Talking to Myself
IMPRESSIONS FROM AN EARLIER LIFE

  CLICK BELOW FOR

1/ The Families Par t 1
P art 2    Part 3

2/Shrewsbury
Part 1 Part 2

3/ Friends
Part 1   Part 2

4/ Out and About
in Shropshire
Part 1   Part 2

5/ Worrying Times
  Part 1    Part 2

6/ Three Holidays
    Part 1   Part 2

7/Writers and Reading
Part 1   Part 2

8/ Of Famous Men
    Part 1   Part 2

9/ School Report

10/ The Pivotal Year
      Part 1   Part 2

11/ Now Back to Penge
   Part 1   Part 2

Back to Shropshire Lad
Editions Homepage

Welcome to the Homepage of Talking to Myself

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. We eventually moved away in the summer of 1951. Having completed the memoir but doubting its potential for publication as a book, I set up the website as a way of sharing it with others.

WHO MIGHT WANT TO READ IT?

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, you may believe that the lives of 'ordinary people' matter just as much as famous or celebrated lives. They can be just as interesting and entertaining to read about - often more so. I've often reflected on the vanity of autobiographers, especially those with a background in 'public life' however defined, who seem to assume that we all desperately want to know more about them and their lives. Too often their writing is dull and they disappoint by not revealing the juicy nuggets we might have hoped they would disclose. Many of these efforts are largely crude exercises in self-justification, rushed attempts by once well-known figures to straighten the record before they fade rather rapidly from public memory. Some are published long before their subject has even had time to live an adult life.

At least I have done that, though some of those other faults may be present here. But, since reading it is an entirely voluntary act, I'm not going to begin with apologies. Vain or not, the work exists and, as many writers say of what they have done, it had to be written. If you share the years I lived through as a child, you may relate to much of the memoir quite closely. Despite our different origins, it could reflect you and aspects of your young life more than you might expect. If it stimulates you to recall your own experiences of that time, it could encourage you to explore your own personal past more closely, and to be rewarded in the process.

It's not at all essential to have had my geographical background at that time. Naturally, if you know Shrewsbury and parts of Shropshire near the town you have an obvious, ready-made setting for much of the memoir in the recollections of your own experience. What matters considerably more is an interest in reflecting on your own early life through these details of somebody else's.

HOW IS IT WRITTEN?

Earlier drafts followed the conventional style of most such accounts: a single voice telling the story from start to finish. This approach generated several annoying issues for me, which I hope I've solved by creating a more varied reading experience. An academic and poet said the other day that our university Creative Writing Schools tend to tell their students that 'You have to find your voice.' He saw that advice as too limiting, preferring to say 'You have to find your voices .'  As you read, you'll encounter a number of voices here, presented in different ways. Among them are quoted extracts gleaned 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. There's 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 are often connected to impressions in later life. In several places, broader historical background helps to show our lives in the context of something much larger than ourselves. Even so, time does move forward. Towards the end, a contemporary search for the place where I was born brings distant past and present together, completing the memoir's circular structure.

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.'

The enticing and very knowingly contrived opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers takes some beating, regardless of its truth: '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 'My mother never changed places.' It sets fewer hares running than Burgess's but, whatever it means, the 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.

Looking at an individual life, family background is an obvious place to start, and I've placed my parents and myself by discussing a pair of family photographs taken in Shrewsbury. I explain how different my mother and father were from each other, and speculate on how this may have influenced the way I developed. There's some South London history too, since that's where both my parents' families lived. Within this background, my childhood perceptions of grandparents and other significant relatives make connections across three generations of those families. After that, the chapter titles and their brief summaries will lead you through the following twelve years.

shropshireladeditions.co.uk has now serialised all this, and so the whole book has been rendered electronic. Relevant photographs are being taken or collected now for inclusion on many of the pages, and will be added from time to time. Having brought the project to this stage, I hope it engages your interest and that you enjoy reading it.

September 2008

CLICK FOR:   1/ The Families Part 1           Back to Shropshire Lad Editions Homepage

NOTE ON THE USE OF PUBLISHED MATERIAL This website has no commercial objectives whatsoever. All quotations of any significant length taken from published material are fully acknowledged and attributed to their sources by detailed reference to author, title, publisher and publication date. The quotations used represent only an extremely small proportion of any publication's original length. In the event of objections from authors, publishers or other copyright holders, such direct quotations will be withdrawn and their substance incorporated instead through summary or paraphrase.

This electronic text version of Talking to Myself: Impressions from an Earlier Life is copyright � Shropshire Lad Editions 2008,
and the moral right of the author has been asserted.