Photograph or memory?

I've been thinking about memory lately, about how and what we remember, about what is real and what just a construct from long-heard stories and family pictures.

Memory is not trustworthy. I remember a time when I thought that everything I remembered was true, but then my brother said, do you remember the time I dared you to pull your pants down at your bedroom window? And I didn’t. I know I didn’t.

Then there are photographs. Do I remember sitting on the top of Beachy Head with the calor gas stove boiling water for tea, or is it just because I’ve seen the photograph in the album so many times, my brother and I smiling up at the camera and my Dad reaching out towards the boot of the car? My memory of Beachy Head is wrapped around with a strong wind, though, bending us double so that we run back from the edge and crouch behind the car so that the flame from the stove doesn’t go out, so that must be another time. We went to Eastbourne every year for my whole life, I once thought, but now I realise that it can only have been for two, or maybe three, years in a row. I know that one of them was in 1976, because it was a family joke that we went on holiday for the only week of that summer when it rained.

I remember standing on the school field that year, the unaccustomed heat of the air keeping me in one place, Stephanie Yates running up and announcing a new temperature high. It seemed very significant, and a bit scary.

Is it only because of photographs that I remember certain things, though? Not necessarily the action in the photograph, but what was happening close around. There’s one of my brother and I sitting on a ladder which is leaning up against a wall, a small wooden ladder with six rungs that was as familiar as the apple tree and the garage door. It is only me, however, that can remember that, before the photo was taken, I sat on the bottom rung and looked up at my brother, a four year old hero, sitting all the way up on the dizzying heights of the top rung, level with the top of the garden wall.

My first ever memories are bracketed with photographs. My Dad holding me on his hip, his hair still dark. I am wearing a blue-checked dress and my blondeish hair is blowing across my eyes. What you wouldn’t know is that we drove down to Newquay in our Morris Traveller. No seatbelts in those days, and the back seat had a flat back which opened into the boot. I think we played the game all of the way down. I would close my eyes, and my brother would lean over and hide a tissue in amongst the suitcases. Then I would lean over in my turn to find it. And then we’d exchange roles. And when we got to Newquay, we could see the hotel, but couldn’t reach it through the one way system.

I know from later information that the hotel was owned by friends of my parents, but who they were I don’t know. If it was just memory I was going on, I’d have to say that we never went inside the hotel, ate any meals, or slept. A faceless girl - bigger than me, a daughter of the hotel, I think - sits behind me on a miniature railway, and I cry every time we go past my parents and the train takes me away.

Going home from a holiday is not something that leaves an imprint. Maybe we had run out of film.

I don’t see my brother a lot these days. He puts some photos up on Facebook, old slides which he has digitally transferred. They open up doors into the past, not always the obvious ones. My cousins comment, we feel nostalgic. I even buy a Formica table when I see it at a vintage fair.

One day, my brother may be the only other person to have a window on these moments, one that is open and not just for viewing through. When I think of this, I want to call him, give him a hug. My children look through photographs as well. They say, do you remember when we did this? Sometimes they are remembering things that happened before they were born, travelling on the back of a family tale. But there will always be times when they will look back and, beyond the edges of the photographs, they will remember more than is shown and they will laugh and hug each other.