Post One

Memory (‘Hands across Time’)

One spring day in 1970 I was travelling on a Greyhound bus in Quebec.  Seated next to me was a charming, elderly French Canadian lady who introduced herself as Mme Charles.  In the course of our conversation she disclosed that she was 85 years old.  When she was a small girl she had spent time with her grandmother, who had lived to be 110.  And her grandmother had told her how when she was a small girl she had stood beside her father on the south coast of England greeting a party of French royalist émigrés.  This seems to suggest the following chronology:

c. 1785  grandmother born

c. 1792 grandmother and her father greet French royalist émigrés

    1885 Mme Charles born

c. 1892 grandmother relates her childhood experience to Mme Charles

c. 1895 grandmother dies

    1970 Mme Charles tells me about her grandmother’s childhood

In other words I am able to claim, in the early twenty-first century, that I once knew someone who knew someone who greeted French royalist émigrés on the south coast of England at the close of the eighteenth.

This encounter instilled in me a lifelong fascination with what I would call the ‘touching of hands across time’. My interest is not in what B told A of their childhood memories but in what B told A they learnt from C (and what C heard from D, E, F and so on, even farther back into the past).  I once contemplated soliciting memories for an edited volume, but had reluctantly to give up the idea: such memories would be pretty easy to fabricate and hard or impossible to verify.  I would none the less be delighted to hear from any readers who are able to contribute anecdotes of this kind from their own family histories.  Few I imagine will be able to reach back as far and spectacularly as I can, courtesy of Mme Charles; but I expect some people will be able to cap a second story I heard from my prep school English master of a call he’d paid on his great-aunts in the run-up to the 150th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1965.  He drew the two great-aunts’ attention to the imminent anniversary, whereupon one of them said to the other, ‘Oh!  Isn’t that where great-uncle George had his leg cut off?’