half remembered things

It is strange and rather worrying how mutable and unreliable long term memory can be.  Mine had placed my childhood meeting with Jeremy Thorpe in our house, and yet both my parents agree that he never visited there, and that it was probably in Exeter's St George's Hall, where the late Liberal leader had come to rally the local fund raising troops at the annual fete.  Instantly my mind recast his gaunt face to the cavernous heights of the hall, and that seemed entirely convincing too.

I used to enjoy the Liberal Christmas Fair, which might make me an odd child.  Every ward had its speciality, which was the same every year, so far as I can remember.  Topsham ran the White Elephant Stall, which yielded an entertaining array of stuff, and Alphington's stall had crocheted toilet roll covers in the shape of dancers' skirts, and bars of soap fashioned into swans with pipe cleaners and netting frills.  Or at least, that's how I remember it.

My father dug out the Isca Fayre LP and gave it to me, on the grounds that he never listens to it, indeed, he no longer possesses a record deck.  We played it last night when it formed a retro West Country counterpoint to Bellowhead, which may have been the first time anyone listened to it in thirty years, and was certainly the first time I'd heard some of the songs over the same period.  I still like it, but again my memory has played tricks, since one song which I was sure they did, would have sworn blind that they did, was not on it.  I could hear the tune in my mind's ear, and the slightly whooping rhythm of the parts coming in beneath in the chorus, but whoever's record it was on, it wasn't Isca Fayre's.  Puzzled, I had a look down the track listings of my Watersons CDs, conscious of the gaps, and there it was, the first track on For Pence and Spicy Ale.  Watersons discography is complicated by the fact that they didn't preserve a one-to-one relationship between the tracks on their vinyl albums and the re-releases on CD, but there the song was, not by Isca Fayre at all.

Sometimes memory runs the other way.  I rack my brains from time to time trying to remember the name of a made for television play I once saw, set in the Fens, as evidence for my theory that the Fens are only ever portrayed as unremittingly sinister in all books and dramas in which they appear. Waterland, The Rainy Day Women, The Nine Taylors.  This play was about a foxy but middle aged teacher of English language to adults, who had married one of her pupils, a considerably younger and definitely hot working class young man.  The body of a local girl is found murdered, and she is gradually seized by the horrible conviction that he did it.  I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw that Billie Whitelaw had died, because I'd thought that she might have been the actress who played the teacher, only I couldn't find any such TV play in her IMDb entry.  So why can't I remember the actress when the play made such a vivid impression on me?