![]() ![]() “We were both away at school at the time. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn’t there?” “I can see it all in my mind’s eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law? He immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, “I remember it exactly as you described it.” But regarding the second bombing, he said, “You never saw it. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.Ī few months after the book was published, I spoke of these bombing incidents to my brother Michael, five years my senior. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire - indeed, made it burn even more furiously. On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning. The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crêpe paper. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) - many of us in our pajamas - walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?). One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal but assumed that the memories I did have were essentially valid and reliable, and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.Ī striking example of this arose in relation to the two bomb incidents that I described in Uncle Tungsten, both of which occurred in the winter of 1940-’41, when London was bombarded in the Blitz: And partly because, in writing about the earliest years of my life, I could not call on the letters and journals I later started to keep from the age of 18. I expected some deficiencies of memory, partly because the events I was writing of had occurred half a century earlier and most of those who might have shared their memories were now dead. ![]() I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated by these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched a three-year project of dredging, reclaiming memories, reconstructing, refining, seeking for unity and meaning, which became my book Uncle Tungsten. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs. In 1993, approaching my 60th birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon - the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upwards of 50 years, memories of my boyhood in London before the Second World War. ![]()
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