The Recording of Reminiscences.....

My recent posts about growing up in Northfleet in the 1940s and 1950s have elicited literally dozens of really lovely comments from others who remember those times or who have a family link to them. I have tried to acknowledge each of them though sometimes this isn’t possible because somehow or other I manage to `lose’ the original response and not being technically all that competent I fail to find it again! At times my own memory of what happened over sixty years ago does not strictly co-incide with other people’s, where for example I have muddled up certain members of an extended family and peremptorily made them a member of an organisation (the much hated Brownies for instance) when they never were! Or I have given a harassed housewife seven children when she had only three, or dogmatically stated a neighbour worked in the coal industry when he was in fact a butcher. Regrettably this is the way a memoir works and perhaps it is the downside of reminiscences because we will all recall eras and incidents somewhat differently. I have, however, tried to stay true to the mood and atmosphere of the times and candidly represent how families like mine, situated at the very bottom of the social heap, conducted their lives, how they reacted to important issues and the language they used to express their thoughts. Expressions and terminologies that were acceptable then would certainly not be tolerable in these more progressive times where hate speech is fully understood and same sex marriage and gender choice simply an option depending upon preference. We have all changed significantly in the ensuing years and for some of us how things used to be is irrelevant. For me though it has seemed valuable to document a degree or two of the differences that existed back then, our acceptance of what Life dealt to us, our attitudes to social change perhaps. Soon all direct memory of the time I write about will be gone for ever and then it will be too late to do so.