Earliest Memory

I am stumped. Cricket stumps. My dad played cricket. All the cream men moving on a swathe of green; running, jumping, diving. Whooping. The red ball. Hard. Nobbled with waxed thread. Heavy. Head-crackingly weighty. The women upstairs in the steely kitchen, untying bags of sandwiches, unfurling foil, proudly displaying their goods. Prising the lids off cold tins, lifting out the baked goods. Cakes, tray bakes, biscuits. A fragrant air, suddenly warm with soft sugar sweetness, then cold again, with brisk reminders they were not for us, but for the men. The men who would have a spread laid out for them, in honour of their green labours. Feats to be lauded. Sport, sportsmen, their men. Not so our sport, our play, our green stains. A source of tutting and threats of no tea. We sneaked off to the rolling banks were we laid ourselves long across the tops and let ourselves unfurl, spinning down fast, crushing ladybirds, their shiny red backs quashed to yellow specks about our persons. Climbing the metal roller for the grass, trying to balance on its smooth circular edge, or on the narrow wooden posts from the rugby season lain out in long raised lines. We climbed. We fell. We laughed. We cried. I liked Purdy best. We walked across the fields to the private open air pool. No adults in sight. Left to ourselves, not so unusual. Now it wouldn’t happen. More fear of drowning? Or less preoccupations? I don’t know. Then the thrill of plunging into the icy water amidst the floating debris of overhanging trees, leaf and bark shredded, dappling the water with dark and light from below. Swimming underwater the full length, not wanting to breathe in the dead insects.

I am We used to have records, audio records I guess I should call them. We would pop them on the record player and listen to deep voices, gentle voices, shrill, mysterious, whatever was needed to convey the mood of the fairy tale. I remember the cover of two LPs in particular. A family of black birds huddled together around a book; one of the LPs had a blue background, the other one red. I don't remember which one contained which fairy tales, but I remember the story of Bluebeard being the most terrifying. One evening my parents left us at home to do some shopping. Me, my sister and my brother. 4, 7 and 3. We decided to listed to Bluebeard and scared ourselves sick. I think we heard it twice, until the only thing we could do was huddle by the door crying, waiting for mum and dad to come back. In my mind, it was pitch dark, late into the night, but it couldn't have been because the shops would have been shut. I remember the imposing wardrobes in the corridor by the front door of our apartment. White doors with mahogany trims. How odd to have wardrobes there. Did they contain clothes back then? Those wardrobes were part of the furniture that followed us from Taranto to Gaeta and Gaeta to Itri, as we followed the trail of chaos set up but my father. If she could have afforded a proper removal company, my mother would have brought the ugly things to London with her. But it would have been something else that wouldn't fit in her new life. So she gave them away, like many other parts of our past, and my father's past, and her own past with him.

I fell off the railway sleeper and hit the ground with a thud. The brown earth on my cheek. “She’s winded,” said Joan. “Winded.” I did not understand. Had the wind whipped through me? Was I part of the wind? Winded. No breath.

My sister fell from the plane tree. “She’s dead,” I said. She was more than winded. She went to hospital. She came back alive.

I stepped on an upturned nail. It went through my red wellington boot into my foot. When I lifted my foot the plank came too.

I cut my hand open on the broken glass of a cucumber frame. I dripped blood all up the wooden stairs.

The pony I was riding took off and fell over on the corner, slipped on the tarmac and my head hit the road. I screamed.

I was lost for six hours on a beach in France. They found me at the police station, my face wet with tears.

Henry came for tea and we ate crisps from a bowl and our knees were touching. We were allowed to watch TV. I was five.

Back, back. Earliest memory? Who knows, probably falling off the sleeper at the adventure playground. I remember the trauma first. Does it matter, though? Could I make it up?

“My earliest memory is of the time when I imagined winning the fastest horse race in the world, doing a double flick flack, rowing to Malaysia, now I can’t see what I was dancing about in the old days when I shuffled through the soft spaces of your imagination, clutching your leg?”

Photography brings memories to heel. I remember it differently. I remembered that photograph differently. She was holding my hand. When in actual fact she was holding my sister’s hand. I must keep writing till I find the story. Is it true that everyone has one story which they repeat over and over? You only have one story. Let’s hear it. Please tell me what it is, for I can’t hear it. In the manufacture of your memories, the stories are made. Yours for the taking, yours for the asking. As you will.