Sometime ago I decided to read “The Hobbit” to my son. I’d been looking forward to it, as I’d loved the book as a child. I was a fair bit older than him when I read it – 11 or 12, perhaps – but I reckoned that, as we’d already got through the first few Harry Potter books and a modern novelisation of Beowulf, the learning curve wouldn’t be overly steep in terms of dragons, elves and the like.
As excited as I was about my son experiencing the book for the first time, I was even more so about revisiting it myself. Re-reading a book I remembered from childhood offered a prospect of revisiting those years, as though the small boy I had been when I first opened its pages might still be contained within them. I imagined a Proustian scenario, whereby, as I turned the pages, a great buried richness of childhood memories would emerge from the depths of my subconscious.
What happened, instead, was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It turned out that all I’d really retained of the book was that it was about some kind of quest, and that it featured a small hairy man named Bilbo, a wizard called Gandalf and a weird slippery little degenerate named Gollum.
I was surprised by this, even a little unsettled. Until recently, if you’d asked me what books I most vividly remembered from childhood, “The Hobbit” would surely have been among them. But what I recalled was the mere fact of having read it, as opposed to the actual experience. I might as well never have read it at all, for all the impact it seemed to have had.
I might as well never have read “The Hobbit” at all, for all the impact it seemed to have had
The experience felt like proof of something I’ve long suspected: that I can neither imagine nor remember much of my own childhood. I could, of course, give you the basic outline, a Wikipedia-style gist. But I’d struggle to flesh it out with vivid detail.
Not long after the dispiriting “Hobbit”re-read, my daughter started requesting “talk-a-stories” at bedtime, by which she meant oral narratives about my own childhood. My store of standard set-pieces – the one where I lost and eventually recovered my teddy bear; the one where my mum and I were stranded on a train in a snowstorm – got me through a few nights, and then I quickly found that I was recycling the same anecdotes over and over.
I no more remembered the lost teddy bear or the snowstorm than I remembered the founding of Rome
Beyond these tried-and-tested tales, I was unable to retrieve any decent, narrative-ready material from my early years. And even these stories were not based on actual memories, but what my parents had told me about my childhood. I no more remembered the lost teddy bear or the snowstorm than I remembered the founding of Rome.
“Genius”, wrote Baudelaire, “is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself.” (This is, I’ll admit, only one of many metrics by which I must acknowledge my own status as a non-genius.) I am haunted by a sense that my life would be richer, more authentic somehow, if I could more easily access a felt connection with my childhood. I often think that I’d be a better parent, too. I would surely be a more empathetic and understanding parent to my children if I were on more intimate terms with myself at their ages. I would be a more creative and instinctive presence in their lives, a Baudelarian genius of a dad.
When one of my children is being difficult and I’m struggling to deal with it, I have found myself getting down on one knee in front of them. This is not, at least consciously, a gesture of pleading, but an instinctive attempt to physically get down to where they are, to look them in the eye at their own level.
I often feel more patient and more empathic when I do this, more in tune with whatever is going on with them (and therefore with me). And I sometimes think this might be because it triggers some deep memory of what it was like to be down there, to see the world from that vantage. Maybe this is how the memory of childhood works, or can work – not vividly reconstructed memories of places, events and stories, but what happens to you when you lower your sightline by a couple of feet.
My therapist has remarked on how infrequently I mention my childhood. When I suggest that this is because I had a happy one, and that in any case it’s not the past but the future that animates and anguishes my days, she invariably looks sceptical. Just because I am not able to extract, on demand, fully formed memories from my early years, she says, doesn’t mean that those memories are somehow gone or inaccessible. They are still there, a living subconscious presence, accessible in unexpected ways. I might not be Baudelaire’s genius, but my childhood may still be alive within me.
I was rounding corners at speed, firing off turtle-shell missiles with devastating accuracy
Last summer, when we were stuck inside a lot with little to do, I bought a Nintendo Classic Mini, a small replica of the Super Nintendo consoles of the early 1990s, which came pre-installed with a load of games I remembered playing as a kid. This, I reasoned, would be a way of assuaging my son’s growing insistence on being allowed to play video games, without giving him access too young to a world of modern games that might devour his free time and creative energies. That, at least, was the official rationale. What now seems clear is that the thing appealed to me, on a deeper level, was nostalgia for my own childhood.
As soon as I started playing “Super Mario Kart”with my son – handily outclassing him, I might add, in two-player Battle Mode – I experienced a sudden closure of the distance between myself and the ten-year-old boy I’d once been. I mean that not in the sense of memories of stories, specific situations or events, but the feeling, the muscle memory, of childhood itself.
I was rounding corners at speed, firing off turtle-shell missiles with devastating accuracy, as though the 30 years since I’d last played the game had never elapsed. The real memories, it turned out, were contained not in a work of literature, where my adult self had expected to find them, but in a video game, where my childhood self had left them.
I don’t think my son is especially enamoured of these games. After all, they’re artefacts of near-archaeological antiquity from his point of view. But he loves to play them anyway: not by himself, but with me, because they allow him to witness me connecting to my own childhood self. And because I’m just more fun to be around when I’m ten. ■
Mark O’Connell is 1843’s parenting columnist and author of “Notes from an Apocalypse”
ILLUSTRATIONS: KLAUS KREMMERZ
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July 12, 2021 at 04:00PM
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I’m a bad parent because I’ve forgotten my own childhood - The Economist
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