem goes, “Drunken or sober,/ The twelfth of October/ Was the day of my birth/ On mother Earth.” Yes, it is so simple, and so appropriate, conceived as coming from the mouth of a new-born infant. Can infants be drunk, let alone drunken? No, they can’t! Yes, they can! At least, in the moment of birth they are bewildered, stupefied, amazed on emerging from the darkness of the womb into the light of the world. Theirs is a paradoxical combination of drunkenness and sobriety.
It was as if in my beginning, in my moment of birth, God said, “Let there be light!” And to my astonishment, there was light. It was the light of the world, the light of my discovery of the Old World. And then, no doubt, like all other babies newly born to the world, I cried. For this fact I have the authority of Lear, who says, “When we are born, we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools.” When I was born, I was no doubt aware of people moving around me. At least, I became aware of them once I could open my eyes. At first, it was so dazzling. I could hardly see anything. Then, once I found I could see, I saw not just “a white celestial thought”, but various beings of various colours, moving around me in various ways. Everything was various, and strange. Even through my tears I found I could laugh. Everything was so funny. Everything was happening on a kind of stage. And the actors on the stage were all fools. At least, for that, too, I have the authority of the Bible. What does the Bible say? It is the wise man who says, “Of fools the multitude is infinite.” Yes, already in those early thoughts of mine, I was thinking in terms of both Shakespeare and the Bible. Or rather, I found that both Shakespeare and the Bible had anticipated me.
From then onwards, I found thought following on thought. And then I found being following on being. Or rather, I was surrounded by beings, including those whom I later found were my parents. And it was the beings who evoked thoughts in my mind. I was aware of the beings, and they evoked my thoughts. It was just as Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am.” But it wasn’t quite what Descartes says. First I was aware of other beings moving around me, imparting variety of colour to the white light of my celestial thought. And then I became aware of myself thinking – thinking first of the white light, then of the variety of colour, and thirdly of the beings in all their variety. So I would correct the saying of Descartes, “I think, and so I am aware of other beings around me, and so I am aware of myself.” What he says seems simpler, and so more appropriate to a new-born infant. But what I say is closer, I submit, to the experience of that infant.
And so it goes on from day to day, as Macbeth says, “to the last syllable of recorded time.” And so the new-born infant acquires the experience not only of light and variety, not only of being and thought, not only of self and others, but also of time – as Macbeth also says, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Or rather, in the beginning the new-born infant has no thought of “tomorrow”. The infant is only too ready to follow the advice of Jesus, “Don’t think of tomorrow, but let tomorrow look after itself.” For the infant every day is just “today”. Again, in the words of Shakespeare, it was only “such a day tomorrow as today”. It was “today”, and then again “today”, and then yet again “today”, if with intervening periods of night. But wasn’t that strange? Each today was strangely passing away, and turning into night. And then there came another today, and then another tonight. Goodness me! Why, what was that? Yes, it was Time. And so the days passed, one after another. At first, I was awake, with all the light and all the variety around me. Then I was asleep, with the darkness hiding the variety. But sometimes even in the darkness I woke up, and then again I cried. I cried not only because it had become all dark around me. I cried because I had had such wonderful dreams. And so, like Caliban, I cried to dream again.
The House Where I Grew Up
“What you’ve written in the foregoing chapter is a pack of lies!” Here I fear my unseen critic has gone a little too far. It is a fact that I was born on October 12, 1925. And it is a fact that Columbus landed on one of the islands of the West Indies on that day, too – though in 1492 he had preceded me by several centuries. But I have to admit that the rest of the chapter is largely speculation. Still, a mixture of fact and speculation is unavoidable in any autobiography. Such are the pitfalls of memory. Few are the people who can boast of an accurate memory. And even so, such boasting is hardly a virtue, but rather a vice.
Anyhow, I have now to qualify the above quoted poem of Thomas Hood, the one beginning with the words, “I remember, I remember”. It continues not, as I have imagined, “the day when I was born”, but “the house where I was born”. But I can’t remember even that. I can’t even remember the house where I was born. The simple reason is that we moved before my memory began to operate. We moved when I must have been about three years old, from Barnes, where I was born (not at home but at a nearby hospital), to Wimbledon, where there were Catholic schools for us children to attend. And it was there, in 11 Devas Road, that I grew up with two brothers and a sister. So what kind of a house was it?
The first thing to be said about it is that it was a new house in a new road. So we were the first to occupy it. As Coleridge says, speaking of the sea, “We were the first that ever burst/ Into that silent sea.” It was a quiet neighborhood, just right for noisy children like us. And so, when my mother warned us against the noise we made, she would say, “Whatever will our Protestant neighbors think of you Catholic children?” But we never minded her warning. We never cared what our neighbors, whether Protestant or otherwise, might think of us. Anyhow, from the road it looked a typical Tudor house, with black beams and white plaster in between, detached from the other houses, with a garage to one side. And there was a front garden, with a sycamore tree growing beside the garage. All in all, what with the imitation Tudor, it was what house agents might well describe as “a desirable residence”.
Then, opening the front door, one entered the spacious hall, with a staircase on one side, and steps leading down under the stairs to a kind of cellar. I only remember using the steps at the beginning of World War II. The air-raid warning sounded just after Mr Chamberlain had informed the English people on the radio that we were at war with Germany. Hastily we made our way for safety down those steps and waited for the Germans