Apologies for the late arrival of today’s contribution to the advent calendar. I have spent the last eighteen hours adding to the list of things I do not have wrong with me. Said list is now assuming the proportions of a three volume novel. Still the good news is that, although what I do have remains a mystery, I don’t appear to have anything sinister. I spent the whole of last night on a trolley in A & E and this afternoon raising the alarm when the woman in the opposite bed tried to pull her cannula out, something that occurred about every five minutes. This means I haven’t slept for 36 hours, so I hope I can be excused if I cheat a little with today’s social history book and use one of my own. I say one of my own; it has my name on the cover but it is really the work of eighty wonderful ladies.
Remember Then: women’s memories of 1946-1969 and how to write your own is what happens when you let eighty women spend a year and a half recording their memories of life in Britain throughout the pivotal period 1946-1969. This twenty four years was one of tremendous change in almost every area that they investigated. During this time, we moved from liberty bodices to mini skirts and from ration books to ready meals. We witnessed the emergence of youth culture, the comprehensive education system, conspicuous consumerism and a new wave of feminism; the Britain of 1969, was very different to that of 1946.
Very little additional research has been done, the women’s voices have been allowed to speak for themselves. Memories are just that and sometimes memory is fallible. Efforts have been made to check dates and facts but for the most part, the ladies’ accounts have been taken at face value. The aim was not to write a comprehensive social history but to give a flavour of the period from the view-point of those who lived through it. Even reading the first names of the participants takes you back to the classrooms of the 1950s.
The ladies described their homes and neighbourhoods, clothes, housework and food, education and work, health and childrearing, leisure and celebrations, as well as tackling more emotive subjects, such as relationships and attitudes. Over a hundred illustrations and a comprehensive timeline of events evoke the essence of the era. This book is much more than just a collection of women’s memories. At the end of each chapter is the brief that the volunteers were given when working on that topic. This can be applied to other time frames and will help the reader, male or female, to write reminiscences of their own.
The women who took part came from a variety of social, economic and geographic backgrounds. Some ladies went to boarding schools, some to grammar schools and others to secondary moderns. Some left school at fourteen, others have PhDs. Some are only children, others had large extended families and some grew up in care. The ladies were aged from 59 to 95, so some experienced this era as children, some as teenagers and others as married women with families. I wove together the words of this disparate group of volunteers, using direct quotations from their reminiscences wherever possible, to reveal this period, as seen through their eyes. The result is a many faceted perspective of life at the time.
The book allows those born after 1969 to gain an understanding of what life was like for earlier generations. This makes it valuable reading for those working with older people, as it can spark conversations and help to awaken memories. If you lived through this era yourself, you will find yourself exclaiming, ‘I remember that!’ on every page.
The History Interpreter - Janet Few 