Secrets

AVERY COLT

How can anything so vivid and insistent as childhood memories be mistaken? The very foundation stones of adult consciousness; how can they be false? For example, I remember my mother coming home from her office one winter night, snowflakes still melting on her coat when she hugged me. And after she took off her coat and threw it across the back of a dining room chair she went into the kitchen, pulled down a bottle of Fleishman’s gin, poured two fingers into a water glass, and drank it down. Rough day at the office indeed. 
Except, whenever I recounted this memory Mother denied it absolutely. “I never kept gin in the kitchen,” she said, “I never drank gin straight, and I never drank Fleishman’s gin in my life.” As I search my memory I see the Fleishman’s label clearly. I also see the unmistakable Bombay Gin label, with Queen Victoria on it, from countless nights on the drinks trolley. But when I try to paste the Bombay label on my memory of the bottle in the kitchen, it won’t stick.
As a writer, of course, I create fictional scenes all the time. Even more, I know that many of these scenes, the characters and their activities, just pop into my head. I can’t even say that the conscious mind creates the scenario, and then the unconscious fills in detail, for often the scenario itself takes an unexpected turn. And the point is, these characters have an independent existence, and the things they do are as vivid and insistent as though I had watched them in real life. So the memory of my mother, glass in hand, could have been created. But why a child, or an adult looking back at childhood, should have created that particular memory, I can’t say. 

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