Speech from the dead

Back in June I caught the first half of the first one of Hilary Mantel's Reith lectures on Radio 4. As one of Britain's best known writers of historical fiction, naturally she was talking about what we can know about the past. She talked about phrases passing down the family and in a sense keeping someone alive and it made me think about the time-spans word of mouth can cover and how immediate it makes the past feel.

I remember my Nana (born 1918) telling me anecdotes her grandma (born 1870) had told her about her younger days, which made my Nana's grandma (and her dad, born 1832) more real to me than many a second cousin who lived nearby but never crossed my radar.

I have been known to refer to someone as an 'Aunt Sarah Ann' because they started clearing the dinner table before everyone had finished eating. The original Aunt Sarah Ann who had this mildly irritating habit was born in 1860 and was my great-grandmother's aunt. Both of them died in the 1950s but the phrase persists in its fourth generation. It is slightly unfortunate for poor old Sarah Ann that this is the one trait that's been remembered by the family, other than her short stature.

Whenever I'm full of cold I think of the phrase 'poorly sick with a shawl on', which my Nana's friend Alice told me was what her grandmother (born 1860s I think, a friend of Nana's grandma) always said in similar circumstances. I heard stories of Alice's grandmother from my Nana too and I've had her described to me, so again she feels quite real to me though I've never even seen a picture of her.

I spent a lot of time as a child talking to Nana and Alice (hence the dedication in The Little Book of Northern Women) and the stories I heard about growing up in the 1920s and 1930s were full of detail as they relived their memories for me. I can still picture vividly many of the things they described - it helps that I spent part of my childhood in the same village, I guess. There's a story in The Little Book of Northern Women called The Silent Witness which grew out of Nana's childhood in particular (not the violent bit, I hasten to add) and I'd love to think that when I'm old I might tell a child born more than 100 years after my Nana some phrase or anecdote that they'll remember, to keep the connection going.