A remembrance lurking in objects

One of England's greatest contemporary writers Penelope Lively talks about memory as not just a private asset but also as something vast and resonant, writes Saudha Kasim.

Some years ago, the organisation I was working for at the time was shifting its manufacturing operations away from the city. As the project team began clearing the site for the new modern office building which would replace a production hangar, a colleague mentioned how they had found an old scrap pit where parts that had not passed quality checks had been discarded. It was, he told me, like digging through a small part of the country’s industrial history, layer after layer of discarded metal representing the passing of decades, telling the story of generations of workmen who had worked in that factory from the time the republic was in its infancy.

You’d think material memory, whether individual or popular, would be most associated with iconic objects: the Sarnath pillar, the bust of Nefertiti, the Kohinoor. But for most of us, there’s no need for a priceless diamond to imagine bygone lives or trigger Proustian recollections when a decades-old machine part can do so with greater felicity. As the British writer Penelope Lively wrote, “The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalising messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle.”

That observation, acute and incisive, appears on the final page of Lively’s book, Ammonites And Leaping Fish, which she describes in the preface as “…not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age.”

Lively — who has won the Booker, the Carnegie and the Whitbread in a long and storied career as one of England’s great contemporary women writers — wrote this book at the age of 80 (it was first published in 2013). She was inspired to write Ammonites And Leaping Fish because she found herself “thinking less about what has happened to me but interested in this lifetime context, in the times of my life.”

The first piece in the book addresses old age — specifically what’s happening to societies where life expectancy has become longer than at any time in human history. “Old age is the new demographic” in large parts of the West and there are many attendant problems that the increasing population of pensioners brings with it. Lively bristles most at the stereotyping of the old, insisting that all that the demographic has “in common… are our aches and pains and disabilities”. She also considers how “the models supplied by fiction” can’t really make much sense of a life that keeps going on because fiction narratives require a definite ending. In fact, it’s long-running soap operas that reflect real life best: “…it goes on and on as a succession of events until the plug is pulled.”

In the other pieces in the book, Lively looks back at her own wartime childhood in Egypt and England, her experiences during the Cold War, and the miraculous and sometimes untrustworthy nature of memory. In old age, she says, she is “time made manifest.” As a writer who’s always loved books, in the penultimate section, she addresses the pleasures of a lifetime of reading and writing.

In the final part of the book, Lively examines, in-depth, six objects that are her most precious possessions — among them the ammonites and a pottery shed with two black fish that give the book its name. For Lively, these objects from different eras of geological and human history expand her concept of time. And in doing so, helps reinforce the central thesis of this book — that memory “is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant.”

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

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