We travelled down Woodhall Road in the Village of Calverley West Yorkshire a few years ago, passing my childhood family home, I asked my eldest daughter if she remembered my mum who died in the summer of 1992 when my daughter was just two years old. I was really surprised to by her reply, she couldn’t remember her grandmother, but remembered two string puppets which hung at either end of the mantelpiece in the living of the house. Those string puppets (pictured above) had been a birthday gift to my brother and I when we were children, looking on the internet today, I discover that they were Pelham Puppets and quite collectable today, but that is beside the point, those two, weird little puppets as one of my daughter’s earliest memories.
I became quite interested in earliest memories and trawling back through the dusty corners of my own brain, I can remember having a holiday with some very dear people who owned a house in the village of Ladypark, close to the Gateshead bypass and Sprawling Team Valley Trading Estate. I remember waving to a man in a train on the Team Valley Trading Estate as he went over a bridge, and I remember boarding a bus in the neighbouring village of Kibblesworth and sitting on my dad’s knee among a group of coal miners with blackened faces. Telling my parents about these memories later, I discovered that we went on that holiday in the summer of 1960 and at that point, I hadn’t even celebrated my second birthday.
Memories always seem to be of paramount importance when I meet with families to prepare for funerals. I have seldom met the deceased, and even if I have, I know very little about their back stories, but I find it interesting hearing about the history of people’s lives. During the time after the life of Jesus, all the early disciples had were memories, and the ministry of the early apostles was based on “do you remember when he said…” or do remember when he did…” Those memories were verbalised initially as the early apostles tried to establish the first Christian Church. The stories were eventually written down in the form Gospel stories and letters and form what we refer to today as The New Testament.
Many years ago, I used to love sitting and listening to my dad and uncle James, reminiscing about the good old days, their experiences of growing up were very different to mine, their memories were about life in the 1920’s and 30’s and I remember now some of those stories. I have been watching one or episodes of the BBC programme “who do you think you are” and the common thread that runs through several of the episodes is people wishing that they had asked their forebears important questions about their history, and it seem to me that as a person dies, their story and their history die with them.
Maybe we owe it to future generations to listen to the stories, to record something of our history, not only does this apply to our personal story. There is a gradually shrinking number of people who have memories of the second world war, there are now just a handful of people who can still remember life during the first world war, my view, years ago, I was entertained by my dad and my Uncle James, they were two old men, reminiscing, but stories are much more than simply remembering the good old days, they are the foundations of our life, our belief patterns, our ethical standards, our hopes, our dreams, and even our Phobia’s and fears. I have possibly banged this drum before but believe that it is worth banging again. Keep sharing your stories, and encourage others to tell theirs, particularly those with years of life experience.