Everyone’s family is extraordinary in its own way. This much and more I discovered in all those years of listening to family histories as a health visitor. It was important to get a feel for where a family had come from, the experience, the highs the lows, the tensions, the ‘issues’ and it wouldn’t take more than a few open questions and saying yes to a cup of tea to learn more. I look on it as one of the privileges of the job, and it was one of the aspects I loved the most and found so fascinating. People’s stories shared and respected.
Translate that love into books and it is understandable that I am always drawn to the family memoirs. The secret to success is for the writer to make their own extraordinary family seem likewise for me the reader to whom they might otherwise be ordinary...if that makes sense, and it wasn’t hard to wander around my shelves and find a selection of those I have enjoyed most in recent years. I think I have written about all of these in the past so please do follow the links if you want to know more about each one..
The Baroness - Hannah Rothschild
and an interview with Hannah at Port Eliot Festival here
The Great Western Beach - Emma Smith
On Chapel Sands - Laura Cumming...how did I not write about this? It was one of my best reads of 2019...
The Three of Us - Julia Blackburn
And then there was the astonishing and very beautiful book American Style and Spirit by Jane Bradbury about her Aunt Augusta and the Roddis family, their lives, their fortunes and their clothes. A picture of Augusta sits on the shelf above my desk and you might remember Jane very kindly sent me a bunch of flowers as thanks for that post. The hydrangeas in the vase lasted so long they eventually put out roots and I was able to nurture a plant. Augusta’s Hydrangea has been through a few torrid times...I planted it out too soon and almost lost it...this year it dried out in the cold frame and I almost lost it again but, like Augusta's clothes, the plant has survived and is thriving again, and I am mightily relieved because it felt like a challenge at which I mustn’t fail.
It was the arrival of another book to add to this selection that made me think more carefully about their attraction. Perhaps, at the moment, it’s about immersing myself in someone else’s life and history instead of my own. It’s quite hard not to overthink all this, especially when the diary is empty and the next thing to get excited about it is the entire nation singing We’ll Meet Again together from their lockdown homes on VE Day. Actually, I am quite excited about this, because any sense of togetherness doesn’t go amiss right now.
Richard Atkinson contacted me to ask if I might be interested in seeing a copy of his book Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract - The Story of a Tangled Inheritance. Published very recently this one of those books that could so easily be consigned to the wilderness in the midst of the current situation, and that has to be heartbreaking for any author who has committed a huge part of their life to writing it. In Richard’s case ten years or so, having found a box of old family letters...
'Richard Atkinson was in his late thirties, and approaching a milestone he had long dreaded – the age at which his father died – when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust on top of a cupboard.
This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica.
Richard’s searches led him to one forebear in particular, an earlier Richard Atkinson, a brilliant but flawed West India merchant who had shipped all the British army’s supplies during the American War of Independence, and amassed staggering wealth and connections along the way. ‘Rum’ Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage; forty years of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over his legacy....'
I'm about a hundred pages in and both intrigued and engrossed. So many of these writers have no choice but to address the 'something nasty in the woodshed' and Richard's family is no exception. He will have to confront involvement in slavery, but his ancestors were also witness to a backdrop of some of the most momentous times in history and I am re-visiting so much that I once knew. The Treaty of Paris...who knew the barest shreds of that were still lodged in my memory.
Meanwhile there must be scores of family memoirs deserving of a mention and already I realise I have forgotten to include Elisabeth's Lists by Lulah Ellender...
Lulah Ellender quotes Hilary Mantel...
'What is to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?'
And I was reminded of an evening spent listening to Hilary Mantel. I hunted out my notes and here's what I jotted down...
'...As soon as somebody dies they become fictional, they become a narrative construction, preserved in memory but in a sense you are not dead if someone still talks about you. The thought hollows you out with a sense of waste and loss for those not known...my greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood... a particle of being... doing honour to what is lost...'
I am sure you have plenty more suggestions to share..
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