My father got cross and frustrated towards the end of his long life. This wasn’t just mild irritation with the daily routine – losing his glasses, running out of marmalade, Anne Robinson never off the telly – it was something deeper and more regretful: he was 80 and felt his sun was beginning to set. Like so many old people, he couldn’t appreciate the value of his past and he needed a project to keep him amused and occupied. So my sisters and I suggested he wrote his memoirs.
He protested loudly that he hadn’t done anything worth writing about – absurd from someone who’d once parachuted into enemy-occupied France. Nothing quite that dramatic ever happened again, it’s true, but I convinced him that wasn’t the point. His stupendous achievement was that he had lived though eight decades and could view each one from the age he was at the time. And the older he got, the more valuable those early perspectives became, a priceless chronicle of a lost age by someone who had scythed a path right through it and been able to tell the tale.
He’d once told me about a typical Christmas Day in 1925 when he was five – every detail from the moment he got up until he went to bed, who was there, what they wore, the presents, the games, the food and drink – and the result was a riveting piece of social history, doubly engaging for any members of my extended family as it was brought alive by real characters who were direct relations. His views on the arrival of radio when he was 10 were just as engaging as on the launch of television when he was 32 – “the window on the world!” – or the internet when he was 78 (intrigued but utterly baffled). It was just as thrilling to hear what an eight-year-old thought about tram journeys “and the crackle of their overhead cables” as what a pensioner made of the new-fangled Eurostar on which he half-expected to look out of the window and see fish swimming past. It wasn’t just the memories that were fascinating, it was his unique recollection of the moment.
But there were two more obstacles in his path, he said. How could he manage it now he was largely confined to a wheelchair – he couldn’t type any more and found handwriting hard – and if somebody presents you with a blank piece of paper headed “The Life And Opinions of Ronnie Ellen”, a tale addressing the best part of a century, how on earth are you supposed to get started?
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: he was born in 1920 so the first chapter, The Twenties, was the story of his life from birth to the age of 10; the second one, The Thirties, from 11 to 20 and so on.
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 record his memories, pressing pause every now and then to top up his glass or 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 send this recording to my other sister who would transcribe it and email me the text, then I’d edit it and print it out and post it back to him with some suggestions as to where he might expand it – “less about your dad being a shipping clerk, more about life at the time” (he then remembered the gas lamps in his street being fired up by a lamplighter with a pole and milk sold by the ladleful from urns on horse-drawn carts). He’d add a few paragraphs in the margin which I’d key back into the file and, when we felt it was complete, we’d forge ahead into the next decade.
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. I got them printed up and took them to a Polish bookbinder in a Shepherd’s Bush basement that smelled of glue and leather who 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 were 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 your memoirs – at times hilarious, at others quite painful, but ultimately very satisfying.
It was so successful in every way that, after he died, I convinced my mother, Janet, that she should write her memoirs too. Like Dad, she couldn’t think of a way to get started and, as her mind didn’t work chronologically, I suggested that each time I came to stay I’d ask her about a different member of her family. A comforting routine soon developed: after breakfast on Sundays I pulled out a notebook and began to record her memories of her father and mother, then her siblings, then her uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents. We got as far back as her great-great-grandfather, “a courageous soldier” born in 1779: a book with a 230-year time span! Extraordinary stories came tumbling out, all news to me – a bee-keeping aunt who brewed her own beer, a grandmother who walked backwards up hills as she thought it was easier, an uncle who developed rare breeds of tulip, another uncle banished to Australia for consorting with “the kind of dancing girls who kicked their legs about”, a third uncle whose party trick was to pretend to saw people’s heads off.
Once every relative had been covered, I got her to enlarge on the most colourful moments of her 90 years – home life, school life, outrageously ambitious childhood walking holidays where she and her four brothers once covered 24 miles in a day across the Cumbrian dales lugging picnics, memories of driving generals in the war, of motherhood, of living in London in the days of rationing and the joys of whale meat, conger eel, “bully beef”, sheep’s heads and marrowbones.
For me, the most satisfying part of both books was that it gave me a chance to ask my parents the questions I’d always wanted to ask but never found the right moment. My father lost a leg in the war aged 24, hit by a German mortar bomb, and he’d never really talked about it or any aspect of his paratroops’ part in the Invasion Of Normandy. In normal conversation you can’t really switch from some trite exchange about football or the cost of beans to “What was it like jumping out of a Dakota into a blizzard of flak?” But in “memoir mode”, there’s no small talk: you produce a notebook or a recorder and the gear instantly changes. You’re in a completely different emotional space.
I asked them both about art, religion, beliefs, doubts, fears, politics, heroes, heroines, regrets and the truth about those batty and characterful, long-dead, ancient ancestors they had only ever discussed rather guardedly, and they were massively forthcoming about all of it, perhaps realising that they were the last link to two centuries of history and they didn’t want to shuffle off this mortal coil taking those revelations with them.
I loved the sense of satisfaction it seemed to give them both, particularly my self-doubting father. His memoir reminded him that his time on this earth had been very far from ordinary. Like everyone’s existence, it was extraordinary: only one person could have lived it and only one person could have told the story, broadcasting to grateful, distant relatives from some remote 20th-century branch of their family tree.
Both their books are irreplaceable records of a lost or disappearing world. Their real achievement wasn’t just the things they’d done, it was that they’d witnessed decades of dramatic and changing times and been able to report back from the frontline. Their real achievement was life itself.
