Uma on Memory

I've spent a bit of time recently lying on the sofa, contemplating my old sideboard of surprises and thinking about the nature of memory.

How does your memory work or fail? It's worth chewing over this question a little because memory is one of life's free indulgences with no interest to be paid on outstanding items and no obligation to follow up a sample by taking on a full set which you just know will prove to be overpowering.

Being a visual person who has spent time in the rag trade, my memories tend to start with shapes and patterns and textures. Here I am standing in my aunt's garden by the hydrangea bushes. The large, papery flower blooms are just brushing the top of my head and the bushes are massed together by the low garden wall like camouflage, a chintzy defence against the outside world.

Now, next to these pretty, puffball patterns made by the flowers and the little girl's curly hair I see another shape, a different presence - my aunt, my Slightly Dodgy Unreliable aunt. The Unreliable One had a different shape from the other women in my little girl's life, she was sharper, glossier, more defined, very much not a pretty puffball. Her trousers were always skin-tight her nails lacquered to a mirror-sheen and she wore high, high shoes which gave a sway to her hips as she walked Unreliable smelt more perfumed than my mother yet somehow also dirtier, more reckless.

I loved to play with my aunt's shoes, arranging them in a circle so it looked as though a collection of glamorous women were sitting around a huge dining table, enjoying a delicious meal and discussing their latest adventures. The shoes covered all over in striped, rainbow coloured silk, right down to the ends of their narrow, tapering heels travelled regularly to India and danced across the marble floors of a Maharajah's palace. Sandals trimmed with bead tassels spent every winter in a hotel by the river Nile, watching sailing boats and crocodiles. My favourite pair of giant, stomping wedges with patent straps could have had a future as a support for my trusty sideboard if it ever lost its legs, had they survived being thrown at a boyfriend's head and on into the middle of the A1. That was particularly sad shoe death; the mourning only intensified when my mother pointed out that the loss was entirely due to Unreliable's 'rackety' behaviour.

What I like about these early memories of my aunt's house is that they bring together two worlds - the pretty, safe garden with its flowers like coloured clouds, a world I now realise my mother fought to make for me and guard against all threats and the unpredictable world of my aunt, full of vivid patterns and sudden, surprising events. Sometimes I stand a vase of hydrangeas on the sideboard, next to a photo of my mother and aunt sitting on a motorbike. Perhaps my aunt was thinking of a road trip whilst my mother planned the grocery run but it's one of those moments where the worlds they created came together, even if only in passing on the back of a Harley Davidson.