Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat and covering
the crossroads I'm standing at,
or maybe its the weather or something like that,
but mama you been on my mind.

There is so much space here that gravity is almost palpable, by the grace of God keeping you from just floating clean off the rim of the planet. Puffy white cumulus clouds march in formation as far as the eye can see, rank upon rank upon rank of them. Out of that limitless blue sky, on summer evenings, the suddenness of thunder, sheet lightning filling the horizon.

A tornado chooses an Edmonton trailer park and leaves twenty-seven dead. It was one of the two biggest events in the history of our city, as unfathomable as the day Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings.

Next day the sun shone again. In winter cars die but the sun still shines out of a clear blue sky at thirty below. There is something oddly moving in the flimsy wooden houses with their vinyl siding and their tar-paper roofs that shelter us against this harsh climate, modern tepees built to last much less than a lifetime - a homeliness in the lack of architectural pretension even in the cities. As if we recognize that this land may be squatted on but never taken possession of - that we are but nomads passing through.

There are few monuments in Alberta, unless you count the deserted barns and homesteads on the back roads slowly turning to humus.

LONG TALL NARROW LONDON HOUSES, at any rate to a child's eyes. One in Hackney, maybe, but it is so out of focus it is barely a recollection at all - my father's father's house. A furrier's bench, silky off-cuts of mink smooth and soft against the skin. Likely I was never there and remember the furs from later. My paternal grandfather died a few months before I was born, nursed by my mother, hardly much more than a girl then herself.

I do remember my father's mother rather sharply from just one visit - that is to say, I remember her surroundings. Herself I don't recall at all - voice, face, nothing, no matter how hard I try. A mental hospital. Green lawns, white verandas, long corridors with dark lacquered hardwood floors. Hatfield?

And "Tea!" she said in a tiny voice
"Wake up! It's nearly five."
Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
Half dead and half alive!

The other house was in Fulham, a square behind the gasworks I think with some imperial name. I call my mother in New Zealand and she tells me Imperial Square at the end of the King's Road, you wouldn't believe how they've tarted up those cottages now, national heritage or something.

What I remember best about the house in Fulham though I wasn't there when it happened and it probably didn't happen in that house anyway was Grandad's mother burning his papers in a fit of anger in the boiler in the kitchen, the ticket that certified he had completed his apprenticeship as a bricklayer. Nanny must have told me the story. I thought it a terrible thing, all those years of work gone up in smoke.

It associates in my mind now with the mad Mrs Rochester locked up in the attic in Jane Eyre and the retelling of her tale by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea - both books I read much later. Was it was the memory of my grandfather's mother, dead before I was born, feeding her son's prospects into the boiler that made the pyromaniac Mrs Rochester so enormously terrifying a figure when I encountered her around the same age at which these events occurred in Grandad's youth - if, that is, these events occurred at all? A sense of déjà vu?

She was a fiery Irishwoman, my mother tells me on the phone.

Where did they come from? I had always thought it was County Cork.

County Tipperary.

The only other literary scenes that have had a comparable power to make my flesh crawl - beginning at the back of my neck and spreading like some evil orgasm down my spine - play on exactly that creepiness of a memory we cannot logically have but do. Like somebody walking on your grave, they used to say in England. They occur in the opening chapters of Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder.

The young heroine, who comes from New Zealand, buys a house on the south coast of England, a country she is visiting for the first time. She keeps walking into the wall at one particular point, as if she knew there was once a door there, the memory encoded in her body. She remembers the wallpaper lining a closet as having a particular pattern - and on impulse peels the layers off, until she finds the wallpaper to be just as she could not possibly have remembered it.

At a West End performance of The Duchess of Malfi a line is uttered on the stage and she begins to scream uncontrollably without knowing why.

I visited the house in Fulham once more in my mid-teens, when Grandad took me with him for a trip up to London. He had lucked out in the New Zealand national lottery, spent an afternoon at the races where he put his winnings on an accumulator, turned up trumps again and come back to England to see his daughter and grandkids. He bought me a Seiko watch. He still called me darling or sweetheart - odd in so masculine a man. It was the Irish in him I suppose. Six months later Dad was promising to push him off Beachy Head with a pair of water wings.

When the money ran out, most of it going straight back to the bookies, Grandad went back to New Zealand and took a job as a night watchman in Auckland Dockyard. One of my vividest memories of him is in overalls and cap dizzyingly high up laying the bricks on the chimney for the power station on the Isle of Sheppey, the square canvas bag in which he packed his flask of sweet tea and sandwiches by his side. Not that I ever saw him at work. It was all in my mind's eye. I remember it just like I remember him smashing my seventeen-year-old mother's operatic 78s because she was getting above herself. Just like I remember the Ypres salient and the Battle of the Somme, the siege of Gondor and the victory on the Pellenor Fields.

Larry Ryan, his name. That trip home was the last time I or my mother saw him - the last time he saw the British Isles.

Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Liecester Square,
it's a long long way to Tipperary,
but my heart's right there.

Though I never liked it - I hate the feel of metal straps round my wrist - I felt I had lost more than the Seiko when it went missing in the bathroom of a French campsite some years later. I had exactly the same sadness, intertwined with a disproportionate sense of guilt, when the cheap blue radio my father gave me when I went to university was stolen. A rare gift, the more precious for that.

This time I have no memory of the house or its inhabitants at all, only the eggs and chips Grandad and I had for lunch there. It has gone down in my mind as the day I discovered I liked fried eggs after all. Now I eat them with Tabasco.

According to Mum I have mixed up two houses and two sets of people in Fulham: Uncle Albert, Grandad's brother; and Aunt Mag, Nana's sister-in-law, who lived with her son Jim. Which and who I visited with Grandad in 1964 or 1965 I don't know, but the childhood memory is crystal clear. Up, up, up the stairs to Aunt Mag, in black like Queen Victoria on pennies that still turned up in the pockets once in a while in the fifties, the worn head of the widow heavy with grief hanging on way past its time. Fid. Def. Ind. Imp.

That I do remember, and have pegged all else to it - places, people, and tales told by others, all coalescing in one tall London house that never was.

[...]

THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO MEASURE the closeness between Tobermory and Penang. How do I love thee? Let me count the strokes.

India Pale Ale. Burma cheroots. Singapore Sling, invented in the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore - G & T, the gin watered with quinine-laced tonic to ward off malaria in saloon bars the length and breadth of the Home Counties. Major Grey's Chutney, Earl Grey's Tea. Kandy, Darjeeling, Simla shipped home in plywood chests out of which my father jerrybuilt cupboards for the kitchen when he and Mum were first married. Bengal Lights, long matches you could buy in the weeks leading up to Guy Fawkes Night that flared red and blue and green round the bonfire.

Remember remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder treason and plot.

Uncle Lou used to come down from time to time with the malarial shivers, a souvenir of wartime days with the Somerset Light Infantry in India and Burma. A less likely soldier is difficult to imagine. He lived for his greenhouse and the one day a year when he got to perform in drag on the London stage for the Boy Scouts' Gang Show. When I think of Lou it is hair brylcreemed back, pipe in hand, Strolling, just strolling By the light of the silvery moon. He lived with Nana and Pa till he was past forty when he suddenly upped and married a large woman named Lil who had boys of her own. There were sniggers. Run, rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.

The Two Fat Ladies with voices full of Victoria plums prepare an English breakfast of kippers and kidneys and kedgeree washed down with copious cups of tea. By roads not adopted, by woodlanded ways, they ride on motorbike and sidecar to the home of the British Army to cook for the officer corps, ghurkas in attendance. Betjeman country, this -

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun.

A Subaltern's Love Song must surely be one of the most erotic poems in the language. But it is a very local, intensely English eroticism - one expects the vicar to show up any moment looking just like Hugh Grant with the floppy hair and the loopy smile in Sirens -

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn

-- a queerly English eroticism, with just the faintest smidgeon of la vice anglaise. Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand! We might be forgiven for thinking the word gaily had already taken on the connotations it was to assume on the other shore of the Atlantic some decades later. Rather wide of the mark, old boy.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts.

Sunday breakfast, Dad's fry-up, at 1 Dashmonden Close or 6 Medway Road. Less fancy than the Two Fat Ladies', but as a treat with the bacon and eggs and sausages we sometimes got lambs' kidneys. Ah, the fine tang of faintly scented urine! On the table was HP Sauce, compounded of the Houses of Parliament, malt vinegar, dates, refiner's molasses, tomato paste, tamarinds, garlic, and spices in the square bottle with the white cap that hasn't changed in fifty years.

The same Indian trinity provides the kicker in that most quintessentially English of condiments, invented in 1830 by two Worcester pharmacists to soothe the palate of a local nobleman homesick for Bengal. The Original and Genuine Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce -

tamarinds and garlic and spices!
tamarinds and garlic and spices!!
tamarinds and garlic and spices!!!

- a chorus-line for an English Wizard of Oz as we all skip on down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire with Clive at Plassey with Gordon at Khartoum with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, with The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, with Harry Wharton and Bob Cherry and Frank Nugent and Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, with Lou and Lil and Miss J. Hunter Dunn, doing the Lambeth walk.

Dyb dyb dyb
dob dob dob
Akela we'll do our best,

won't we?

Fancy a cuppa? Nary a tea leaf ever grew on the chalk Sussex Downs where Puck interrupted Dan and Una's midsummer night's dream with his wondrous pageant of England's mongrel history, a riot up and down the globe. Rudyard Kipling lived for a time in Rottingdean - I remember the strange name from childhood holidays at Seaford; an impression of nondescript respectable villas crowding the hillside. How many corpses sleep beneath those herbaceous borders, awaiting their Miss Marple?

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be-
by the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

On a clear day, from Beachy Head, you can see New Zealand.

I rented a bicycle in Tobermory and flew over high moors past long cleared crofts to Calgary, a slip of shining sand on the very edge of the western ocean. From Calgary it is a fast hour's drive to the Scottish turrets of the Banff Springs Hotel, the jewel in the crown of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Nawab of Pataudi knocking them for six at Lords - ever the English gentleman that Harold Larwood was never. But it was the Nottinghamshire miner as won us the Ashes with his bodyline bowling Down Under.

Ancestral memories, these. The Empire - a music hall, a variety theater.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall.

AFTER SEX, SHE SAID, I think of High Windows. You know, just a couple of kids fucking. I remember the poem, and the book it came from, one of those wafer thin Faber and Fabers I thought so intellectual at sixteen.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.

I am not young, nor really is she, and what we have is more complicated than happiness. But I know what she means. I think. Or maybe Larkin's poem resonates with me for quite different reasons that come together in the moment. It isn't just that (as she assures me) the lines that furrow my face disappear after sex and she briefly forgets the million and one responsibilities she owes to herself and others - that once in a way we are just two carefree kids enjoying ourselves again.

There has always been that miraculous understanding between us, punctuating the pomposities with which we are surrounded, letting slip gales of laughter. Enjoying ourselves. At ease with ourselves as neither of us has ever been able to be with anyone else. You are like my own skin, she once told me.

My beloved student.

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. As I am doing now, perhaps. Philip Larkin can be a sour old bastard. But how sublimely the poem ends, leaping from here to eternity:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Beyond the glass the sky. The same blue sky we see reflected back at us in the eye that fills the canvas in Magritte's The False Mirror.

There is the word pipe and the painted image of the pipe, neither of which actually is a pipe. Somewhere beyond, outside the picture, there are real pipes from which the word and the image derive their solidity - yet to which neither the word nor the image ever adequately corresponds. You cannot smoke the word, tamp down the tobacco in the image. Still a pipe is a pipe, not just a meaningless assemblage of wood or clay. It has a name. It conjures up images. The soldiers smoking in the trenches, Pa and Uncle Lou smoking in the front room in Sittingbourne, Merry and Pippin smoking in the wreckage of Isengard. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien smoking in their rumpled tweed jackets with the leather elbow-patches as they dream up old worlds together in the snug in the Eagle and Child in Oxford where I drank once with Philip and Daniel. Ripped out of these cascading significances it wouldn't begin to be a pipe either, would it now?

If I close my eyes I can hear that quizzical, ever-so-slightly mocking chuckle in Dan's voice - the one that likely cost him tenure in Arizona. He could be in the room with me now, standing, as he usually contrived to do, somewhere slightly on the edge. But he is not.

The endlessness of the sky, the endlessness of language - I could be confected of every song I have ever heard, every landscape I have glimpsed from a train or a truck or a plane, every morsel of food I have ever put in my mouth, every book I have read, every kiss, every touch. But I am not. I could so easily dissolve into the vastnesses - fly through high windows like Chet Baker and float clean off the rim of the planet. But I do not.

I do not, because this here is not a pipe - however much it may resemble one.

Our memories are not the things we remember. The things we remember no longer exist. We compose ourselves out of the traces those things have left in us - fragments snagged in the net we cast over the tumult of our lives as they ineluctably and forever escape us.

Blue skies, nothing but blue skies. Empires on which the sun never sets. And at the center of Magritte's eye, a great gaping black hole.

La condition humaine. The illusion of identity - being in denial.