The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

sand and shell, that fell gently towards a huge expanse – at low tide – of mud and ankle-deep water, before falling away again into a shipping channel, which was bounded a few miles beyond by the seemingly symmetrical outline of the volcanic island of Rangitito, that framed the entrance into Auckland harbour.

      We become more or less what we have always been, which might be why we take so little notice of the ways in which we have changed, which in turn might be why, in so many of the chambers of the museum of memory, we find some empty scaffolding, a blank wall, a pail and broom, and a laconic notice that describes the picture that must once have hung there. The unhappy, the abused, the insecure and the fearful are tormented by their memories, and want to forget. Happy people are secure, and securely unaware of their happiness, serenely enjoying each moment, without overtly wishing to remember. The changes, the disjunctions, the Alice in Wonderland moments when we tumble into a new environment, stay with us, but the intimate, physical, moment-by-moment experience of humdrum contentment blurs immediately and fades swiftly. Even so, some memories survive, with a sensual intensity that can be evoked unexpectedly by a smell, a sound, a set of words, a name, a snatch of song, or even a moment in the sun or the rain.

      Such recall can happen on some hot, perfect day in the Mediterranean, one of those days when the Sun’s rays burn through the fabric of a cotton shirt and begin to caress the shoulder muscles with the force of a physiotherapist’s thumbs; because on a summer day in Auckland the Sun could hammer the city hard enough to set up a heat-shimmer on the concrete lanes at the centre of the road, and melt the tar strip on either side. It can happen halfway up Mount Fuji in Japan, at a picnic spot marked by lumps of scoria: fist-sized lumps of rapidly ejected volcanic rock so hot and so gas-filled that when it cooled and fractured it was as full of holes – the technical term is vacuoles – as a sponge, but jagged and unforgiving to the touch; because Auckland, of which Devonport was fifty years ago a poor suburb, was built on dozens of extinct or perhaps just dormant volcanoes, all of them low, conical and piled high with scoriaceous rock. It can happen in summer rain: Auckland was a rainy place – it still is – with twice the precipitation of London, and an enduring memory is of a childhood barefoot in the rain: a warm rain, all too often kept off by an uncomfortably sticky waterproof. It can happen when I stand under a pepper tree in Claremont, California – the Peruvian pepper, Schinus molle, a pungent but not particularly common ornamental species that leaves a film of resin on the fingers: my brother and two sisters and I grew up watching the world go by from the gnarled branches of an old pepper tree in the front garden.

      My memories of the house at Derby Street, Devonport, are not easily separable from the memories of the little world I knew beyond the house, and this untidiness serves to illustrate the difference between a house and a home: a house is a box in which you shelter, eat, sleep, love, procreate, work and even die, but you could have done the same things in the box next door, or in the next road, or in the next suburb. A home is where you become yourself, and you may leave it, but it does not so easily leave you. The furnishings in Derby Street were – by twenty-first-century standards – modest enough, but there were maps everywhere, because we were the children of a geographer: piles of old National Geographic maps; maps of the British Empire with India and Malaya and Canada and Australasia and half of Africa in pink; maps of pre-war and wartime Europe; economic maps intended for schoolroom walls that showed Australia with little pictures of sheep, and ingots of iron, and stooks of wheat; relief maps; maps marked with contours; maps that showed only population density, or rainfall, or vegetation, or prevailing winds; maps of the world’s trade routes; and even military maps of Pacific islands printed on silk that subsequently served as scarves.

      The furnishings also included bookcases, from which all four of us read indiscriminately, along with whatever we had picked up from the local lending library: on a rainy day one of our parents might enter the living room to find all four of us, cross-legged or lying on our stomachs, following the adventures of Richmal Crompton’s William, or Captain W.E. Johns’s Biggles, or Captain Hornblower, or discovering What Katy Did and why Anne loved Green Gables, or lost in the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia or struggling blankly with the Everyman edition of Herodotus, or a novel by Graham Greene. It was there that we – all of us – discovered that the narrow pages of a book offered a doorway into the wider world, and through these doorways we began to explore and colonise those other places, those other domiciles, fortresses, redoubts, camps and caravanserais that make up an identity’s address book.

      The glib phrase for such places is ‘in the childish imagination’, but those landscapes we discover in books are as real to us as any we might happen to see as tourists or townsmen later in life. We do not ‘see’ reality, we construct it in our heads a fraction of a second after a pattern of electromagnetic wavelengths has hit the retina and set up traffic in the optic nerve. We make a picture of a cliff-face, a city or a log cabin from the reflected radiation perceived by our eyes; but this is also what we do when we read words in a book. When I first heard about the great, grey, greasy banks of the Limpopo, all set about with fever trees, I had no idea at the time that the Limpopo was a real river, but it stayed with me as a potent location all the same, for me and for the Elephant’s Child in the Just-So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. When, years later, I pursued Kipling through the cities of imperial India, I had no idea of what a newspaper office might be like, but I picked up a very clear idea of one from ‘The Man Who Would be King’. By the time I read – and loved – Kipling’s extraordinary short stories based in Sussex, I knew that Sussex was a county or administrative region of southern England, and I even knew the words of the march sung by the Royal Sussex Regiment during the First World War, but it never occurred to me that I might live there. These locations of the imagination that grow from the printed pages of books also included addresses that lodged for decades, and perhaps for a lifetime, in the mind: Rat’s riverside home in The Wind in the Willows, along with Mole End, ‘where a garden seat stood on one side of the door, and on the other, a roller’, and above all the home occupied in the Wild Wood by Badger, where ‘the ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction’.

      It was from Kenneth Grahame’s extraordinary book (extraordinary because he was the Secretary of the Bank of England, and he wrote lines that became quoted throughout the English-speaking world, along with a chapter that provided a record title for Pink Floyd) that I learned that ‘the South’ was a magic place of romance and warmth. ‘What seas lay beyond, green and leaping and crested! What sun-bathed coasts, along which the white villas glittered against the olive woods! What quiet harbours thronged with gallant shipping bound for the purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in languorous waters,’ Rat reflected, in the chapter ‘Wayfarers All’. It says a lot for the power of literature – it says a lot for Kenneth Grahame – that Provence and the Côte d’Azur and the Ligurian coast came alive in such sentences, and exerted their collective magic, and made me identify, at ten years old, the south as a place of warmth, and aroma, and bliss. It also says a lot for the power of the imagination that it didn’t worry me in the least that, for a New Zealander, the south was the direction of increasing cold, wind, rain and finally frost and snow, and that the Sun occupied the northern half of the sky. And I don’t think I noticed at the time that I already lived on a sun-bathed coast lined with white villas glittering against the evergreen wood, and that Auckland was screened by purple islands, set low in languorous waters.

      Perhaps it was the absence of wine and spice; perhaps it was the oblivion of familiarity; perhaps it was the force of the printed word – but I never noticed quite how Mediterranean my own home suburb was until I had left it for a couple of decades. More probably, it was because all Antipodeans of European origin, at that date, enjoyed an imported culture.

      Our films came from Ealing, Pinewood and Hollywood. Most of our weekly and monthly magazines arrived, months late, by sea from the United Kingdom. Our household had piles of the National Geographic magazine, others the Saturday Evening Post. We read the books that any Londoner might know. I learned about Squeers’s cruel Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire, by taking Nicholas Nickleby with me on the open deck of a wooden ferry-boat to school in the mornings, looking up occasionally when porpoises