"Her only thought was that this might be the single chance she would get in her life to associate with beauty."
I have a memory I think of as The Memory.
It is seen from the point of view of a small person just seeing over the wall of a playground in East Hardwick Elementary School. The stone is hot, and is that kind that flakes into gold slivers. The sun is very bright. There is a tree overhead, and the leaves catch the light and are golden, and in the shade they are blue-green. Over the wall, and across the road is a field full of daisies and buttercups and speedwell and shepherds’-purse. On the horizon are trees with thick trunks and solid branches. The sky is very blue and the sun is huge. The child thinks: I am always going to remember this. Then she thinks: why this and not another thing? Then she thinks: what is remembering? This is the point when my self then and my self now confuse themselves into one. I know I have added to this Memory every time I have thought about it, or brought it out to look at it. It has acquired notes of Paradise Lost, which I don’t think I had when I was five or six. It has got both further away and brighter, more and less ‘real’. I always associate it with one of my very few good memories of my maternal grandmother—a perpetually cross person, who never smiled. The year she died, she began to forget, and forgot to be irritated. She said to me, sitting by the fire at Christmas, ‘Do you remember all the beautiful young men in the fields?’ And she smiled at me like a sensuous young girl. She may have been talking about the airmen who were billeted on her in the war—or she may have been remembering something long before my mother was born. I shall never know. But I can see the young men in the fields.
A. S. BYATT, from her Introduction, Memory: An Anthology. Edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt. London : Chatto & Windus, 2008.
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