Preface

We only ever see the second half of our parents’ lives – the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together. It’s hard to think of our parents as young – or maybe I mean young adults – when everything stretched out in front of them and was possible. The versions of them that we see and judge every day have been shaped by experiences they’ve had, but which we have never known: the times they were hurt; the days they won; the times they compromised. For so much of it, we were simply not there.

So who are we to judge? Maybe we don’t know them at all. And yet they must be – or were – only ordinary people like ourselves. Or the ones, as their kids, we may become. We all walk on common ground.

These days, in the age of infinite digital storage, an ordinary life is being documented every second of every day. Lofts and blanket drawers are stuffed full of video and audio cassettes, MiniDiscs, digital audio tapes, hard drives, smart cards and DVDs of all our unviewed photographs and eight-hour wedding receptions. Future generations will get sick of hearing about us.

But the ones who came just before us have left fewer footprints: a handful of private letters in a hat box; a voice captured on a slowly oxidising crumbling reel to reel; three minutes of a single holiday on a tiny spool of Super 8. They are the disappearing generation. We need to read the things they will eventually throw away, to listen out for the offhand remark and the moments of lucidity. We might even learn something. About them. And ourselves.

I tell this story from first-hand and second-hand experience: the moments I lived through; the handed-down stories; the photographs and the letters; the rummaging in the attic; a few public archives. It’s a true story, or as true as any of our own stories are.

It is about my parents. And me.