WHAT ARE MEMORIES MADE OF?

How much do we remember of childhood, how much is embroidered, how many memories are either false or inherited?

These questions often arise in my mind when reading memoires of early life particularly when the detail in such narratives is intense and when the author reaches back to so early a period of his or her youth where, equivalently, I would have little to say.

One vivid set of such early memories is contained in the first volume of Serge Aksakov's autobiography - 'Years of Childhood'.  Aksakov (or Aksakoff) was born in Russia, in 1791 and his book is almost a quarter through - and filled with detail after detail - even before he remembers the events surrounding the death of Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, in 1796.

Born eighty years later in France, Marcel Proust covers much of the same ground - the amiable or belligerent and always eccentric behaviour of his relatives and their servants, the changing landscape witnessed - in his case - through railway carriage windows, in Aksakov's through the windows of horse-drawn carriages or the frost-rimed windows of sleighs.

For me, perhaps, the most striking story is that written by Priscilla Napier of whom, like Aksakov (less so Proust), I know nothing bar that written by her own hand.  Napier spent her childhood in Egypt before the First World War (she was born, apparently, in 1908) and her description in, 'A Later Beginner', of the lives of the ruling, or at least powerful, English elite in that part of the Middle East is extraordinary.  The heat glows off the pages, the childish feuds and friendships exactly drawn, the dust, the sea, the Nile, the Arabs - and again the servants: cooks, nannies, housemaids, stable boys, (as well as early teachers), are near perfectly preserved.

But to repeat the opening question.  How much of this is true?  As we grow older, all of us preserve memories for some reason important to us but, as others pass, impossible to verify.  And when verification is attempted some, perhaps many, of the 'facts' begin to be undermined.

Studies have been done on the elderly and their remembrances (to quote Proust) of 'times past'.  In many cases the circumstances of the recollection (date or location) have been proved to be impossible.  For me such analysis is interesting but I am not sure it is consequential.  Does an error of detail reduce the value or indeed the credibility of a memory?  Of course a formal historian would say that it does but I am not quite so sure.

I remember (!) my only visit to Jerusalem some 20 years ago.  My first impressions of the organization of the monuments, in particular the Christian sites, turned quickly to annoyance as my Western mind revolted at the notion that everyone of consequence in the earlier part of the New Testament seemed to have lived in the Via Dolorosa - Joseph at one house, Mary at another and so on.  Unlikely.

I was profoundly disconcerted by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre under the altar of which are, notionally, three holes where the crosses of Christ and the two robbers had originally stood - far too close together for likelihood and inside the city wall.  In fact this location came to Constantine's mother the Empress Helena in a dream in the early part of the fourth century.

None of the details were accurate but this does not mean, I see now, that none of the stories is true.  I make no comment about the divine but I am sure that much of the history related in the New Testament is right and the fact that events took place a few hundred yards from where they are commemorated rather than on the exact spot, seems irrelevant over the space of two thousand years.  Memory has turned to symbolism.

And yet, and yet.  The area of Jerusalem which moved me most was the Garden of Gethsemane in the same place it has always been and populated, in many cases, by the same olive trees - the very ones - that were alive when Christ walked the garden.  The impact when memory - legend if you will - and fact come together is profound.

That profound impact is to be felt in the three books I've mentioned which leads me to think that their recollections are also true in fact and in detail, as well.  It is just my memory that plays me up from time to time.