What do you wish you had asked your grandparents and parents about their lives, and your family history? What would you like your grandchildren, family and society to know and remember about you? My children are always saying ‘Write it down Mum’! So this is what I’m inviting you to do.
Experience shows that having an audience, either as listener, reader or viewer helps to develop a ‘good story’, so this is how the group will run.
You will be writing a series of anecdotes and memories, details and stories. What was your first day at school like? Your favourite clothes as a teenager, or your best friend. At some point, we might want to see our whole life journey so far, and look forward to the future. We might want to put the stories into chronological order, or use a thematic approach
We use our time in the group to get inspiration from other people’s stories and talk about your own. I hope we will inspire each other when we share something of our lives in the group and go on to have something to pass on to our families or to future historians.
Going through a big box of paperwork to be sorted out I came across an 86 year old postcard. It transported me to the back room of our old Victorian terraced house when I was a child. The postcard was an excerpt from a poem The Gate of the Year by Minnie Louise Haskins. It became famous when King George V1 quoted it in his 1939 Christmas speech after the outbreak of World War 11.
“I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”
All through my childhood it sat in an ugly black plastic frame on the ledge of a tall wooden cabinet next to my Grampy’s chair. I could see him in his chair which was ornately carved with a dark green velvet back and seat. To a child it looked quite like a throne. The arms of the chair were flat and wide in contrast. He used to put his tobacco there and the little machine he used to put the paper and tobacco in to make his rollies. I would stand there tongue hanging out waiting for him to give me the cigarette to lick the paper closed. He would laugh and we would carry on making some for later.
I can picture him walking down our street tall and upright. His silver hair brylcreamed in place. His moustache still black as his hair had once been. He wore a black Crombie coat and always used his ebony walking stick with the silver head. It was engraved with the name of his brother Edwin who was mortally wounded in Ypre and awarded the military medal for his bravery.
