Every family tells a story

THE trouble with memories is that you forget them. Or you don’t think they’re important so you don’t pass them on. Aristocratic families have houses full of portraits, books and records about their families. Celebrities get to go on Who Do You Think You Are? which can reduce even Jeremy Paxman to tears.

Meanwhile the rest of us rely on stories from Granny – which we’re probably not at all interested in until it’s far too late. Good news then, that more people are writing down their memories, not for fame and fortune, or even for publication – but just as a way of recording their own little bit of history for their families.

Two such accounts have landed on my desk.

Both written just for families, yet proving to be fascinating bits of social history. One is the memories of miner’s daughter, the late Vera Thompson, born in Sacriston in 1921, one of six children who lived in a typical miner’s house - two bedrooms, no bathroom, no kitchen.

It was a time of incredible hardship, when children went to school barefoot in the snow. During the strike of 1926, five-year-old Vera went to the local chapel hall every day for a bowl of soup and a mug of cocoa – and longed to be able to take some home for her hungry parents.

There were lots of funerals.

“Funerals were spectacular, we always went to watch those beautiful jet black horses with a fine plume of feathers on their heads,” she writes.

One woman in the street owned a black coat and hat which were lent out when the need arose. And the children were eager to be the one chosen to go round the school collecting the pennies for a wreath. A chance they got all too often.

“Child mortality was so high yet we took it as a matter of course,” recounts Vera.

But there was plenty of fun – concerts, carnivals, where they decorated the street with ferns and paper flowers and bunting tied across from the leg of one brass bedstead to the one across the street – walks in the countryside, the Rechabites’ trip to the seaside, which started with a two-and-a-half mile walk to Plawsworth railway station.

Vera’s father, Lancelot, was a talented musician (like his father before him, who composed a piece called The Sacriston Volunteers) and played for the cinema (where the children got in free) and the theatre (where they walked in smartly carrying a music stand or an empty violin case before finding seats in the audience) and ran a concert party round the clubs.

Tiny Vera was lifted on to billiard tables in smoky rooms to sing her songs. Many years later she ran her own concert party - The Sacriston Road Show.

In between though, she went into service in Bolton, and then did war work, putting explosive fuses into bombs. One exploded while she did so. She had shrapnel in her legs until her dying day. “I suppose I should have sued for compensation, but never did,” she says.

She survived to marry – no time for wedding preparations and walking five miles through the rain to get home for her wedding – and have two daughters.

“She was a fantastic singer,” remembers younger daughter Carol Steel, from Crook , “and did an amazing amount of charity work over her lifetime.”

WHILE Vera was battling with explosive detonators, Eileen Farnaby, later Thompson, was born into a very different life in Eryholme, a small village south of Darlington, a quiet rural backwater still pretty much as it was in Victorian times. Brickyard Cottage then had just four rooms, including two bedrooms, for three adults and eventually seven children.

Unlike Vera’s family, Eileen and her brothers and sisters never went hungry. “One of the real benefits of living on a smallholding at a time when rationing was still in place. I remember line upon line of peas, beans, cabbages, cauliflowers, lettuce, strawberries, raspberries gooseberries, apple, pear and plum trees, tomato plants and cucumbers.

“Baking day was always on Friday and when we came home from school the big table in the living room was laden with baking.” And all this before they had electricity.

Although the children were well fed and clothed, they had to work for it. The Farnaby smallholding had three Nissen huts full of hens.

Every day after school Eileen used to gather the eggs – eight big baskets of them – then take them into the house and sort and clean them.

“This was my job and that of my brothers every night after school and at weekends. We just got on with it and thought nothing of it.”

October half term was always spent potato picking and in the early autumn evenings, after they’d packed the eggs, the children used to go out collecting rosehips. “Our hands and legs would be scratched red raw but we didn’t mind for we would get threepence for every pound we picked,” she says.

Gradually the “never had it so good” times came to Eryholme too – the house was enlarged, and electricity and running water were installed.

They even had a phone and a car. And, like so many people, had their first television in time for the Coronation in 1953. The family story is typical of so many of this generation.

R EADING these histories of ordinary unassuming families – often faced with extraordinary challenges – is riveting, because the world has changed so quickly and dramatically.

How many of today’s children would live on a bowl of soup and a mug of cocoa? How many would expect to share in the family’s work? Or even walk miles before a trip to the seaside? Yet what comes over in both cases is a strong sense of family and community, a resilience to cope with hard work and trouble and a delight in simple pleasures.

Will our children and their children be able to say as much?

Even though these particular reminiscences are a generation apart, there is a strong sense of a different age, different attitudes. They are written at the point when memory is just tipping over into history and will become even more fascinating in the future.

We have never been so interested in history, particularly our own family history, and it’s a fascination that’s unlikely to fade.

So, as the nights draw in, if you’ve ever thought of writing your life story for your grandchildren, this might just be the winter you get it done.

Your great grandchildren will love it.

Jeremy Paxman was reduced to tears by the stories of his grandmother’s desperately hard life in the slums of Glasgow.

Meanwhile Kevin Whately, always such a down-to-earth chap, discovered that back in the 17th Century his ancestors were friends of Oliver Cromwell and were some of the richest and most powerful in the country.

Barbara Windsor’s great grandmother was desperately poor, a matchbox maker, living in one of London’s worst slums. Yet she was one of the lucky ones, having fled the dreadful Irish famine that killed more than a million people.

One of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen’s grandfathers was a merchant sea captain in the First World War, his ship sunk by a German U boat.

And Rory Bremner discovered his great grandfather was a surgeon in the Crimean War.

Every family has its stories. Maybe it’s time you told yours.