#memory-and-identity

#memory-and-identity

I won't, I promise, refer to Felicity Kendal as Tom Stoppard's muse. No, she says firmly. Not this week. Speaking to Stoppard's former partner and longtime leading lady is delicate in the immediate aftermath of the writer's death. But she is previewing a revival of his Indian Ink, so he shimmers through the conversation. The way Kendal refers to Stoppard in the present tense tells its own poignant story.

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn't remember making them. When he was seven, in the summer of 1969, his father woke him up to watch the moon landing; it was the middle of the night where they lived, near Southampton, in England.

When we talked, it wasn't just about jobs or kids or where life had taken us. It was also about remembering who we used to be - those fearless, awkward, hopeful kids who thought the world was ahead of them. There's something grounding about being seen like that again, by the people who knew your firsts and loved you just as you were.

I still have that copy; I've carried it through half a dozen states and a dozen moves and uncountable phases of my life. Twenty-seven years later, its pages are vanilla-sweet, from the decaying lignin; the imprint was long ago absorbed into another. But "I Who Have Never Known Men," which was first published thirty years ago, in French, has found new life.