tentatively, beginnings

ch. 2 of an unpublished work in progress entitled anamneses: memoirs in search of a subject

JUST HOW FAR BACK does it go, this self that can be derailed by such chance encounters, only to be put back on track again, and again, and again - a very long division with remainder? What is it Walter Benjamin says in One-Way Street?

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations! What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations, what horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below, where the deepest shafts are reserved for what is most commonplace?

Nanny and Grandad, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, lived next door to Nana and Pa their entire married lives until Grandad went to New Zealand after Nanny died when I was twelve. Their house on Hill Rise in Greenford on the western fringes of London is a scattering of sharply focused remembrances, metonyms that stand for but never quite add up to a whole. The white porcelain toilet with the worn wooden seat and the hanging chain I couldn't reach. The bone-handled table knife, sharpened down the years to a third its original size, that Nanny always used for chopping parsley. The stench of the rabbit I once watched her gut, its intestines steaming in a bucket on the back steps. Her fat white thighs wobbling as she fastened her suspenders, one leg up on the bed, an endless fascination. Pinky-gray powder puffs on perspiring flesh.

A box of buttons, big and small, ornate and plain, wood and cloth, brass and bone, tipped out on the counterpane, harmless objects to which I took a wholly unreasonable dislike. I still find Bob Hope's signature tune Buttons and Bows vaguely sinister, and not just because with every face lift the man comes more and more to recall Dorian Gray - a deceitful warp, somehow, in the moral fabric of time.

One day nearly half a century later Yoke-Sum tells me she used to collect buttons, all kinds of buttons, as a child. The old memory flits across my mind, and I am suddenly uneasy - as if this were a bad omen. I fear the shadow of the past, the boy tripping up the man.

BBC Radio broadcasts of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and Test Matches between England and Australia. Middlesex, a large and mysterious book with three long lions engraved in gold leaf on the red cloth binding of the cover, over which I spent endless hours poring. The dented brass biscuit barrel, its contents sparingly dispensed with tea. Custard creams, ginger snaps, pink wafers, dark bourbons, which Nanny bought loose from the serried ranks of square glass-topped tins at Woolworth on Greenford Broadway. I still remember the name of the lodger, John Brunston, the slow twinkling red and green lights of the planes coming down at night over London Airport.

Newspapers were laid out on the table, rags (one for cleaning, one for polishing) and fingers turned inexorably black. The milky beige smell of Brasso lingered on the hands long after the keepsakes had been burnished and put back in their places till they were ready to be taken out and handled once more. A Spanish galleon in full sail across a serving-platter, Pa's copper-bound shell cases from Bapaume or Wipers or Verdun.

I was four - five at most. It must have been on a weekend because we drove down to Greenford from the flat in Kilburn in the black Austin Seven instead of going by tube. I had been playing in the rightaway behind the house where I got into an altercation with another boy. I boasted that I threw sand in his face - which I hadn't. It was a handful of ivy, ripped off a wall. Dad demanded I say sorry. I refused. He called me names! Dad promptly turned me upside down over his knee. Trying to impress Grandad, I suppose. It is the only time I recall either of my parents ever laying a hand on me. My bottom throbbed in the back of the car all the way home.

I was sent to bed without any dinner, in the room where the mustard gas rubbed its back against the window panes. The yellow seeped in from the sodium lamp outside. Often, in that room, I was frightened by car headlights scanning the ceiling.

Later that night my mother brought me my dinner on a wooden tray upon which she had carefully arranged my toy dogs.

A MOTIF, A REFRAIN, echoing down the years, shifting its shape with the times. One of those tunes you can't get out of your head no matter how hard you try.

My cabinet of curiosities contains some undoubted perversities, salted away from prying eyes when my years were still numbered in single digits. An illustration in one of my father's few books of a guard in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp flicking away with a bamboo cane at the naked buttocks of a British officer, first the right and then the left, until - I have not forgotten the description - they were a mass of bloody weals. What impressed me most was that all the while the soldier continued to squat stoically, weaving baskets. I was equally captivated by a drawing in our Latin primer of a boy supported on the shoulders of four of his fellows as his tutor flogged his bare backside with a bundle of ferulae. Our form master, the hearty, popular, and occasionally apoplectic Mr Trett, told us how they did things properly in those days. Small boys like us were whipped, naked, in the marketplace in Sparta to make them into men.

Punishment will come whenever I desire to give it. You need not be disobedient to merit it. I will punish when it pleases me. Sometimes that will be the only reason for it.

The sufferings of Job. Nearer my God to Thee.

Thirty odd years later, sipping an ouzo in the empty square with the orange trees, I remembered them - the Spartan boys, I mean. A sleepy town in the Peloponnese, with precious few ruins to show for all that ancient bravado. Remember the baths by which you were slain, warns the epigraph to the third poem in George Seferis's Mythical Story:

I awoke with this marble head in my hands
which exhausts my elbows and I do not know where to set it
down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our lives joined and it will be very difficult to part them.

I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed
I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak
I hold the cheeks which have passed beyond the skin.
I have no more strength.

My hands disappear and come back to me
mutilated.

Seferis belongs with Prévert and Apollinaire among the Penguin Modern European Poets alongside Kerouac and Eliot and the other denizens of Amsterdam's mists. I stole this particular volume, Four Greek Poets, from the SPCK Bookstore in the church beside Rochester Cathedral when I was sixteen. The slim Penguins slipped so easily into the inside pocket of my school blazer. I no more knew what Mythical Story was about then than I did Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna or Desolation Row - and nor, for the same reasons, did I care. A couple of years later, as an undergraduate at Essex University, I persuaded myself it was an allegory of modern alienation.

The poem speaks to me now of the poignancy of recollection, which is undoubtedly both mythic and storied; of the necessity and impossibility of connecting presents with pasts; of the burdens of memories that are ours - yet not.

Having known this fate of ours so well
wandering around among broken stones, three or six thousand
years
searching in collapsed buildings which might have been our
homes
trying to remember dates and heroic deeds:
shall we now be able?

A bus ride above Sparta lies Mystras, a once prospering Byzantine town of maybe forty thousand people, vacant today save for a few Orthodox nuns and monks, reminders of just how far east this cradle of western civilization has traveled in the millennia that have slipped by since they whipped small boys in the marketplace. Doe-eyed saints keep watch in the silent churches. Greece is an affront to narrative proprieties, Myceneans and Macedonians, Byzantines and Franks, Venetians and Ottomans all indecently layered in a riot of ancient miscegenations. Pausanias may still serve as a reliable guide as you hear the pipes of Homer's shepherd on the dry slopes above Mycenae, walk the broad-paved streets of Old Corinth in the footsteps of Saint Paul. Or not.

One Wednesday afternoon when we were lining up for games another pupil, Kevin or Michael or Richard Phair was his name, slipped down his gym shorts in the playground to show off the souvenirs of the caning he had received the night before. A slight fair-haired kid, not the sort to get into trouble. The neat red stripes were already turning purply-blue. I can still feel the pang of jealousy I felt then. I was especially envious of the fact that the discipline was administered at bedtime, over pajamas, an intimacy of cane and bottom day boys like myself would never know.

I learned why rattan was favored as an instrument of corporal punishment not long afterwards, when I got three strokes from Mr Jameson the junior school headmaster for scrumping strawberries from a farmer's field. I must have been nine. The last thing I saw before I assumed the time-honored position was other small boys' faces eagerly pressed up against the glass panel in the door. Remembering the brave British officer and my nameless Roman predecessor, I determined not to cry.

Manliness. That night, my mother made me chicken noodle soup. Afterwards, I secretly inspected the marks on my behind in the bathroom mirror.

IT BEGINS QUIETLY AND MODESTLY on the organ, without a hint of the splendor that is to come. Swaying, lightly building,

dadadadadadadada dadadadadadadada
dadadadadadadada dadadadadadadada
dadadadadadadada dadadadadadadada

Then, crashing in on that high F in full-throated fortissimo in glorious unison, the choir.

Za-dok the priest
and Na-than the pro-phet
anoin-ted Sol-omon king

Seldom have I been so transported. Except, differently, by the fragile, ethereal beauty of Charles Villiers Stanford's Magnificat in G, the soaring treble solo line sung by my friends, Steve (or was it perhaps Peter?) May, Andrew Potts, who had voices of a quality I did not. Except, differently again, in the rising cadences of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, joyfully belted out by choir and congregation at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols every Christmastide. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light ...

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

One Maundy Thursday the Queen herself came - the first time the service, at which once upon a time monarchs used to wash commoners' feet, had been celebrated outside Westminster Abbey in centuries. I could have reached out and touched her.

Six weeks of summer holidays apart, I sung for my supper in Rochester Cathedral every day for six years from age eight. This paid for my education at what in England is known as a public and everywhere else as a private school, supposedly the second oldest in the land founded by Bishop Justus in 604 AD.

Sing we then the school of Roffa,
for Roffensians proud are we.
Sing the school of saintly Justus,
first to plant the stately tree.

Choir practice took place every morning at eight fifteen before school in the room at the top of Gundulf's Tower lined floor to ceiling with brown cardboard box files stuffed with motets, anthems, masses, Te Deums, Magnificats, Nunc Dimitises, Stanford, Gibbons, Purcell, Howells, Palestrina, Byrd. Every weekday at four, Saturdays at three fifteen, Evensong. Sunday Matins at ten thirty, Holy Communion at eleven fifteen, Evensong at three fifteen. Christmas Day started with a choir practice at nine. Weddings and funerals, for which we got a half crown or even five shillings each, were extra. I loved it.

The cathedral is cavernous cold spaces and high windows colored and clear - the long plain Norman stonework of the nave, the narrow stretching upwardness of the quire.

It is also intimacies. The mustiness of hassocks worn threadbare by shuffling knees, the shine on priestly cassocks, the smallness of The Book of Common Prayer. The little moveable cards, white on black, on the board by the pulpit that spelled out the Hymns of the Day. The hot tiny crowdedness of the organ loft where if you had a cold and couldn't sing you got to turn the pages and watch the choirmaster's feet and fingers fly, snatching the smooth wooden stops with names like Diapason black lettered on ivory. The smell in the vestry, fresh sweat from running from school to make the service on time, the stale odor of infrequently washed robes. The vergers' room at the bottom of Gundulf's Tower, warm as toast from the iron stove in the corner, where one spring when I took to cycling in to swim in the icy school pool at seven in the morning I was allowed to eat my breakfast. Soggy with sardines or tomatoes or eggs, Mum's sandwiches always came in a waxed Sunblest bread wrapper.

Moss on the wooden gate to the cloisters from Minor Canon Row - the sheer dampness of England, which instantly floods back the moment I step out of the terminal, sniff the air at Heathrow, walk around the quad at St Peter's, a great wave of nostalgia.

The cloisters lawn, where I once put a cricket ball through a medieval window. The small sunken garden with the wooden benches where we used to talk to Rusty Willard. An old man with a floral waistcoat and a stick, his face and its prominent nose ruddy with a fine tracery of broken veins and capillaries, he was there in the cloisters every Saturday and we would wile away the hours with him between the end of Saturday morning school and Evensong. Rusty always had time for small boys. Too much time by half, my parents thought. When I proposed to invite him one year to our Guy Fawkes Night bonfire party they were only too happy. Rusty came bearing a large box of fireworks and his usual good cheer. They seemed reassured.

Children live in the same world as adults but are not of it - and vice versa. Just as the child is, and is not, the father of the man.

When old Joe Levitt, the irascible stand-in for Robert Ashfield the choirmaster, heard that we had debagged one of our number - chased him and caught him and pulled his trousers and underpants down - he solemnly lectured us on the lewdness of our behavior. Levitt was disgusted. So was I. At Levitt, in his greasy black suit. It was him who was making something filthy out of it with his dirty mind.

I loved Andrew Potts's lithe amber body. We called him Panda. His mother was of mixed race, from the West Indies where Father Potts had a parish as a young man. The cane was a fixture in their household too. The boys, Panda told me, got it on their bare bums, which excited my usual envy.

When I say I loved Panda's body, that feeling was intense, unselfconscious, and quite without shame. I wanted to stroke his skin. Just like I wanted to take the pain of the cramps Steve May got in his calves, the agonizing pain he told me his doctor father massaged away, for myself. Children are not asexual beings. There is though a world of difference between the child's and the adult's sexualities: and this old Levitt failed to grasp. We misleadingly call it innocence: that part of ourselves we leave behind - or at any rate refigure - in the passage through puberty. Only the memories trail.

The ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again
and smile in a strange silence.

Is this why the treble voice is so uniquely affecting, so precariously beautiful? It is quite different in timbre to the female soprano. Only two women I have heard come close. One is Nellie Melba in her 1906 recording of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. She had a voice of unearthly purity, plucking those high notes unerringly out of thin air. The other is Alison Stamp in a translucent performance of Allegri's Miserere, which the young Mozart supposedly stole from the Vatican, recorded in King's College, Cambridge. The sunlight pierces the shadows. She sounds just like a boy.

Is what touches us, perhaps, something metaphorical - the doomed perfection of a voice that is always on the edge of breaking, its fleeting beauty supported by the slenderest column of air? An intimation of mortality, a walk through the valley of the shadow of death, in the cherubic pipings of a ten- or twelve-year-old child?

I used to go carol singing every Christmas, privateering. In a couple hours I would make what my father earned in half a week. Women invited me into their houses to sing under their trees, lavished me with candy, cookies, mince pies, coins. Then there came a time, round about thirteen, when I longed for my child's voice to snap. I had already looked in the windows of coffee bars, smoked my first cigarette.

ALWAYS THE BODY: growing out of things, changing, the first hairs between the legs. Now it is the first creakings of age, white hairs that can no longer be ignored flecking the brown. Stiffness in the shoulders when I wake, the bleeding of gums and hemorrhoids. Occasional troublesome murmurings in the chest.

Fifty isn't old, boy! pronounces Dad on the phone from Burnham-on-Crouch, six thousand miles and half a lifetime away. He turned eighty this year. The accent I grew up with grates on me, it sounds harsh to my North American ears. It is the year 2000 and my friend Daniel, the last of the long-haired boys, has been dead more than two years already. What frightens me most is the prospect of my body unhinging my mind.

Nana made it to one hundred two with her marbles intact. Pa was long gone and so were Nanny, dead from a stroke at fifty-three, and Grandad. I last saw Nana on her hundredth birthday. I flew down from Glasgow with the largest bottle of gin I could find and the first pictures of her first great-great-grandchild, my daughter Natasha. Pretty girl, she approved. Now don't you be having any more just yet! A man shouldn't have no more than he can afford! She went on to quiz me on my knowledge of the preservatives, as she called them, you could get to prevent accidents these days. Nana's own last child, my mother's Uncle Lou, arrived unplanned and unexpected when she was already in her mid-forties. The old girl, as Dad called her, used to frighten the life out of me when I was a kid, unfailingly greeting me with the words And what are YOU doing here? I couldn't connect to the kindness under the rough exterior. Years later she would send me the occasional ten bob note saved from her pension with the instruction Buy yourself a packet of fags.

The copy of Puck of Pook's Hill that sits on my bookshelf is an accidental survivor of my childhood. It was given to me by Mickey Chance, the head chorister, who took me under his wing. Mickey too is long dead. He blew his mind out in a car around the time the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. So did my friend Jon Cooper, reaching down for a dropped steak pie while driving his father's Jaguar too fast. He was seventeen. The funeral was held in the cathedral. I remember his mother's stiff gray face. I remember his elder brother Robert's riotous drag queen performance as Lady Bracknell in our school play a couple years earlier.

A handbag?

I most vividly remember the young soldier I met just that once at Jon's funeral and went for a beer with afterwards at the Marquis of Lorne, his face crisscrossed with stitches, the hitchhiker Jon gave a lift to that night. But I remember little of Jonathan. Or of Mickey, come to that.

Inside the cover, the letters neatly joined-up in a large and loopy hand that bears little resemblance to mine, is written

D. G. Sayer,
1, Dashmonden Close,
WAINSCOTT,
KENT.

3.A. King's School, Rochester.

Above it, using a ruler, I have carefully crossed out

M. H. V. CHANCE.
SILVER BIRCHES,
TELEGRAPH HILL,
HIGHAM,
KENT.

The pencilled inscription is faint but still legible. To D. SAYER. The third form - I would have been ten.

A frequent companion in those days was a boy who lived across the street who was also named Derek, or Durrrk, as it sounded when pronounced by his German mother, a bride brought back from the postwar occupation. I didn't know what to make of her. The War hadn't finished for me. German bombs fell on Wainscott, floating down like colored lights into the dream as I struggled to wake up out of the dream. Durrrk's mom put sugared water on lettuce, not salad cream.

Foreigners weren't too common back then. I recall only two at my school, Kofi Bonsu, black as the ace of spades, a wizard fly half, and (Ben?) Arbenz, who came second in the alphabet after Akester. We knew him as The Yid. Only very much later did I learn what the epithet meant. His parents came from Austria. My mother's cousin Jimmy, who had a gammy shoulder from the polio, was another of our family who found his way to New Zealand. He consternated us all when he picked up a Filipina wife en route. Lolita was her name. Nana showed us the pictures. She's not too brown. On the other hand, she's not too white either. Or was it the other way round?

Two-Way Family Favorites, every Sunday lunchtime on the BBC Light Programme, well into the sixties. Tunes for our boys in Suez, Malaya, Cyprus, BFPO 13, 40, 21. Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, tomorrow I'll miss you. PS I love you.

The whole world changed, I think, around the time my voice broke.

The other Derek went to St Andrew's, which, he gleefully told me when we were pissing up against a wall one day, was a dirty school. Did I know about jam rags (sanitary napkins) and rubber johnnies (condoms)? No, I did not, and nor at the time did I very much want to.

Always the body.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

STRUGGLING MANY YEARS LATER to explain myself to a woman with whom I was deeply in love though I didn't know it yet, I found myself relating this memory.

We crawled out of the window of Gundulf's Tower, shinned up an iron ladder, crossed a flying buttress on a second ladder with rotting wooden rungs, and climbed over the parapet using three iron hoops set asymmetrically in the stone. Each step in this adventure had its own particular fear. A door, which was always left unlocked, led under the eaves of the cathedral roof. There must have been lighting, weak bare electric bulbs. Wooden catwalks crossed deep shadowed pits, the upper side of the perpendicular vaulting in the quire far below.

It reminded me of the Mines of Moria, where Merry - or was it Pippin? - drawn to the darkness against his will, dropped the stone down the well-shaft that brought the orcs and wakened the Balrog.

O blessed Meriadoc! cried Pippin as the fragrance of freshly-picked mushrooms arose from the covered basket. Following a bout of yellow jaundice I couldn't eat fried foods for two years. One day when Mum was sick my father's drinking buddy Bert, a small weasely man who had been a navy cook during The War, came over and made her his specialty. It just had to be mushroom omelet. He expertly sliced the fungi, fried them in butter. The smell was heavenly.

We reached the bell tower where thick candy-striped ropes dangled down for the ringers. Another ladder, so steep as to be almost vertical, led upward to a heavy trap-door in the floor of the belfry. The only way to open this trap-door, if you were eleven or twelve, was to turn around and lift it with your shoulders. This required letting go of the ladder. I was the first, from my generation of choristers anyway, to set eyes on the bells in their giant wheels and touch the hands of the immense clock one hundred fifty feet above the ground.

The quire and transepts were later additions built onto the Norman nave whose massive circular arches have stood in their place now for nine tenths of a millennium. The roof of the nave, I would guess, is about six feet lower than the roof of the north transept. The parapet around the transept takes in only three sides of a square; the fourth is cut off by the bell tower. To get onto the nave roof you must jump down across the right angle where the nave joins the transept. If you miss you will plummet twenty feet or more onto another roof covering the side aisle of the nave. If you succeed there is no way you can climb back. For these reasons I don't think it had ever occurred to anyone to attempt that ridiculous leap. The west roof, and the two towers at its far end that had doors leading to the clerestory below, remained terra incognita.

One day I jumped. Less because I wasn't afraid to than because I was. The recollection of it makes my stomach churn even now - especially now, when I have two children of my own.

I don't think this particular to boldly go was quite what Wittgenstein had in mind in the famous closing sentences of the Tractatus. But for me, at least, there is a vertiginous connection.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Pure chutzpah. But yes, that was me. That is why I communicated the memory to her. Let me be more precise. I hadn't given the cathedral roof a thought in thirty years - it was the urgency of communicating myself that suddenly brought the memory streaming back, unbidden.

WHAT, THEN, DOES IT MEAN to say I remember?

To remember is not an act of volition, except at the most superficial level - remember her birthday, remember to buy the milk. Remembering is scarcely an act at all. I can try to make memories, rig the triggers that will bring them back: the photo album, the home video, the mnemonic devices we use to recall telephone numbers or facts for an exam. Even these memoranda cheat us: in the end it turns out to be the snapshots we remember, not the vacation.

If I concentrate hard enough, sometimes I am able to trawl my mind and bring back something I know I once knew but have since forgotten. This is not straightforward either. Recently, I went from a tune without words to the unique texture of two voices intermingling in my head - Was it Frank and Nancy Sinatra? - to dadadadadadada I love you, but the title of the song still eluded me. Something Stupid popped into my mind ten minutes later, when I had given up trying to remember and was thinking of something else. Otherwise - which is to say, most of the time - I can no more summon up memories on demand than I can command myself to forget.

The sense in which it is I who remembers is akin to the sense in which it is I who breathes - or who dreams. To dream, I must sleep. Only when I recollect the dream next morning - which does not happen very often in my case - do I make it my own. It might almost be more accurate then to say I am remembered. Memories flow through me, and it is most certainly not me who is directing the flow.

And yet - it is precisely in that uncontrollable flow that the I who remembers is also constituted. We say of a man with amnesia that he has forgotten who he is. In this sense the self always is a memory. There is an I who can remember only because there is an I who is recalled. Who is called back.

I only have one language, says Derrida, yet it is not mine.

Burt Bacharach songs are playing on the stereo, making me feel mushy.