Kevin Ireland - Backwards to Forwards

This is not an autobiography. It does not attempt to present a full account of a life; it does not dwell on events or achievements; it does not propose explanations or excuses; it does not examine or interpret motives; and it is deliberately selective. It is a memoir, derived from impressions, conversations , anecdotes and poems, and its vague focus is a trip to Eastern Europe that I took by chance in 1959.

The narrative leads indirectly and haphazardly towards and away from this single happening, not because I think it important in itself, or even central to my existence for there are several other, equally erratic, ways that I might have shaped this story but because it helped change me as a writer and, far more significantly, because it has lately begun to suggest that I may once have had a little-noticed, but uniquely privileged, personal observation point from which I now sometimes imagine that I may have caught a whiff of the odours and a flicker of the shadows of the times through which the whole world drifted.

It was a lucky break, for the place, the people and even the tang in the air were different then. In the 1950s, and especially the 1960s, life on Earth altered and not just in attitudes, styles, relationships, beliefs, values and expectations, or in the dynamics of its many languages. Sometimes I think the planet must have been wobbling almost off its axis.

Yet I have tried to keep reminding myself that all such impressions can only be discriminatory and distorted. We may revisit moments in the past, but they cannot be relived. Even the most meticulous historian is never going to get the facts exactly right. He or she will always impose discriminations , interpretations and suppositions. But this is part of their interest. We re-humanise our yesterdays by our efforts to re-enter them.

In this record I have altered a couple of names, but the rest is the truth as I remember it. The omissions may be considerable, but my excuse for them is that they would have jam-packed the tale and obscured whatever pattern it now possesses. Most of my old friends and great occasions belong to another set of markers that may one day disclose a pathway towards a new point of view.

The single thread I have held to as this tale has unravelled is the process of recollection itself. My previous memoir, UndertheBridgeandOvertheMoon, was also underpinned by a single event, the break-up of my family, but I was able to use that narrative device in a fairly straightforward chronology, for we usually perceive our family history in terms of progress and development, and we reconstruct the events of our childhood and youth in a linked sequence of awakenings, or as a series of steps towards independence and insight. Adult storylines seldom work like that. This one occasionally moves backwards and forwards in time, for that is how we recall our more recent yesterdays.

My method was to go to my desk each morning and simply jot down a record of each episode from my past as it came to me in the early hours, mostly in moments between sleeping and waking. This is a manner of working that many writers follow, but in addition I have tried to preserve the basic structure and chronology of the record, going back only to correct and amplify. It seemed to me, from the beginning, that I should not try to alter the erratic shape of remembrance.

The test is this: there is a devious mechanism in the mind that sets its own times precisely. It is best left alone. When it is fiddled about with, it stops ticking. I have tried to keep listening for it. The sound is faint. It is measured in heartbeats.