| The cucumbers on the roof |
|
The mothers came to lunch on Sunday. They cover most of the last century from Zeppelins to e-mails and my mother was telling us the story of how one day she heard my grandmother shouting for help from the garden. There was an air-raid shelter dug into the ground, on the roof of which a thick layer of earth was piled up as additional protection. In the spirit of 'Dig for Victory', my grandmother had planted cucumbers on the roof and had gone out to dig the patch over. She had dug her spade in only to find that she had made contact with the casing of an incendiary bomb, which must have fallen harmlessly in the previous night's air-raid. Fortunately it did not go off in response to my grandmother's direct hit either. The bomb disposal squad was called by my mother in her official, albeit somewhat unlikely, capacity as the air-raid warden for the street and they made it safe. It's the sort of event in life that stays with you. Later that day, I was standing by the sink of one of our student houses washing from my hands the dust from an old wardrobe which I had been breaking up. We needed to replace it and there was no way we could get it down the rather narrow staircase in one piece. It had come with the house, which had been sold to us some years previously by an elderly lady who had lived there for a very long time. And so I suppose the dust I was washing away represented, in some sense, the history of that house. When we meet someone new, of course, they have no idea what our history is. The people who have featured in our lives over the years know the part of our history which they have shared with us and whatever-else we choose to tell them, but friendships come and go and, during even the longest friendships, there are things which will have happened of which the friend will not be aware. And so there is no-one who really knows everything which has happened to me and how I reacted to all those events: not even me. I, who lived through it all, cannot remember everything which has happened to me. My memory of my own life is necessarily very selective. But there is a sense in which everyone knows my history, because the events in my life and how I dealt with them, together with that accident of history, my genome, have made me the person I am today. And so someone who has only known me for a short time sees me for what I am now, rather than seeing what I am now, but through the distorting lens of what I was in the past. For there is no doubt that it takes some time for us to adjust to the changing personality of our friends. But it takes even more time to adjust to our own changing personalities. My initial reaction, for example, is still to think of myself as the tongue-tied adolescent I was with, now, just an artificial veneer of self-confidence. Of course, the reality is that I have long since ceased to be timid and am now probably at my happiest when having a good conversation.
|