How I unwrapped my family’s greatest GIFT
Forget pressies... the most magical thing children can do at Christmas is ask Granny and Grandad about their young lives — as VICTORIA HISLOP reveals, it helped inspire her bestseller
OVer the Christmas season, most of us will find ourselves next to a valuable source of history — and I don’t mean the latest volume of Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher biography (a well-meant gift for the bedside table). It’s our parents and grandparents I am talking about.
Each and every one of them is a living, breathing historical resource who can give us insight into so much. But, so often, we don’t even realise it.
Unless they have diaries or boxes of neatly collated correspondence in the attic, the older generation may well leave us without passing on the often extraordinary details of their lives from a rapidly disappearing era.
All too frequently, people say (when it’s too late): ‘If only I’d talked to them.’
It was when I was writing my last novel that I realised how important it is to do this. Those Who Are Loved is a narration from a 90-yearold woman who has never revealed the full version of her life story for reasons of shame, fear and stigma (she fought and killed in the Greek Civil War and, for decades after, lived in fear of persecution).
At the party to celebrate her birthday, when she is surrounded by four generations of her family, my character, Themis, realises that she has nothing of any monetary value to leave them. Her true legacy is her history and experiences — the story of her life and all that she has learned, which is unknown to her grandchildren.
My own maternal grandmother lived with us from when I was five until I had just left university. For all those years, she was a constant presence in the house, quiet but always available to help, chat or teach me her old-fashioned skills, such as knitting.
I realise how lucky I was to have had a constant drip of information that helped me form an image of her past. There was nothing I loved more than to hear her talk about her childhood.
Her father was the superintendent (the word they used for chief executive in those days) of a psychiatric hospital in South London, and she and her five siblings grew up there, playing in the grounds and mingling freely with the patients.
Her tales of hearing screams from the padded cells used to thrill and shock me, as did the friendship one of her sisters had with a patient, which ended in marriage.
I worked out early on that her childhood home was a place where ‘inconvenient’ relatives could be parked — someone who had committed a dark deed, for example, or did not quite fit into society.
I knew about her five siblings, one of whom drowned while in the Navy, and the sister who married a very wealthy man (defined for my grandmother by the fact that her father-in-law drove a rolls-royce and had a lucrative dry-cleaning business) but never had children, so there was always a touch of pity, as well as a detectable hint of snobbery, in my grandmother’s descriptions.
The same sister had a ‘woman friend’ (she used to say this while leaning towards me in a rather conspiratorial manner), and this friend sometimes came to visit us wearing a tweed suit and trilby. This was unusual in the 1960s.
My grandmother grew up decades before there was even a hint of political correctness in the air.
Some of the epithets she freely used to describe people cannot be used in this newspaper, but I remember that she always called me a ‘dirty little Turk’ if I did anything wrong — a reference, I only realised later, that related to a specific historical event which had involved the British Navy and shocked the nation: namely the destruction of the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor by the Turkish army in 1922 and the massacre of thousands of innocent people.
My grandmother’s habits were also clues to the life she had led. She was struck down with flu in the 191819 epidemic (from which 50million people died worldwide). She survived, but always put it down to the doctor’s advice to rebuild her strength by drinking iron-rich Guinness, a daily ritual to which she adhered for the next six decades.
Her nightly storage of underwear (corset and bloomers — she called them her ‘stays’) beneath her pillow was another habit deeply rooted in her past. During the Blitz, she often had to leave her home in the middle of the night to take refuge in an Anderson shelter and, being a child of the Victorian age, she always put on her underwear first.
She kept rolls of pound notes under her carpet (she hadn’t trusted banks since the 1929 Wall Street Crash) and there was a visible lump in the floor.
every habit she had, both large and small, had a genesis in her past and a ready explanation. There are plenty of gaps in my knowledge of my grandmother’s life, but overall, I have a strong sense of the narrow english society in which she lived.
She married a captain in the Merchant Navy (which sounds adventurous), but scarcely stepped outside the narrow confines of elmers end in South east London (and definitely not outside this country).
She lived a different life in a different world from him, boiling her brisket and potatoes and eking out rationed basics to feed three children, waiting for her husband to appear on his fortnightly visits home from the Baltic, sometimes with a fur, sometimes with a diamond.
I have always felt lucky to have this image of a life so near and yet so far from my own.
Of my paternal grandparents, however, I know much less, and I now kick myself for this. My paternal grandfather, Vincent Hamson, was a journalist and on the committee of the House of Commons Press Gallery from the early 1930s. He became the editor of Hansard in 1951.
I only discovered this after he died, when I found myself leafing through a carefully kept scrapbook that included press cuttings showing his presence at every important event of state for more than two decades. I had known none of this until that moment.
In my eyes, he and my grandmother were simply a sweet old couple pottering about in their garden, she with the secateurs, he pushing a lawnmower. The focus of attention, when I look back, was always on us, the grandchildren. What had we been doing? How was school? How were our holidays, etc, etc.
For the 20 years that our lives overlapped, my grandparents were at a stage of being blissfully happy in their home and never going further than the corner shop.
My grandfather had met Churchill and there was I, doing my history O-level and never asking him a single question about his life!
I can only imagine that my grandparents thought I would be bored by their reminiscences of the olden days. How wrong they were — and what a wasted opportunity.
I think we need to refocus, turn our attention to the older generation and encourage our children to do so as well. Those born in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s will remember the arrival of television, the ballpoint pen, cat’s eyes, plastic and so much more. Their schoolrooms looked different, they learnt different subjects and the teaching was in a different style (as were school uniforms).
All of this is precious information, and so much is unwritten. Most history books focus on other things — politicians, rather than ordinary people — so we miss out on much of the richness of the past.
So perhaps, this Christmas, rather than watching TV after lunch (we have all seen Shrek several times already, yes?), we should turn our attention to the older people in the room. And perhaps grandparents should encourage this, surprising their grandchildren with something that might at first seem disappointingly simple: a notebook and pen.
This might be the best gift the kids ever get (though they won’t know it
at the time). The questions posed to grandparents can be simple: where were they born, where did they go to school, when did they leave school (my own children, for example, don’t know their grandfather left school at 14, a common thing in pre-war days).
How did young people socialise in the 1940s and 1950s? In the days long before dating apps such as Tinder and Hinge, how did our parents and grandparents meet?
Where was their first meeting? At a dance hall? In a tearoom? And what was the path of their courtship? Everyone has their story, but so many remain untold.
An alternative method of discovering and capturing the memories and histories of our elders is to use a mobile phone (never too far from a teenager’s hands) and film them as they answer the questions that lead us to the essence of their lives.
Rather than grandparents filming grandchildren, let’s turn the cameras around. Many of us have boxes of videotape of our children’s summer holidays, parties and Christmas Days (all using now-defunct technology, so we can’t play them). But we have none of the grandparents.
My first choice, though, would be to do this on paper, as it is a medium that might make the elderly feel less self-conscious.
And it has a permanence that technology simply doesn’t have.
The details of ordinary lives will be preserved, and it will allow younger people to ponder the differences between then and now.
Has society made progress? Did people manage better when there was a less baffling choice of food, but fewer chemicals involved? When people played games with each other, rather than on their phones? When there was less obesity because everyone walked, rather than going by car? When anxiety and depression were less prevalent, despite the threat of an air raid?
It will not only be facts that are recorded, but thoughts and reflections. And it will help to create a social biography, not just of our own families, but of this nation.
So, when we are sharpening the carving knife for the turkey, why not sharpen our pencils, too?