I Remember, He Remembered

This was the title of a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast on Saturday afternoons some years ago, and it fascinated me. The premise was that if someone had told you their earliest memories, those memories stayed 'alive' and could be passed on by you to future generations. Oral history in the making. And the examples they found - of elderly people who recalled memories recounted to them by their own grandparents - were quite incredible. One man had been told by an ancient relative of his memories of the Napoleonic Wars. Imagine that! A family memory going back to 1815, handed down from father to son, and eventually to great-grandson, and still kept alive in the late 20th century. Maybe there is still someone who holds that memory, like a treasured family heirloom, and will pass it on yet again.

Perhaps in the same programme, someone talked about a field behind their house, which was exceptionally hummocky, with one particular hillock always being referred to locally as 'where the old king was buried'. Nobody knew why it was called that. It just always had been, as far back as anyone could remember. It was a folk-memory.

One day, it was excavated, and what was found there? Relics of a far-distant age which indicated that it had indeed been the grave of a highly important man - a 'king'. The folk-memory was true - an instance of 'I remember, He Remembered' so old that nobody knew when it had begun; yet it had persisted through many centuries.

My 'I Remember, He Remembered' was passed to me by my father, who was born in 1895. He grew up in Gosport, Hampshire, which stands on the shores of Portsmouth Harbour and close by his house ran the branch railway line from near the harbour to Fareham, where it would join the main line. It was probably quite busy - I remember trains using it regularly myself, although mostly for freight by then - but its main claim to fame was that it was used by Queen Victoria when she visited her home Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight.

Now, the most direct route for the Queen would have been via Portsmouth itself. There's still a station right on the harbour, and in older days the Isle of Wight ferries used to come right to the end of its platforms. But Victoria disliked Portsmouth, to such an extent that she refused even to use it as a travelling route. She caused a jetty to be built further up the harbour (still called the Southern Railway Jetty) and there she disembarked and crossed to Gosport, where her train awaited for the last part of her journey.

It was the last journey she ever made that was remembered by my father, after she had died at Osborne House. As a boy of six, he saw the black-clad carriage bearing her coffin, travelling slowly through the fringes of the town, and knew that the Queen's body lay within. Someone presumably told him, and presumably he understood the gravity of the occasion, for it was a memory that stayed with him throughout his own long life, until he died at the age of 89. A memory that was by then 83 years old.

Queen Victoria died in 1901. I hold the memory now of that train journey, and it's 110 years old. I've told my grandchildren (and I'll probably tell them again, to make sure!) and I hope that either they or I will tell their children. It could last another 50 years. Another 100. Who knows?

I'm not looking to draw any conclusions from this. Not all folk-memories are true, though they're worth paying attention to. And it doesn't really matter to anyone else that I hold a memory of a moment in history 110 years old, or that some descendant of the Napoleonic Wars man holds one going back nearly 200 years. But it's interesting. And, somehow, it feels valuable.

So if you have such a memory, passed down through the family, take a little time to make sure it gets passed on. It's as valuable as a piece of antique porcelain. In fact, since it can't be sold at auction, subject to the vagaries of a collector's market, it might be said to be even more valuable.

Have a rummage through Grandma's attic (her memories) and see what treasures are still there!

Flies- I Hate Them!

I mean – why flies? Why are they necessary? Are they, indeed, necessary? And, whatever their purpose, can they really carry it out to fulfilment by massing and buzzing at the very top of the high triangular window in my new kitchen extension?

Every fine day, there they are. Where are they on dull, wet days? Why can’t they be satisfied to be there when I have the doors and windows open? Why? Why?

Maybe I seem a little hysterical on this subject, but so would you be if you had had the experience I had, years ago, when I had just moved into a small cottage in Worcestershire, under the shadow of the Malvern Hills.  I’d been in it a week, just got the furniture arranged and the books unpacked, and was carrying out the building society’s demand for woodworm treatment by employing two gentlemen who were possibly more at home on horseback, wearing Stetsons and shouting ‘Whip crackaway!’ to do the necessary work.   I’d left for work that morning, having let them in, and returned in the evening confident that all would be well.

Actually, I’d already returned at lunchtime to find that all was not well. While spraying noxious substances in the loft, one of them had fallen through the ceiling over the landing (well, it’s easily done when you’re more accustomed to the wide open spaces of Arizona) leaving a large, unsightly gap in the newly-painted plasterboard. But they’d apologised profusely and promised to return to make it good, so there wasn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t, however,  expect to find what I found when I came home that evening.

Every fly that ever there was had taken refuge in my loft. (I should, perhaps, explain that it was October and they were hibernating, thus answering that other age-old question about where flies go in wintertime. Check your own loft sometime, if you dare.) They were large and fat, replete with whatever flies eat to keep them going through the long cold months until they come out to torment us again. And the woodworm spray was as fatal to them as it was to woodworm.

They were dying. All over the house. With that huge gap in the landing ceiling, there was nothing to stop them. They came down, staggering slightly, in search of fresh air, but it was too late and they lay, spinning on their backs and making that high-pitched buzzing noise flies make as they die – and I can tell you, when three or four thousand do this together, the noise is horrendous. It sounds more like a chainsaw being operated just beside your ear.  And they were doing this everywhere. On the floor. On the furniture. On the windowsills. Down the back of the sofa. In the beds – yes, in the beds. And they were doing it to the pervading and noisome smell of woodworm treatment. Nowadays, Health and Safety would probably say you couldn’t live in a house that was being treated like this. But this was before that august body burst upon us and I and my 10-year-old daughter had nowhere else to go. And my dear little cottage had been spoiled for me. I was in tears.

There was worse to come. My car, a battered little Mini, needed distilled water for its battery (I told you it was a long time ago) and I had to walk to the nearest garage to get some. That was over a mile away, along dark country lanes and of course it was raining. Lashing with it.

Carrying an empty cider bottle, I set out, leaving my daughter at home, and trudged sobbing through the dark, wet night. About 40 minutes later, wet, bedraggled, tear-stained and clutching my cider-bottle, I opened the front door and came in, to find a strange man sitting on a kitchen chair, having brushed it clear of dying flies (however fast we swept them up, more came lurching drunkenly down from the loft) and, presumably  for want of anything better to do, showing my daughter a selection of carpet samples.

I had completely forgotten he was coming. I never found out quite what he made of the wild-eyed apparition who came bursting in out of the night, nor of the apparent squalor in which we lived. But I dragged myself together, explained rather unconvincingly that the bottle contained distilled water, chose a carpet more or less at random, and once again set about vacuuming up flies’ bodies. We went to bed in the only sheets I could find that hadn’t been died upon, and next morning cleared up the harvest of the night.

Eventually they were all gone and – eventually – the cowboys did return and replaster the ceiling, although they never came to repaint it. But that’s why, when flies arrive on hot days and buzz around the rooms or mass on that high window, I get a little tetchy. And I can’t go to bed knowing that they’ll be there in the morning. Last thing at night, I get the vacuum cleaner, climb on to the kitchen table and suck them all into its bag. I hate to think what it’s like in there but I am never going to look, so I’m never going to know.

If ever you want to see murder in a woman’s eyes (probably you don’t) just look into mine when I am setting about the flies that dare to enter my house in summer. I tell you, I absolutely loathe them.