Memory keeping people close

Text 1: The Last Film, by Nathan Greer

An original short story extract.

The camera cost Theo two pounds at the car boot sale on the old airfield: a heavy black thing in a leather case that smelled of mothballs. The man said it was probably broken. It was not broken. When Theo got it home and opened the back, very carefully, he found that there was still a film inside, wound almost to the end.

The chemist took a fortnight to develop it, and charged more than the camera had cost.

There were twenty-three photographs. A grey, windy beach. A cake with candles on a kitchen table. And in almost all of them, the same old man: tall, bald, laughing, in a cardigan, holding up a crab on the beach, blowing out the candles, pretending to fall asleep in a deckchair. In the last picture he was asleep in the deckchair for real, his mouth a little open, a newspaper over his knees.

Inside the leather case, behind a flap, Theo found a luggage label. It said: E. and R. Whitlock, 14 Orchard Rise.

He cycled to Orchard Rise and stood on the doorstep for a long time with the envelope of photographs before he rang the bell.

The woman who opened the door was small and white-haired and holding a tea towel. When he explained, she did not say anything. She took the envelope and looked at the first photograph, and then the second, and then she sat down on the stairs in her own hallway, as if her legs had decided for her.

“The camera went to the car boot with his things,” she said at last. “I didn’t know there was a film in it. I didn’t know.” She held up the deckchair picture. “That was the September. That was the last week.” And then she laughed, and wiped her eyes with the tea towel, and said, “Look at him. Look at the state of him. He always said he never fell asleep.”

Text 2: The Boat Song, by Morven Gillies

An original contemporary memoir.

My grandmother sang me the same song every time I stayed with her, from when I was a baby until I was far too old to admit that I still wanted it. It was in Gaelic, which she had spoken as a child on Barra and had mostly lost in fifty years of Glasgow, and it was about a boat, she said, and a girl waiting on the shore, and the wind. Her mother had sung it to her. Nobody had ever written it down.

I did not understand a word of it, and I did not need to. I knew it the way I knew the smell of her house, the coal tar soap and the furniture polish.

When she was ninety-one, and in the hospice, I asked her to teach it to me properly. I took a notebook. It was harder than I had expected. Her voice had gone thin and cracked, and some of the words had gone too. She would sing a line and stop, and frown at the ceiling, and say, “There’s a bit there. Something about the oars. It’s gone.”

So we made it up. Not the tune, which she still had perfectly, but the gaps. Where she had lost a line, I hummed, and she nodded and hummed with me, and that became the line. By the end of the week I had two verses in my notebook, spelled the way they sounded, with a row of dots in the places where nobody remembered anything at all.

She died in the spring. I have a daughter now, Eilidh, who is three, and every night at bedtime, with the light off and the door open a crack, I sing her the song about the boat and the girl and the wind. When I get to the dots, I hum. Eilidh hums too. She thinks that is how it goes.

I suppose it is.

‘Both texts present memory as a way of keeping people close.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what is remembered in each text
• explain how far memory keeps people close
• compare how the writers present memory

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.