A fat baby stuffing its face. Two small boys in a tin bath. Boy standing next to a Christmas tree. Six months? Four years? Five or six? Ages are approximate; the photographs (some of which are above) are not dated. Moving on: boy in Wolverhampton Wanderers football strip. Top Dog studs on dubbined leather ball. About nine. Morose twelve year old, eating sandwiches from a Wonderloaf wrapper. Thirteen: cricket sweater, striped shirt. Fifteen: pale adolescent frame half-submerged in black pond. Eighteen: sipping beer against a white wall in monochrome sunshine. Long hair, Lennon specs. Then on to the next decade, and the next. Young man in subfusc. Older man in suit. Man and wife. Man, wife and children. I know this unfolding life: it's mine. I know the story. But beyond name, genetic make-up and autobiography, I'm not sure what connection I have with the protagonist. What sense does it make to say we are the same person, this middle-aged man rattling the keyboard, and that chubby infant staring quizzically out into the grey distance of the 1950s? If the self is a yarn it weaves stuff far more varied than the changing fashions in the photographs. What strikes me is how little I remember.
Some years ago I had a patient who suffered an almost total retrograde amnesia. She was in her mid-thirties. Driving home from work one day she became confused. The route turned unfamiliar. She was soon lost and pulled up at the kerb to ask directions. The problem was that she didn't know where she was headed. "I want to get home," was all she could manage. Home, according to the address on the driving licence, was just a few streets away. But the house, when she arrived there, was unfamiliar. She sat outside for an hour, rain pounding the roof of the car, and then went up and rang the doorbell. Satisfied the house was empty, she let herself in. A stranger turns up and is not at all surprised to find her in his house, but wonders why she is sitting in the dark. Other than showing some borderline abnormalities of blood flow in the medial frontal lobes, the brain scans were uninformative - no holes in the head to account for the catastrophic drainage of memory. Nor were there any obvious psychological causes. She saw psychiatrists, hypnotists and therapists, all to no avail. We pieced together the story of her life - the schools, the jobs, the friends and the relationships. It turned out she had been married and divorced by the age of 25, but had no recollection of her husband. "He's a good-looking man," she said, studying a photo of the pair of them. They'd shared a flat in Derby for three years. Had she no recollection? "I recognise the wallpaper," she said.
And that's what I find. I'm recognising carpets and wallpaper more than I'm making empathic connection with my child self. There's a clear sense of objects, space and place but no sense of event. No sense of being there. I don't remember my little brother washing my hair in the old tin bath. I don't remember my first day at school, although there I am in blazer and cap. I have no memory of lying like that in front of the fire with notebook and biro. There are well-rehearsed, generic memories of such things, long since woven into the fabric of "me," but the "I" of subjective experience floats disconnected from the story. And even when specific memories seep through, can I be sure they're reliable? Jean Piaget famously remembered being the victim of a kidnap attempt as a small child. He recalled sitting in his baby carriage and witnessing the struggle between his nurse and the would-be kidnapper, he saw the scratches on her face and he saw the man being chased away by a policeman with a short cape and white baton. The event became a vivid paragraph in the Piaget life story, illustrated with rich visual imagery. Years later the nurse confessed to fabricating the entire episode. My own false memory is more prosaic. I clearly remember the wooden box seat in my grandmother's outdoor lavatory, although by the time I was born it had long since been replaced by a free-standing porcelain crapper.
The phone rings. It's my brother. We've been out of contact for months. I tell him I'm just going through some old photographs. I remind him of the two of us sharing the tin bath in front of the fire on Sunday nights. Then there's the picture of us on the kitchen table playing banjo and accordion. Here we are on bonfire night, each trapped in a ring of sparks. There's the one of us in the river that day he very nearly drowned. They illustrate my story, our story, but what does it mean to remember other than to recount the tale? "Not much," he agrees. We talk about the old house, a dilapidated terrace with holes in the roof and a history of hauntings. As well as buckets catching rainwater, the attic was still littered with the previous occupant's religious paraphernalia and relics of exorcism. We were next door to a fish and chip shop. The lavatory was 30 yards away across someone else's backyard. Remember? Of course he does; it's part of us. I tell him if the street hadn't been demolished I'd be back there excavating, looking for relics of myself in the bricks and tiles and corrugated iron fences. "I remember the carpet," my brother says.
