AFTERTHOUGHT
Here Be Giants
By ALAN BRIEN
My first memory is of tracking down a long, dark,high corridor towards a door which suddenly opened and threw a great, yellow rhomboid of sun- light across my path. I can hear myself squeaking and panting, like some tiny puppy, excited by the un- expected chance to escape into a new and overlit world without walls and ceilings. My viewpoint joggled and tilted like a film image on a screen as I stepped Unsteadily over the front doorstep, and the pebble-dashed pavement was warm and strange on the tender pads of my feet as I trotted away along the street. Then giant footsteps sounded behind me, a larger shadow swallowed up my small silhouette, and I was hoisted into the air by a pair of adult arms. All I could see was a white bone button, large as a cartwheel, on the front of my mother's blouse, while the soundtrack played over the noises we made to each other, mine half-frightened, half-exhilarated, hers half-concerned, half-amused.
I describe this fragment from the tattered archives of infancy in cinematic terms because it seems to me that during those years I really was a camera. I saw and recorded everything but myself. As adults, we grow used to things and people designed to meet us at eye-level. In our staid, steady, measured movements, we restrict our field of vision to a horizontal sweep of about 120 degrees. We have forgotten what it is like to be thrown about like a parcel so that the ceiling reels and swirls, to fall about like an epileptic so that the floor rushes at you at express-train speed, leaving your eye focused on a corner of patterned carpet while your nose syphons up dust like a vacuum-cleaner nozzle. Childhood is a time when you learn everything at everybody's knees. It is a life lived on tiptoe. You travel Gulliver's second voyage first, and, like him, you see the big people's faces are as full of pits as a dartboard and their limbs as hairy as gorillas. They wear clothes as thick•as tarpaulin and shoes as large as sideboard drawers. Their books are all the size of encyclopaedias and their cutlery the size of cutlasses. They are continually wreathed in clouds of smoke or palls of scent. You do not need to tell children about BO—it is what all these monsters puff out with every ponderous heave of their limbs. To bury your head in those laps is to become giddy with the fume of ageing, unaired flesh. To create Brobdingnag, Swift did not need to hate humanity, he merely needed to remember when he was small.
You can separate genuine childhood memories from synthetic ones by selecting those in which you yourself are invisible, an optical lens on unsteady pins, very near the ground. If you see your own face, peachy-soft and apple-shiny, in the rushes, then you are recalling some long- lost family snap, or playing a role in some home movie you have heard too often described by your parents.
My next memory also projects itself on a CinemaScope screen. It is of the bowl of the night sky in whiter; black, frosted, glistening like a crystallised plum seen from the inside. I was watching it, indeed I seemed almost em- bedded in it, as I lay on my back on a home- made sledge, pulled with resentful jerks along a snow-silent alley by my elder sister. I had never seen anything before which did not appear to change its position as I changed mine. The walls of the houses slid past as if on oiled runners. A gas-lamp seemed to sway like an illuminated palm tree as we passed through the orbit of glow. We turned many corners before we reached home. Yet all the while the stars, like bullet holes in an unbreakable smoked-glass dome, kept invariable pace with us, neither following nor leading, but just waiting. It was the nearest I have ever come to a tiny mystical experience.
After this, most of my memories start to include other people in near-leading parts, often with a few lines to speak. And despite Truman Capote's belief that the mind can be trained to near-total recall, I find that many of my obstinately-held remembrances will turn out, when I collate the record with independent wit- nesses, to include large hunks of what, at the politest, must be called fiction. We are all of us more of artists than of reporters. Even the most impartial witness uses words, and in the English language there are no true synonyms. Each adjective and each noun reveals a choice, and a choice is a comment. An objective account could only be written mathematically, and would not be worth reading except by a computer.
My first two memories, though they give me simple pleasure to run through on my mental projector, hardly seem much of a haul for three years of life. My first philosophical problem, set for myself by myself and never solved, was this—which is more real, a true experience I have forgotten or an imaginary experience I remem- ber in vivid detail? After all, once the past is the past, it is dead. It is a childish illusion that there are some secret signs, known only to adepts, by which all our habits can be traced from our external appearance. At the age of eleven, my friends and I confidently claimed to be able to recognise a girl who had had 'it' by the way she walked—if I remember, a kind of pigeon-toed swing of the behind. We classified everybody's sister between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one as they passed, while we inno- cently pretended to be busy with our childish marbles. (It is only now that I remember that we excluded all married women, though we knew that they could not be virgins.) The habit is hard to break and many a man and woman have come to grief through refusing to believe the truth about possible partners because they saw no signs in their faces.
I still preserve a fantasy that there is some way to open up the entire uncensored reel of the past if only I am in desperate need. And it is amazing what will come flooding back, if you lie still and let it pour out. Some day I may have the courage to risk one of those drugs, such as LSD, which aid the development of un- processed memories. I have a feeling that if do, I shall regret the loss of the dull, but tranquil, images I now inflict upon you.
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