ABSTRACT
The work of remembering is always a present activity. Where we have arrived for the moment, emotionally as well as socially or geographically, is the place from which we look around at the landscape of our own life; the story we make of it is created from what Phillida Salmon calls its “current end” (Salmon 1992). In the enterprise of attempting to re-create the life of a person who featured in her own life as mother, Joan mixed biography with autobiography, and told it from the position she was in at the time. In the effort to recall her mother, and imagine beyond what she could recall, Joan found it hard to detach Eliza from Harrynot least because, as a “late child”, she had entered her mother’s life when it was already halfway lived.
