Accessing the Past
Sometimes it can pay to be old!
2021 marks my 40th year at the chalk face. I remember, as a naïve young trainee teacher, wondering how on earth I could stay in the profession for 40 weeks let alone 40 years, yet now I find myself strangely reluctant to leave a career that has brought me so much fulfilment (I suspect, like childbirth you forget the painful bits after a while!)
I imagine my students see me as something of a dinosaur, though. The other day I was telling them how, before emails, we had to use carrier pigeons to convey messages, although Semaphore and Morse Code could be equally useful. Increasingly they give me that look that says they don’t know if I’m joking, or whether, considering my obvious senescence, I might actually be speaking the truth.
It set me thinking about how useful it is to be writing books set in world war two as the daughter of two people who lived through it. My parents were older than average (for the time) and my father was the youngest son of an older mother, so my paternal grandmother was a Victorian.
Growing up, I was familiar with phrases such as ‘make do and mend’ and ‘sides to middle’ (the practice of cutting worn bedsheets down the middle, turning them over and stitching the sides together so that the frayed bits were turned to the edges). My mother used to wash plastic bags and hang them on the washing line to be re-used, and iron wrapping paper and put it back in the cupboard. She would look at me in horror if I ever ripped open a present. Attitudes which seem strange to today’s children, were hard wired into me and I feel positively queasy if someone throws away a bottle of washing up liquid without cutting it open to eke out every last drop (I was the child that had to wait months to do the craft activities shown on Blue Peter because I wasn’t allowed the Fairy Liquid bottle until long after others had made Tracy Island.) If you don’t know what I am talking about you are far too young!
But all these memories have come into their own when writing novels set in the 1940’s. I remember my mother talking about her mother boiling washing in a ‘copper’ atop a stove, and wringing the wet clothes out in a mangle. My grandmother used to make her own marmalade until well into her 90’s and her little house was filled with the aroma of oranges each January (along with the distinctive calor gas odour of her old stove). I remember when children’s toys were made to last (and were distinctly un P-C) and when you had to tune in your (black and white) television, then move the TV arial around on top to get a clear picture (and avoid the dreaded ‘snowstorm’!) I could go on….
My point is that if you are writing books set within living memory, you have a rich treasure store of resources in the elderly people around you, or in your family memorabilia. Libraries and the internet are useful, but personal recollections can bring the past to life in fresh and individual ways. And our historical novels may well be better for it.