How far back can we remember ?
One hundred years ?
I wasn't around in 1925 and my family talked about the Second World War all the time, but nothing about before because they were all born in the twenties, except my grandmother, who was born in 1901 but she didn't talk very much about the past, not even to join in with stories about the Second World War. I was told that her whole family had been killed when a bomb struck their home in the Liverpool blitz while she was in Formby with two of her children, my mother and her brother. They'd been evacuated to the nearby coast before the blitz. She was happy and loving and jovial when I was a small child, often singing in a high, sweet voice. A big fan of Bessie Smith. She recalled Paul Robeson singing to the workers in the Albert Dock in Liverpool. It's possible she was actually present since she worked at Tate and Lyle warehouse sewing sugar bags for a time during the war. In her later years, when Dad had managed to get a mortgage for a house over the Mersey and moved me, Mum and my brother out, Nana stopped talking. She would sit in silence, unable to walk unaided due to arthritis, undoubtedly in pain physically and mentally and unable or unwilling to enjoy life any more despite my uncle getting them a council house not too far from us so that Mum and I could visit every Sunday. It saddened me that even the cup of tea cake I liked to bake for her couldn't bring a smile to her lips, me, the little girl she used to call Queen and sing You Always Hurt the One You Love and other plaintive songs to.
No, my only link with ' before ' was a strange and wonderful contraption shaped like a cross-bow called a stereoscope which came with lots of postcards that you put in a slot at the end behind the lenses so that when you looked through them, the image was 3D, so magical for a child to look through and I became familiar with the beautiful and exotic images of Victorian people at the seaside, in glass houses, perambulating around a park or riding in horse drawn carriages or stood proudly in front of beautiful buildings.
Not my memories, nor the ones of my family. My father would tell of failing his school certificate and being allowed to stay on to re-take it, only to fail it again. Despite this, he eventually got a good job at Ford's new plant in Speke. My mother left school at 14 to go into training as a nanny. When I passed the eleven plus to go to grammar school, Dad's muttered, resentful comment was that he wished my brother had too, yet he found me a piano, abandoned in some school playground and somehow got it home for me and helped me paint it white and everyone, even the next door neighbours, let me play without discouragement, never telling me to shut up once.
I once asked my Dad what he would like to have been if he could have been anything in the world and he said a concert pianist.
His own father died when he was 15 months old. Mum's father died when she was 10.
Mum died at 58 when I was 28. Dad at 69 when I was 39.
They got me on the road from Speke to Yorkshire, out of the clutches of the poverty they were born into, but never quite far enough away for me to feel relaxed. My tendency to hoard the good stuff is testimony to that.
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But of history and memory, I know this;
that my earliest memory is the sound of the greyhound, Mari, running up and down the stairs and my brother screeching with laughter and shouting ' send her up again Nana '
yet this can't be my memory, it must be a story told me later because I don't remember Mari, the poor old worn out greyhound rescued by my uncle who worked looking after the dogs who raced at Anfield stadium,
still, sometimes at that liminal point when falling into the pit of sleep, these sounds clatter and echo and I wake with a jolt, sometimes sweating, feeling sorrow and pity for the dog, the darkness of those times and the loneliness of falling asleep.
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