INTRODUCTION

I suppose that this is, in essence, a collection of little stories, those anecdotes that are kept alive as they are told and retold within a family and they never really escape and remain, as you might say, familiar. They are a bit like the embarrassing tales that your mother might have told about you to your friends when you were a teenager.

My mother used to love telling the most amazing little stories about her life and those of us who had taken the time to sit with her and listen to her stories, the ones that she used to tell over and again, we became so familiar with the things that she told us that eventually the stories became part of us, and when she died we still told variations of the same stories to one-another. We had become part of the story.

Of course there were those whose lives were too busy and filled with things that were far more important and whose time was too precious to be wasted listening to the ramblings of a little old lady. They walked away; turning their backs on the storyteller they left the story.

Mum used to tell wonderful stories, not that I always understood them, she would talk about people that she knew as a child, in her teens, or in wartime as if you should know them, “You must remember them,” was what she used to say, and there were people, places and events that she would talk about, year in and year out, things that she would tell to me (and anyone else in the family who had the time to listen) and in a strange way I ‘do’ remember. I am part of that story and it continues with me.

I’ll never be able to tell a story in quite the same way as my mother could. Mum would start a story and go off at tangents here and there, always coming back to the main story without loosing the plot. To say that she went off at a tangent is not exactly true, mum told a story in intricate and (what I can now recognise as exquisite) detail. It would infuriate me at the time because at the point in the story where someone’s hair, shoes or even the look on their faces had to be described, mum would give a detailed description of it, as if this apparently minor detail was the central point of the story. I can’t remember the number of times that I told her to stop waffling on and to get on with the story, but every time she would just laugh and go on with an intricate description of something that seemed to be totally trivial at the time, but the stories went on, getting longer and more intricate with each telling, always the same and yet, always changing, never a case of just being ‘the same old story’ because if you took the time to listen and gave just a little bit of yourself to the process of making the story you might (one day) get close to an understanding of how these old stories were growing and developing like a part of the family because as long as they were being remembered, while they were being told and retold, they were still alive.

These are little stories about things that have happened in my life. In a way they are not stories about me, and if I am the central character in the stories it is only because I was looking out from my centre and seeing what was happening around me.