 Memoirs provide a fascinating insight into our ancestors' lives
More on memoirsWrite it, scrapbook it, film it: three ways to make a record of your life Useful websitesLife Diary
LifeLines Press
Bound biographies |
|
A life in words - writing your memoirs
Preserving a life history is a burgeoning business now: but where do you start, asks Mark Ellen
My father got cross, tired and bored in his eighth decade – and, most of all, he was frustrated. It wasn’t just that mild irritation with the daily routine we all feel – losing your glasses, running out of marmalade, Anne Robinson never being off the telly – it was something deeper. He was 80 and he felt his sun was beginning to set.
This unsettled him, understandably. Now that he wasn’t able to achieve so much, he wondered what he had achieved before. He needed to look back at the arc of his existence and appreciate its value. He also needed a new project to keep him entertained.
We told him he ought to write his memoirs. Though he liked the idea, two large obstacles appeared to stand in his path. Surely he’d left it too late? How could he manage it now that he was largely confined to a wheelchair? He couldn’t type and found handwriting hard work.
And if somebody presents you with a sheet of paper headed “My Life by Ronnie Ellen”, a tale addressing the best part of a century, how on earth are you supposed to begin?
Two cunning plans were devised and promptly put into action. Firstly, he should divide his life into eight chapters, one for each decade, and only progress to the next instalment when the previous one was done and dusted. This worked wonderfully.
Then we devised a system to help him write the book. He would scribble down the list of topics he wanted to address in each section, pour himself a Guinness and then – occasionally interviewed by his eldest daughter, but mostly alone – he’d deliver his memories into a cassette-recorder, pressing the 'pause' button every now and then to top up his glass or to recover from the great shoulder-shaking convulsions of mirth the whole process seemed to provoke (I still have the tape of him literally weeping with laughter at the memory of a school dancing lesson in 1929, my mother cackling in the background; even the dog joins in at one point).
He’d then post this recording to his youngest daughter, who’d transcribe it and send the text to me by e-mail, and I’d print it out on paper and post it back to him with some suggestions as to where he might expand it – “Do more about a typical Christmas Day in 1925, from breakfast to bedtime!” He’d add a few paragraphs in the margin which I’d key back into the file and, when he felt it was finished, we’d forge ahead into the next decade.
Almost immediately we realised the real value of the project. It was more than just an affectionate account of forgotten aunts and eccentric uncles brought back to life. It was a living social document, a priceless chronicle of a lost age from the unique perspective of someone who’d lived through it all and been able to tell the tale.
Every detail of that first chapter was fascinating, especially as seen through the eyes of a child.
His five-year-old self, in 1925, remembered how the gas lamps in the street were fired up every evening by a lamplighter with a pole, and how milk was sold by the ladleful from an urn on the back of a cart.
He remembered petrol being hand-pumped into cars from a huge glass reservoir. He remembered the busy traffic on the Thames near his house in Teddington – “the punts and skiffs going over the rollers, the pleasure steamers passing through the great lock”.
But most enthralling of all – certainly for my DVD-dependent children – was his portrait of the unimaginable world before television or even radio. In the immaculate detail that childhood memory never loses, he recalled what passed for entertainment in the decade after the First World War.
There were games of Snap and Rummy and an early form of Scrabble called Word-Making And Word-Taking. Everyone was expected to “do a turn” at parties – to sing, recite a poem, dance or play an instrument.
The arrival of the Army & Navy Stores Catalogue, full of mind-boggling new retail options, was always “a great source of wonder”.
There was a national obsession with a cartoon in the Daily Mirror called Pip, Squeak And Wilfred, a bizarre family comprised of a pipe-smoking dog, his penguin wife and their offspring, a rabbit, all of whom could apparently speak and walk on their hind legs.
There were memories of the crackle of overhead cables as he rode the trams to Shaftesbury Avenue.
Even more astonishing is his youthful analysis of the political machinations of the day. At one point he overhears grown-ups talk of the Jarrow March, and his first awareness of the General Strike is when his father steps out every night with a steel helmet and truncheon to guard the local train depot as a Special Constable.
When the Second World War arrives, in chapter three, it’s through the eyes of a 23-year-old required to land in Normandy by parachute at midnight from the jump-doors of a Dakota, a story he’d never felt able to tell us at any great length before, full of fear and chaos and excitement.
For most of his 84 years life was, of course, less dramatic. It didn’t matter. For the rest of the book he merely sits back and observes the dramas unfolding elsewhere across the landscape.
He’s 11 years old when the first crystal set appears, a rudimentary radio attached to an aerial on a pole in the garden.
He’s a pensioner when he tries to make sense of computer technology. It’s a magical combination of life at the time and the age of the person assessing it. And if it’s so intriguing now, how enthralling will it be in years to come?
When he’d finished all eight chapters, we dug out the old photographs – many we’d forgotten existed – and my brother-in-law, a graphic designer, laid out the pages in the form of a book.
I printed up 10 copies and ferried them round to a Polish bookbinder in a London basement that smelt of glue and leather.
Three days later, he delivered a stack of hardbacks lavishly embossed in gold leaf with the legend “Bill’s Memoirs” – the nickname his grandchildren had given him.
It looked so splendid we even organised a book launch. Someone knocked up a sign – “Meet local author RONNIE ELLEN!”
Corks popped and all the family queued up to shake the old boy’s hand and receive an individually signed first edition. He made a wonderful speech, in his battered old sun hat, about the experience of writing his memoirs – at times hilarious, at others quite painful, but ultimately very satisfying.
Above all he had proved that his was not, as he’d previously protested, an “ordinary life”. Like anyone’s life, it was an extraordinary one. Only one person could have lived it and only one person could have told the story.
He’d witnessed a period that few – and, eventually, none – of his readers would ever know. His book is a personal legacy to be passed on down to them, not by some unknown diarist or historian, but by the great-great grandfather they could never meet broadcasting from a distant branch of their very own family tree.
I think everyone should write a memoir. If the task seems too daunting, just try to record some small section of your life story. It doesn’t have to be a big production like ours. It doesn’t have to be bound and illustrated.
My aunt has written a sparkling record of her life as a farmer’s wife in the Fifties, very short, no pictures, just printed on one side of sheets of A4 and stapled into folders.
My mother-in-law has told the wonderful story of her three-month trip to Samoa in the Forties, and scanned in drawings from her sketchbook at the time.
All these memoirs exist for future generations to read. They’re irreplaceable records of a disappearing world that would have been lost forever.
And more importantly, the authors felt a great satisfaction in compiling them. They realised that ‘achievement’ wasn’t just about the things they’d done, it was about the changing times they’d been lucky enough to experience. Life itself was their achievement.
I can’t wait to write mine, to be honest. Is it too early to start right now?
Written by Mark Ellen
This article was created: 18 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 13 November 2006.
 Email  Back to top
|
