Living History.
At school, I tried really hard to succeed at History. My brother enjoyed his history lessons, and my mum could name all the Kings and Queens of England, but I struggled with the political concepts and I was rubbish at deciphering documents.
I can recall snippets here and there – the Versailles Peace Treaty, the League of Nations, NATO, David Lloyd George (not to be confused with Harold Lloyd, whose TV shows were being rerun back in the eighties, when I was studying for O level History), and World War Two, but to me, it was simply a list of names, dates and figures.
Recently, I’ve learned more about the past by listening to those who have lived it, than I did sitting in class at school.
I’m at the wonderful phase of book writing – the beginning – when a whole new world, new characters and new scenarios are evolving. I’ve almost completed my research, but I have enough at this stage to start getting the first draft down. One of the characters in the book is named Nell. She grew up in the Channel Island of Jersey during WW2. With my history of … history, I needed to research this period of time and a friend of mine who, like Nell, grew up in Jersey, has been kind enough to talk me through her memories.
Spread over a few get-togethers, we chatted for several hours. Not only was I touched by my friend’s willingness to talk about her life, I am now better educated and have a higher regard for those things I tend to take for granted. To sit with a person who lived through the rationing, faced starvation, had no means of heat, and no form of communicating with the outside world, has made modern history real, and I wonder if I’d have learned more at fifteen if I’d had the honour of being taught by the people who were there. That’s not to say the teacher wasn’t doing her job – she was highly regarded and I liked her, but hearing the stories told first hand, and listening to the personal accounts have affected me more and given me a greater insight than I ever gained trying to absorb dates, times and document captions from a sheet of paper.
Or is it that now I’m older and have a history of my own, I understand more the value of life?
Nell certainly does.
Take care.