Sunburnt Speculations

An exercise in sourcing story from youngest memories.

Christy invited me into his kitchen and began to make us both a cup of tea.

   Will here do?” he asked jiggling the tea bag in the small pot.

   “This will be great,” I replied. “OK. If I put this cushion on the table?”

   “Sure. You go right ahead and get yourself set up there.”

I took a cushion out of my backpack and placed it on the table – equal distance between two chairs that faced each other from opposite sides. I removed my portable field recorder from its cover, placed it on the cushion, plugged in the remote, and ran a sound check.

“All good over here,” I said, smiling to put him at ease as he set the mugs of tea on the table with a plate of shortbread.

“You can dunk if you like” he added.

“Before we start,” I said. “I just wanted to thank you for agreeing to do this interview. We’re exploring early memories of members of the Post-War Generation for a local history project. If there’s any question you’re uncomfortable with, of if you want a break, just hold your hand up and I’ll pause the recording. OK?”

He nodded. So, I continued, ticking off the items on my checklist one by one.

“So, I’ve got the signed consent form. Thank you for that. Any questions?”

“No, you go right ahead, young fella’,” he said, dunking his biscuit in his tea and taking a bite.

I ran through the prelims: date, time, setting, interviewee, subject – and then continued.

“Christy, can I ask you, what do you recall were your earliest memories?” A bit direct and to the point perhaps, but best to get straight into it.

He gazed up and to the left for a moment as if accessing a memory, or deciding if he might answer, before looking at me directly and replying.

“Now you might not believe this,” he said, “Not many do. But I can remember before I was born, hmm?”

He paused, raising his bushy eyebrows as though challenging me. I smiled and nodded, inviting him to go on. Not wanting to interrupt the flow.

“Well, it was more of an awareness, really, than a memory. He emphasised the word. “An awareness of just…” He paused. “… of just being, I guess. There was light. Beautiful, warm, golden light. I was in the middle of it and it just sort of washed over me.”

Nodding again, I resisted the temptation to jump in and ask him to elaborate. It seemed I’d passed some sort of test, for he continued almost as though he was satisfied that I could be trusted to believe.

“After that there wasn’t much until I was about three. At Clangatoona on the Coast. And I can remember getting up on my highchair and undoing the latch on the door to let myself out of house early one morning while the parents were still asleep. I was going to pick flowers with Mandy you see. We went all the way round the block to the street that ran down the back of the hill to the beach. Imagine that! Just us two kids. Three years of age. All that way to pick Scurvy Weed and Pink Shamrock.”

His eyes brightened.

“Because that’s where the fairies lived.”

Silence.

“And what happened?” I asked now drawn into the magic of his memory. He dunked again and went on.

“It was cool and all the colours were bright and fresh. The blues and pinks. We each picked bunch to take to our mothers – probably both knowing we’d get into trouble. Of course, they’d wilted in our hot, small hands by the time we got home. I don’t know what happened to Mandy. Mother put the flowers in a vase.” He chuckled. ”And Father set the latch a foot higher up the door frame.”

Then he burst out laughing at the memory.

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Craft Notes

This was another Josip Novakovich exercise. Here’s the task:

Write down your first three memories. Can you make a story out of any of them? Try. Even if you aren’t sure what you remember exactly, keep going. Imagine that you remember more than you do. Expand and rewrite in the third person, and forget it’s you.

Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer’s Workshop (p. 21). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I chose to invent the oral history setting because it allowed me to shift my memories (yes, they are my earliest memories!) into the third person and still preserve the detachment that would give me space to create fiction. I think it worked.

“Scurvy Weed” and “Pink Shamrock“

These were flowers of my childhood. They grow in coastal regions of South-East Queensland. We didn’t know them by those names. They were just blue and pink flowers. They were beautiful and to us they were magic!

Photos by Brian Walters https://anpsa.org.au/plant_profiles/commelina-cyanea/ (Scurvy Weed) and Nick Lambert (Pink Shamrock) https://bie.ala.org.au/species/https://id.biodiversity.org.au/node/apni/2889233

“Clangatoona“

This is a made-up place name. But you might be able to recognise it! In 1958, around the time of this memory, it was a small town on the Southern end of the Gold Coast.