Precious unreliable memory

Text 1: Setting Point, by Ann Tregarthen

An original short story extract.

Mum had forgotten my name again by the time the plums were stoned, but she had not forgotten the jam.

She stood at the stove in her blue apron with the big aluminium pan, the one with the dent in the side from the time Dad dropped it in 1979, and she stirred with a wooden spoon whose end had been worn flat by forty years of exactly this. I had brought the plums from the market. I had intended to do it myself while she watched from the table, but she had got up as soon as she smelled the fruit, and taken the spoon out of my hand, and that was that.

“You don’t want too much water,” she told me, as if I were a neighbour who had dropped in. “People drown them. And you want a cold saucer in the freezer for the setting point. Have you got a saucer in the freezer?”

I had. She had taught me, thirty years ago, in this kitchen, standing on a chair.

She talked the whole time. About plums, about sugar, about a woman called Doreen who had once added pectin from a packet and been, Mum said darkly, found out. She did not know what year it was. She had asked me twice that morning whether her own mother was coming for tea. But when the jam began to climb the sides of the pan in slow, glossy bubbles, she lifted a spoonful, let it fall, watched how it dropped, and said, “Nearly,” with perfect authority.

She tested it on the cold saucer and pushed it with her fingertip until it wrinkled. Then she looked up at me, pleased, and for a moment her eyes cleared, and she said, “There you are, Ellen. That’s how you know.”

I said yes. I said it was perfect. I did not trust myself to say anything else.

Text 2: Creosote, by Hugh Danvers

An original contemporary memoir.

They were creosoting the fence at the end of the station car park, and the smell reached me before I had worked out what it was: black, sharp, oily, like tar left out in the sun. I stopped with my ticket in my hand. I was seven years old and standing in my father’s boatyard at Brancaster, the summer before he died, watching him paint the bottom of an upturned dinghy while the gulls screamed overhead.

I could see it all. The slipway green with weed. The radio on the workbench, playing cricket. The way he held the brush, like a pen, and the way he let me do one plank, and the black streak that I got on my new sandals and was not told off for. That summer has been the bright centre of my childhood for forty years. I have described it at dinner parties. I put it in the eulogy I gave for my mother.

Last Christmas I mentioned it to my sister, and she put her glass down.

“Dad never had a boatyard,” she said. “That was Mr Lumley’s yard, next to the caravan site. We went there one afternoon. Dad didn’t even like boats. He was sick on the ferry to Wells.”

I said she was wrong. She was eleven that summer; I was seven; she had always been better at facts. She found a photograph to prove it: my father in a deckchair, in a shirt and tie, frowning at the camera, nowhere near the sea.

And yet. Standing in the car park with the creosote in my nose, I can still feel the weight of that brush and the warmth of the wood under my hand. I can hear the cricket. I know, now, that some of it is borrowed and some of it invented and some of it, perhaps, never happened at all. I find that I do not want it any less.

‘In both texts, memory is presented as unreliable but precious.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what the characters remember and forget
• explain how far memory can be trusted in each text
• compare how the writers present memory

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