I was contacting my six year old's schoolbooks over the weekend and by complete coincidence my mum arrived with an enormous sack of musty, dusty old books that had been mine when I was around the same age. They'd turned up in a cupboard on Tamborine Mountain and she thought I should have them.
There were a number of things inside that sack that I'd completely forgotten: it may interest you to know, for instance, that my social studies scrapbook from the mid 1980s contains a brief unit on 'Head lice and how to get rid of them', complete with a six step illustrated guide. For your edification, step two, 'Use special shampoo twice in one week', is underlined, so I gather that bit's rather important. Such useful personal grooming tips can be found sprinkled amongst units as diverse as 'How to make a light bulb light up' and 'I could help a disabled person this way'. I've listed (and illustrated!) ten ways to help disabled people, but I've asterisked and underlined number seven, 'Be Nice.' Which seems like pretty good advice when dealing with people in general.
I couldn't help wondering how my dad felt about the little essay I wrote about him:
'My father's name is Warren. He is about forty-six years old. [Dad was actually 34 at the time] He is an engineer. He likes beer, picnics and watching the news.'
It's illustrated, and he's looking up from the television set to smile. The teacher has given me a 'Very Good' stamp and added 'Well written! Neat work!' I have made a mental note to check my son's parental essays before they go back to school for marking and judgement (of his parents, I mean.)
My favourite find was a little book, hand-cut and stapled by the teacher, its cover made from brown swirly floral wallpaper, circa 1974. I remember being rather awed by that wallpaper cover: it had a lustre to it back then, so the brown was almost golden in that classic seventies way. The passing decades have stripped it to matte, but I still felt an echo of reverence as I held it in my hands. We were not a wallpaper family, and I always felt a little envious of those who were. On the front of my special book, I've printed the title 'My Hobbies', and inside, in very careful handwriting, I've written that my hobby is being a ballerina and then outlined in great detail the times and days that I attend ballet lessons. And clarinet lessons. And then the contingencies if I couldn't make one of those lessons and needed to make it up. I did not have much of a nose for narrative back then, but the handwriting is very neat. On the final page, I came across the following:
'Another hobby of mine is reading and writing. At the show in 1982 I came first in my writing. I like writing the best out of them both.'
Which made me happy, because I've always felt slightly odd when other writers started speaking about how they always knew they wanted to be writers. It turns out I did too, only I'd forgotten about it for a time.
As I went through those books, alongside the things that had slipped my memory completely were certain pages I remembered vividly. As in, where I'd been sitting when I'd worked on them, mistakes I'd made and how I felt about them, bits that made me proud. The distance between now and then was missing, somehow, and I was able, almost, to reach out and touch my seven year old self. I don't need much urging to think about memory and the way it ties us to the past, and I've been wondering what it is about some experiences that makes them so easily retrievable. Traumatic or exciting events I can understand: but why remember the moment spent sitting at the kitchen bench, eating sultanas and shading around the illustration of a girl having her hair combed for lice, when so many other similar moments are lost?
And, when I'd returned to covering school books and I was doing that thing with the ruler that gets the bubbles out of contact, I had the happy but also kind of melancholy wondering as to whether my son, decades from now, will pull out the notebooks that his mum covered for him, dust them off, and turn their pages once more. What will he have written or drawn inside? Will he look back at the copious drawings of A380 planes and remember his dream of being a pilot? Will he perhaps be a pilot? And will there be certain pages that draw him, as if by a thread, back to the moment when he sat, six years old, in a damp classroom, and the days seemed to stretch eternally, and his lunch was waiting for him in his bag, and the future seemed endless? I hope so.
***
In the mail yesterday--the real mail, I mean, the sort with envelopes covered by handwriting and stamps and fingerprints--I received a copy of Beverley Nichols's Cry Havoc; his anti-war missive published in 1933. For anyone interested in the Mitford sisters, Cry Havoc is the book that Jessica (Decca) rated so highly in Hons and Rebels and that earned a place on her socialist bookshelf in the room she shared with Unity. I adore Nichols's writing--his memoir of the 1920s, The Sweet and Twenties is a brilliant and thoughtful read--so I have very high hopes for this one. I'll let you know as soon as I'm finished.
***
Finally, thank you so much to everyone who sent lovely messages about my books. Writing is my favourite and my best (as Lola from Charlie and Lola would say), and to know that you enjoy the books makes me very happy indeed.
Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 2:34PM ;)
Memory musings, new books, and useful personal grooming tips
I was contacting my six year old's schoolbooks over the weekend and by complete coincidence my mum arrived with an enormous sack of musty, dusty old books that had been mine when I was around the same age. They'd turned up in a cupboard on Tamborine Mountain and she thought I should have them.
There were a number of things inside that sack that I'd completely forgotten: it may interest you to know, for instance, that my social studies scrapbook from the mid 1980s contains a brief unit on 'Head lice and how to get rid of them', complete with a six step illustrated guide. For your edification, step two, 'Use special shampoo twice in one week', is underlined, so I gather that bit's rather important. Such useful personal grooming tips can be found sprinkled amongst units as diverse as 'How to make a light bulb light up' and 'I could help a disabled person this way'. I've listed (and illustrated!) ten ways to help disabled people, but I've asterisked and underlined number seven, 'Be Nice.' Which seems like pretty good advice when dealing with people in general.
I couldn't help wondering how my dad felt about the little essay I wrote about him:
It's illustrated, and he's looking up from the television set to smile. The teacher has given me a 'Very Good' stamp and added 'Well written! Neat work!' I have made a mental note to check my son's parental essays before they go back to school for marking and judgement (of his parents, I mean.)
My favourite find was a little book, hand-cut and stapled by the teacher, its cover made from brown swirly floral wallpaper, circa 1974. I remember being rather awed by that wallpaper cover: it had a lustre to it back then, so the brown was almost golden in that classic seventies way. The passing decades have stripped it to matte, but I still felt an echo of reverence as I held it in my hands. We were not a wallpaper family, and I always felt a little envious of those who were. On the front of my special book, I've printed the title 'My Hobbies', and inside, in very careful handwriting, I've written that my hobby is being a ballerina and then outlined in great detail the times and days that I attend ballet lessons. And clarinet lessons. And then the contingencies if I couldn't make one of those lessons and needed to make it up. I did not have much of a nose for narrative back then, but the handwriting is very neat. On the final page, I came across the following:
Which made me happy, because I've always felt slightly odd when other writers started speaking about how they always knew they wanted to be writers. It turns out I did too, only I'd forgotten about it for a time.
As I went through those books, alongside the things that had slipped my memory completely were certain pages I remembered vividly. As in, where I'd been sitting when I'd worked on them, mistakes I'd made and how I felt about them, bits that made me proud. The distance between now and then was missing, somehow, and I was able, almost, to reach out and touch my seven year old self. I don't need much urging to think about memory and the way it ties us to the past, and I've been wondering what it is about some experiences that makes them so easily retrievable. Traumatic or exciting events I can understand: but why remember the moment spent sitting at the kitchen bench, eating sultanas and shading around the illustration of a girl having her hair combed for lice, when so many other similar moments are lost?
And, when I'd returned to covering school books and I was doing that thing with the ruler that gets the bubbles out of contact, I had the happy but also kind of melancholy wondering as to whether my son, decades from now, will pull out the notebooks that his mum covered for him, dust them off, and turn their pages once more. What will he have written or drawn inside? Will he look back at the copious drawings of A380 planes and remember his dream of being a pilot? Will he perhaps be a pilot? And will there be certain pages that draw him, as if by a thread, back to the moment when he sat, six years old, in a damp classroom, and the days seemed to stretch eternally, and his lunch was waiting for him in his bag, and the future seemed endless? I hope so.
***
In the mail yesterday--the real mail, I mean, the sort with envelopes covered by handwriting and stamps and fingerprints--I received a copy of Beverley Nichols's Cry Havoc; his anti-war missive published in 1933. For anyone interested in the Mitford sisters, Cry Havoc is the book that Jessica (Decca) rated so highly in Hons and Rebels and that earned a place on her socialist bookshelf in the room she shared with Unity. I adore Nichols's writing--his memoir of the 1920s, The Sweet and Twenties is a brilliant and thoughtful read--so I have very high hopes for this one. I'll let you know as soon as I'm finished.
***
Finally, thank you so much to everyone who sent lovely messages about my books. Writing is my favourite and my best (as Lola from Charlie and Lola would say), and to know that you enjoy the books makes me very happy indeed.