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Whenever I hear the word “home”, I think of the oak table in our dining room.

My parents worked as GPs, out early and back late, so during the week meals were rushed and casual – usually I would eat in the kitchen, on a high stool, or in the living room, plate on lap in front of the television. But at weekends we would eat together and then the table would come into its own, its grainy top so brightly polished that the panes of the sash windows were duplicated there, in miniature. In one corner there was a little dent, in the shape of a bird like a grebe or moorhen – a flaw in the wood, which I’d run my finger over, loving the texture.

The table meant warmth, solidity, durability. Gregariousness, too, especially at Christmas, when my cousins would drive over from Manchester to have lunch with us. Sometimes there would be as many as 15 for turkey and plum pudding, and an extra table would be put out, with us children forming a T at the far end. I’d gaze down the long oak table, the adults massed around it like Jesus’ disciples at the Last Supper, and wonder if I’d ever grow up or marry or have children or live in such a house with such a table.

Now my parents are dead and the oak table stands in my dining room. We don’t use it much, even for dinner parties: eating in the kitchen seems less bother. And though you can fit eight round it at a pinch, six is the most it will take comfortably. Not that it’s shrunk, of course. But reality has – or, rather, the wide horizons of childhood turn out to be narrower than they seemed at the time.

The table isn’t just smaller, but darker and more scratched than I remember it. And there are two dents on the surface, one of them bird-shaped (I got that much right), but neither in the corner. If somebody came along and told me that the table wasn’t made of oak, I would not be altogether surprised. Even the sturdiest of memories turn out, when put to the test, to be flimsy.

My house is full of furniture my parents owned and which they, in turn, had inherited: wardrobes, dressers, chairs, desks, cupboards, tables. If my house is in a time-warp, that’s partly because I’m too mean or lazy to go out looking for new stuff and partly, too, that I hate the values of our disposable culture, where nothing is deemed worth keeping (or mending) if it’s more than five years old.

But the real reason behind my hoarding of objects is the memories that they provoke. They’re not all good memories, nor can I rely on them being completely accurate. But they’re part of who I am and what made me and of the story I carry round in my head. So the oak table makes me think not just of Christmases with my cousins but of a particular lunch from which my mother, normally a stoic, fled in tears because of an anti-Irish joke made by my father (she being Irish and missing her family). The dangerously leaning wardrobe in our bedroom reminds me of the one that fell on my sister when she was nine (my mother had to drag her from underneath it). The rolltop desk at which I’m writing this stirs memories of my father’s surgery and his disinclination to write prescriptions for patients he suspected of slacking. (“Give them drugs and they’ll be better in a week,” he used to say. “Give them nothing and it’ll be seven days.”) As for the shrivelled black wet suit hanging in the garage, I associate it with teenage summers when I used to water-ski.

Photographs are a more obvious way to prompt memory, and the chest of drawers in my study is crammed with albums that commemorate childhood and adolescence. But photos can be misleading. There’s one of me, at 12, with a grass skirt, bikini top and hoola-hoop – I’ve no memory of why I was wearing the outfit but if the photo suggests a fondness for cross-dressing, or a future as a transvestite, these tendencies have been sadly unfulfilled.

Other photos I have show my mother smiling – an adored wife, proud parent and energetic career woman. She was all those things. But she could also be “low” and unhappy for long periods, and I can remember an occasion when misery so got the better of her that she packed a suitcase and abruptly took off.

Do we ever really know the people we live with? Photos give us a face, but not what goes on behind it. ‘That’s caught him perfectly,’ we say, but something always escapes capture and comprehension. I felt close to my mother. But she was an enigma. Only after her death, when I read the letters she had written during wartime, years before I was born, did I come to understand her.

We all rewrite the past as we get older, modifying this memory or that in the light of later experience. Once we’re parents, for example, we are better placed to judge our own parents – to see where and why they went wrong, and to appreciate their strengths. When I was 13, my sister failed her 11-plus exam. Believing the local secondary modern lacked the resources to provide her with a decent education, my parents sent her off to boarding school – but allowed me, already ensconced at the local grammar school, to remain at home. My sister endured an unhappy few years, feeling punished for her academic failure, before my parents, regretting their decision, brought her home again. Their mistake cast a shadow which never really faded. But even my sister never doubted that they loved her and were doing what they thought was best.

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