Flashbulb Memories

BBC Radio 4 did a series on memory last year and has just returned to the subject. One of the programmes dealt with ‘flashbulb memories', the vivid, detailed and enduring recollection of a moment or a day when some momentous event occurred.

The results of a survey revealed that we in Britain chose the following three events as flashbulb memories:

The death of Princess Diana
The death of JFK
The attack on the Twin Towers

Others were Churchill’s funeral, the first moon landing and the coronation. Considering all that’s happened worthy of the mind’s camera, it’s surprising that JFK’s murder is still remembered with such clarity.

I wondered which events sprang to my mind with this combination of shock and awe or, in retrospect, seem life-changing.

I thought of what one might call ‘world events’ and I’m old enough to recall the trauma I felt when Jack Kennedy was murdered in Dallas on the 21st November 1963. A Friday afternoon it was, and I was sitting in my parents’ living-room when the news came through, tentative at first, leaving room for a hope, which was soon to be dashed.

Why was it so traumatic? Kennedy, for all his charisma, had not achieved what, say, Lincoln had. Was it just his incredibly courageous calling of the Russian bluff over Cuba? He had presided for only 3 years, nothing like the reign of Roosevelt which had included the emergence from depression and the Second World War. Was his sudden death met with such grief?

It’s similar to the public affection for Princess Diana. It seems that to be loved, you have to be young and attractive, and, preferably, suffer a bit. I still find the hysterical reaction to her death rather disturbing. It was as if something had gone fundamentally wrong with the British character.

Despite that I remember the events of the week between her death and funeral pretty well. All those damned flowers; the Queen being dragooned into appearing on TV and criticised for not making a nauseating display of grief, while the rest of the country was ululating like savages; Tony Blair doing what he does best (making speeches).

For some reason the public reaction seems to tie in with the report published today by UNICEF, which declares that British children have the lowest sense of ‘well-being’ in the developed world. In other words, despite all their advantages, they’re consumed with self-pity. Pathetic.

But the day of the funeral is what stays in my mind, partly because it was such a triumph of organisation. Like the Queen Mother’s funeral, indeed like the Coronation, which older people still recall vividly.

But it stays in my mind for entirely personal reasons. It was on that day I made formal farewell to someone very dear to me. This is where I give in to self-pity.