Treasures of Time by Penelope Lively Page B

claimed to have had revelations of life before birth; the account was somewhat mystical and while including a convincing description of being suspended in a ‘sea of greenish liquid’ referred also to angelic hosts and divine choirs. Tom’s earliest memory was dull: he was walking with his father along the tow-path of a canal near his home; squatting down to inspect something on the bank, he slipped and plunged one foot deep into the soft mud below; the mud sucked and clung, he shrieked, his father hauled him up and wiped him down. How old he had been, he did not know; judging by the remembered height of a concrete bollard at the spot, which was still there, he must have been about three – the bollard had towered above him.
    Other memories were equally insignificant – and personal. Which led him to suspect that those autobiographies which so impressively tether the subject’s youth to the course of history are often either reconstructed or invented. If you grew up during a war, of course, or were in some other way inescapably linked to public events, then things would be simpler; you would indeed have shared some kind of collective experience and have bombs or loneliness or the proximity of famous people to prove it. But if you have the good fortune – or misfortune – to spend your childhood in peacetime in a politically stable country in modest, but not deprived circumstances, then memory has a certain timeless quality. One’s own life seems to run parallel to what is happening on the public stage, rather than being involved with it. Which, of course, is not the case. The winds of change blow on us all, conditioning a great deal more than how we dress or what we eat.
    Which made it unsatisfactory that the sharpest recollections were in that sense mundane. When was it that his schoolboy self had hurtled down a hill, freewheeling on a bicycle, the senses ablaze at the sight of a female thigh rising and falling alongside? Not just any female thigh, either, but that of his first girl, Lorna Blackstock, and what has become of her, goodness only knows. The bike is still in the shed at home; a more durable relationship. And when was it, sometime before, that he had sat in the kitchen, on a static summer afternoon, hot, suspended in time – forever three o’clock, forever twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen – reading a novel in which a larger world is suggested. On the fringes of consciousness, unexperienced emotions and preoccupations lurk; flies sizzle against the window; Mum comes in and fills a saucepan at the sink.
    Only in the more accessible past does history rear its head; one begins to read newspapers, hold opinions, take note. A Tom more ancestral to the Tom of today sprawls in a chair, listens to a bloke on the telly holding forth about the Americans in Vietnam, does not agree, argues subsequently with his father. And another Tom listens with a critical ear to discussion of incomes policy, of who gets how much for doing what, and sees that this is not a matter of abstract or academic interest, that one is going to be in there with the rest, and pretty soon too.
    All of which has led, somehow, to the Tom of today, of now, who would probably be surprised by Laura’s claim, and possibly affronted. Few of us, after all, feel obliged to accept an affinity with – or take responsibility for – our own day and age.
    Tom, walking down Tottenham Court Road, was thinking that Stukeley’s world – despite its physical discomforts – had a lot to offer a certain kind of person. His kind of person, he suspected. Given, of course, the right educational and social opportunities. A small cultural and intellectual élite largely known to one another; diversity of job opportunity. Of course, there was a lot that would not have done at all, but that could be said of any time. Undiscriminating acceptance of what you know will not do either.
    He had decided to go down to Oxford for a few days; there was stuff in the Bodleian