A glimpse of past lives was to be had in our house last week. We are doing our hall and stairs and so the first job for the painter-decorator was stripping the old wallpaper. We are no strangers to DIY — my wife, especially, is so hardcore as to rank among the SAS of do-it-yourselfers — but the vertiginous drops presented by Victorian proportions and three storeys of height long ago persuaded even otherwise fearless she that our walls and ceilings are properly the preserve of professionals.
Exposed beneath, on plaster that is at least 60 years old, were the etchings, doodles and signatures of some of those that went before. We’ve allowed the same for our own young over the years, giving them free rein to leave their marks on plaster soon to be covered once more. And so it evidently was for the children of other owner-occupiers.
Caricatures were the preference. On one wall after another were pencil drawings of faces, silhouettes, profiles and whole bodies, near life-size; big chins and noses; huge and staring diamond-shaped eyes; massive mouths; and mad hairstyles. The same person, or perhaps some other artist in the family, realised an anatomically detailed, so-called Super-Mouse. Long ago some censor — a parent, perhaps, or the artist, having lost his or her nerve soon after the act of creation was complete — sought to erase the details but the ghostly parts, between muscled legs, have survived the decades behind paper.
A smiling Santa Claus; a Superman; cartoon faces large and small; a well-rendered daffodil; a smiling sun-face. There is a Norwegian fjord too, complete with sunrise and prickled with pine trees and a carefully annotated “tree line” and “snow line” — evidence of some long-forgotten school geography project. On another wall some scholar has bothered to set down the mathematical equation 3x+2x–1x+3. Otherwise ephemeral thoughts, random notions made inadvertently permanent against the odds, decorate the walls.
More touching by far, though, are the words. Beside a bedroom door: “NO ENTRY! KEEP OUT”; “Once upon a time . . . ”; “J Loves . . . your guess is as good as mine”; “J, some time in the past”. Arguably best of all: “Why, oh why, am I in love with Colin?” Whatever happened to Colin? I have to know, and yet I don’t suppose I ever will.
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Let us be honest: we are not dealing here with the cave art of Lascaux or Altamira. What survives upon the walls of our house is the nonsense work of children given permission to make some graffiti on surfaces soon to be covered up. Our three have added to the collection, signing their names, recording the dates of their handiwork, daubing more smiling suns. It is the throwaway, carefree nature of the offerings that makes them so affecting, though.
As an archaeologist I’ve uncovered all manner of items deliberately left behind: burials of loved bodies; careful artworks etched into the interior fabric of foundations and so only for the eyes of gods. Always more intriguing — to me, at least — were those things dropped and lost or cast aside without a second thought.
An old friend, long gone himself now, once showed me the carefully excavated evidence of where someone had knelt down for a few moments some thousands of years ago. Within a scatter of tiny flakes of stone, left behind by a knapper taking time to put an edge on some or other stone tool, were the tell-tale spaces left by his or her knees and toes while they did so. That it was possible to find where a fellow traveller had knelt down thousands of years ago, and also what they had done while they knelt there, put the hairs up on the back of my neck at the time and does so every time I think about it, including now while I type.
We are, all of us, here for such a short time in the scheme of things. Some of us might try to leave behind some proof of our having been: a diary, a novel, a painting or whatever. The seeming truth of the matter is that the best hope any of us has is that we might be remembered by our great-grandchildren. Apparently four generations is the outer reach of family memory, so that beyond the great-grandchildren we are utterly forgotten. Which are the marks, if any, that will outlast us? Those etchings and words will be covered again soon. When, I ask, if ever, will they be seen again?
