I recently went to stay for the weekend at my parents’ house. This is always a nostalgic affair for me as my heart and soul are still firmly rooted in Oxford, and I’ve never really managed to let go, even after more than 20 years away. But this trip down memory lane was very different.
My mother had spent several weeks ‘clearing out the storage room’, and sorting through all of my childhood belongings. She asked me if she could have a quick look through it and tell her what I would like to keep, and what she could now throw out.
I was expecting a few notebooks filled with bad drawings of trees, and maybe a collage or two from primary school, a random birthday card from someone I can’t remember or, I hoped, a Valentine’s card from a 7-year-old admirer.
What I got instead were two huge boxes absolutely crammed with detailed diaries of holidays stretching as far back as the late 70s when I was only five. Amongst these were piles of school exercise books, sketch books, home-made magazines, receipts for train journeys and cinema trips, postcards from European cities and museum visits, even my drawings from nursery school, and practice hand-writing jotters with huge round letters traced over the dotted outlines.
This wasn’t a nostalgia trip – this was an entire childhood on paper. The gradual formation of a character, a person, a life. I sat up late into the night pouring over the miss-spelled words, the scribbles and scrawls, the thoughts and feelings of a child of four, six, ten, and fourteen.
It was like sitting in a room with my younger self and talking with her. Hearing what she was thinking, learning what was most important to her, the things she noticed, dreamed of and felt excited or sad about.
Reading on and on through the pages of diaries and notes, themes started to emerge. There was great emphasis on every item of food consumed (children are incredibly concerned with what goes in their mouths!) and any opportunity to mention that we went to a shop – a shop! – was accentuated with exclamation marks as if it was the most exciting thing ever.
An extraordinarily detailed historical record of the daily details of life back then, from the toys we had to the clothes we wore, the routine of the day, the games we played, and the way we communicated, interacted, and spent our time as a family and as individuals in our free time. It would also be a psychologist’s dream to read and analyse the thoughts and feelings of this child, her relationship with her parents, brother and friends – and take these forward into many things that have happened in my adult life.
Kids today…
But what struck me most, leafing through my childhood and seeing things I had forgotten all about, having strange, deep memories re-awoken in parts of my brain long, long put to sleep, was how incredibly lucky I am to have this record – and what a huge shame it is that my children, and most children now, don’t.
They live their lives digitally. They FaceTime and Snapchat each other. Instant moments created, shared…and lost.
They send WhatsApp messages and texts, all of which are deleted. They take photos on iPad’s and phones constantly but there are so many thousands of them they will never really look at them. And eventually they will probably either be thrown away or kept in a box, the battery long since dead and the charger lost.
I’ve tried as hard as I can to make them keep little diaries while we’re on holiday. To write things down, keep a record, save notes from friends and hold on to physical objects that will jog a memory one day, far down the lifeline.
I’ve kept their post cards, as much of their school work as my attic can hold, favourite pictures, artworks, models and projects. Special items of clothing, plane tickets and programmes from all the school plays and concerts.
But there are no diaries. There is nothing recorded of their emotions and characters, what they thought and felt, worried about, dreamed, wished, and got excited about.
It made me very sad to realise how much time my children spend creating things and sharing things, which all disappear. How much of their childhoods will go unrecorded, and unsaved.
Would you like to delete this message? Yes. Click. Gone.
I know I’m going to be fighting a losing battle, but I’m going to TRY and get my children to write something down about what they’re up to these days, even if it’s only a couple of times a year. I think they will be glad they did, especially when they’re 40 years old and I ask them to have a look through the memory box and tell me what they’d like me to keep.
The answer, I hope, will be ‘all of it’.