Travelling Alone

My local writing group set the Title Travelling Alone, and it triggered some feelings induced by researching my father's biography. I am still only beginning to comprehend the enormity of the project but the process triggered the thoughts I have attempted to express below. I would like fellow bloggers comments. I  have to read it out at the end of the week so if you can save me any embarrassments by timely suggestions for improvement I would be grateful.

Keith Mac

Travelling Alone

Writing the biography of a loved one involves travelling alone. Physically one travels alone to research and revisit old haunts. Metaphorically one can only travel alone in one’s mind. Old emotions, regrets and fond memories are triggered by revisiting that earlier life. These lead to a deeper understanding of one’s subject and one’s self.

            In Tower Hamlets, I had a glimpse of life in the docklands in the late 1920s. Of the threat of smallpox: the introduction of electric lighting to public buildings: of allowing borrowers free access to library shelves and to the sudden death of a newly appointed young senior assistant. In Chelmsford I walked a street I had last walked as a twelve year old, and in the archives I entered a world of preparation for war; the minutiae of air raid precautions; the  pressures on the home front and the sense of a turning point as the needs of returning servicemen became a priority.

            Appreciation of hidden pressures, ambitions thwarted, triumphs and disappointments unknown or unacknowledged in the vigour of one’s own life, though shared in discussion, can only truly be felt in the journey of discovery one makes alone.

            In the new year of 1917 my father was eight and a half years old. By the end of the first week his grandfather had died of a short illness, his father had resigned his job as a fitter and workshop foreman to join the war effort and his mother had given birth to his baby brother.

            “You are the man of the house now Archie,” his father had said, “look after your mother and Stuart and little Jackie, work hard at school and be a good boy. Ask Grandpa Parsons or one of your uncles if you need any help. I’ll write whenever I can.”

            “But, Daddy, do you have to go?”  he asked.

            “It’s my duty, son. You wouldn’t want your friends to call me a coward, would you?”

            “No Daddy,” said Archie reluctantly.

            Only researching documents from a variety of sources and bringing them together could reveal this situation, but the lonely journey only begins there.  How did the proximity of those world changing events affect his character? Reflecting on my own early life did these events have an impact on the character I knew as a child? On more mature reflection can I trace the sense of responsibility my father showed in work and family back to these traumatic changes in that one January week? His pacifist commitments: his chairmanship of youth groups: his lifelong commitment to education for all. It seems farfetched until further developments; his father’s posting to Mesopotamia, from which no one was expected  to return; the transfer to the North West Frontier when the war ended, or the arrival of a baby sister when my father was fifteen?   

            As my research uncovers more details and juxtapositions further journeys of exploration and conjecture unfold:  journeys of the mind that can only be travelled truly, alone.