The poignancy of memory

I keep on working through my old photos, a process constantly slowed down by the reawakening of memories of moments long past, of people long missed and of events long gone.

There was a morning in 1982 when Danielle announced to me that she really ought to have a pregnancy test. By the time the afternoon was nearing its end, I’d forgotten all about it and when I rang her I began talking about all sort of indifferent matters. Eventually she interrupted me:

‘Don’t you want to hear about the test?’

I managed to bite off the words ‘what test?’ and simply answered, ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ although her tone of voice made it fairly clear what the result had been.

‘Positive,’ she told me.

It wasn’t a shock but it certainly was an overwhelming piece of news. The kind that you know at once is going to leave absolutely nothing the same. And, from this first intimation of his arrival, I have to say that Michael has affected the nature of my life pretty fundamentally ever since (aided and, I like to think, abetted by the arrival of his brother Nicky just eighteen months after him).

One of the first things we had to do was get married. I appreciate that these days it’s far from unusual to have a child outside marriage, but this was 1982 and the dear, sainted Maggie was Prime Minister and making it ever more difficult to acquire British citizenship. We didn’t know the sex of the child at that time. The problem would arise if it was a boy, as indeed turned out to be the case: the French still imposed on young men that ghastly waste of time known as military service and if the child was born, even in England, he wouldn’t inherit British nationality from me – and therefore the escape card from the French military – unless I was married to Danielle first.

As it happens, by the time he turned eighteen French military service had been reduced to a day and he did it anyway. Though it turned out to be as complex as getting married had proved nearly nineteen years earlier. Which is another memory that brings me great pleasure...

So we didn’t actually need to get married, although I’m not at all sorry we did, 36 years on…

The problem with getting married was that Danielle needed a divorce first. You know the Oscar Wilde saying about a second marriage proving the triumph of hope over experience? Danielle was about to demonstrate it.

Her first husband made no problem about the divorce but he spoke no English and all the documents were in that language. It proved difficult to get him to sign in the right place, but eventually he did. We were married on 11 January 1983 and Michael was born on the 29th, so it was a close-run thing.

Incidentally, thereafter I became the specialist in remembering our anniversary, Danielle in forgetting it. That lasted until 2005 when our first grandchild – Aya – was born to my stepson David and his wife Senada also on 11 January. Danielle’s never forgotten Aya’s birthday so she now remembers our anniversary too.

It was a small wedding organised in a hurry. We had some close friends and family there and naturally took photos of them.

Leonard, my father, to the left in his trademark black tie
Alasdhair to the right, in a far-from-trademark beard
The smiles reflect their personalities...

The one I came across the other day was of my father and my old friend Alasdhair. My father was a man of extraordinary gentleness as well as courage and he was an inspiring presence in my life. Alasdhair I had met when we were both 13 and we had remained close through our school days and university. Later, he moved to the US but we kept in contact all the same, seeing each other from time to time but, above all, each remaining a constant known presence in the life of the other.

The photo therefore represents some precious memories to me.

But they are poignant too. My father lived only just over four more months after that picture was taken. Alasdhair did better but succumbed, to cancer, just over two years ago.

The joy is tinged with sadness. I suppose that’s what the passage of 36 years is bound to bring. But the pleasure of finding the photo was undiminished for all that.

Parting of the ways with my oldest friend

The one benefit of a boarding school, from a kid’s point of view, is that you’re with your friends all the time. They’re within walking distance. There’s none of that phoning their parents to check whether they can come over and establishing when is convenient for both families. You just pop round, convenient or not.

The first step, of course, is to make some friends at the school.

Fortunately, when I showed up at the boarding school I attended – Dartington, now sadly closed – I found myself quickly thrown into the company of one boy of my age. In fact, he was a couple of months younger, which was a shock to me: I was used to being the youngest in my group. He also had a name that struck me as weirdly spelled: Alasdhair (pronounced Alastair).

We had a number of interests as well as our relatively young age in common. We both liked languages, for instance, and we shared an interest, passing as it turned out, in physics. However, it was neither of those things that first formed a bond between us.

One of my earliest memories of Alasdhair was cycling with him to a poetically named village near the school, Landscove. Isn’t that evocative? Coves are things you get on the coast. What’s one like when it’s inland?

It turns out, nothing special. Landscove is in Devon which is known for its hills. That made it a struggle to get there on our bikes. It was little reward for the effort to discover that it was a pretty little village but with nothing to distinguish it from any of the others around.

Alasdhair was fortunate in having his mother, Barbara, and sister, the equally strangely-spelled Shellagh (pronounced Sheila), living at the school. Shellagh and Barbara were as charming and fun as Alasdhair and it was balm to my soul to be adopted by them. They offered me a welcome which I’m sure I outstayed by repeatedly visiting their flat in the evenings to enjoy the atmosphere of family life while away from mine.

But inevitably I spent most time with Alasdhair himself. We listened to comedy radio programmes, in particular I’m sorry I’ll read that again, featuring the team that went on to launch Monty Python along with the one that launched another TV programme, The Goodies. We cultivated our taste for science too, notably by stealing rather a lot of wire at one point, laying it around the roofs of the school and using it to run an illicit radio station. Fortunately, we were caught before we ran out of enthusiasm for becoming DJs.

We also tried fermenting potato juice and then breaking into the chemistry lab where we tried to distil the product into vodka. Our pains yielded a lot of broken lab equipment and a tasteless, murky liquid with absolutely no intoxicating effect.

What else did we do? We walked on Dartmoor until our feet felt like lead. We bored our contemporaries by talking about relativity theory without understanding it. We maintained a friendly rivalry over linguistic ability, which I probably edged over him in French, but he won hands down overall by also learning German.

I don’t want to give the impression that we lived in each other’s pockets, because we certainly didn’t. We each had our own circle of friends, his significantly larger than mine; our orbits simply intersected more often than most and we had too much in common not to keep gravitating towards each other.

After school, we kept up our bond by making for London to study Physics. We both got involved with the radical left and took our eyes off the study ball with the result that neither of us covered ourselves in academic glory, though he got closer to it than I did. We lived with some other friends in glorious squalor, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the unfashionable east of the city. We even took in a group of young West Indians we met locally, which led to some interesting and colourful experiences, not always with the most successful of outcomes.

After college, our ways parted, as he made for the States and I stayed in Europe. Even so, we spoke or wrote from time to time and met occasionally. We went skiing together, with the woman, Danielle, who became my wife and another who didn’t become his, and we spent time together in Danielle’s home region of Alsace, enjoying the life, the food and the drink of the three countries that join there, France, Germany and Switzerland.

We met in England too. On one occasion he, his first wife and I met in Oxford for a picnic. We started by shopping for delicacies – smoked salmon and smoked ham, melon, salads, French bread, white wine – after which we faced a characteristically English mishap, when the heavens opened and threw down a deluge which looked apt to drown us.

Fortunately, we found a gloriously English solution. In South Parks Road there is a cricket ground with a graceful wooden pavilion and, in those days, the grounds weren’t fenced off from the road. We repaired (quickly) to the terrace of the pavilion and found all we needed: a table and benches under shelter. The picnic was all the more memorable for taking place within a metre or two of dense downpour from which we were fully protected.

In later years, I was sorry to hear that his marriage had ended, but delighted by the pride he took in his children’s progress and the joy that gave him. I was pleased too by his second marriage, to Becky Villarreal, an event I know brought him solace in what turned out to be the last few months of his life.

For he remarried not long after learning that he was suffering from stage 4 cancer, the disease that had much earlier killed his mother. Cancer has no stage 5, unless we use that term for death. Even so, his doctors held out a meagre hope of giving him another year or two of life.

It really was a meagre hope and on 4 November, it ran out.

Alasdhair Campbell, 1953-2016
in Dartington Hall Gardens, one of his favourite places

Of all friends with whom I still maintained contact, Alasdhair was the one I’d known well longest. Though the contact was more tenuous in later years, it had never been broken; but because it was tenuous, its ending feels all the more unreal. I certainly haven’t accepted it yet, and still expect to write to him or hear from him at any time.

It’s a particularly strong feeling when I visit Oxford, as I still do frequently, and see the cricket ground and its pavilion. That leaves me smiling with pleasure at the memory of our picnic and ruefully at the fence that prevents any repetition of it. I feel it too whenever I travel by air, as it reminds me of the many long journeys Alasdhair used to take for work and which he would commentate on facebook. Indeed, it is on a plane that I’m writing this testimonial now.

Odd that he’s not around any more. Terribly unfair. And poignantly sad.

The curious effect of a dog in a night garden

It seemed so empty, so mind-blowingly banal, the older person’s dogged determination to follow a dull routine through to completion, each and every day.

That was how I saw my grandparents’ generation, as a child. Or worse than a child: as that most awful of creatures, an adolescent. 

I’d see those old people, each night, turning off lights, putting things away in the fridge, carefully turning lock after lock on their doors. Painful.

‘God preserve me from ever becoming that dull,’ was my unspoken prayer.

I’m not at all convinced that one of these old people I watched with such a sense of superiority was my maternal grandfather, but for some reason when I remember those times, it’s him I think of. And I have those memories most days.

That’s because each night, any time after 10:00, my dog Janka gets her last trip of the day to the garden. She likes gardens. She likes to be among plants and flowers. So she likes that final visit of the day.

Janka feeling comfortable

It’s a peaceful moment, a sort of cadence to the day. And the ritual has clearly defined rules. The other day I tried to take her out at 9:30, but got an incredulous look.

‘What game are you playing?’ she seemed to be saying, as she refused to leave her place of comfort on the sofa. ‘This is much too early. Try again in an hour or so. Half an hour if you’re really too knackered to last any longer.’

But some time after 10:00, right up to 1:00 in the morning (that’s the deadline before the barking starts), she’s fine and ready to head out. Just as long as I come with her. I don’t have to do anything, or even be that close to her. Just stand a way back on the path while she pees, tell her she’s a good girl when she’s finished, and then follow her back into the house.

It’s slightly odd because for the first pee of the day she needs nobody. Open the door and out she goes. But in the evening she needs a more companionable moment, so I provide a little company.

Then we get back indoors. First thing, to ensure I don’t forget, I turn the garden light off (did I fail to mention that Janka feels a little light is an essential ingredient of a comfortable garden visit at night?) Then there’s the back door. For reasons that escape me, it has three locks. I’m sure there’s no need for all of them, but if there are three, I’ll lock three.

That’s when the memories hit me. As I doggedly turn the locks, and carefully check that I’ve done everything, back comes the image of those old guys doing their banal daily duty. And I’m invaded by the chastening feeling that my prayer, like most prayers, went unheeded. I’ve turned into just the kind of person I hoped I’d never become. 

Not a particularly gratifying sensation.

But, hold it, what the heck. I’ve just had a moment of sociable peace with my dog. And funnily enough, when I think of my grandfather, it isn’t obsessive evening rituals that come to mind, but his smile, his strength, the things he cared about passionately and the things he didn't care for at all. Welcome memories. Thirty years ofter his death. 

That's got to be worth a moment of mild self-deprecation.

In any case, got to get the door locked. After all, who wants to offer an easy opportunity to burglars?

When a good memory is bad news

An excellent memory is a real blessing. A memory that's merely good, on the other hand, can turn into a curse.

My memory is good enough for me not to have to write down quite a few things. Dates of appointments, for instance. Or of course PINs. And most of the time that’s fine, but the difference beetween a good memory and an excellent one, is that every now and then a good memory lets you down.

Because it’s good, I rely on it, so when it fails, I’m in trouble.

The first time was in a supermarket a couple of years ago. I’d picked a bad time to go. All the checkouts were packed. I queued for ages and it was with a real sense of relief that I got to the front. As the woman on the till was ringing up my purchases, I was doing the good shopper thing and packing them neatly into bags, and moving them into my trolley.

‘How will you be paying?’ she asked me.

‘By card,’ I said, proud that I’d already got the plastic out ready to stuff into the reader.  I’m not one of those people who leave it to the last moment to get ready to pay and then have to spend minutes searching for a card they can no longer remember where they put. I’m ready in plenty of time.

And then came the moment of ghastly truth. I keyed in my PIN with complete confidence: ‘Code Incorrect’ the machine rudely and inexplicably told me.

Of course, I’d reversed two numbers. I tried again with them the other way around. Same result.

Behind me the queue was getting longer and longer. Everyone was wearing the expression of people who are making a major effort not to let their expressions reveal their irritation, but I could read their minds. ‘Come on, you moron,’ they were thinking, ‘get it right and get out of the way.’

I tried a third combination of numbers and my card was blocked.

Fortunately, the supermarkets are used to this kind of incident and a well-oiled machine went straight into operation. The trolley was wheeled to one side and I was allowed to go outside and kick my heels in the car park until, as inexplicably as it had vanished, the PIN returned to me. I seized the moment to draw some cash so that I could settle up without relying any further on my card. Or my memory.

Last week the same thing happened to me. I was introducing a colleague to the delights of Indian cooking in Luton. My favourite restaurant serves food which is extraordinarily good and stupidly cheap. Unfortunately, crazy technological gimmicks like card readers have passed them by. I stopped at an ATM to get some cash.

A potentially daunting sight

And the blasted PIN gap opened up in my memory again.

This time it took a very particular form. I couldn’t remember the position of one particular digit out of the four. I was convinced it was the last, but that didn’t work.

‘Of course,’ I remarked to my colleague, lightly, ‘just got the figures out of order.’ I tried again with the renegade digit in second place but with no better luck.

‘That’s funny,’ I commented, sounding less confident, ‘I can’t imagine what’s happening.’

I tried with it in third position.

That was it. Card blocked.

‘Why don’t I pay?’ my colleague asked. She was being polite and generous, not at all suggesting that I was cutting a pitiful figure. But I felt pitiful. However, given that I had little choice, I just nodded glumly and she paid. Which made it hard for me to play to the role I was rather relishing, that of the welcoming host.

The PIN, as usual, came back to me a couple of hours later. And in a new humiliation for my fallible memory, I had to recognise that I could have searched for ever for the position of that awkward digit. It doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the code.