The Cure For Sleep: Memory Games
Season 1, 002: holding our loved ones in mind
The Cure For Sleep (W&N: 20 Jan 2022) is a memoir about the ways in which our earliest loves and losses affect our adult lives – and what it takes to gain strength and purpose from these, instead of only circling those events in memory like hungry ghosts.
April’s extract is about trying to hold a person in mind, even as they are going away from us. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own - no more than 300 words – on this theme in the comments section.
Read the Season One stories contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website: bedtime stories | memory games | bonding | choosing | promises | size & shape | time | desire | regret | faith | rebirth
april’s extract
Last wild minutes of that long and sleepless week. Things I said and did before I removed my granny from her home forever:
Fetched a best outfit so nurses might understand her value.
Held up a mirror while she did her lips and cheeks.
Brushed her white hair as I’d never been allowed.
Sat her dressed and ready by the unlit fire.
Tried next to make a going-away bag which could carry the whole house, its essence, off with her to hospital: knitting needles, wool, wedding photo. The cheap beads she put on over a clean blouse every evening (a habit of changing off after each day’s work to feel beautiful for her husband and herself that she’d kept up in his memory). Envelope of funny stories she cut from newspapers and Woman’s Weekly, that she could never read aloud without crying with laughter. Letter her favourite grandchild wrote from the farm in her first year of widowhood, asking if she’d please come back to help with lambing? The photos of me and others she took to bed on the night she tried to die.
Ran after that through the only remaining rooms of my childhood (my mother moved often after I left home; my father’s house – one painful season aside – had always been locked to me). Rifled every drawer and wardrobe as if I could steal and keep safe how I loved her: Cotton reels; shoe polish; jars of homemade jam and pickles; hat for Chapel; fifty-year old crêpe-paper Christmas decorations; smelling salts. Even heavy things I could never use, I wanted to take away in my arms: crank-handled sewing machine, coal scuttle, meat mincer.
Looking, looking, looking. As in the memory games she would make on a tray for my pre-school self, whipping off the teatowel and daring me – quick! – to remember everything: thimble, nutmeg, queen of hearts. This time trying to hold her whole life in my mind. The little margarine tub where she kept soap and flannel for the strip-wash done at her kitchen sink each morning. Sand-timer got from a jumble sale with a crude drawing of a cockerel on the wooden board that held it, and this wisdom: The cock does all the crowing but the hen does all the work. Tins of bright enamel for painting a new spring coat on the garden gnome each year. Binoculars with foxed lenses and a mildewed case used daily to keep watch on weather coming in from the coast towards the fields of her old farm.
Understanding, only then, how strange and static my way of living had always been. How I began when young, through loss, to prize routine and everyday objects more than people. As if by loving a person in pieces, through pieces, to pieces, I could suspend time, stop sorrow.
Last words. Me kneeling, holding her hands in mine.
‘Have a good rest at the hospital, Granny, and be home for Spring.’
‘Once I go, I shan’t never come back.’
‘But you must. I’ll have a baby before the end of next year.’
What I’d always pushed away, I now pulled close. An offering to the woman I loved who’d been happiest in the care of children and small animals. Wanting – too late – to make a baby that would make her want to live.
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Tanya, your wonderful story has both broken and lifted my heart. I can’t wait for the book to come out! I recognise parts of my own story within yours, and you have unleashed so many memories and feelings, in this piece in particular about my great grandmother, Amy.
The story we grew up with, passed on to me by my father, strangely, not my mother, her grand daughter, was that she had been in service, fell prey to the attentions of the master, or his son, or someone, anyone, and had become pregnant. Because of this, she had been locked away in the crazy house until she died, nameless and forgotten. It’s what happened to unmarried women then, just one of those Victorian things.
Thirty years later, my work on our family tree uncovered a different story. My great grandmother was feeble-minded, deaf and dumb, and also a scholar, depending on which census you read. She had worked at the local mill with everyone else, lodged with various family members in a succession of tiny tied-cottages, swapping about here and there, weavers all the way down. The birth certificate named a father I could not trace, a name made up to save face no doubt, but she looked after her only child until he went to fight in the French trenches.
It wasn’t until she was forty-one that they took her away, just as they had taken her mother and her sister to a different asylum, the reasons unknown or concealed. She died inside that place after 46 winters, in the spring following the birth of my sister; they could have met, but my mother didn’t know about her grandmother then, and realised only years later that she must have been ‘the old lady’ that her parents went to visit ‘in hospital’ on occasion.
My sister’s own daughter bears her name.
Hi Tanya. You have shared such incredible writing and encouraged so many others to do the same. It has been a battle to overcome imposter syndrome and write some words to join them. As you know from your kind mentoring session earlier this year, I found it incredibly difficult to start to write about the loss of my Dad and the grief I feel, even now. This short thought came to me today, just a couple of weeks ahead of what would have been his 80th birthday. Thank you for your encouragement, as always.
In Sepia
The 3D you is a sepia photograph now. Colours faded. I squeeze my eyes tight in a bid to bring you back to life, channelling Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. The edges are fuzzy, and I can just about make out the crinkles around your eyes. I can’t see your hands or the shape of your body in your red jumper anymore. But it is smell and sound that sharpen the lens a little.
That red jumper now sits amongst my own in the wardrobe. I inhale it, but your scent has dissipated and mingled with mine long ago. There is just one drawer I can open, though. Your old bedside table sits in the hallway, which I filled with Dad things: a hammer, spirit level, screwdrivers and alum keys. And it is here where the last molecules remain of a life once lived: a faint whiff of tobacco and the sweet woody mustiness of you.
The catchy piano chords, the snap of drumbeats and the line, “put a pony in me pocket, I’ll get the suitcase from the van” take me back to the sound of you laughing. An uncontrollable belly laugh that I otherwise rarely saw. I see you slapping your thigh with tears running down your face saying, “Bleedin’ wrap up” or “Sod my old boots”. Never mind the Only Fools and Horses catchphrases; you had your own.