by Liz Byrski
Returning home I never felt quite the same about time. I began reading about how the working class and children were integrated into the discipline of industrial time, the factory sirens, the school bells, the endless measurement and disciplining of their relation to time. Submission did not come without struggle. My metaphor of the Indian Railway often sustained me during childrearing, where plans are routinely capsized and nothing seems to arrive, career-wise, on time. You get there, I told myself, just like on Indian Railway, in the end, even if not on time. And there is a lot of pleasure along the way.
But I was younger, and time seemed an infinite expanse stretching out ahead of me. Now I have lived far more years than I have left so my relation with time is less dreamy. Moreover, a writer’s life is full of deadlines, which last year were especially pressing as I had a new book out. It now takes me a little while, and no little moral effort, to relax and get inside the Slow Zone of Care. When I come to see my mother, a game of cards at first seems interminable. I find it hard not to check emails on my iPhone. Sure enough when I finally succumb and sneak a look, there are all kinds of work obligations, interviews or request to give talks I should immediately attend to. I pause shuffling the deck of cards and send messages back to my publicist with a satisfying sound of a whoosh like a rushing wind, as if to emphasise the speed of the device I am holding. But this device also traps me: I am expected to respond at once, in a mere millisecond, to never be away from work, an expectation of instantaneity. As I spend more time here, slowness gets easier and easier, and more enjoyable, just as it did on Indian Railway. The book tour is finally over and the imperatives of work slide into a fuzzier focus, they are no longer in sharp, hard outline.
Our relation to time is deeply hierarchical, and shaped by culture. Time is a status marker; anyone giving time to others is usually lower in social status. There is a subtle or not so subtle downgrading of anyone in the Slow Lane. Time is also deeply gendered in a way that is quite simple, with a profound, long-lasting impact on women. Women’s time is still meant to be available to others, for care, with what’s left over devoted to paid work. Men’s time is meant to be made available for paid work, with what’s left over available for family. The assumption is they are a care commander who has a female care foot soldier doing all the care work. ‘Good’ women are marked by their willingness to give time. Women have traditionally acted as time sentries and time wardens, preventing intrusions into men’s time as wives, secretaries and assistants, and as conservers of the family time bank, able to be drawn on as needed. ‘Don’t Disturb Daddy’ is the name Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum gave the phenomenon of tiptoeing around men’s time.2 Women’s time in contrast, seems porous, a door that is always open. Care of the aged still carries an assumption that a woman, this time a daughter, is not at work, has all the time in the world to attend to her old parents.
Even the oft-used word, ‘spent’, to describe time passing, is not innocent of its impact on how we see care. It shows not only the irrevocability of time which has gone, but of new, exploitative attitudes to time; that it ought to be about productivity, and efficiency, all the opposite values of any ethic of care of the frail aged, especially someone who is losing any sense of the straightness of Time’s Arrow. ‘Spend’ also carries inflections of the domineering relation of the business world, of ‘time is money’, of males at the top of the hierarchy whose attitudes to care go unchallenged. ‘I am too busy and too important to “waste” time on care.’
And yet … my last word on my analyst’s couch connected to purple would be courage. ‘Old age is not for sissies,’ says one of Mum’s friends, quoting Bette Davis. I am often silenced by my mother’s courage. I don’t want to sentimentalise this period in her life, but her matter-of-fact braveness is one reason why none of this is simply burdensome. As Baraitser says, an ‘encumbered experience is in an odd way generative’. How did an unencumbered life, so remote from most people’s experience, with such vasty unequal consequences, ever become an ideal? All this time spent with my mother is deeply valuable to both of us. Certain ghosts in the mother knot have been laid to rest. Sometimes I have struggled to get here, but our time together can be quite lovely. My mother is more expressive of affection than at any other time in her life. I find new sources of respect for her, or perhaps rediscover them. I am moved by my mother’s gritty stoicism, her adaptability, her uncomplaining resilience. Especially I admire, how in spite of everything, she goes, full of joy, into the Whipstick.
Velvet – Rachel Robertson
1
It is rich, deep purple velvet. Even now, it pulls you to touch it, to feel the silken allure. Cut into a rectangle with pinking shears and stuck onto a piece of buff card, it can fit into a woman’s palm. On the back, the words: ‘a bit of coronation robe.’
We found this, my sister and I, upstairs at my mother’s house in a box file that contained things from her childhood – old photos, a menu from her parents’ wedding, and her birth notice. The words on the back of the card with the purple velvet are in my mother’s handwriting. My sister’s grey eyes darken as she holds it.
We are captured, both of us, by these mementos from our mother’s past, most of all by the sample of purple velvet, symbol of another place and time.
‘Yes, my father gave me this,’ says my mother, though she doesn’t remember when.
Because she is eighty-seven, my mother thinks it is time to pass on the contents of this box. She decides to loan it to me so that I can photocopy the material for my siblings. That day I leave her house cradling the precious cargo of her past in my arms.
She knows I am the writer in the family, the memoirist. Did she think about this when she passed the box to me? Does that mean she trusts me to write about her past or not to do so?
I am the memoirist in the family but the one with the worst memory. I often have to ask my siblings about events from our childhood because they seem to remember more than me, even the youngest. It’s an embarrassing irony, but I wonder if this is perhaps why I write memoir. To try to piece together a past that is hazy and unreliable, to make the self more real.
But how do you write a life when you have only fragments?
2
‘That piece of purple coronation robe – roughly when do you think your father gave it to you?’ I ask my mother on my next visit. She is unsure but she knows it was before the war. After some discussion, we decide that this piece of material must be from King George VI’s coronation in May 1937.
‘I remember watching the Princesses in the Royal Jubilee celebrations,’ my mother says. ‘I was about eight. My father’s office was on St Paul’s Churchyard and his office was on the ground floor, but the firm above his gave us seats at their windows to watch the procession.’ My mother is one year younger than Queen Elizabeth.
‘But that wasn’t a coronation,’ I say.
‘No, I suppose not.’ She looks a bit vague. She’s had a long and full life. Some things have gone from her memory, others are anchored there firmly. I can understand her remembering the Jubilee: it was a major event in London and because of her closeness in age to Elizabeth she would have had a particular interest.
The Silver Jubilee of King George V was in 1935, so my mother would indeed have been eight. She would have had a good view as the royal family approached St Paul’s Cathedral where a Thanksgiving service was held on 6 May 1935. There is an image on the St Paul’s website of a painting by Frank Owen Salisbury called Reception of King George V and Queen Mary at the West Door of St Paul’s Cathedral, Jubilee Day.1 Queen Mary is so pale she looks like a waxwork. Behind the King, Prince Edward looks both supercilious and ill-at-ease (one reads the future into such works) while the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are dressed alike in pale peach outfits and hats. Behind them stands a Sikh in full regalia. Judging from the existing film of the event, I would say this painting is a work of imagination rather than documentation. And memory, too, is part imagination, each memory a recreation
rather than a reproduction.
3
The image appeared to me when I was reading A History of Silence by Lloyd Jones. Something in the texture of the writing summoned a form into the back of my mind. I put the book aside for a moment and allowed the shape to grow, and there it was, a pattern of lilac and purple petals, a texture that was almost velvet – was it velveteen perhaps? The design was a version of paisley. I could stroke it down my side, so it was a dress. Like a mini jigsaw puzzle of memory, it slotted together and I could see and feel once again my first special dress of purple velveteen. A dress that made me special: in this dress I shone, for a moment I was centre of the picture, no longer just a spectator.
Imagine this, plain shy Rachel clothed in such a dress!
Immediately, I feel a need to verify this image. I wonder if my memory of the colours and design is correct. It was the 60s, so bright colours and patterns were in vogue, as was velveteen. Mainly, though, I got my older sisters’ hand-me-downs, so my clothes were at least ten years out of date. I often wore matching outfits with my younger sister, both outfits having been originally worn by my two older sisters. Sometimes the clothes were exactly the same (there was a pair of Chinese-style pink blouses I remember, which we always wore with green skirts and homemade hair bands of the same green) but other times the styles were the same but in different colours. In principle, I had no problem with wearing matching outfits with my little sister but in practice I could see that she was more attractive than me – cuter, funnier, prettier, more confident – and that it did me no favours. I wasn’t resentful of this because I adored my little sister but I was self-conscious about it.
I’m quite sure that the purple velveteen dress was an original. It was made or bought just for me and there was no matching dress for my sister. This might have been one of the reasons it was special to me. Recreated now in my mind, I see it is also a beautiful piece of fabric – the balance of white, lilac, deep purple, black and lime green, the warm and the cold colours combined, the way the design is both soft and spiky, with its stylised leaf shape.
I’m suddenly struck by the fact that the living room and kitchen in my house are decorated in white, black, purple and lime green. I don’t even like the colour lime.
4
We use memories as a way of forgetting. What we remember allows us to forget other events and therefore create a coherent life story.
But what if the forgotten comes to us, like a dream, a tear in the fabric of our life?
5
I am twenty years old and wearing a lilac t-shirt, a white skirt with a broderie anglais frill and my new purple suede sandals. I have painted my toenails purple to match the sandals. I sit in a chair in my flat and a man kneels before me. Earlier, there has been a fight on the stairwell of the apartments across the way and I have watched anxiously from my balcony. The man strokes my thighs. He takes off my sandals, slowly, caressing me with his velvet voice and his eloquent hands.
‘I like your matching toes and shoes,’ he says, smiling in such a way that I don’t know whether or not he is laughing at me for wearing purple nail polish. He pulls me to my feet and we walk upstairs to my bedroom, where he smiles again in the same and different ways.
6
‘Did you see any of King George’s coronation, then, when you were ten?’ I ask my mother. ‘Maybe you saw them on their way to Westminster Abbey.’
‘I’m not sure, dear,’ she replies.
I show her some internet photos of King George VI in his coronation robe, which does indeed look very similar to the piece of purple velvet she has had all these years.
I know very little about my mother’s father, only that he was a textile merchant in London and died when I was three years old.
‘How did your father get this bit of the coronation gown?’ I ask my mother. She doesn’t know. Possibly it was my grandfather who supplied the purple velvet himself to the royal dressmakers. I think this is unlikely as I’m sure someone in the family would have mentioned this before now. We aren’t monarchists but it’s the sort of thing that would have been discussed. We decide that her father must have known the merchant who supplied the material to the dressmakers. As a textile trader himself, he would have known other traders. I can imagine a friend giving him a sample of velvet from the roll that the King’s Imperial gown was made and him passing it to his daughter as a keepsake. It must have been a potent symbol to a self-made man whose parents migrated to London from Eastern Europe before he was born and who grew up in the East End.
7
At my mother’s house I go upstairs and look at her row of photo albums until I find the right one – dated 1963 to 1973. It is years since I’ve looked at this album. In fact, I can’t even remember when I last opened it. The first pictures of me are grainy black-and-white photos of a baby wrapped in a shawl. Soon I am a toddler and then a little girl. Many of these are in colour, and quite a few of them are badly faded, blotched or discoloured. It makes me feel I’m viewing an artefact in a museum.
I look for the purple paisley dress. I look through every page of this album and then through the next one (1973 to 1985). There is no purple dress. When I think about it, if there had been a photo of me in this dress then I probably wouldn’t have forgotten it for over forty years. It’s a disappointment not to see the dress, but looking through the photos is surprising. I see that, in fact, my little sister and I were very similar as children and that both of us look sweet in the photos. Perhaps she is slightly prettier, but often it would be hard to tell us apart except that I am older and taller than her. Our matching dresses are smart, too, and suit us. They don’t look at all like hand-me-downs. There are photos of me in several very pretty, obviously new, dresses – a cornflower-blue dress, a red and white pinafore, a chocolate-brown dress with a very smart belt – that are later handed down to my little sister. It’s true that I am more likely than my siblings to look self-conscious in the photos or turn away slightly but, actually, there are many good photos of me. It seems strange to recognise this after remembering myself for all these years as the plain one in the family, wearing other people’s cast-offs.
As for my purple dress, I’m now beginning to doubt myself. Is it confabulation, borne from a desire to have been, just once, someone special? It’s not hard to invent memories and rewrite your past. A writer, especially, is often tempted to fill in forgotten details and then may wonder if their imagination is functioning partly as memory anyhow.
As Drusilla Modjeska has noted, imagination and evidence vie for ascendancy in memoir, and memoir itself, she suggests, is as much ‘a mapping of a mind’ as the recreation of experience.2
The purple paisley dress is now part of my family story whether it actually existed or not.
8
A small parcel comes for me, postmarked Cambridge. It is from my oldest sister and she has sent something just for me. I am eight years old and this is the first time I remember her being away from home. Inside the parcel is small card with an Arthur Rackham illustration of Alice in Wonderland and a lilac silk handkerchief. It is the finest handkerchief I have seen. It is so soft and smooth and the colour is like the foxgloves that grow in our garden. Does this mean my sister hasn’t forgotten me?
9
I am having dinner with friends in an outside courtyard. Pink bougainvillea grows up the walls and some of the flowers lie on the ground, faded to a dusky pale purple.
‘Look,’ says my friend to me, ‘your shoes match the fallen blossoms perfectly!’
It is at this point that I remember that other moment, thirty years earlier, when I wore purple sandals and nail polish. It’s as if I had lost the memory of that evening until now, because, although I have thought about the man and my relationship with him quite often in the intervening years, I have never before remembered that evening of the fight, the way he took off my sandals, the mixing of his laughter and desire, my anxiety and desire.
Richard Holmes says, ‘There is a goddess of Memory,
Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.’ 3 I believe that Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses and so I like to think that Calliope (the Muse presiding over eloquence and epic poetry) in particular would have been close to her troublesome Aunt Forgetting.
10
On winter evenings, my sisters and I undress in bed, tossing our day clothes onto the floor and pulling on our brushed-cotton nighties under the sheets. My older sister taught me this trick – not the oldest (the one who went to Cambridge) but the next one, still six years older than me. If we can, we do the reverse in the morning, staying in the warmth of the bed until we have some haphazard layers upon us. The three of us share a bedroom but we are sent up to bed one at a time, based on our age. My little sister (she of the grey eyes) is quite often still awake when I arrive for the night and so we talk quietly until she falls asleep, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Some nights we can’t sleep and I climb into her bed and write words on her back with my finger and she tries to guess what I write. This, too, is a pastime started by my middle sister and passed down.
After my sister drops off, I return to my own bed, making that cold hop between them as fast as I can. Then I create a cave under the covers and read by the light of a small torch. I think my parents know I read late into the night but it is a quiet, ‘intelligent’ thing to do and therefore acceptable. Much less acceptable to my mother is the addiction I have to pulling out tufts of wool from my pink candlewick bedspread. It is a delicious feeling as the wool pops out, and the spaces left behind are marvellously blank. I seem unable to resist doing this. Sometimes I pull out a whole section, and then the flower that was once there disappears completely, leaving no trace except emptiness. It is like undoing the past.
