Write YOUR Life Story.. for future Packington Residents to read – and to be amazed..?
In March 2020, while confined to his home in our village, Adrian Mongredien writes:
At Hay Literary Festival, I heard a historian talk on how to write the story of our lives.
She told us that nothing is more valuable to historians than first hand experiences. The only way these can be discovered and cross-checked is if a number of people can be persuaded to write about their own individual experiences.
In the next few years the number of people who can remember living just after or through the Second World War will rapidly diminish. Every one of us has a unique story to tell. Events that we may see as mundane and ordinary may be fascinating to our great grandchildren. Consider – if you are over 70, then:
- you probably grew up in a house with no central heating;
- with coal fires which you were taught how to light and keep going.
- you may remember what life was like before television.
- you may have had no shower, but one bath a week if there was enough hot water.
How can we write our own life story? A good way to start is to find your birth certificate. In my case I was able to find, from mine, the building that I was born in on google maps – a nursing home in Weston Favell Northamptonshire in 1942- and discover that it is still there although it is now an old people’s home. Can you remember
- the house, or area, in which you were born?
- Where you first went to school?
- How near were you to your local shops?
- Was food and sweets rationed?
- How many people lived there in the city, town, or village where you lived as a child?
- Where was the nearest Park?
- What sort of games did you play with other children living on your street?
- Did you have a birthday party when you were a child?
- What sort of presents did you receive at Christmas?
- What was your favourite radio programme?
- How many times did you go to the cinema every month?
Answers to all these questions will be of interest to future generations who will almost certainly be living very different lifestyles, as indeed are we today already.
I started writing the story of my early life a couple of years ago. Along the way I have found myself searching the internet for photos of New Brighton Pier (now demolished) and my secondary school (also demolished), and recently discovering on the net, the value of the house where I lived in a bedsit for ten months, during my few years in London in the “swinging sixties”. I was amazed to discover that it sold a couple of years ago for over £27,000,000. That is twenty seven million!!
You have no idea what will turn up until you sit down at your lap top and begin to remember your beginnings.
Over two decades ago, our Village History Group produced some fascinating reminiscences in the form of this “Where were you in the War?” booklet. Please will you NOW help us write YOUR history, for future village residents to enjoy? PVHG hope to publish YOUR story in a similar booklet when our current enforced home isolation comes to an end ..
