Passing on Memories

This is a topic I come back to again and again and there are aspects of it that really fascinate me. One that has been on my mind recently is the extent of 'oral memory', and it's an issue coming up in my studies

We think of a 'generation' as only being about twenty five years between someone's birth and the birth of their first child. On average it's longer now but in both Japan and England it increases only slowly. A 'life span' on the other hand has increased a lot over the last fifty years - in Japan from aound 65 years to around 80 years.

So typically most of us have young adult memories of our grandparents and even fifty years ago we had clear memories of them as teenagers. This strikes me as usually the crucial relationship in passing on memories - and with them perhaps our culture and sense of 'being' and history.

In effect our grandparents - and sometimes our great-grandparents - are like a bridge in time. The transmit to our ears what they heard with their owm.

For example my own grandfather was born in 1898, his father in the 1870's and his own grandfather, who he remembered well, in the 1850's. So there's a direct line of 'memory' that goes back from me through him to my great-great-grandfather's experiences as a child around 1860.

That's a formidable thought eh? Many of us have or recently had some direct oral access to memory of 150 years ago. When my grandfather used to say to me "My grandad used to have to get up at five on the farm to feed the cart horses" he was actually talking about something that happened in Yorkshire during the Edo-jidai or before much of the American west was colonised by white settlers.

When I worked in England back in the 1970's I remember hearing a very old lady on local radio talking about this. I can't remember the exact link but it went something like this. She had been told by her great-grandfather that his great-grandfather had told him that his grandfather as a young man had been a scared young pikeman for King Charles II guarding the city bridge in our Civil War battle there in September 1651. That's three centuries in just five lifetimes.

Well, I think it's interesting. It's always a good time to ask people about their oldest memories.