Memories of childhood affect most of us. Perhaps we see these flashbacks as more genuine than adult memories, but they certainly have a poetic quality about them and a mysterious force. One of my memories is of watching Film Noir on BBC TV's Sunday afternoon Film Matinee in the early 60s (usually after Sergeant Bilko in the Phil Silvers Show if I recall). I would have been around eight years old, the boy in the picture below if I remember correctly. To
this day, many of the films I watched at that time and, above all, the feelings and arbitrary images associated with them, are very fresh. For example, the Melancholia of The Third Man, the smoking and brooding Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past while I still get a tingle down the spine when I see the opening scene from Citizen Kane and hear that word, "Rosebud." What was Kane thinking and feeling? Was there that shocking realisation that only childhood memories are real or that these fragments of memory will come back to haunt us and remind us, as we draw our last breath, that our ambitions come to nothing?
For me, what lingers in the mind is the fatalistic mood, the flashbacks, the dramatic shadows and the flawed protagonist, the banter and the voiceover narration.
I only realised that Film Noir had influenced and inspired my writing when a number of readers suggested that several of my books had a "noirish"
feel about them. I think this is probably true of The Poor Singer of an Empty Day. It has all the hallmarks mentioned above: the flashback, the shadows and a flawed protagonist - Julian - tormented by memories.
Here is an extract. Julian is being interviewed in the consulting room at the local station of the Kent Constabulary.
It was at that moment that Julian turned a mental corner, and waiting for him there was a memory from 1968. It seemed that someone was sketching a familiar shape inside his skull. The shape was the suppressed memory of a person who had once humiliated him, and it was clawing its way out of the subconscious. A mental glimpse of the managerial suit and white shirt-cuffs came and went in an instant, but the image came relentlessly forward and soon it had a name, John McKnight.
McKnight was half-in and half-out of memory, and Julian was flustered, unsure how he was going to deal with this bully. Should he face him as the older man from 1998 or as the young boy from 1968? The dregs of the boy were still there and trembling while John McKnight came forward. But the memory was changing while it approached. There was now a younger man present, and both he and John were moving in Julian’s direction, two figures, side by side. There was a sense that they were floating just above the grass of the beautifully tended Tiltyard lawns, and a suggestion that one of the two had said something amusing for both men seemed to be smiling.
The image of McKnight evaporated, but the younger man returned. He seemed to shed light as he came forward, and in the light, Julian saw his thinning hair and his glasses, balanced on the end of his nose. With this image came a name - Dick Duncan-Smith, and a string of words associated with him. Suddenly, like McKnight himself, the man disappeared, a stray thought in the black hole of lost time. Only the echo of his words remained, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
The memory passed Julian by, and he was left with a feeling of amazement that such people could have been forgotten for so long. Why, he wondered, had these men decided to crawl into the present at that particular time? He supposed they had been brought back to life during the earlier incident in his car, and its associations with violence, fear, lawlessness and the mention of the emerging person’s name, John. But above all, it would have been the sight of Kathy’s face that revitalised the two men.
Julian made a quick decision, a statement of intent to himself. He was not yet ready to free and attend to these unwelcome ghosts, and he forced the men back into the darkness in which he had imprisoned them thirty years earlier. The eighteen-year-old Julian might be dead, but he was unsure whether he would be able to face McKnight as the forty-eight-year-old person he actually was.
“Sir? Are you sure you’re all right, sir?”
He looked the policeman right in the eye and smiled his lop-sided smile. In a distracted tone, he said:
“Am I all right? Yes, I’m absolutely fine.”
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