There exists a picture of my mother and I taken almost sixty years ago. I was something like three or four months old and my mother, clearly proud and pleased to have produced me. Every now and then in my childhood, I remember her bringing it out to embarrass me, the way many mothers must do as part of the normal duties, part and parcel of bringing up a boy.
I am dressed in the usual over decorated fancy hat and cape and she is wearing a dark blue dress with white piping around the edges. Or is she?
Colour has played a role in some of my former jobs, culminating in being a colour photograph printer in the early eighties. Hand printing wedding pictures takes a great deal of skill, as I am sure my neighbour Stephen Henry, photographer, will agree. Seeing the subtle shades of colour in the shadows, knowing how much colour to subtract on the enlarger so that the next print would be perfect, I found took a deal of concentration that I never knew I had.
So why is it that when I refer to the picture to my mother she always corrects my assertion that the dress was dark blue, It was, of course green. Why is it that this brain, a brain that was at least capable of being trained to a high degree of colour perception, steadfastly insisted against the evidence, that the dress was blue?
What else have I got wrong in my memories?
How can I trust anything I remember faced with this, this, memory?
No comments:
Post a Comment