As a child, one thinks of truth as a completely black and white concept. Something is either true or it isn’t. As one gets older everything becomes more complicated and the black and white merge to very many shades of grey, more than 57, more even than on a Farrow and Ball paint card. The words fact and fiction add to the mix and then who knows what is real? I clearly remember an English lesson with a year 6 class when we were considering this problem and some of them were struggling. I suggested we think about a school trip and how on their return they would each write their own account. They would all be different because we all bring our own personalities and experiences to any situation and, inevitably, they are many and varied.
I have started this column with these thoughts because I have been reading a book by Margaret Forster called Private Papers. Written and set in the 1980s it is rather cleverly constructed. A daughter, Rosemary, finds a partly written memoir by her mother, Penelope, at the back of a drawer and we get the mother’s thoughts and her narrative of her past life, interspersed with the daughter’s version of events, obviously different, sometimes very much so. As both a daughter and a mother I occasionally found this uncomfortable reading as I could see how easily well-intentioned words or actions could be misinterpreted, misconstrued and one could end up in a totally unintended situation. Is it always the best thing to say exactly what you think? Does it matter if these thoughts are hurtful to others? Is your truth also that of others? I can certainly think of many times when I have decided it would be better to just keep my mouth closed … and then been criticised for that!
Rosemary, the daughter who comes upon the papers, is enraged by what she perceives as her mother’s distortion of the truth. The family is at war within itself over several decades and generations but it is also affected by the Second World War (when their father is killed just before D-Day) and later the political ramifications surrounding the Falklands War. It occurs to me that when I first read this book in the late 1980s, I would have felt quite differently about it, firstly because it would have been about ‘now’ rather than modern history of several decades ago and also because of where I was placed in my family life. Your own feelings about life change with age. My own truth is different now. Rosemary, despite being middle aged when she comes upon this memoir is unable to see anything from her mother’s point of view. Her mother is simply wrong!
Strange things resonate now that previously would not have done so. On the first 1980s reading, these couple of lines would have passed me by completely. Now however I am nodding sagely in agreement: ‘No need in London, to fear bleak days, to shudder at grey, leaden mornings. Out. I can always go out, somewhere, there is always a treat available.’ Exactly how I feel when I get out of the train at Marylebone! Also, one of the daughters comments on the amount of photo books, art journals, and even commonplace books that the mother in the story has … as indeed do I. There are no diaries or memoirs for my children to stumble across I hasten to add, in my favour. Really, really I hope that is all the two of us have in common, although she does mean well and she does love her children!
Margaret Forster sadly died in 2016 so her oeuvre is complete. 25 novels, 14 biographies and much social history and journalism. Concerned very much with the role of women in society and with their social mobility, her writing is carefully considered and often intense. A history of feminism, Significant Sisters (1984) was probably her heaviest writing and the work with which she was most pleased. She was proud of her northern working-class roots, growing up in Carlisle, and although she lived in London with her husband (Hunter Davies, I’ve written about him in a previous Bookends) and children for most of her life, she disliked the literati activities of parties and book signings, far preferring to be with her family and to spend her time writing. Those who think they are unfamiliar with Margaret Forster might however remember the film Georgy Girl, based on one of her novels and starring Lynn Redgrave. The film had a title song that became a hit for the group The Seekers.
I had thought that this article would primarily be about personal truths but it has also become about how your life story and where you are within it affects your own response to a narrative. Interesting to think of reading as a two-way process, what you are taking to the story as well as what it is offering you. So, I think this is a clever novel, sometimes witty, sometimes upsetting and also frequently unnervingly direct. It focuses on the complexities of family life and somehow insists that you interact with the developing story.