The end of October I

How do we remember?

Kenneth Roy

'I think it's based on a true story,' said the girl behind me in the cinema. I was tempted to turn round and say, 'Yes, and my uncle George was part of it.'
     Uncle George was John Rollo's works manager at the Bonnybridge factory where Ian Hamilton and his friends hid the Stone of Destiny while it was decided what to do with it. The stone lay in the basement directly under uncle George's office for weeks, through the winter of 1950-51, and George knew nothing of it. His unwitting role in the adventure is not depicted in the current film, but I record it here for any posterity that the internet allows: my uncle George sat above, if not on, the coronation stone.
     As I left the cinema, I tried to visualise uncle George, who has been dead for many years. This wasn't difficult. I pictured him as a melancholy, dour Scot, although in his youth he had been wild and exciting by Bonnybridge standards. I then tried to remember anything he had said. This was less successful. Although I met him many times as a child, I couldn't think of a single word he had ever uttered, nor bring his voice to mind. This realisation saddened me.
     I thought of John Rollo, the patriot and philanthropist, one of the greatest Scots of the 20th century. I have a strong pictorial impression of Rollo at uncle George's funeral: a brooding presence in the darkest suit, tightly buttoned, all three buttons, a slightly ill-fitting suit, affecting somehow; the suit of an old man. He spoke, of course, but I have no recollection of what he said.
     Are these experiences untypical, or do they suggest that memory is more powerful visually than vocally? A friend, a religious person, explained to me the theory that immortality may consist of a single stored image evoking intense happiness; perhaps the face of a loved one. This seems to exclude all those people, countless millions, who never experienced intense happiness, who knew only misery, although it remains an intriguing idea. But again, the human voice is nowhere.
     Then I began to think of the hundreds – no, thousands – of people I have interviewed in my professional life, on television, on radio, in the newspapers. As I sit here typing this, I can picture quite a few of them; for example, I can conjure up an approximate image of David Niven changing his shirt in the studio 30 seconds before we went live on air. But if you were to ask me to repeat a word Niven or any of the others had said, I would struggle. They were not all forgettable politicians spouting the latest cant or, as in the case of the engaging film actor, authors plugging their now long-forgotten books; some were distinguished and wise. But it's all gone, I'm afraid – a case of in one ear, out the other.
     A few exceptional people are verbally memorable for a single phrase. In the course of a long, boozy lunch with the supreme political journalist, Alan Watkins, I asked casually what he made of the young man who had just been elected leader of the Labour Party. 'There's nothing there,' Watkins replied dismissively. Even now, when I hear the name Tony Blair, all I can think about is his nothing-thereness.
     Or, closer to home, my father, a producer of plays, who found the Sunday morning after a production difficult for several reasons: there was the inevitable hangover to be considered, the various debts and mess to be cleared up, as well as the sense of crushing anti-climax. 'After the show, the shit,' he would mutter gloomily into his cups. I confess to a liking for my father's favourite saying. It has the merit of being applicable to many situations, but it is also a neat metaphor for the generality of the human condition. How apposite it has been this October, as the long years of unbroken prosperity have come to a shocking end.
     'There's nothing there', a delightfully accurate summing-up of Tony Blair in advance, and 'After the show, the shit', my father's ultimate verdict on existence, fall woefully short of a body of personal verbal testimony. If talk is so unmemorable in this age of round-the-clock gabble, is there a case for less of it? Even the notorious Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand might agree. The season of remembrance is almost with us. It will be marked, as always, not by the spoken word but by a decent silence.