SMK · Public domain.
Someone can be easy to place in childhood and difficult to describe. We know which end of the table they occupied, how their voice reached the landing, the pause before their key turned in the lock. Asked what they were like, we have less to offer. Even someone whose face we remember may survive most vividly in a scene where they were looking elsewhere. They were doing something; we were nearby. The recollection does not quite become a story.
A story would help. It would give the person something to say or do, an encounter through which their character could be shown. But perhaps the difficulty is worth keeping. There are ways of knowing someone that arise from sharing space and time with them, without the exchanges that a biographer would recognise as evidence of a relationship. A child may know where an adult will be before knowing much about who that adult is.
Consider an ordinary, imagined afternoon: a child drawing at one end of a table while someone at the other end sorts papers. Neither activity concerns the other person. Yet the child’s situation would change if the adult got up and left. The room would contain a different possibility of interruption, help or conversation. Depending on the relationship, the departure might bring disappointment, anxiety, relief, or no conscious feeling at all. Physical proximity tells us very little until we know something about the people sharing it.
Perhaps being attended to and being accompanied are not quite the same thing.
Attention can make a child the subject of the moment. An adult listens, explains, watches, asks for an answer. Accompaniment allows two occupations to continue alongside one another. There can be pleasure in having no response to make, in pursuing something while another person remains available. But the distinction has uncertain edges. A child may appear absorbed while waiting for an adult to look up. The adult may seem preoccupied while listening carefully. What the child experiences and what the adult intends need not coincide.
In “The Capacity to Be Alone”, published in 1958, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott proposed that an early experience of solitude could occur in another person’s presence. His account depended on a reliable, supportive relationship; the other person’s mere location was insufficient. It is a theoretical formulation, rooted in the mother–infant assumptions of his period, rather than an experimental finding about all children. Its useful suggestion here is modest: being occupied with oneself and being sustained by company need not be incompatible.1
The adult sorting papers may belong to that kind of company. Or the child may know that asking a question will be unwelcome. From outside, the two afternoons could look almost identical. Even the remembered quiet cannot decide between them. A child listening for a key may be waiting to run towards the door, or judging how long there is before it opens. Familiarity supplies expectations. It does not tell us whether those expectations are happy ones.
There is a further difficulty. The afternoon available to the adult remembering is not the afternoon available to the child who lived it. Years have intervened, including years in which the child was already forgetting.
In a prospective study, Patricia Bauer and Marina Larkina returned to events children had discussed at about three. Different groups were interviewed again between five and nine. The older groups recalled fewer of those early events, although their accounts of the events they retained were generally more complete. The ability to tell a better story was developing while access to parts of the past was being lost.2 An articulate adult account, then, cannot simply be treated as a fuller version of what the child once knew.
Nor does the ability to remember arrive all at once. Katherine Nelson and Robyn Fivush’s developmental account brings together memory abilities, language, an understanding of time, and a growing sense of oneself among other people. They also distinguish memories of particular episodes from knowledge of recurring events: what generally happens at dinner, for instance, rather than what happened at one dinner.3 This distinction matters when a remembered person seems inseparable from a room. “She used to sit there” makes a different claim from “I remember the day she sat there.”
In recollection, the two can become difficult to separate. A particular scene may carry our knowledge of a routine; what we know happened repeatedly may help furnish an indistinct scene. This offers a possibility, rather than a diagnosis, for memories whose setting is clear but whose date and occasion are missing. The person at the table may belong to an afternoon we can still retrieve. They may also stand for a succession of afternoons which we can no longer distinguish.
Other people participate in this sorting. Fivush’s review of autobiographical memory describes how conversations about the past help children develop accounts of their experiences. Elaborative reminiscing, which opens out an event through detail and discussion, is associated with richer, more coherent reports; training studies support an influence of conversational style on later recall.4 Such findings complicate the appealing idea that the least discussed moments must be the most authentic. A memory does not lose its claim on us because someone helped us tell it.
Nevertheless, a household’s preferred stories need not exhaust what happened there. An outing has an obvious beginning and end. Someone going about their usual work may supply no occasion for a family anecdote. It seems reasonable to ask whether this makes some experiences harder to narrate, without claiming that they must therefore have been recorded more deeply. These findings give no warrant for ranking the quietly accompanying person above the person who paid us direct attention.
Remembering itself involves construction. As Daniel Schacter’s review explains, recollection draws on processes that can combine information and introduce errors; these processes also help memory function usefully.5 This does not mean that every detail is invented. Research on adults’ freely recalled, verifiable experiences has found considerable accuracy in the details they did report, despite substantial omissions.6 Neither result can authenticate a childhood kitchen. Together they discourage both the confidence that memory is a recording and the blanket suspicion that it is merely fiction.
For the person trying to understand an old presence, factual uncertainty is only part of the problem. An accurately remembered action can acquire a different meaning. The adult who sat silently after work might once have seemed forbidding. Later knowledge of their circumstances may suggest exhaustion. That interpretation could be better informed; it could also be a generous story supplied where knowledge is missing. A change in understanding need not erase what the silence felt like at the time.
Virginia Woolf encountered a related difficulty in “A Sketch of the Past”. She could summon the sound of her mother’s bracelets and the particular appearance of her hands, yet struggled to describe her as a separate person. Her mother had filled so much of the household’s life that Woolf had scarcely been far enough outside her influence to see her distinctly. Writing later, she considered the demands made on a woman surrounded by children, relatives and an exacting husband.7 The vivid details had survived alongside a large gap in understanding.
Woolf’s difficulty shifts the question. The person remembered indirectly need not have been peripheral to the child’s life. They may have been so continuously involved in its conditions that their own purposes were difficult to see. Someone prepared the meal, but eating it did not require knowing what the preparation cost them. Someone was at home in the afternoon, but the child may never have asked whether that was where they wanted to be.
There is a risk, even in affectionate recollection, of preserving people as useful parts of a setting. The grandmother becomes her chair; the person who cooked becomes a reassuring sound from the kitchen. A paid carer may be remembered as a constant presence while the employment that brought them there, and their life beyond that work, barely enter the account. To notice this is not to accuse the child of ingratitude. It is to recognise a limit in the adult’s description. The conditions of one person’s childhood were also the circumstances of other people’s lives.
Painting can make that limit visible without resolving it. In Vilhelm Hammershøi’s 1901 Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor, a woman sits with her back to the viewer. Light falls across the floor, and the room claims as much attention as the figure. SMK’s research places the work among deliberately composed views of the apartment Hammershøi shared with his wife, Ida; it identifies her as the likely model.8 This is an arranged picture, not an unguarded record of domestic life. Still, the turned back leaves something unavailable. We can look into the room without gaining access to the woman’s thoughts.
That reserve matters. A figure absorbed in something beyond our view can invite recognition without yielding an explanation. Calling the room peaceful would describe one possible response to the painting. It would tell us little about the woman. Childhood recollection can tempt us into a similar confidence: because a person belongs securely within the scene, we imagine that we know what their presence meant, perhaps even what they felt about being there.
Some recollections do carry a clear history of kindness, or of fear. There is no reason to dissolve such knowledge into a general mist of uncertainty. But other presences remain mixed. A person could be dependable in one respect and unreachable in another. Their routines could make a day intelligible while their temper made it difficult. The sound that now evokes longing may once have been irritating. Missing someone does not settle the quality of the relationship that preceded the loss.
Nor does the language of a household fit every childhood neatly. The recurring adult might have belonged to a classroom, a shop, a succession of temporary homes. What persisted could have been a brief daily overlap, without the permanence of a shared address. The significant circumstance is that someone’s life repeatedly came within range of the child’s. Whether this became companionship, constraint or simply part of the day remains a question for that particular history.
From adulthood, it becomes possible to recognise how much happened alongside us. This need not produce gratitude, forgiveness, or a revised verdict on anybody. It may instead make an old certainty more specific. Someone’s presence made a room bearable; we cannot say that they understood us. Someone frightened us; we may still remember an ordinary gesture without fear. The recollection can hold more than the account we have made of the person.
The adult at the table had a task to finish. The person whose movements could be heard downstairs had reasons for moving from room to room, some of which may never have concerned the child listening above. Those reasons are easily lost when a life becomes part of another person’s remembered world. The sound of the key may be all that returns. Whoever carried it had already lived a day we did not see.
Sources and endnotes
[1] Winnicott, D. W. (1958). “The Capacity to Be Alone.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
Consulted the complete five-page article in a digital transcription, especially pp. 417–419.
Publication record · Full text consulted[2] Bauer, Patricia J., and Marina Larkina (2014). “The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood: A prospective investigation of the course and determinants of forgetting of early-life events.” Memory, 22(8), 907–924.
Full text: Methods; age-related patterns of recall and narrative content; cross-lagged relations; Discussion. First published online in 2013.
DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2013.854806 · Full text[3] Nelson, Katherine, and Robyn Fivush (2004). “The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory.” Psychological Review, 111(2), 486–511.
Author-uploaded full text; event-memory distinctions at pp. 488–489.
DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.111.2.486 · Author copy consulted[4] Fivush, Robyn (2011). “The Development of Autobiographical Memory.” Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 559–582.
Author-deposited Review in Advance copy; sections on maternal reminiscing style and correlational/experimental child-memory outcomes, provisional pp. 2.8–2.10.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131702 · Author copy consulted[5] Schacter, Daniel L. (2012). “Constructive memory: past and future.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 14(1), 7–18.
Full article in Harvard’s hosted copy, especially pp. 8–9.
DOI: 10.31887/DCNS.2012.14.1/dschacter · Full text consulted[6] Diamond, Nicholas B., Michael J. Armson, and Brian Levine (2020). “The Truth Is Out There: Accuracy in Recall of Verifiable Real-World Events.” Psychological Science, 31(12), 1544–1556.
Accepted manuscript, including methods and discussion; discussion pp. 23–27 in that copy. Final publication metadata checked separately.
DOI: 10.1177/0956797620954812 · Accepted manuscript consulted[7] Woolf, Virginia (1985). “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, second edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Relevant passage: pp. 80–83.
Page images and edition details inspected.
Edition consulted[8] Hammershøi, Vilhelm (1901). Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor. SMK, National Gallery of Denmark, KMS3696. The museum’s Hammershøi archive titles the work “Interior. Strandgade 30.”
Object record, image and contextual catalogue entry inspected. Ida is described as the probable model, not identified with certainty.
Official object reference · Museum catalogue and interpretation