There's a tendency for people nearing the end of their lives to want to write some account of them, and perhaps to find some sense in the pattern. No doubt that was always so, ever since writing began. It was certainly a strong impulsion in Victorian England, as the dustier shelves of second-hand bookshops testify.
Here, for instance, bought off a charity stall for 10p, is Episodes and Reflections, "being some records from the life of Major General Sir Wyndham Childs, KCMG, KBE, CB", once of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, later of Scotland Yard. "Providence never intended me to be a gunner!" he announces, he hopes alluringly, on page one. It's all rather as you might expect. Much smiting of various enemies, interspersed with plenty of jolly japes in the mess at Dum Dum with Blobs and Nappy and Stodger and the mess waiter they all called Fathead (his real name was Fateh Mahomet). The general's nickname, you might like to know, was Fido.
There are thousands of books like this one, recording lives in the services, religion or politics, many much worse than Sir Wyndham's. I was reading the other day the memoirs of an obscure late 19th-century politician called Farquharson, who at one point turned aside from his story to wonder what right he had to assume that readers would find any interest in what he had written. "Well wondered, old boy", I was tempted to write in the margin.
Still, Fido and Farquharson didn't have the advantage of a book I have just obtained through the Daily Telegraph: Time of Our Lives, the Essential Companion for Writing Your Own Life Story, by Michael Oke, published 2004, reprinted 2005. It is full of solid practical information and sound guidance. "Write the way you speak," he advises. Don't write accounts of divorce or separation or family quarrels that might upset people you do not wish to upset. And don't just trudge chronologically from A towards Z. Work hard at digging out things you had almost forgotten.
Oke has a series of memory jerkers to help you. Remember Dad's evening routine with his carpet slippers? Can you recall what you yourself used to say when you got in from work (was it, perhaps, "Is the kettle on, Mother?") Was there a bounding hound to greet you? Can you still recollect the hat stand that stood in the hall, or the banking up of the fire with nutty slack at bedtime, or the second stair that creaked when you tried to creep in at night, or the first time you heard an air raid siren, or the muffin man with his deliciously tempting wares, or putting mothballs in a muslin bag round your neck to clear the sinuses, or blackleading the grate with Zebo?
Among those who may have mixed feelings about this book are literary agents and publishers who are no doubt now being deluged with typescript autobiographies full of nutty slack and bounding hounds and evening slippers and grates reeking of Zebo and the muffin man hammering on the door yet again with his trays of temptation.
But Oke is in the clear, for another sound piece of advice, perhaps the most important of all, even before page one, says: "The emphasis is not to write a best seller, but a personal record for friends and family to enjoy." That seems to me an entirely commendable project. Write for people you know; Waterstone's, in most cases, should have nothing to do with it. There are certainly many families, especially after bereavement, and some social historians too, who will come to cherish such records.
A friend of mine who was dying was persuaded to make a tape of his life story for his grandchildren; it also brought immense interest and perhaps some solace to him.
You don't necessarily have to do it yourself. The Guardian has a project where newer, younger reporters work through the paper's collective memories with those in retirement. Oke himself, I see, runs an outfit called Bound Biographies, in which he has assisted with more than 100 private autobiographies. A friend of mine, Dan Bindman, runs an operation called Familymemory that makes video films in which older people talk, with a few gentle promptings, about their lives. He recently completed an interview with a once quite familiar figure in far left politics, Jack Gaster, now 97. What amazed the family was not the political stories, most of which they had heard before, but reminiscences entirely new to them about his early life.
Another possibility... But that, I'm afraid, is all I have time for this week. I need to find out whether the trick with the mothballs in the muslin bag is still any good for one's sinuses. Also, we seem to have run out of Zebo.
