The most dangerous writing of all
I didn't know my Uncle Jim well. He was a lot older than my Dad and lived far away in a magical place called Ascot, which was quite close to a big castle, a fantasy lake and a tame safari park with baboons and lions and stuff.
I was seven or eight when my parents drove me to Ascot to spend a week with Jim and Claire. Their kids were grown up and gone so it was just me and the old couple in their immaculate house. The holiday was over within two days. Aunty Claire's corgi - of course it had to be a corgi; corgis are royal! - savaged me that first evening, after which I became severely uncooperative, refusing all food, drink and comfort. Dad collected me the next evening; no words were spoken on that long night drive home.
And that was that. Five decades passed without me giving much of any thought to any of my parents' siblings and their spouses. Their histories were not my history, thus not my problem.
A few months ago, on Facebook, a cousin mentioned in passing that Uncle Jim had written a memoir before he died. Other cousins joined the conversation, chatting about the awful circumstances surrounding my Dad's family while they were growing up.
I asked where I could buy, or find, this book; promises were made and soon enough I possessed what turned out to be 39 pages of tightly typed, paragraph free, hard-to-read recollection.
The days shortened and the day came when we werent going to school, as usual, We were going to stay with some other children, for a little while, Could we still see grandma yes sometimes, My litt le brain couldnt think of anything else to say, We had some bags packed and with the new baby we were taken in Mr Garraways old trap to a big Brick house at the other side of Bracknall. There was a big arched gateway and a man in a little room . We waited here for a little while and then we were taken to another place. with 2 beds and some other furniture. and red lino on the floor, We sat around talking and then a man and a lady brought us some tea and foodon a tray. They shut and locked the door, We were locked in. We sat around playing I spy and asking mum what was going to happen to us She said not to worry everything would be alright. Gradually the light went and mum put some old newspaper over the window She said somebody might look in. She undressed us and we got into bedshe did the same and was feeding the baby, There were chamber pots and a bucket in the corner of the room, I couldnt go to sleep I was worrying what was going to happen to us. We could hear people moving about and men talking in gruff voices.Eventually I must have gone to sleep, Mum got us up and washed and dressed us, And made the beds, There was the sound of the door being unlocked and the man came inwith the lady, with some breakfast, and a little later another lady came in, She walked over to the bed, and picked up the baby, And without saying any thing she went to walk out, with him Iscreamed she is taking the baby and Bert and I went to the woman and beat her with our little hands. and kicked her, Moyher took hold of us and pulled us away And the woman walked out with the baby,Mum was crying bitterley and we were too. what would they do with the baby. or us for that matter, who were these terrible people. mum said everything would be alright. Worse was to comeWe were made to eat the breakfast and drink the tea, Mum said we would be going some where with other children. we could play with. No. she wouldnt be coming with us, but we would see her on Sunday. Later in the morning we said goodbye to mum, and we were taken off by a nice lady to another house.
... Ignore the punctuation, the erratic capitalisation, the (rare) misspelling. Forget the missing line breaks. Just read it. Then read it again.
In a bunch of run-along words Uncle Jim described one of the worst days of his life.
I have a diploma in Creative Writing. All the learning I did to get through that course is for nothing, compared to the shocking impact of his tightly remembered details.
Everyone has a story in them
While writing this post, I made the mistake of searching the Internets for "memoir as therapy". It turns out that writing your life story has metastised from hobby to creative-industrial complex. We celebrate those with the most harrowing life events, for sharing those traumas with the world.
I spent time going through every entry on that page of search results. Most of the articles I read emphasised the transformative, empowering, life-changing benefits that memoir-writing can bring to the person who embarks on such a journey.
What most of the articles failed to mention is that writing a memoir is possibly the most dangerous form of writing a person can ever do!
Seriously, if you want to explore your life experiences through the medium of memoir, make damn certain you have a strong support network - friends, loved ones, paid professionals - before you commit the first word of the first draft.
Writing a memoir can damage your mental health!
I know this because I have - on several occasions, often inadvertently - embarked on a project which led me to some dark and disturbing folds in my brain. Tucks which damaged me. Webs from which I had to be rescued by interventions from others.
The most obvious example of this is my own self-published memoir about my seven week encounter with the British Army. The events themselves form a trivial story of stubborn failure; I wrote about my adventure mainly as an interesting exercise to see if I could resurrect some memories of a bunch of incidents I could barely remember.
I thought I would spend maybe a month or so writing a first draft. I thought I might uncover some humorous episodes which I could later use as the basis for a short story, or some poems.
Such thoughts are for the birds. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Within weeks of starting the draft I found myself trapped in a net of reminiscences. A few were true recollections; most were variations of truth: what if I had said this, or done that? All of them crowded my thoughts. As time progressed they came to dominate my imagination.
I was already in an unhappy situation at work - the business had pivoted once too often and I was the last software engineer left standing. The simple solution was to find a better job and move on. I only got half the memo - the resignation bit. My efforts to land a new position elsewhere while working out my notice were unplanned and half-hearted.
Work - didn’t seem that important anymore. I was having too much fun daydreaming fresh scenarios: what if I had said that, or done this other thing?
I felt nothing on my last day as I processed the farewells and stepped away from a five year career.
Having no steady income should have been a wake-up call. Instead of arming myself with witty retorts to military-inspired hardships to overcome, I needed to draft focussed applications for interesting opportunities. Reconnect with former colleagues; network like a maniac to short-circuit the search for paid work.
Instead of getting on with life, I took a holiday from life.
Work on the memoir slowed, then stopped. Why bother documenting old realities when I had a whole new imagined world to live in?
Some eight months later I went to see my doctor for a routine checkup. The ten minute consult was almost done when, for no reason, my eyes suddenly leaked. Tears sprouted and fell; they wouldn't stop. I don't know whose shock was larger: the doctor's, or mine!
"I've got no money," I told him. "I can't pay the rent. People keep sending me emails and letters and demands ...
"I don't know what's happening to me!"
Beware strangers bearing confessionals
There's lots of poets who have a good claim to have ruined Poetry. My favourite Ruinistas are the confessional poets of the 1960s onwards, in particular (but not especially) Mr Berryman and Mrs Sexton, led down the path by that there Mr Lowell himself.
I'm sure at the start of the Confessional Movement there was a purpose to the poems these people wrote and published. Breaking taboos about acceptable subject matter was certainly high on the list: mental health; sexual assault; childhood deprivation - these are all incredibly important topics that needed to be pushed into the spotlight. Without the work of the early confessionals I doubt we'd be in a place today, sixty years later, where everyone is allowed to share their experiences of life - hopefully in a safe space.
And yet ...
While I enjoy reading a good confessional poem as much as the next rubber-necking poetaster, I'm sad that the rise of confessional poetry has ruined the gig for all of us poets who came after those trailblazers. Because I live in a world, today, where poetry is no longer about the images and rhymes and metaphors.
Most people who read poetry these days require the poems to be rooted in something personal to the poet. They want the assumed confession to have insight, to offer catharsis. Most of all, they expect poems to at least allude to some sort of Personal Truth, and the poet responsible for penning those lines to have lived that particular Truth.
I cannot say it enough times: All Poems are Lies.
When I write a poem, I am not confessing to anything. I am not a confessional poet. I am a storyteller; I weave narratives from which the listener/reader (who is unfortunate enough to encounter them) may-or-may-not pluck their own insights and revelations.
I am not my poems. All Poets are Liars!
I look back at the words my Uncle Jim wrote at the end of his life and wonder: how much damage was he willing to inflict on his mental health so he could share his history with the people he most loved? Reading the clumsy sentences, the answer seems to be: everything? Or maybe there was little damage. Maybe he had already processed his life story, alone in his mind or shared with his wife, in ways that he had already come to accept.
The words he put down on paper were not set out to garner sympathy from strangers. There's no agenda emerging from between his endless lines. The only profit on offer is to those who called him Dad, Grandad, Uncle - a profit beyond money which helps each of us pivot our lives in relationship to both his hardships and his joys.
When I started this Substack (just a couple of weeks ago) I didn't have a clear idea around what I wanted to achieve here:
To offer technical insights on how to craft better websites? Well yes, I do want to use this space to document my struggles as I've attempted to build a Javascript library to deliver properly accessible <canvas> elements.
Or maybe write some opinion pieces about the current state of the world, building on my civil service career to offer unique insights into the stupidities we now face? There's nothing to stop me doing that either - fuck the advice that a platform such as this needs a tight focus and a target audience.
Another idea I've had is to serialise one of my novels - Spin Trap - if only to force me to resume writing its half-finished sequel.
But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that one of the key purposes of this venue is to give me the space to memorialise myself. A place to note down snippets of my life and then, maybe, explore them. I know it's a dangerous idea but this time I know what I'm getting myself into.
I've no intention of dreaming myself into an eviction notice again!