Writing: the Power of Childhood Memory

Working with writers to recover childhood memories can lead to some small yet powerful moments of recall. One of my own that popped up in session recently was a memory of school cross country running: being one of the last; legs mottled blue from the cold; ghastly!

Now, all these years later I’m running and the knees cope better if I head off hard roads and into the hills. The air is super-charged with the scent of sun-yellow rape. There is birdsong – a chiff-chaff and the song of a skylark, somewhere high and out sight - and I have a moment of epiphany (GCSE poetry students, remember? A moment of realisation, like stanza three in Bayonet Charge – except I might change Ted Hughes’ harsh consonants of ‘cold clockwork’ for a softer sibilance!) So: by what sweet serendipity of the stars is it that I am here, in the East Yorkshire Wolds, cross country running and loving it?

1     Memories from school days are still as powerful as ever; the door to our childhood never closes.

2)     I’m so glad I don’t suffer from hay fever.

3)     PE teachers in the 1970s have a lot to answer for!

Week 2 Ghost Writing

Another ghost writing session with my client who has sustained brain injuries in a car crash. This time we attempt to return to memories from his young school days - or what fragments remain from this time. A surprising amount of detail surfaces: he recalls that he was naughty in primary school (weren't we all!) and that as a young adult he liked Depeche Mode.

My issue is how to write this. How much detail do I add, to shape his fragmented material into acceptable memoir which the reader can picture? Or should I leave his hesitant, sometimes repetitive/disrupted narrative voice to speak for itself? As our session comes to a close, he says:

        'It's hard to explain. The car crash has made me... Deep down I wish
         I was a different person; I wish it had happened to somebody else. But it was ME
         and that makes me want to scream out loud but I don't; I don't want to do that
         This cake is nice this cake I've just eaten it was beautiful a beautiful cake. It was nice.
         I want someone to see me for who I am. I'm not a bad person. It's just hard.'

His words bring my heart into my throat; seems to me they are fantastic at just speaking for themselves.

The new rise in fascism

Just read two WW2 novels: Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers (1987) and Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key, written some 20 years later, in 2007. Huge contrast: Piercy’s literary tale of the interwoven fates of her characters weighs beautifully heavy. De Rosnay’s story probably originated in a good idea but is written into clunky dialogue and clumsy plot-swings.

Both focus on the horror of the treatment of Jews during the war years. We read it as fiction, but cannot forget that it was real – therein lies the power of such material to appall yet fascinate.

Fast forward then to Britain, 2017: a young Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker, 17, is attacked in the street; brutally beaten. He came here for sanctuary; there is none. How many tried to stop it? It is an awful parallel to draw.

Over and over, the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe and its abhorrent outcome is charted in fiction, but we cannot forget that its origins lie in reality. Some 60 years later, we are in a new and dreadful reality of our own.