Further to my last I’ve made a start on some real writing, as opposed to these blogging ephemera. Instead of an occasional post to commemorate a day, I am engaged on a so-far shapeless project to put down something a little more lasting: not just for a book, but a hardback; allowing myself a length of time—let’s say something between three and eighteen years—to do the job properly. Disinterestedly and for its own sake.
Which leaves this column, this organ, this blog, free for odd remarks, and keeping in touch with a select band of dear readers. One of the topics which has already emerged from the shapelessness of my “hardback project” is “rewriting the past”. Yes, I know the phrase implies that I shall be the author of a falsification; for as everyone knows, the past is immutable.
Yes, but what I mean is something different. The past rewrites itself before my eyes, leaving me an innocent observer, rather than the perpetrator of falsehoods.
My second stepfather is a case in point. In the thirty years I knew him before his death in the mid-Eighties, I treated him as the mere consort of my mother; a man who became progressively drearier and more distant in my eyes.
I wrote about him here in this blog, as part of the landscape of certain youthful memoirs. At a certain point, having given him the pseudonym of Blackett, I decided to name him in full: Septimus Carr Leslie Blackett Charlton, so that any interested party might one day find his name through a search engine.
His grandson from New Zealand contacted me; and now my sister has unearthed a set of photographs of Sep taken before I, at the age of 11, first encountered him. I have made them public, mainly for the sake of his estranged family and descendants, here. But also, as I’ve become aware in the last few days, I’ve done it for me.
Now I wish I could get to know this man, whom I undervalued so much at the time. In some mysterious way, I discover it is not too late; and that I can begin to treasure being his stepson. And I pray that his real son and daughter, who were snatched from him by inexorable fate in childhood, never to see him again, may gain something similar, by the contemplation of old photos.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Good luck with the project. I think there comes a point where everyone should write the story of their life, as they remember it, as they interpret it, in the style that suits them, telling of what they have done and how things happened and of the people that mattered along the way.
I often wonder if I will have the courage to ask my own parents to record their lives and memories, before they die. It's not that they don't talk about the past, but it has probably never ocurred to them to mention, or to their children to ask, most of what it would be interesting to know when they are gone.
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Thanks for your gracious encouragement, CIngram, especially in view of the apparent heckling I fling at you on your own blog.
As for your point about parents recording their lives, my various children certainly stand in need of some background to their own lives and origins, their father having had a chequered childhood and adulthood beyond all imagining. Sometimes I tell them orally the answers to their questions but it is too complex to deal with in that way.
But the thing is, the effort of writing is so great that the real spur to me is not mere recording but the production of true literature, that would do more than inform about facts.
I have in my possession one or two memoirs written by relatives of an earlier generation and see how badly written they can be, how irritatingly unreadable and unreflective.
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I have in my possession one or two memoirs written by relatives of an earlier generation and see how badly written they can be, how irritatingly unreadable and unreflective.
But at least they wrote them, and left some details and thought on their own lives. Most people don't even do that, because it doesn't occur to them that anyone might be interested. And it is, for most people, a monumental task to express anything complex in words.
I have read memoirs, scribbled accounts of a few vivid memories of long ago, or transcripts of oral accounts brought to mind by the questions of an interviewer, from people with little or no experience of writing or history of any kind, and they can be fascinating and are invariably illuminating. Frustrating, too, for what they leave out.
As to the 'heckling', it's always a pleasure to hear from you, even though I do sometimes find your remarks rather surprising :-).
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We really never know each other, do we? So many people whose lives we touch, and we know so little.
It's easy to construct a “skin” that we cover all of the discrepancies with, a shortcut that keeps us from needing to understand.
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Thanks Vincent, if it wasn't for your blog I found about Sep I would still be looking for him. It's a pleasure reading the blogs and enjoy seeing the country side of where you are. It's great to have a new Uncle and Aunt and to find out about my grandfather I've never known. One day, I want to hop on the big bird from New Zealand over to England and come give you and your sister a big hug!! Words still cant quite explain how I feel with all the info and help you have supplied. Sep lives on in our memories and not a day goes bye when I dont think about what he was like. I know the story you write will have a happy ending. Take care.
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after looking for you and your sister for 30 years at last my son found you . i have so many things i would like to ask you both and im not much of a letter person so im comming over to uk hope we can meet up and fill in some empty spaces looking forward to seeing you
Michael Charlton
New Zealand
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Michael & Nigel: It will be a great pleasure to meet you, each or both, when you come to England from New Zealand, to share memories, to show you photos and places, to answer your questions, and I'm pretty sure Mary feels the same way. For my part, I have many memories and still-untold stories about Sep, which I will try to put down in writing.
And it’s extraordinary how we did manage to make contact in the end. When I started to write about Sep I called him Blackett (for other readers, this was one of his names – he was one of the Blackett Charltons, I understand). But it was on a certain day, as this blog recalls, that I decided to give him his full name. That was in August 2008, on the occasion of my first visit to East Cowes since I had left the Isle of Wight forty-eight years previously. That was the time, as I record on that day’s blog, that I felt Sep as a presence, prompted by walking the streets of a town where he had lived for years before I first met him. That was the moment I became tangibly aware of his previous life and the children who were taken away from him. It did occur to me at that moment that someone who knew him would be able to make contact, but I never ventured as far as thinking that it would be his grandson, who would tell Sep’s own son.
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vincent is it the east cowes primery school you are going to in june? if so i would like to try to make it there as its 59 years since i left but still remember my teacher mrs Box and classroom .
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Hi Michael, no it is not. When I arrived in East Cowes I was 12 and ready to go to the Newport Grammar School, founded in 1610.
But I am pretty sure your school is still there. Let me know if you can make it, for I shall be free Sunday 6th June, and we could look at those places together if you wish.
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