… Is it working? Is it on? Cordy, is it working? I just speak, do I? I feel silly. I mean, where do I start? And it seems wrong. I mean it was all about the recordings, wasn’t it? That’s what made it all happen. I just, I don’t know. I did one of these for the Oral History Society but they just wanted to know about the village and the nuclear tests and what it was like in the old days. This is private. But I know. I know it needs to be told. Have you got my notes? My reading glasses are over there … All right, that day … I’d been shopping in the morning. Fish. Eggs. Bread. Flowers for Mam. Usual. Some of those chocolate mint balls for the boys. Why do I remember any of it? Then there was the graveyard. You startled me. The church. The storm. The body. All of it … I can’t get my breath. Cordelia, please, can we turn this off? I’ll start again when I’ve got my breath. I feel dizzy. Please. Cordy, please …

Transcript 0002, recorded October 29, 2010

It’s an odd thing, harking back. Half the stuff you remember as you are now and half of it you remember as you were then. You remember being upset with your parents when you were eight and they blamed you for setting fire to the outhouse when you were taking out the hot ashes. But in the memory, it’s you as you are now. So you understand your parents’ point of view, ’cause you’re a grown-up and you’ve had bairns yourself and you know the frustration and the expense and the fear. But you’re still feeling like a bairn at the same time. You remember the feeling of unfairness. Temper. You were being blamed for something that was an accident and could have happened to anybody. You remember the tears on your cheek and the hard hand off your bare backside and the shame that sliced into you like skewers into a side of pork. So you’re both people. You then, and you now. So when I remember ’67; when I remember that time, I always feel a bit bad because the way I used to think, the bad way, is still a part of me. And I feel awful for how I must have appeared in that moment. For looking at her the way I did. As if she’d done it. As if she’d brought the storm and knocked down that tree and made me look at that man, all mangled and twisted like that. How could it be her fault? How could it be anybody’s, ’cept for the nasty bugger who had left him there like a bag of rags and rubbish? Am I making sense? John tells me I’m hard work. Reckons he could bottle me and sell me as a headache.