I've never consciously made any effort to
remember the stories my Grandad told me. Nor have I ever had any
particular interest in finding out about my family roots or origins. Any
information I possess has been incidentally acquired and randomly filed
away in my memory. So when I started trying to record events from more
than fifty years ago, I found it was not easy.
Nevertheless, it's amazing how the very
process of putting things down on paper in as orderly a fashion as
possible, leads from one forgotten incident to another. Memories
that had not seen the light of day for years and years, suddenly
became real again: like long forgotten toys, rediscovered in a dusty
attic.
However, as much as I tried, I found
that those incidents just would not come to mind in an automatic,
orderly or chronological manner. It was most annoying. Often they
needed a catalyst to make them resurface
and even then I found that accuracy could
sometimes be suspect. A photo, a conversation, or something on
paper, would sometimes lead to the strangest of destinations or
conclusions, and even now, years after I started this project,
memories come back when least expected.
As I don't have the patience or
temperament to collate all this flotsam and jetsam I've had to find
a way of presenting it in an acceptable manner. Also, I don't want
to fudge things and tell fibs but I'm only really interested in
rediscovering memories of my childhood and yarns my Grandfather
told me of his early life. I'd never make an archivist.
So there are many omissions about the
Painters that will need fleshing out by others. |