2010-09-05 11:46:08
A man's brain
Our ability to recall events seems to sharpen as we get older but can it be
trusted, asks Lisa Jardine in her A Point of View column.
Have you noticed how as you get older your long-term memory seems to become
increasingly sharp?
When I was in my teens I used to marvel at the facility of my elders to summon
up complete passages of poetry or prose, while I fumbled for more than a
phrase.
Now I find I can recite surprisingly large chunks of Horace Odes that we
learned at school: "Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque
turres" - "Pale death knocks indiscriminately at the doors of the cottages of
paupers and the palaces of kings".
Every time I take a country walk, I am surprised to discover that I can recall
the name of each common wild flower as my eye lights upon it - rosebay
willowherb, birdsfoot trefoil, ladies' bedstraw, meadow cranesbill - names my
mother taught me on our childhood walks in the countryside around Monk's
Risborough in Buckinghamshire where we lived.
Perhaps most strange are those moments when something triggers an intense
memory of an event that you had almost entirely forgotten, but which returns
suddenly now with extraordinary clarity.
Here is a case in point. I went up to Cambridge in the 60s to read mathematics
at Newnham College. In those days there was a separate entrance exam for Oxford
and Cambridge, and my parents arranged for me to have coaching for the maths
papers with a maths master at the boys' school close to my family home in
Highgate.
Once a week Mr Bellis taught me how to master the subtleties of university
level maths problems, and in the process built up my wavering adolescent
confidence, convincing me that there was nothing they could set me that I would
not be able to solve.
It was Mr Bellis's wife who suggested, when I arrived in Cambridge, that she
should put me in touch with Timothy (let's call him) - a former student of
theirs, who was now in his final year at Fitzwilliam College (then Fitzwilliam
House) reading history. It would make a nice introduction to student life, she
proposed, he would help me to find my feet, and besides, he was such a charming
young man.
Sure enough, shortly thereafter I received an invitation to tea with Tim at his
lodgings in Silver Street. My Newnham fellow-students were impressed - Tim was
a prominent figure in the university acting world, the star of a number of
critically praised undergraduate productions. Mounting the stairs to his
bed-sit, I felt grown up and rather sophisticated. The sensation of well-being
increased as I sat in an armchair with sagging springs while Tim, dashing in a
denim shirt, toasted crumpets at his three-bar gas fire, and entertained me
with amusing anecdotes about undergraduate life.
Suddenly the door burst open. In rushed a small, elderly man, dishevelled as I
remember, and dressed in some kind of crumpled dark grey overalls. Pointing his
finger directly at me, he began hurling abuse: "I know your sort! I know what
your kind of girl gets up to, you hussy! Now you just get out of here this
minute!"
Start Quote
I was the one, I had thought, who had not known how to handle the social
embarrassment
End Quote
My newly-gained confidence collapsed like a soap-bubble. I struggled to my
feet, barely able to hear Tim's protestations above the din of the continuing
verbal assault, and fled.
I never saw Tim again. I think, though I'm not sure, that he sent me a note of
apology for what had happened. But I was too mortified even to consider
repeating the experience. I put the incident to the back of my mind, and I
barely thought about it for decades.
However, this particular story has a sequel. In July of this year I went back
to Cambridge, where Mr and Mrs Bellis now live in their retirement, on the
occasion of Mrs Bellis's 80th birthday. There was a joyous party, in a marquee
among the climbing roses and herbaceous borders of the garden she had lovingly
planned and tended. I had only been there for minutes when I spotted Tim -
virtually unchanged by the intervening years, and suddenly the incident of 40
years ago replayed itself before my eyes with extraordinary clarity.
I introduced my husband, and he in turn presented his wife. "Darling," he
exclaimed. "This is Lisa. She is the person I told you about, who once had such
a nasty run-in with my landlord when we were at Cambridge." "Oh yes," she
returned. "Whenever we hear you on the radio he reminds me of that awful
occasion, and how devastated he was by it."
I was dumbfounded. I had imagined that calamitous tea-party had barely made any
impression on the sophisticated young actor who had hosted it. I was the one, I
had thought, who had not known how to handle the social embarrassment. Not once
had it occurred to me that he might have minded too.
Hilarity
Even as I tell this story, though, the historian in me feels a pang of anxiety.
I am almost sure that not all those details I gave you about the bed-sit in
Silver Street, and my recollection of what Tim looked like in his blue shirt,
while I sat in the battered armchair by his spluttering gas fire, are accurate.
Man with photo Memories are easily triggered
They became convincing and vivid as I turned my minds-eye back, shining the
spotlight of my recently enhanced long-term memory upon them. I probably
introduced some extraneous detail that actually belonged somewhere else in the
capacious carpet-bag that is my middle-aged memory bank.
Although Tim and my accounts of the main facts were surprisingly similar and
caused much hilarity in the retelling, what would have happened if we had
expanded on that recollection, to include more impressionistic aspects of that
fateful afternoon? Might we, together, have begun to embroider the basic facts,
creating a composite account which resonated with other events that took place
around the same time?
One consequence of the heightened sense of recall we acquire with age is that
we find ourselves running together things that happened to us and things that
were reported (in newspapers or on television) at the same time, or are told to
us by those we knew.
Last year I chaired an evening of readings, performances and short talks at the
Whitechapel Gallery in London, by and about celebrated Jewish writers for whom
the old Whitechapel Library, with its books in Yiddish and German, had offered
an intellectual lifeline when they arrived from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and
30s.
Cable Street riots Witnesses to the Cable Street riots of 1936 were able to
clearly remember the events
In the course of it, several speakers mentioned the Battle of Cable Street,
which took place on Sunday 4 October 1936 in London's East End. This was a
clash between anti-fascists, including local Jewish, socialist, anarchist,
Irish and communist groups and the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald
Mosley. Mosley's intention had been to send thousands of marchers dressed in
uniforms styled on those of Mussolini's Italian blackshirts provocatively
through a district which was predominately Jewish. The anti-fascists turned out
to stop him, and the result was a pitched battle between the Metropolitan
Police, fascists and anti-fascists.
At that Whitechapel Gallery evening, everyone there over 80 could vividly
recall the Battle of Cable Street. Most said they had witnessed it at
first-hand, and the scenes of out-of-control street-fighting had clearly burned
themselves in on their memory. Some could describe as if it were yesterday the
fear they felt, as the event descended into near-anarchy. All the same, I had a
sneaking feeling that since they could not have been more than 10 or 12 at the
time, perhaps one or two of them were recalling those chaotic events with help
from Pathe newsreels or the memories of others.
I am not suggesting that any of us does other than tell the utter truth as we
recall it, when we narrate these intensely-remembered moments from our personal
past. Rather, I am admitting that, as someone with a reputation, I hope, for
telling persuasive stories from my own life, I might not always get it
absolutely right, and that while that does not detract from an entertaining
tale, for on-the-record purposes it might not quite match other versions of the
same events.
When we historians try to recover the past, the first person "I" of oral
testimony, the voices of those who were there, are particularly seductive.
Their strength of feeling communicates itself to us as no written record ever
could. It connects us, compels our continuing attention, prevents our ever
forgetting. Where the factual detail is concerned, though, if I'm anything to
go by, I suspect it would be a good idea to cross-check for historical
accuracy.