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Pupils at Bosworth Junior School (Harold Hill) c. 1972
Rather like Sebastian Horsley, I have always been happy to have my existence confirmed by official documentation: police files, medical reports, tax returns, etc. are, as he says, for many of us, our "only claim on immortality" [1].
So you can imagine my distress when I discovered that my mother and/or sister acting as self-appointed memory police had thrown away my school reports, neatly handwritten by my teachers in royal blue fountain pen ink at the end of each year and offering an assessment not only my academic ability (limited), but character (flawed) [2].
It is, as I say, not simply that these things had sentimental value; they had also existential import and their disappearance from the world matters to me more even than the disappearance of the schools themselves or the disappearance of old school friends.
Of course, my mother and/or sister didn't simply dispose of my school reports; toys, games, letters, and assorted treasures from the past that had helped ground me in being, were all brutally shoved into bin bags.
In the name of tidying up and making space, all traces of my childhood which I had lovingly sought to preserve, were casually eliminated; "replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled" [3] ...
Notes
[1] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, (Sceptre, 2008), p. 102.
[2] From memory, I can recall that the consensus seemed to be that whilst I was capable of producing good work, I was too easily distracted, too chatty, and too keen to amuse my fellow pupils by playing the class clown. No doubt they would simply stamp the letters ADHD on the reports were they written today.
[3] Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020), p. 14.
For further remarks on this subject, with reference to the work of Michael Landy, click here.
