Aide-Mémoires
The Art of Not Forgetting
Aide-Mémoires: The Art of Not Forgetting
I can recall my first childhood visit to Paris in 1976 in vivid detail. There would be two more trips, in the Easter of ’77 and ’78, but on those occasions it would be without my mother, Yvonne. Just my twin brother, James, and recently separated father on his inaugural solo-dad vacation. Given that his company had just moved him to the French capital for work, it must have felt more like a busman's holiday than Paris in the spring.
In the mid-70s, Paris was undergoing a project of misguided urban modernisation, with high-rises and flats going up in unlikely locations. Across the road from our father’s furnished apartment on the rue St Charles – from which the Eiffel tower could be seen looming over an intersection – there was a building site. I have indelible memories of this. When we weren’t sightseeing, I used to sit at the window and watch the hard-hatted workmen and toiling cement mixers. The predatory, cormorant-like cranes would swoop down for girders and carry them off to be added to a new building, like twigs to a nest. In the mornings, we would go out and walk along the corrugated-iron site-fence, peeling off strips from the French posters. Our mother would walk us to the boulangerie where we would queue with the locals, inhaling the good bread smells, salivating over the pain au chocolate, until it was our turn to ask for une baguette, s’il vous plâit. At al fresco café tables, with our parents hunched unhappily over their crèmes, the thin green Michelin guidebook open on the table, we would sip our Cokes and collect the sugar wrappers. I never wanted to go back to England.
One of the reasons I recall our Paris visits with such clarity is that I kept a ‘holiday diary’. This was a scrapbook stuffed with metro tickets, postcards and sketches, along with a pencilled commentary on each day’s activity. I still have it; the Sellotape barely holding everything in place, flaky and brown. When I pick it up, half of the postcards drop onto the floor. I should really fix it, but that would be sacrilegious. A retrofit. An act of revisionism. On its faded green cover, in felt pen, I have written: in paris Holiday book. On the inside page, there’s a drawing of two gay tricolour flags. Opposite this is a postcard map of the metro and a date: 3rd April 1976. The following entry (spelling and capitalisation preserved) is accompanied by a detailed drawing of the Eiffel tower, an outsize tricolour flying from the top: 4th April 1976. On the second day in paris we went to the Eiffel tower that’s were I got the map on the other page. But we did not go up it… After about three attempts, it seems we finally went up the tower: First we went up in a lift (see post card) then we had a look throw a tellyscope and we saw the sacra cur…And so on, page after pedantic page. All of it repetitive and terribly spelt, yet what’s preserved is a sense of innocent fascination, of joy in urban exploration. Rereading it now, I can relive the whole experience, including a quarrel with a ticket lady at the Botanical Gardens. Not only are the sugar wrappers there, stuck next to metro tickets (with their stamp-lines that always put me in mind of the gills on a shark), but also a fold-out A4 drawing of the building site, titled View from lounge window in Flat. And there it all is, just as I remember it. The crimson cranes. Our red Renault 4 parked across the street. The posters on the site wall (15 Jours Contre Le Change). A stick figure walking with an umbrella. And the new, half-built high-rises dominating the space; the soaring Haussmann skyline slowly being undone. All of it still there in a single naïve drawing.
***
There are two other documents that provide a singular window onto the past, containing details that time would otherwise have buried.
The first is a ‘Child Study’ by our aunt Lisette. In 1971, while putting her acting ambitions on hold, Lisette undertook a postgraduate psychology degree and stayed with us for ten days over Christmas in order to observe twins. The Child Study was her dissertation, a qualitative research project. Consisting of sixty typed pages in a sturdy brown ring-binder, it’s a unique window on my past; of a time I don’t remember living through, though I clearly did. James and I were three-and-a-half when she completed the project. Looking at it now brings forth a raft of conflicting emotions, though I have to remind myself how lucky I am to be looking at it at all. Not many people have access to such a detailed time-capsule, one that records their young life with such methodical care.
On the Contents Page are various matter-of-fact headings, followed by taxonomic subheadings. INTRODUCTION: The Family/ The Home/ Method of Study/ A Typical Day. PHYSICAL: Early Development/ Physical Activities/ Sleep/ Dressing/ Head Banging/ Thumb Sucking/ Large and Fine Muscle Control. SOCIAL EMOTIONAL: Anger/ Frustration/ Aggression/ Jealously/ Fears/ Affection/ Humour/ Sympathy/ Joy, Excitement/ Relationships with Adults/ Relationships with Parents/ Routine/ Ritual. INTELLECTUAL: Concentration/ Speech/ Use of Language/ Curiosity/ Problem Solving/ Stories/ Concept of Time…
And so on.
I haven’t listed them all. But each section provides fascinating reading. There are also many photographs. The most striking are those of us gambolling in our grandmother’s sunny garden, surrounded by upended toy wheelbarrows, spinning tops, one-eyed teddy bears. My favourite is the shot in which both of us appear to be somehow standing inside a bench, in a hole where the slats have rotted away in the rain. Gurning, chubby-faced twins: Me in red, James in blue. It’s easy to see this as some kind of metaphor for where things were heading.
The hardest sections to read now are The Home and The Family. There’s a black-and-white shot of our house on Storehouse Lane with a Morris Minor parked outside. Peopleless, with the sunflower-print blinds drawn in our bay window, the sunshine slanting across the gravel road, it’s a picture of timeless tranquillity. The caption reads: The Boys’ Home.
Then there’s a picture of us all together as a nuclear family on one of Granny’s park benches, presumably one that wasn’t falling to pieces. My father, resembling a stern junior bank manager, sits stiffly in shirt, tie and slacks, committing the fashion crime of sandals with socks. My mother, in a jazzy Paisley shift and crimson trousers, is sitting straight-backed, formally posed; her hair blowdried into a style I would later associate with Jill St John from Diamonds Are Forever, the Bond film on general release at the time. My brother and I appear be tending to them like servants, handing them biscuits, showing them toys. Me in my red shorts, looking over my shoulder at the camera. James seated, frowning, his little fat legs emerging from his tight blue shorts; dinky Clarks sandals over violet socks. The caption reads: The Family.
And we were, for a few brief years.
Though looking at the picture forensically, I can detect notes of disharmony in the way my father’s crossed leg points away from my mother; his right hand tensely closed. And my mother, with her knees locked together, her head bowed, appears self-conscious, rigid, under strain. They look like they’ve just had a row. This tension might, of course, just be a result of the exigencies of bringing up young children – two tearing twins, at that – but there’s a visible lack of closeness, of joy, between them, even then.
The Study goes deep into our early development and mutual dependence, though not in an overtly analytical way. There are scattered references to behavioural psychologists such as Jersild and Mittler. Lisette states that we do not have the disadvantage that Doctor Winnicott puts forward, of being an only child; though maybe we, like only children, may miss out in the lack of richness of experience which results from having older and younger siblings. This was astute, as twins without brothers and sisters, while rarely alone, can often feel like only children as they grow up, without the guidance of older hands. Their development is always relentlessly parallel. Lisette might have been thinking of her own childhood with my father and her sister. As the youngest of three children, she would have benefited from Geoffrey and Paula’s more advanced stage in life, and the rich, rambunctious family life surrounding her.
Much of the writing in the Study is refreshingly basic and direct. These children seem bright and alert, outgoing and friendly, she writes in her Introduction. They are average height and weight. They have straight, fairish hair and dark brown eyes…Mother and father were married five and a half years ago when she was 25 and he was 30… The parents decided they would have two children, and so, as they both arrived at once, it is unlikely they will have any more. They decided on two for reasons of personal economics and world population. The latter detail is enlightening, revealing a progressive outlook I didn’t know our parents possessed. Later, Lisette tells us: The family is relaxed and happy, the mother having a gentle, patient and unruffled manner all the time with the twins, being very understanding and tolerant of small children’s needs and demands. She talks to them a very great deal in the home, and provides ample play material.
There is also revealing mention of their parenting routine: Mother has recently started working again two nights a week in a local hospital, although she has not worked since the twins were born. She works Wednesday and Thursday nights, going out after the boys are in bed. Dad gets the boys up on Thursday and Friday and takes them to playgroup; Mum fetches them at lunchtime after snatching some sleep. And then there are observations that subtly indicate all is not right with their marriage. Mother and father do not go out much together in the evenings. If they do go out, usually to dinner with friends, a friend babysits.
It’s strange and frustrating to read all this about your own parents’ lives. Illuminating, but also tantalisingly bare. I want to know more, more about what they were thinking, about what they thought of us; two burgeoning twins who had descended on their sedate existence in the sticks to cause merry havoc. It’s like reading a novel in which there’s no real disclosure, just surface facts, with all the real dirt withheld. Paraphrasing Jersild and English, Lisette writes: Children reared in an atmosphere of freedom, emotional warmth and expectation of achievement show high intelligence and have been found to be emotionally stable and well adjusted. This was clearly how she saw our family in the early seventies. Reading it now, I can only lament how things turned out.
Much of the rest of the study is taken up with close observation of us, her willing guinea pigs, as we played, fought and ate our way through the post-Christmas days. She states that her Twins Study would be valid as we were ‘rarely completely on our own’. It would seem that twins have very special problems and advantages, and I have tried to tell whether these have affected their development in any way. She goes on to state: Unfortunately, the fact of their youth also meant that they could not be persuaded to produce ‘samples’ at will – drawings or paintings for example. Despite this, there’s no shortage of hand-made cards, sketches and collages in the study’s pages, much of it crayoned onto ‘computer paper’, endless rolls of which my father took home from his work at ICL. These were large connected sheets with technical data on one side; the blank reverse side perfect for the pouring on of paint and glue.
What becomes clear is that most of the behavioural psychologists my aunt cites are not discussing the development of twins, but singletons. Then, as now, there was not much out there in terms of hard research. The only work directly relating to twins in her bibliography is Peter Mittler’s statistics-heavy The Study of Twins (1971). In this respect, there’s something pioneering about Lisette’s dissertation. What strikes me most forcefully is how well-formed the dynamics of our twin-dyad was, even at the age of three. Our pattern of one twin leading while other abdicates responsibility was already in place. Neither twin seems dominant physically, she writes. One may take the lead in standing alone, another in walking, and they seem to achieve a ‘first’ alternately… They seem to go through phases, of a couple of months duration, where one twin seems more stable, settled and go-ahead, and the other more easily upset and occasionally ‘whiny’ and clinging. At the moment James seems to be the ‘weaker’ one, but Jude passed through a similar phase in the Autumn of 1971. This seems to tie up with their alternate ‘leading’ in physical and intellectual skills too.
Later, in the section headed ‘Aggression’, Lisette observes that the twins have been used to sharing their mother from birth. This may well largely remove one of the more common causes of aggression – jealousy and having to share possessions… Neither has known a time when Mother was exclusively theirs, so this does not cause them to be aggressive to each other… Both parents are scrupulously fair with them, and there has never been the faintest sign of favouritism. This last observation makes me sigh when I read it back today. Like much of the Child Study, it illustrates how well our parents worked as a team, how much thinking and restraint went into it, and how, when that was removed, chaos was allowed to take hold.
Leafing through the Study again is like watching an hour of shaky Super-8 footage of one’s childhood, helpless in the grip of strong emotions; the projector whirring behind one’s head. It’s good to learn that, like all children, we were once happy, spontaneous, joyous. And also subject to the same unmanageable jealousy and rage. This, for example, is emblematic of how twins must learn to negotiate the world together: 31.12.71. At the end of tea, Jude, rather overtired, and James were given a few Maltesers to cheer them up. Then Jude wanted the empty packet. James then tried to pull it away so Mother removed the offending object. Jude screamed and shouted for the packet, so she gave it to him again. James pulled at it. So Mother tore the offending packet in half – quite gently, explaining why she was doing it. But this was wrong too. Jude screamed louder, ‘I don’t like it torn, I don’t like it torn!’, and got himself into a state until they were taken to bed. The usual story procedure calmed him down.
It’s grim to think we were still behaving like this in our thirties, arguing over the artwork to our second album, though without Mother to arbitrate between us.
In many places, I found myself wondering to what extent our personalities were already settled at the age of three. Under the heading ‘Affection’, Lisette notes: James however has always been a little keener to cuddle than Jude. 2.1. 72. James sat on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and put his arm around my neck and cheek against mine and sat for a long while like this. ‘I’m loving Sette, Mummy,’ he said to his mother. ‘Sette’ was our word for Lisette, as we were unable to pronounce her two-syllable name.
There are many other scenes of interaction between me and James that jump out as intensely vivid. Under ‘Sympathy’, Lisette writes: Mother told me that at Playgroup Jude was crying a lot. James put his arm around him, saying ‘Don’t cry, Jude,’ and comforted him for some time. He even gave him his own Teddy, his most precious possession. Later, she writes: Jude had a splinter in his foot and was crying. James gave him his car to hold. There’s a simplicity in this that I find impossibly moving. I can’t remember the car, but I do remember James’s teddy, a bear we would perform mock operations on a few years later, perhaps influenced by our mother’s profession. ‘Scalpel,’ my brother would demand, holding out his hand, ‘forceps…’ And down went the butter knife onto poor teddy’s chest.
Most abundantly, what’s clear is how being a twin provided us both with an endless supply of laughter and companionship. The overall emotional feeling is one of sheer joy in being alive… The boys would seem to have a very real social advantage in always having a playmate at the same stage of development. My favourite section of the Study is headed ‘Humour’. As elsewhere, my aunt makes a verbatim record of our childish speech. The boys are beginning to enjoy words, and find some of them funny. They also laugh at Lavatory humour. 30.12.71 Conversation between the twins alone in bed:
Jude: Is he here? (meaning Teddy)
James: No he’s making a pooh (screams of laughter from both)
Jude: And he got all wet. (more laughter)
James: And he didn’t mind (more laughter)
Jude: He washed my hand and he did that all over again (screams of laughter)
James (appreciatively): Say somefin else.
It’s hard not to think of Derek and Clive when reading this. I want the full filthy transcript.
In conclusion, Lisette writes: These two little boys seem to me to have suffered in no way from being twins, contrary to what you might expect from reading twins studies. It’s reassuring to see this acknowledged. However, suffering was about to come from a different, unexpected, angle.
***
The third and last time-capsule document is the most extraordinary of the three, and it only came to light on clearing out my father’s loft after he moved to a care home. It’s a ring-binder chronicle, complied in 2006 when he was seventy, covering every year of his life. Each year gets a single page, which is split into four vertical columns headed: Personal and Professional/ Family and Friends/ Activities, Interests, Leisure/ External Events. On the left-hand margin there are the months of the year. External Events refer to world events, which gives rise to a number of bathetic juxtapositions. So, for example, in January 1975, where under Activities, Interests, Leisure, he records Bought Ignis fridge-freezer, under External Events he notes: Donald Coggan made Archbishop of Canterbury. Or, in September 1974, next to Bought preserving pan for beer and wine-making, he writes Haile Selassie deposed. In April 1976, when he records our first Paris trip with To Paris with Yvonne & boys. Stay three weeks in furnished apartment in rue St Charles, he also notes: Callaghan becomes PM. Later that year, in November 1976, under Personal and Professional, there’s a simple, heart-stopping declaration: Yvonne wants us to separate. Under External Events: Carter made US president.
Why did my father keep such a record? The starkness of each statement, the lack of comment or emotion, is startling. I can only conclude he compiled it as an aide-mémoire to guard against future senility. And it was certainly written retrospectively, with all the information culled from his functional desk diaries, also preserved in the loft. His fear of senility wasn’t unfounded. Our grandmother had suffered from dementia, dying of its related ills in 1991. And by 2006, our aunt Paula was more than advanced with the Alzheimer’s which would see her move to a care home in a couple of years. When it came to my father’s turn to move into care, it was the autumn of 2022. He was 86, and his partner of thirty years had just died. He’d been living in her Bromley house for decades but had no stake in it. By that point, the official dementia diagnosis was two years old and he had started to wander out on his own, along the climbing lane outside the house where cars hurtled at alarming speed, lost and disorientated. With the house being put on the market imminently, we had no choice but to find him somewhere else to spend his last years.
We got lucky with a care home in a converted town house bearing a blue plaque in Swiss Cottage. It was clean, with superbly empathetic and professional staff, and near enough to visit regularly from Tufnell Park and Dartmouth Park where, respectively, we now both lived. Once he’d arrived, along with two suitcases of books and clothes, and had been installed in his tiny room which overlooked a serene back garden, we set about clearing his wider effects from the Bromley house. We had the unenviable task of deciding on what to keep and what to throw. It wasn’t easy, either physically or emotionally.
A house clearance is usually only undertaken after a parent dies, but Geoffrey Cook wasn’t dead. He was sitting out his days in the care home's living room, which, though warm and cosy was populous and not conducive to rest. Never a man to socialise unnecessarily, he spent much of his time hiding in the conservatory, where we’d visit him for tea and biscuits. There he’d try and pretend he still had a handle on things, responding to the question of how he was getting on with a resigned, ‘Ooh, not so bad, all things considered...’ without supplying any further detail. In reality, he was slipping further into Wordsworth’s strange seas of thought, alone.
***
The loft in the Bromley house was reached by a dangerous concertina stepladder that unfolded from a small aperture in the top-corridor’s ceiling. When we first managed to get up there, we were astounded. He’d kept everything. Not only were there our grandfather’s canvases and big sketchbooks preserved from the 1930s and 40s, but box after dust-coated box of everything a life can gather after nine decades on planet Earth. It’s a wonder the floorboards hadn’t caved in. Every box was marker-penned with a description of its contents. Inside each we found invoices, cards, correspondence, carbon copies, theatre programmes, holiday guides, books, magazines, receipts, juvenilia and diaries. For a man who was rarely sentimental, we were surprised and moved to find Christmas and birthday cards we had made for him in the 1970s when he was still at home, preserved in neat plastic folders. Heart-rending effects from when we were still a family. We quickly realised the task of deciding what to keep and what to throw couldn’t be done there and then. We would have to remove it all, transport it back to north London, and trawl through it later.
It was clear he’d been meticulous in filing every step of his progress through life. The question was, why? If he’d been a writer or artist, there might have been a reason to archive everything, for research purposes, perhaps. But he wasn’t an artist. Given that he was still alive, we could always ask him, though it was unlikely he would’ve remembered why he kept this stuff; or that until very recently he had ever lived in a house with a loft. In Paul Auster’s memoir of his deceased father, The Invention of Solitude, he declares: ‘There’s nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man’. But our father wasn’t dead, it only felt as if he were as we carried each box down the shaky stepladder.
There were many anomalous, revealing discoveries. The folder of theatre programmes, for example, from the 50s through to the early 80s. Stoppard, Pinter, Shakespeare. Who knew he was such a theatre buff? On the cover of each was a pencilled date of the performance, many from the late 70s when he’d been cast out of the family home. When did he find the time, or the money, to go to so many plays? Then there was the correspondence between our parents; harsh communications written during their divorce. One note pulled me up short. A terse message to our mother informing her he was stopping his monthly maintenance cheque when we reached eighteen. And then a carbon of a typed, dated letter to the bank, cancelling said direct debit of £37.50. It was chilling to read this communication, and troubling to wonder why he’d kept it.
Most of the boxes, we couldn’t help but notice, were wine cases. My father and his late partner had been great imbibers, getting through a couple of bottles of good French vino every night. It was a wonder they both lived so long. Packed into a dozen of these were his collections of Private Eye and National Geographic magazine stretching back to the sixties. About to leave them behind, a quick Google revealed some of the early copies went for twenty quid each on eBay. The last objects we removed were our grandfather’s paintings and sketchbooks. Hoarded in dusty sheets and portfolio files, they were cumbersome and heavy. Oil on board, or finished paintings with ornate frames I remembered from the walls of my grandmother’s house in Pinner. Some of the pictures were on show in the house downstairs, and would soon be transported to my father’s room at the care home. But the others were ours to keep. In the end, we almost left one behind. And not just any old painting, but a portrait vividly imprinted on me from earliest childhood.
Just as we were about to leave the loft and turn out the lights, James lowered his dust-mask and said,
‘What’s that over there?’
Jammed behind a heavily clad heating pipe, face to the wall, was a modest piece of hardboard in a frame.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said, wanting to get out and head for the pints of Guinness that awaited us at the local pub. ‘Just an empty frame.’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘It has to be one of Stanley’s.’
I went over and, as carefully as I could, removed the jammed object. As I tugged it out, I heard an awful scratch before it came free. It was indeed a painting. A portrait of a man, now with a small hole in its centre.
‘Shit, I’ve damaged it.’
‘Don’t worry, just get it out of here…’
It was a self-portrait my grandfather made as a young man, sitting in shirtsleeves before a dark mirror; his face in half-shadow, looking very much like Wilfred Owen’s haunting photograph, a jar of chrysanthemums next to his elbow. I remembered it well, hanging on the living room wall in Storehouse Lane for years. There’s photo of me and James, aged eight, posed before it in our USAF Airforce sweatshirts. And we almost consigned it to oblivion.
***
Hidden among all his effects was the ring-binder containing the chronicle. Once we’d transferred the boxes and canvases back to north London, there was so much to search through the task felt overwhelming. In fact, we only discovered the file after our father’s death eighteen months later. And there he was: alive again on the page (if you can call a series of utilitarian diary entries life). Buying a preserving pan to make homebrew. Replacing our clapped-out Renault 5 with a shiny blue Citroen Ami 8. And undertaking what appears to be an epic amount of DIY. Knocking the living room through. Pulling up the carpets to reinforce the floors with hardboard. Installing shelves in alcoves. Overhauling the drains. Even redoing the wiring on every floor, which he attempted from a Penguin paperback guide, a potentially lethal undertaking. For the allotment, he bought a scythe, and later a petrol-guzzling Flymo, whose gasoline stink and fearsome blade I remember well. There he cultivated lettuces and carrots, and the thin, sweet radishes I loved to eat whole after rinsing off the soil.
There’s something of The Good Life to all this. It paints a picture of a resourceful, practical, devoted father, working hard to make a secure home for his young family. Indeed, when he was shovelling earth in his brown corduroys he resembled Richard Briars in the much-loved sitcom. His holey orange ‘outdoors’ pullover always smelt pleasingly of bonfire smoke. But there’s also something obsessive about it all. Something manically self-reliant. He didn’t have to fix the roof and sort out the drains himself, tasks probably better left to professionals. Was all the DIY a displacement activity for what was going on in his marriage? The chronicle tells another story where this is concerned. In the eighteen months before he announces Yvonne wants us to separate, the DIY stops and he records that he put in an offer on another house. The chain eventually falls through, but the question remains: why put in six years of work establishing a cosy, secure family home only to suddenly sell up? Around this time, ICL close their Stevenage plant and he’s given the choice of either moving to their Manchester site or working in their Paris offices. I dimly recall the threat of moving up north at the time. But he moves to Paris instead, out of the family home, returning only every other weekend, thus beginning an itinerant life that would last until the early 90s. Why choose another country to the one where his wife and kids lived? The chronicle baldly records all his Paris addresses: Oct 75: Lodge Paris Home Hotel in Blomet… Easter 76: Furnished apartment rue St Charles… May 76: Take apartment in rue de Vaugirard… Sept 76: Back to Paris Home Hotel… Nov 76: Apartment, 12 rue Pierre Curie, Robinson, Sceaux… In that short period, from summer 1975 to late 1976, he moves five times.
I can only conclude that this was when our mother began her affair with our future stepfather, which was either quickly detected or owned up to, casting our father into the wilderness. Even then he intuited that a record needed to be kept; that, if there's an art to not forgetting, it lies in writing everything down.