Remembering the Unmemorable?

It's a strange thing, memory. You can be told a devastating piece of information that will alter your life, and you will find it hard to recall it all in detail, and yet someone tells you an anecdote about the theft of a fruit tart and you remember every word and can retell the story over and over.

I have been talking to a friend recently about family history - theirs, not mine. When I was asked about my family history I had to admit that its all mainly hearsay and conjuncture, and wouldn't stand up in court. I think at best you could describe my family as a group of natural story-tellers and at worst, they're a bunch of lying bastards! No two people tell the same story about any incident in the history of my family. But then I think this is the same for everyone.

I don't remember things that happened to me only weeks ago. Yet I can remember having breakfast with my father in the kitchen of our old house, just before we went to the hospital to collect my new baby sister. I can remember the hideous wallpaper that hung like a depressing mural on the walls of our kitchen at the time. I remember having cornflakes for breakfast that morning - this was over fifty years ago. Yet I can't remember when I heard the news that my father only had a short while to live or who told me this devastating information, and this was only six years ago.

Humans have a knack of remembering the mundane, while forgetting the important. The above story about the fruit tart was told to me by my Grandmother on many occasions. I used to help her bake when I was young and she would tell me stories about when she was a girl. Her brother one day was told to deliver a fruit tart to a sickly neighbour by her mother. In true 'Dennis the Menace' style he snook off and ate the tart. When it was found that the neighbour hadn't received the tart, he was tracked down by his very frightening Italian mother, who could make grown men quake in their boots. Once confronted by my great-grandmother, he invented a story about how a neighbour's dog had attacked him and eaten the pie. Wanting to believe the lying little scamp she marched off to confront the owner of the dog that he had accused. Her anger soon waned when the owner of the dog told her that the dog had died that day, “it ate something poisonous,” he explained. My great-grandmother sheepishly told the owner how sad she was to hear the news, then gave her son a gift of money for saving her from poisoning the neighbour. This was the only story that my Grandmother told me about her brother, Giacomo, as she failed to mention that he was a decorated war hero!

There is a television programme called, 'Who Do You Think You Are?" This is where celebrities look back at their families. Like my family stories, they find out lots of untruths that they were led to believe about long dead relatives. The family history that I found most interesting was Ainsley Harriot's. Ainsley is a famous chef here in Britain and is a regular on daytime TV cookery programmes. His family are from the Caribbean island of Jamaica, but he knew very little about his ancestors. For him, it was a roller-coaster ride of emotions when he found out about his family. He had been led to believe that his great-grandmother was part Indian, only to find out that she was the result of an overseer raping women to replenish stock, on the plantation where she was a slave! I don't know what Ainsley thought when he found this out, but I felt physically sick! He then learned that other grandparents had been decorated soldiers and policemen. But the biggest shock was to find out that his ancestors weren't all black, as he had thought, but his great-great-grandfather was a white slave owner! Maybe there are some family stories that are best forgotten?

I do wish now that I had listened more to my family members when I had the chance. Their stories about the past seem to have more meaning to me now I'm older. My grandfather was an enigma though. He never ever spoke of his past, all we know about him comes from other people. We know that his father died when he was quite young and his mother remarried to a man that my granddad didn't like. My granddad snook out of the house late one night only to be confronted by his younger sister. She asked him where he was going, and he told her to go back to bed. She begged him not to leave her with the man that his mother had married, so he took her with him. They walked from Thomas Town in Kilkenny to Dublin, where they somehow managed to catch a boat. He was fifteen she was thirteen, and neither ever went back to Ireland again.

She married, and like lots of Irish immigrants of that period moved to America and settled in Boston. She sent granddad letters on a regular basis, but in the end they lost contact. As a writer, can you imagine the wealth of stories I have within my own family? But I now have no way of accessing them.

So if you're young and think that your granny or granddad are just boring old giffers, listen to what they have to say. You just might uncover a story you will never forget!