Remembered Or Recreated?

I'd forgotten how one night, 45 years ago, Stephen and I ventured into the churchyard at the back of his house and deciphered a  18th century verse epitaph by candlelight, but it must have happened because he wrote about it at the time in a letter which appears in the book he's just published. "Candlelight" he says, "restores the lettering marvellously by casting oblique light on the indentations." Now that he's reminded me of the incident it all comes flooding back. Or does it? Do these pictures I can see of flickering light and scrabbling fingers actually come from the memory banks or has my imagination created them as it might with any scene from a book?