by Ian Wedde
The asynchrony of my twin brother’s and my left-handed/right-handed, daughters/sons configuration suggests that, as well as being separate and different, we combine to make a more comprehensive whole. How we remember works in this way. We amplify each other’s worlds. My memories tend to be large, self-dramatising, unreliable – they are easily distracted by auxiliary suggestions (Yes! Yes! That too!), by too much analysis and a morbid compulsion to understand. Dave, on the other hand, has a wonderful, succinct memory for material facts and a sanguine disregard for the kinds of traps I set myself. He remembers the name of our bach neighbours on the Snout, and the moment he says ‘Rossel’ or ‘Russel’ (later, we sort out that they were Rousells) I truly believe I can picture the man, rather sandy haired and big, with a greasy beret pulled back over the nape of his neck.
Dave remembers that another family whose father’s name sounded like Jock Steneer, or more likely the Rousells, whose bach was closer to the Horne one, included a couple of daughters, three or four years older than us, with whom we used to row across the bay to get ice creams – and the moment he tells me this, I’m sure I remember it. He remembers vomiting out the car window as Chick drove us along the twisty gravel road from Blenheim to Picton, and at once I can smell his sick and see the resigned pallor of his face. He tells me that the Rousells owned not just a launch but a ‘classic displacement launch’; impressed by this, I find a memory rising up of a fishing trip in that launch, when someone hooked a big octopus out by the reef at Dieffenbach Point and hauled it up to the boat’s gunwale; it pumped water and ink all over us before someone cut it loose.
This is how I know that Dieffenbach Point isn’t just the place, or the sign of the place, where I first began to be distinct and at home in myself; it’s also ‘the place’ where I am joined to my brother and what he remembers, which is different from what I remember; and to our mother and father. I imagine that the octopus has by now taken our father’s Omega Seamaster watch and our mother’s ivory bracelet to a safe place, a lair, where it protects them. And that’s where they are.
The artesian well
Not as I encountered it later, but as I remember it, 32 Francis Street, Blenheim, was on the right-hand side of the road as you approached Horton Park. It had a glassed-in sunporch to its right, where you convalesced when you had the mumps or flu. The house was set back from the street across a broad, immaculately mown lawn. There was obviously something about sustaining a beautiful grass nap that obsessed my father – perhaps it was the combination of order, which he loved, and doing stuff outdoors, which he also loved. Many years later, I would watch with admiration as, wearing a disgraceful pair of khaki shorts, he mowed the desiccated grass in front of the apartment he and my mother had in Amman, Jordan, while astonished Jordanian families watched and made comments from neighbouring balconies.
To the right of the house as you faced it from Francis Street was an un-gated driveway which opened across the footpath to the road. In summer, the tar in the footpath, and especially along the edges of the gutter where it joined the road, would get soft and almost melt. I remember the taste of that tar, and its delightful smell and texture. Our grandmother had a method of removing the stuff from our hands with butter. I don’t know how, or why, that worked. Nana Horne had other mysterious remedies and arcane approaches to hygiene and sanitation in her repertoire, of which the most fearsome was a pink rubber hose with a squeezable bulb at one end, which was used to introduce a warm, soapy, colon-cleansing enema to her twin grandsons.
Though the driveway down the side of the house was made to accommodate a car, it never did, since there was a single garage to the left of the house on the street-front. This was where the well-used grass catcher was stored, along with various other useful things. It was also where I remember Chick kept his home brew, and where he sampled it with friends. Dave, however, remembers another shed or garage at the end of the right-hand drive where the brewing occurred. He thinks brewing also took place in the mirror-image garage of the house next door: ‘The name Joker Hillman springs to mind. Hedge clipping on the Horne side was rewarded with a nod and a wink from Joker, and Dad would disappear.’
I can remember exactly the intonation and shape of the word my mother (Dave thinks grandmother) called out when it was time for our father to leave his lip-smacking cronies and come inside for some reason – ‘Al-beeert!’ I think there was a concrete-mixer in the garage too, but this memory may be specific to one occasion when it was in use there, on the footpath, with a hose running to it from the garden. No doubt there was a pile of builder’s mix or sand nearby, so perhaps it was also the time when Dave and I poured sand into the family car’s petrol tank. This story was told often, as were other catastrophe anecdotes, including the time we painted the inside walls of a neighbour’s wash-house with blue shoe polish. I don’t remember the sand-in-petrol-tank incident, or the shoe-polish one, though I’d like to.
When I navigate my way with as much honesty as I can along the seam between what I believe I really do remember and that other class of ‘memories’ consisting of handed-down family stories, photo-album prompts, or the mnemonics that have been implanted by research or the serendipity of return visits, I discover a special class of memory that seems to defy the distinction between remembered fact and recovered memory. The facts include the basic appearance and layout of the house in Francis Street, with its large back section and a corrugated-iron fence between us and neighbours called Priddle. The Priddles had a parrot which clung with its frightening black claws to the rotary clothesline in their backyard; I remember the sound of its yells, but not what it said. I remember the workshop my father kept across a concrete yard from the back door to the kitchen. I remember the smells of sawdust and the sound of a saw. Years later, when I read Katherine Mansfield’s perfectly chosen word ‘panting’ to describe that sawing sound, I was returned instantly to that workshop. As a bonus, I also remembered the ripe smell of my father’s farts, which I associate with various kinds of exertion there.
I remember a large walnut tree at the far end of the back garden, and beneath it the immense, warm, sweet-smelling compost heaps with their piles of minutely chopped clippings from the grass catcher. I remember sticking a garden fork through my foot in or near the compost heap, and the bizarre sequence of allergic reactions to the penicillin shot I was given to ward off tetanus – the rash, the ludicrous swelling and so forth.
I vividly remember the sight of Bobby Moss’s backside disappearing urgently through a hole in the hedge at the bottom of the garden where my father cultivated strawberries, and where he’d surprised Bobby in the middle of a raid (we’d just returned from Waikawa Bay); I also remember the taste and smell, unmatched since, of the strawberries.
I remember the feeble pallor of Dave’s face after he’d had his tonsils out, and his horrible breath; and the bloodstained shirtfront of the distraught man who’d bowled him off his bike, and Dave’s bewildered yells as he was lowered into a bath to be washed so his wounds could be seen (I also remember envying his bravery when he went to the police station with our father to make a statement, returning with a certain smile and Chick’s arm around his shoulders).
I remember disliking the corned beef our mother cooked, which tasted of its smell; I disliked it just as much when she persisted with it in the years not long before she died.
I recognise the other kind, the recovered memories, for what they are, because they seldom come with smells or sounds – thus, the pageboying of Norma’s bridal train is a blank, wan, two-dimensional event. These memories play in my mind like film sequences without sound; they are incomplete artefacts; they don’t make me go hot or cold, or feel anything much – my balls don’t retreat in remembered fear, I don’t get teary; try as I might, I can’t find empathy for those other actors in the moment, not even for my brother.
And then there are the transitional memories, as I think of them: the memories that seem to rise slowly to consciousness and, once there, to build a br
oad, expandable field of meaning around themselves. Their factual immediacy or accuracy I can’t be certain of, but they come accompanied by the most vividly carnal sensations of all.
There are few of these memories. They seem to be the most important ones. I think of them as making their home in my imagination, at once free from indexical truth and at the same time precisely situated – even embedded or embodied – in phenomena. What I’ve learned about them is that their triggers are primitive and undeniable.
In 1969, at the age of twenty-two, driving out of Colombo towards Kandy in what was then called Ceylon, thirteen years after leaving Dave’s and my childhood home up the Karnaphuli River in East Pakistan, a smell of frangipani, dust, cooking spices, shit and dried cow-dung smoke came in the car window on a scorching breeze, and I at once had a memory so vivid it was almost a hallucination of the floral pattern on one of my mother’s dresses when we lived in the riverside wilds on the perimeter of the stinking paper mill at Chandraghona. I hadn’t seen my mother for several years – she and Chick had been in Cairo and were currently in Amman – but then, all at once, she was in the hot, dusty car with us; or rather, a pattern of shapes and colours that stood for her was in the car.
I think of the imagination as a place of narrative scaffoldings. Here, smells may be represented as colours, thoughts as beats or rhythms, and words as movements. In this space my imagination makes what sense it can of a pleasurable chaos. It’s a place of promiscuous sensory mash-ups, fascinating because illicit, illicit because unreliable, unreliable because contingent. Nothing becomes lucid there without having first pushed back against or given in to anarchy. This is the home of play. Facts aren’t playful; nor are taste- and odour-free recovered ‘memories’. But those transitional memories are invitations to play.
The last time we sat down to talk about our childhood in Blenheim, Dave had no memory at all of the artesian well in our Francis Street backyard. This was a shock, because for me it’s one of the few memories that lead a rich, privileged, unpredictable life in my imagination. I know this makes it unreliable – but I also know it’s undeniable. The well was to the right of Chick’s workshop and just beyond the concrete apron that extended from the kitchen steps. It was set into the lawn by the workshop wall or perhaps the wall of the laundry that adjoined the workshop.
How could Dave not remember the strong, thick, wooden lid that sealed the well and was meant to be too heavy for kids to move aside – but which we did? The lid was exciting because it signalled not just danger but danger that was specific to small children. As if in defiance of this danger, I once hammered a packet of my father’s precious brass boat nails into the lid, which was probably one of his overdone woodwork projects – they tended to be too heavy and not quite square, just like mine.
Though I know it may be my imagination orchestrating such auxiliary effects, I remember the brass nail hammering produced a deep, hollow, echoing sound that was frightening because it was happening in an unseen place, and because it made my stomach heave with a kind of pleasurable terror, as if I was standing on the brink of a cliff or clinging (as I once did) to the upper trunk of the walnut tree. It was dark and cool in the well once the cover was off, and an unfamiliar smell came out of it. It must have been the smell of the water itself, and of the damp brick shaft, and I remember it as having a mineral freshness, unlike the leaf-mouldy smell of the creek at Waikawa; but I think of it as the smell of darkness.
How old would I have been when I first inhaled that darkness and peered down into it? Chick used to lower into the well a wire basket filled with big brown bottles of beer to cool them, and perhaps I first peeped over the edge as he did so, and listened to his warnings about the danger of the well which were no doubt both frightening and tempting. I must have been at least six – just old enough to shift the heavy lid aside – when I gave in to the temptation: ‘I’ because Dave denies any memory of the well, though in fact it would have taken the two of us to shift the lid (ha!).
I seem to remember (but can’t be sure) that I (or we) liberated a frog into the well, or that a frog had somehow got into it, and lived there, happily croaking. This was only one of the reasons for our parents’ anger and distress when I (or we) poured a can of drained-off sump oil into the well – which would have killed the frog as well as poisoned the water. It was the possibility of transgression, the terror and seduction of that mineral smell of darkness that made the well and the memory of it potent. But the stinking black sump oil that killed the frog we never saw, only heard, in the water we never saw, only smelled, pushed that illicit anticipation across into something more fearful and incomprehensible, with sorrow and remorse attached: a first inkling of death, perhaps.
It must be absurd to suggest that a five- or six-year-old kid could have that kind of apprehension. Or perhaps not. About sixty years after I poisoned the well at Francis Street, Donna and I went on holiday to Niue in the Pacific. One day we walked through forest on the eastern side of the island to a deep chasm at a place called Vaikona. Spiky pandanus plants grow across razor-sharp formations of coral granite honeycombed with deep caverns and tunnels, some of which run out to the sea or open in huge submarine cracks in the reef. There’s a cave surrounded by pandanus, with a dusty lip overlooking a steep slope down to the cave floor and, further in, a pool of fresh artesian water.
The scanty information we had suggested you could go down there using a knotted rope attached to a tree root at the cave entrance. The rope wasn’t there, though a rickety sign warning of danger was; but I nearly did scramble down anyway. Not far away, the rhythmic surf drove against a rocky coast, but deep within the cave the chasm’s tranquil pool glinted where sunlight reached it through the dark opening. It looked heavenly, but the rope was missing, and so, although I hesitated at the lip for long enough to hear the echo of the surf hammering on rock at the nearby coast, I didn’t go down.
Getting back out again was what I should have thought about, but didn’t – until later that night when, hot with fearful sweat, I began to walk towards a mirage of the deep cave pool and the resonant hammering that came from it. And then, as I stood half-awake on the balcony of our room overlooking the sea, I saw a rope of stars that reached the moon gleaming like a pool in the sky, and I climbed back into sleep but couldn’t tell if the hammering rhythm I heard there was in the chasm or somewhere else, a place I couldn’t return to, no matter how much I wanted that.
What I remembered at that moment on the balcony of our holiday place on Niue, in a state halfway between waking and dreaming, in which images, sounds and smells seemed to pour in and out of each other, was the well next to my father’s workshop at Francis Street in the early 1950s. I hadn’t thought about it – or the sound of hammering, or the smell of darkness – for sixty years. But it was there. And when I was awake again in the bright Pacific morning, it was as if the transgressive power of my childhood memory had shaped my sixty-year-old glimpse of death. And had done that by reaching out from the imagination-home that had always travelled everywhere with me, into the vivid, pleasurable, particular world of phenomena at the edge of the Vaikona cave.
The shit
I was impressed during one of the remembering-home conversations I had with Dave when he came up with the name of Bobby Moss’s sister – Glenys. Perhaps this was the woman about my age who introduced herself to me as Glenys at the 2013 Millenium Gallery reading – but I can’t be sure of that. I remembered Bobby’s backside beating a hasty retreat through the hedge behind my father’s prized strawberry patch; I can remember that as an incident, but can’t get a mental picture of Bobby himself, what he looked like, his face, his expression. I get nothing except his fleeing bum, which was in grey serge shorts, and the sound of Chick bellowing. And I can’t remember anything at all about Glenys. She’s just not in the jigsaw set.
But in trying to find her, and while poking around for her shape among the fragmentary memories of childhood life in Francis Street, I am startled by a memory I haven’t
gone looking for, haven’t expected and don’t want – except that, like my memory of the artesian well with its smell of darkness and, later, its reek of defilement, this memory is potent and irresistible. It’s irresistible in part because it’s been hidden all these years; no doubt it was hidden because it was illicit at some early stage; and no doubt it’s irresistible now because it was once forbidden. Here, then, is my chance to summon up again those innocent transgressions that took place within the childhood family home.
This in itself is a seductive idea. It reminds me of the moody frisson that quivers inside Rimbaud’s great poem ‘Les Poètes de sept ans’, in which the introverted child, his soul ‘livrée aux répugnances’ (given over to abhorrence), lurked in the cool of the latrine, nostrils flared, thinking; or bit the naked bum of the eight-year-old girl who’d jumped on him and then ‘Remportait les saveurs de sa peau dans sa chambre’ (carried the flavours of her skin to his room). Rimbaud gives his game away in the last two lines of the poem, revealing his adult retrospection, his perverse relish for the precocious brat who:
– seul, et couché sur des pièces de toile
Ecrue, et pressentant violemment la voile!
– which Jeremy Harding has translated as:
He lay in his coarse canvas sheets
Gripped by a premonition of setting sail.
What’s going on here? Of course we can never remember exactly, or recreate, or relive the experiences we had as children. Rimbaud looks back at his febrile childhood self, rebellious and hypocritical, furtive and charming, besotted with travel and adventure romances, from the point of view of a precocious seventeen-year-old who has already begun to ‘set sail’ for the exotic locations that would seduce and destroy him. He’s delighted to observe in this child-self the seeds of what he’s becoming as a man. No doubt what he sees and writes in his poem is accurate in some way – as is what he writes a couple of years later in ‘Mauvais sang’ from Une saison en enfer (1873): ‘Encore tout enfant, j’admirais le forçat intraitable sur qui se referme tojours le bagne …’ (When I was still a small boy, I admired the unrepentant convict on whom the prison gates would always close …)