LEST WE FORGET by Liz Manning

 

I’m writing this on Remembrance Sunday. I’ll be off to church in an hour – to the service after the official Act of Remembrance at the war memorial across the bridge five minutes’ walk away. I can see the flags flapping in the ever present sea breeze from my window.

I’ve been doing a lot of remembering since I moved to Cornwall in September.

Remembering the moment we stood on Hannafore Beach, wind-whipped and exhilarated, as we decided to buy this house. Remembering the phone call I got, on the same beach, telling me I hadn’t got the promotion at work, which turned out to be the guidance we needed to make the move here.

Remembering our honeymoon only a few miles away: the hand-in-hand walks along Banjo Pier, the romantic meals in a tiny Polperro restaurant, and the terribly timed bout of tonsilitis.

Remembering my parents’ story of their honeymoon here:  made possible by free travel (Dad worked on the railways) and free accommodation (invited to stay at the local manse by their old minister), treating his children to a speedboat trip as a thank you.

Memories have played a major part in my Creative Writing MA so far too. I’m reprocessing the experience of my Dad’s dementia through poetry, finding new ways to put it in context. Discovering buried emotions that I had thought long relinquished but channelling them into my work, or maybe exorcising them at last.

Stories that my Dad told me of his childhood during the War have found their way into a short story and a potential novel that I’ve started writing. For example, his experience of staying out during air raids to watch the planes, rather than go to a shelter, turned into a story of a mother hunting for her missing son when a bomb hits his school (based on research I found online of my Dad’s grammar school actually being bombed in the Blitz). Or the care home where my novel is set is based on the one my Mum was in at the end of her life.

But it’s something we all do as writers, isn’t it? Write what we know. And a lot of what we know is our memories.

Through our writing, we can come at those memories, painful or pleasurable, from a different angle. We can re-examine them, use and mould them into something else. We can reclaim and repurpose them.

We have to be careful, of course, because we are often not the sole owners of these memories. They may be precious treasures which others may have locked away for good reason. But handled sensitively and prayerfully, our writing may be a way to honour the people who shared the memories with us.

And God can be in all of this. In the new perspective writing about them gives us. In the links sharing our stories builds with others. In the honesty and vulnerability. In the skill and creativity. In the resurrecting and remaking of our rememberings.

Liz Manning lives in Cornwall and is doing a Creative Writing MA at Plymouth University, where she’s exploring fiction, poetry, and screen writing possibilities. She hopes to have something ready for publication by the end of the academic year.

She blogs regularly at https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/