Madeleine of mud
Saturday morning, the first of winter, aptly cold and dark with drizzle, and I was driving with the dog to buy bread when there came into view, through the misted windscreen, a junior soccer match. I stopped the car. And the reason I stopped the car was best described by Proust, the long-dead novelist, author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
I wrote an essay on A La Recherche at university some 40 years ago, so no, of course I haven’t read it. And it’s too late to start now. The point about Proust, as with all great writers, is not what he says but how he says it, in other words his style, and style by definition is what gets lost in translation. So if you’re going to read Proust you should read him in the original and alas my schoolboy French has gathered too much rust for me to do so. I shall go to my grave unProusted and the loss, I realise, is mine.
The little I know of Proust, therefore, is secondhand. I know that he was homosexual. I know that he was frail of health. And I know the story of his famous tea-cake, the madeleine, the taste of which evoked such memories that it became a symbol. Proust’s madeleine represents the memorytriggers we all have, laid down like little land mines. At any moment you can step on one and boom, you are flung back down the unique random path through time that you alone have trodden to somewhere you’d forgotten you remembered. And anything, as Clive James has observed, can be a madeleine. The football match last Saturday was one for me.
The boys were small, the ball sodden and the pitch huge. And with a suddenness that made me gasp I was back at Hassocks County Primary School at the age of maybe 10. The memory came with instant sensory detail: I could feel the woollen socks we wore for football, could see again my football boots with the moulded plastic sole, could feel the weight of the heavy woven shirt, could even smell the mud.
I got out and joined the few spectators on the touchline, parents mostly, with gumboots, umbrellas, dogs on leads. And as I watched the 10 year olds of 2018, they acquired the names and faces of the kids I played football with, most of whom I haven’t seen since 1968.
That deft kid in attack was Paul Catford, whose eyes were actually catlike, and who danced down the wing on silent paws. That feisty kid in midfield, nipping like a corgi, was little Kirk Matthews, whose skin was a storm of freckles. There at the back was big Russell Arnold, who could boot the ball a mile and sometimes even head it. He had hair like a pot scourer. And surely that boy had to be Glyn Mansi, who had hair the colour of tangerines and skin that was almost blue, while over there was ice-eyed angel Michael Morris, whom every mother loved on sight and of whom I was terribly scared. All of these little boys, if still alive, are 61 years old now, fathers probably, grandfathers even, now nearing the end of their working lives.
I stayed and watched some twenty minutes, suffused with memory. Paul Catford scored a goal and celebrated. Come on, I said to the dog, we’d best be going. And as we went back to the car, this grim grey winter morning, I realised I was smiling. Le temps is never quite perdu.
And we went on our way to buy bread.