The Enormous Melon, and Low-Yuk-Gin

My first act of memoir

Last year, I cleared out my mum’s flat in Bath when she was moved into a care home after a fall. This was a tragedy in itself, and clearing her flat was sad and difficult. We only had a day to do it, and my mum was a hoarder. She had held on to so much, and for so many years. Though much of it seemed, to me, worthless – hundreds of old copies of the Radio Times for example - there was also a sorrowful logic to much of her harbouring. All the books on gardening – though she hadn’t been able to garden for a long time – held her memories of the garden, and what gardening had once meant to her.

In the drawers, I found my dad’s old Remington Razor and a few of the dice he had once played with. And from the shelves, I pulled out a handful of my old school books, and among them, this handmade book – The Enormous Melon, and Low-Yuk-Gin: A true story told by Hannah Lowe.

I have almost no memory of making this book, but the drawings and handwriting are unmistakably mine. The inscription indicates I made it in 1990, a year after visiting Jamaica for the first time, so I must have been thirteen, at secondary school, and clearly in ownership of a fountain pen and some colouring pencils.

What strikes me now is the fallible nature of memory. Not only do I not remember making it, but the book also suggests a different narrative from the one I’ve been carrying around for years as an adult. I’ve always felt a guilt – common among memoirists – that I didn’t talk to my father when he was alive, that I showed little interest in his life. And perhaps that became true. As an older teenager, I remember being excruciatingly embarrassed by him. I also remember going to see him a few days before he died, when he was very unwell, but wanted me to sit by his bedside and talk to him. I didn’t, or couldn’t. I was twenty-one, just out of university, and completely unprepared for the gravitas of the situation. If it sounds bizarre to say I didn’t understand he was going to die, it is also true.

What also strikes me is that I made an early attempt to narrativise something of his life, to write down a story he had told me, presumably during our holiday to Jamaica. It had clearly fired up my imagination, and Jamaica had beguiled me, and perhaps marked the beginning of my understanding that I was something other than white and English, which is what I looked like, and how I was treated. The title of the book I made holds a version of his Chinese name, which even now feels like something only ever whispered in our house, and is probably not an exact transcription.

The map I drew of Jamaica is scattered with the lodestars of my father’s storytelling – the names of his childhood friends and the locations he mythologised – ‘the Banyan Tree’, ‘Yallas Pond’, ‘The Black Bridge’). Yallas is in fact ‘Yallahs’, the small coastal town where he was born.

The book - forgotten, rediscovered - feels like my first act of memoir. I’ll leave the actual contents of the story for another post, and end with a thanks to my mum for her hoarding. Even the most mundane of objects can carry meaning, which we might only realise later, and among them, we might find little pots of magic. My mum held on to everything she could – her own form of archiving, a way to not forget.