Welcome to the Homepage of Talking to Myself

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WHAT IS THIS MEMOIR?

 

It’s a collection of impressions from the earliest part of my life. Up to the age of twelve and a half, throughout the 1940s, I lived with my parents in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, eventually moving away in the summer of 1951. Doubting the memoir's potential for publication as a book, I decided to set up the website as a way of sharing it with others.

 

 

WHO MIGHT WANT TO READ IT?

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We’re told there’s a voracious market in Britain for biography and autobiography. Even so, I wouldn’t assume that anyone particularly wants to read a memoir about the early life of a complete – and not at all famous - stranger. However, it could interest you if you believe that the lives of ‘ordinary people’ matter just as much as famous or celebrated lives. In fact, they can easily be just as interesting and entertaining to read about, and often more so.

 

If you share the years I’ve lived through, you may relate to much of the memoir quite closely. It could reflect you and aspects of your own young life more than you might expect. It may help you recall your own experiences of that time, even encouraging you to explore your own past more closely and constructively.

 

Anyone who knows Shrewsbury and parts of nearby Shropshire has a ready-made setting for the memoir in their own memory and experience. But that background isn’t essential. What matters much more is an interest in reflecting on your own early life through these details of someone else’s. The term 'Life Writing', for which university courses are available, now embraces writings such as autobiography, biography, journals, diaries and letters, all expressing aspects of an individual's life, experiences and memories.

 

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HOW IS IT WRITTEN?

 

The conventional style of most such accounts is a single voice telling the story from start to finish. This approach raised several issues for me, which I hope I’ve solved with  a much more varied reading experience. You will meet a number of voices presented in different ways. They include quoted extracts from a memoir that seems to exist already. There are letters, short stories, transcripts of telephone conversations and face-to-face interviews, articles, and other formats. Among them are a postcard and an email, and even an imagined conversation with Charles Darwin.

 

The book speaks through themes rather than following a strict time-line. The early years often connect with impressions in later life. In places, broader historical background puts our lives in the context of something much larger than ourselves. Even so, we do move forward through time and, towards the end, a contemporary search for my birth place brings past and present together, completing the memoir’s circular structure.

 

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WHERE DO WE BEGIN?

 

On beginning a piece of writing effectively, Ernest Hemingway wrote:

    

     ‘All you have to do is to write one true sentence,

      and then go on from there.’

 

Regardless of its truth, the enticing and very knowingly contrived first sentence of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers takes some beating: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ Talking to Myself is probably the first and only memoir that begins with the sentence ‘My mother never changed places’. It sets fewer hares running than Burgess’s but, whatever it means, my sentence is certainly true. Most of the sentences that follow it are also true, or true enough. The best thing is to read them for yourself. Then you can make up your own mind about the truth, how much it matters and whether there’s more than one kind of truth.

 

When looking at an individual life, family background is an obvious place to start. I’ve placed my parents and myself by discussing two family photographs taken in Shrewsbury when I was a baby. I explain how different my mother and father were from each other, and suggest how this may have influenced the way I developed. There’s some South London history too, because that’s where both my parents’ families lived. Within this background, my own childhood perceptions of grandparents and other significant relatives make connections across three generations. After that, the chapter titles and their brief summaries lead you through the next twelve years.

 

Having brought the project to this stage, I hope you enjoy reading it. The quotations below may lead your mind into appropriate territory.

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Memory and the Past

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To compare, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is like trying

to gather in one's arms the hyacinthine colour of the distance. But if it is once

achieved, what sweetness! . . .  The past is only the present become invisible and

mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs

are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

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                                                                         Mary Webb: Foreword to Precious Bane

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We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.

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                                                                                            Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca

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Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

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                                                                                            WH Auden: The Dyer's Hand

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Life is not what we have lived, but what we remember and how we remember it

in order to recount it.

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                                                                                                      Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Click the buttons below for each of the eleven chapters.

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At the end of each chapter there are navigation buttons

to take you to the next chapter or to other sections of the site.

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