1. Professor Josiah Dingle

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN THINGS (1)

Let me introduce myself. I am Roger Pandrake and I’m well stricken with age. Seventy-plus to be truthful

I was lost in the rain, and boy, wasn’t it hammering down. It had been bright sunshine when I’d set out, but like mischievous gigantic signals from the skies the clouds had seemingly appeared from nowhere and started drenching me. And I was clad only in a fetching pair of shorts and a rather old tee-shirt.

So the voice, when I heard it was welcome.

“Hey, fellow, you’re likely to catch your death! Come and shelter until the heavens turn dry.”

I knew him, of course, though only on a nodding and good-day sort of way. He was professor Josiah Dingle and he had a reputation for being a bit of an oddball. But, I thought, any port in a storm! So I half-ran to where he was standing in his doorway, my feet splashing in hail that had also fallen with the rain. It was quite a gathering of the elements.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking myself a bit like a dog that’s just jumped out of a river after fun and frolics, “it’s turned rather nasty.”

“It happens,” he said, “come in a try to dry off.”

He gave me a towel to help and I stripped off my minimal clothing for him to shove in his tumble-dryer, and within short order I was dressed again and dry as an old timer like me can be.

“Come and sit down,” he invited, leading me into another room in which there were only three chairs. I made for the one closest to me.

“Not that one, though,” he said, “that’s a very special chair. Take this one!” and he led me towards a second chair and sat in the third one himself, leaving what he called very special unoccupied. And glancing at it I could see that it was a bit on the odd side. It had a small but obvious metal frame round it, and at the back a slender pole topped with a disc of some sort rose up to above head height.

“It’s an odd looking chair,” I murmured, inviting him, I hoped, to elaborate on what made it special.

“It’s got qualities few people would comprehend,” he said, and gazed fiercely at me as if trying to assess whether I would understand his peculiarities or not.

“So I see,” I replied. “It seems to have a couple of buttons on its arms and a weird looking frame. It can’t be that comfortable!”

“Ah, but it is, in a world where comfort is not the most important thing,” he grinned. “Tell me, what do you make of time travel?”

“It’s tosh,” I said, “are you trying to tell me that chair’s a time machine?”

“Not at all! I agree … tosh is a good word for fictitious time machines. If there was any such thing and people were using them then we’d see them wandering like ghosts through our world from the future all the time, taking in all the sights and maybe calling on their great great grandparents just to see what they were like. But nobody from the future ever comes, ergo they haven’t found a way of travelling through the fourth dimension, and also ergo it’s impossible.”

“My opinion exactly,” I told him, “and it would get damned crowded if emissaries from the next thousand or so years came a-calling whenever they pleased.”

“Especially if they wanted to see Nelson’s column before it tumbled to the ground, or Anne Hathaway’s cottage or any of the more celebrated and noble artefacts of ours and past ages.”

“You mean, Nelson’s column might fall down?” I asked, shocked.

He shrugged. “It might,” he said, “I have no special knowledge, but it’s pretty clear that not much made by man will survive for ever.”

I thought of mentioning Egypt’s famed pyramids, but thought better of it. They’ve been there for millennia, but that’s not for ever, is it?

“But there is something that conquers time,” he murmured, almost teasingly. “Tell me about your earliest memories...”

What a nosey old boy he is! I thought, but answered anyway.

“My first day at school sixty odd years ago,” I contributed, “I remember bits of that day, not the school part but the walking to school with my mother part very well.”

“It’s like a picture in your mind?” he asked eagerly.

“A bit fuzzy, though,” I agreed, “after all it’s been an awfully long time.”

“And how did you feel?” he asked, “walking towards the first big adventure of your life?”

“I don’t remember,” I admitted, “but excited, I guess.”

“That chair would help you clean up the memory, because you’d be shocked what’s lurking almost out of reach in your little grey cells. Tiny details you may not have thought of since the memory was created, maybe even a stone you trod on or a cat that passed you by. Loads and loads of things that you’ve told yourself you’ve forgotten.”

“And that chair would do that?” I asked.

“Precisely,” he grinned, “I know because I’ve tried it. Now look, it’s nothing like travelling through time because we’ve both agreed that’s tosh, it’s just polishing a dormant memory in your mind until it’s sharp as the day that formed it.”

“Crikey,” I said, not sure of how to react to what I perceived as enthusiasm on his part.

“And there’s more,” he murmured.

“What more could there be?” I asked.

“Look at it like this. It’s your memory in your head, all the details being put into your image from the corners they’ve leaked into and ordered into place by the circuitry in the chair. Yet it’s nowhere but in your head. However, there’s a kind of tenuous connection...”

“There is?” I asked, “how tenuous?”

“The brain that captured that memory. Your brain was there when you saw whatever it is you remember. It’s the same brain, though possibly a tad older than it was back during that first ever walk to school!”

“More than a tad!” I grinned.

“Precisely,” he said, “but what if we could create a thread that would take your mind from the present to the past? Using that memory, so that you could see the world you think you’ve forgotten, and see it in all its sharp, focused multi-coloured reality, more than a tarted up memory but real. You seeing your own past through the eyes you had back then. The reality of an age ago being overlaid on your once-faded memory?”

“I’d have questioned the possibility,” I replied, not wanted to offend him but being honest. “After all, it’s a form of time travel I suppose, and that, as we say, is tosh.”

“Ah, but is isn’t,” he told me, “you go nowhere but stay in that chair. The connection is quite a tenuous one and it’s between two identical things: your brain from the past and your brain right now. They’re the same brain, only it may have grown a bit larger since you were five or so years old.”

“And more feeble,” I muttered, aware that even though I feel the same as I always have I realise that sometimes the obvious is less obvious than it might be.

“Quite,” he grinned, “it’s the same with me, I’m afraid, professor or no professor.”

“So you claim there’s a connection?” I asked, not wanting to lose him to forgetfulness.

“Oh yes,” he smiled, “tenuous, but a connection, and that old memory of yours comes to life because it’s no longer a memory but the actual real things that formed that memory in the first place. You’re not there, of course you’re not, but your eyes are able to see exactly what they once saw, in living detail. Look, it’s still raining out there and over cup of a nice hot drink I’ll tell you something that I saw years ago, and revisited only recently. You can believe me or not, I don’t care, but every word is the truth!”

“Interesting,” I murmured, encouraging him.

“But first, the kettle,” he said, “will coffee do?”

“That’d be nice,” I replied, “No sugar for me, though.”

© Peter Rogerson 08.06.20