A while back I made a bookcase to fill a blank space against a wall. I make a lot of furniture and I find the pastime relaxing. After I’d finished the bookcase I looked downstairs in the storeroom to find some books to fill the shelves and in a box I found a copy of David Niven’s “The Moon’s a Balloon”. I opened it at random and in the introduction my eye was caught by a quotation by Evelyn Waugh. It read as follows:
“Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.”
Niven went on to say he thought this “a load of old balls”, and I must say I agree with him. But there is some truth in what Waugh said too. There is nothing better than a frequent sense of déjà vu for objective analysis of past events. And this is what I suspect Waugh was getting at. Whatever the truth may be, it got my brain working in the circuitous way it often does. I began thinking about biographies in general, and then, the many times I’d listened to stories my Grandad told me as a boy while we sat by the fireside at his house at Seven Kings, or later, the cottage at Earls Colne. I remembered how I’d asked him on various occasions if one day he would write the story of his life. But he was a talker not a writer, and, like most people, he never got around to it.
As I skimmed through Niven’s book, I was surprised at how well written it was. He had even got his apostrophes in the right places. Niven was a good raconteur, an astute judge of people and knew how to paint a word picture in plain simple English. What more can one want? But the stories and anecdotes seemed very tame compared with some of the things my Grandad told me had happened to him, during his long and colourful life. And it was at that point I suddenly realised that unless someone attempted to put down on paper the remnants of his life that still existed in the form of stories his loved ones still remembered, they would all, eventually, be lost for ever. And that made me very sad.
So I sat downstairs in the dimly lit storeroom with this thought at the back of my mind, thumbing through books I’d not opened in years - that is, until this observation jumped off a page: “Books can be broken broadly into two classes: those written to please the reader, and those written for the greater pleasure of the writer.” That also got me thinking. Thinking in a new direction. Would it be possible to combine the two? Could I produce a worthwhile story about my Grandad - and maybe even other members of my family? A story for personal satisfaction, for others to enjoy, and maybe even please old Grandad if he were looking down on me?
I don’t think that by nature I’m morbid or introspective - I’ve never had the time - but I must say I became a bit sentimental as I thought about various incidents from the past. I even became a bit preoccupied by the transient nature of life and all that sort of thing. It was all quite unlike me really. And that’s when, after some thought, I came to the conclusion that this would certainly be a worthwhile challenge for me to tackle. And besides, it would be a change from making furniture!
Most of my childhood times were very happy. A few were very unhappy. I’ve tried to be objective with them all. But most importantly, I’ve tried to create a relaxed series of snapshots that show the way it was back then. That’s why I’ve named this, “Rambling Recollections”. The stories I’ve written are just that - stories. They make no claims to be anything other than an attempt to reconstruct the flavour and character of my family times as a child. Certainly, the incidents and anecdotes are all real - they all happened - but sometimes I may have the dates, or the places, or the exact words said, not quite accurate. It’s not always easy to remember events exactly as they were after more than fifty years. So if you can find any inaccuracies, please don’t bother to tell me. They would, at best, be incidental.
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