A Message to the Children: A Guide to Writing Your Autobiography

By Jim Williams

Those who come after us will want to know we really lived and loved as intensely as they do. Tell them.
WHO ARE YOU? WHY DO YOU ACT THE WAY THAT YOU DO?
These questions capture the essential things we want to know about ourselves and explain to others. Yet so often we fail to do so. Instead many of us spend a great deal of effort researching the history of our ancestors to discover no more than the fact that they were workmen, servants and grocers of whom we can learn next to nothing. If only they had written the story of their lives!
A Message to the Children is a book with a difference: an account of the author's life, a memoir to his children, a love letter to his wife, and a guide to how you, too, can write about your own life. Written in an easy and amusing style, it explains for the benefit of the non-writer such subjects as how to break the task down into manageable sections; how to exploit photographs and scrapbooks for materials; and what themes to write about. Then it applies those lessons in a way that will both touch and entertain you.Jim Williams is a Booker-nominated author of thirteen novels and two works of non-fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marble City Publishing
• Release date: Dec 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781908943934

Jim Williams

Jim Williams is a young man from Greece who has a thirst for knowledge. He’s studying hard for academic achievements, and he’s writing more and more stories to enrich his mythologies. With a vibrant imagination and a flair for the dramatic, all seems possible to him. His never-ending quest continues.

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A Message to the Children

A guide to writing your autobiography

by

Jim Williams

Also by Jim Williams

American Values

Irina’s Story

The Sadness of Angels

The Demented Lady Detectives’ Club

The English Lady Murderers’ Society

Tango in Madeira

The Argentinian Virgin

The Strange Death of a Romantic

Recherché

Scherzo

Anti-Soviet Activities

Farewell to Russia

The Hitler Diaries

How to be a Charlatan and Make Millions

Copyright 2007 Jim Williams

e-Book licensed  in 2018 by Marble City Publishing

ePub edition

ISBN-10 1-908943-93-9

ISBN-13 978-1-908943-93-4

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

The right of Jim Williams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and patents Act, 1988.

A Message to the Children

Those who come after us will want to know we really lived and loved as intensely as they do. Tell them.

WHO ARE YOU? WHY DO YOU ACT THE WAY THAT YOU DO?

These questions capture the essential things we want to know about ourselves and explain to others. Yet so often we fail to do so. Instead many of us spend a great deal of effort researching the history of our ancestors to discover no more than the fact that they were workmen, servants and grocers of whom we can learn next to nothing. If only they had written the story of their lives!

A Message to the Children is a book with a difference: an account of the author's life, a memoir to his children, a love letter to his wife, and a guide to how you, too, can write about your own life. Written in an easy and amusing style, it explains for the benefit of the non-writer such subjects as how to break the task down into manageable sections; how to exploit photographs and scrapbooks for materials; and what themes to write about. Then it applies those lessons in a way that will both touch and entertain you.

Contents

To Begin

A Dream of Red Tulips

Nellie

Shiny Jim and Adolf Hitler

The Last Cowboy in Wrexham

The Last Victorian

Gents and Gypsies

Little Jimmy’s Christmas

My Holidays

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam

My School

University

The Kindness of Strangers

The Road to the Tiberius Club

So This Is My Life?

The Trainee Millionaire

Bizarre and Dangerous

James Hale and Oscar the Cat

Fabulous Freddie Teaches Poetry

Parlez Vous Williams?

The Scrapbook Approach

The Clock

Falling in Love Again

A Visit to Poussin

Postscript

TO BEGIN

For years I suggested to people that they should write their autobiography. Not for publication, you understand, but for the family: especially for the grandchildren. I even had a few practical suggestions as to how they might set about it.

Of course I did nothing about writing my own autobiography.

I’m like that. Bone-idle and more than happy to give people advice that I don’t follow myself.

Then, a few years ago, in a sloppy lazy fashion I began to put pen to paper and wrote some bits and pieces with no particular plan in mind except that they weren’t for general publication. Nothing might have come of them, except it occurred to me that my advice on writing – always assuming there was something to it – might be of wider interest. And so, as I wrote my essays, I began to write accompanying notes so that other people could follow the process and pick up hints as to how they might go about it themselves.

This book comprises the pieces I have written about my life, together with the notes explaining my choices and techniques and how you may adapt them to your purposes. The result isn’t an autobiography in the conventional sense. In fact I think it’s better because it captures more of the texture and feel of life, though that’s something you must decide for yourself.

I want to emphasize that writing your autobiography is exciting and the emotions you feel and describe will be genuine, because in Life, unlike Art, the characters really experience joy. They really suffer. They really die.

Writing your autobiography is dangerous. The Good Guys don’t necessarily win. The Hero may not make it to the end.

I hope that when you’ve read this book, you’ll want to try your hand.

So shall we begin?

A DREAM OF RED TULIPS

Little Jimmy is five years old and lying in bed at home in Warwick Street, Oldham and the year is 1952. Dorothy Mee has told him the King has died, and next year he’ll see the Coronation and get a souvenir mug and a case of chicken pox. His mother, Nellie, is fretting about the state of the roof and owes Machin the builder (whose daughter has a lazy eye and a good one covered with a pink patch over the lens of her spectacles) seventy-five pounds. It’s the largest bill Nellie will ever have to pay and she remembers the exact amount fifty years later.

Most of this is bye the bye. What’s important is that Jimmy has been to school and enjoyed himself at his artwork. He’s come home excited and now he’s lying in bed and a picture forms in his mind.

It’s of three red tulips. They have green stalks and green leaves and grow in a brown pot. The background is a vivid yellow. Years later Jimmy discovers Van Gogh’s Chrysanthemums and can see that Vincent has something of the idea. But they’re a pallid affair compared with Jimmy’s tulips. Nothing can capture the vivid scarlet of the blooms, the deep emerald green, the vibrant yellow, the radiance of the whole. No other image can generate the same excitement because none will be so fresh as the one he has at the age of five.

Jimmy draws with sticks of hard wax crayon that come in a cheaply printed carton. Nellie buys them together with colouring books on Oldham Tommyfield market. She often takes Jimmy there. The bus fare is a penny each way, but they sometimes walk. The market also sells surplus school exercise books made for the Gold Coast colony. On the back of the cover they have extraordinary tables of weights and measures, full of troy ounces and rods, poles and perches.

At school Jimmy is also allowed to play with Plasticine. He loves the red and the white, but the colours are gradually absorbed into a muddy green. Yet on one occasion he comes by them in their pristine form and makes a figure with a red jacket and white breeches, which he says is Dick Turpin, the highwayman. Somewhere he’s seen a picture of a redcoat soldier.

Who can say why history interests him? He learns to read a collection of Arthurian legends and Norse myths and will always know that Loki killed Balder with a piece of mistletoe. He swaps his most valuable soldiers with Alan Hutchinson, his best friend, so he can have one figure in a Napoleonic uniform. Nellie is furious and reverses the exchange. She has no feeling for history at all, even though she does remember the amount of Machin’s bill when it’s become a part of history.

The morning after his wonderful dream, Jimmy arms himself with wax crayons and sets about realising it on paper. There it is: red tulips, green stalks and leaves, brown pot, yellow background.

‘That’s nice, Jimmy,’ says his teacher, and it is nice. She gives him a gold star and writes very good in red ink.

And yet...

The truth is that the dream of red tulips can’t survive its translation into this world. The problem isn’t a technical weakness in the drawing or the colouring, but in the very fact that the image has been taken from the realm of wonders. Jimmy will no more forget the palpable disappointment at the failure to realise his vision than he will forget the dream itself

But he remains grateful that he had the dream.

NOTES ON A DREAM OF RED TULIPS

I’m in a bar in Abu Dhabi with Fabulous Fred Day, and Billy Brooks is telling stories about Ben Ley, who died of a heart attack while swimming. Ben was famous for mangling his words. Billy is from Liverpool and has a deep voice of gravel and spent cigarettes.

‘So,’ says Billy, ‘Ben is telling me about this wedding – he’s at this wedding – it’s a posh wedding, this wedding he’s at. He says, says Ben, The bridegroom was wearing this fancy suit and a carafe. That’s what he says: "a carafe", you know? A carafe? So I says, "What do you mean, he’s wearing a carafe? I mean what’s he doing wearing a bloody jug of wine, eh? Round his neck, says Ben. He’s wearing this carafe tied round his neck."’

This book is about autobiography: how I wrote mine, which you’re reading, plus a few ideas about how you might write yours. I’ve begun these notes with a tale about Ben Ley because it illustrates the natural way in which people tell stories. Read it again and notice how sparse the details are. We don’t know when or where the wedding took place, or when or where Ben told his story to Billy. For that matter you don’t know – because I didn’t bother to say – when it was that Billy repeated the story to me. The fact that we were in Abu Dhabi is immaterial: I might have said Dubai or Derby for all the difference it would make. That little detail is just a trick of storytelling. By locating the incident in real space, I persuade you it really happened – as indeed it did.

Billy Brooks is a funny man and can tell a dozen tales about his mate Ben fit to make you weep. Fabulous Fred Day is another and in the course of this book I’ll tell you a few more things about him. If you were to ask most people to tell you in their own fashion about someone they know, they’d probably recite a series of anecdotes about the time when X did this or said that, and the order would follow the significance of the stories. It would reflect their humour, their pathos, the light they throw on the human condition, their impact on the lives of other people, and so forth. However it’s very unlikely they’d follow a strict chronology and it would probably be very difficult to assign a date or a place to most of them. And the reason is simple. For the most part Life doesn’t have a plot. It’s just stuff that happens. The point of the Ben Ley story is his habit of chewing up the language. No other detail matters. The point of my story of red tulips is the remembrance of a childhood vision. I don’t recall how it stands in relation to all the other things I did at school (such as being called before the headmistress for peeing in the playground), because that relationship has no significance.

The basis of my approach to writing autobiography is to follow this natural trend of story-telling, setting down incidents that seem to me to be important but without any effort to string them together into a plot. Where I do put the various anecdotes and recollections together, the reason is that I sense a pattern: an outline of a picture of who I am and where I’ve come from; and here and there a touch of colour.

This is the method I recommend to you and which this book sets out to explain.

NELLIE

‘I didn’t know my own name ’til I were eleven,’ says Nellie.

I partly understand her. Her maiden name is sometimes Nellie Webb and sometimes Nellie Wright. Webb – she says – was her ‘real’ father, but Wright, her stepfather, was the one she loved. Except, she tells me on another occasion, her ‘real’ father was a man called Roper, the nephew of the manager of the Sun Mill who went down with his ship in 1916. Which leaves the mysterious Webb where exactly? In life, he fell off a ladder and died, and so exits this story having scarcely come into it except to lend an unwanted name.

‘My mother were called Marrow,’ Nellie volunteers. She doesn’t know the spelling. A whiff of uncertainty clings to it. ‘Her mum and dad kept a lodging house for prison officers in Knutsford. I think she had other children before she met Webb, but ’ – she adds – ‘ I don’t know who they were or what they were called.’ Or, indeed, if they ever existed.

My grandmother was evidently a sporting type, what with a family in Knutsford, the affair with Roper, the interlude with Webb and finally a marriage to Wright, who fathered my Uncles Fred and Joe. She took snuff and drank beer.

‘She was a fat, dirty, smelly old woman,’ my brother Denis says.

‘She were a alcoholic,’ says Nellie. ‘It were Wright who first learned her to drink. But she didn’t like pubs and used to take beer home in jugs.’

Grandma Wright experienced a late conversion.

‘One day she said I’ve given up drinking,’ Nellie explains. But, if so, it did her no good. Nellie shakes her head: "She died a fortnight later.’

I was four years old.

The problematic matter of names extended to Nellie’s children. I’m called ‘Jim’ not ‘James’. My sister is ‘Anne’. One brother is ‘Denis’ (single ‘n’). The other is ‘Jack’ not ‘John’. None of us has a second name.

I can’t explain this meanness. I joke about it. ‘It was wartime rationing. You couldn’t get the coupons. Either I got a second name or my sister got a winter vest.’ However, I suspect one of the more subtle effects of poverty is that it extends into the imagination. I’m not sure my parents thought their children were entitled to bear a second name.

My grandmother cleaned houses.

‘You couldn’t meet a nicer woman when she weren’t in drink,’ Nellie remembers. As for her stepfather: ‘I loved him to death. He were lovely.’ Fred Wright was gassed in the Great War and invalided.

Nellie spent her childhood among poverty, disability and alcoholism. And love. She never felt her parents didn’t love her. But the poverty was hard. ‘At Christmas all we used to get was an orange,’ she tells me.

I can’t decide if Nellie is bright or not. She may be. The problem is that her horizons are deformed by poverty and, bright or not, she’s a silly woman. I can say this without shame because, unfortunately, I happen to be a silly man.

Whatever the case, Nellie won a place at grammar school. It was the greatest disappointment of her life. She shakes her head at the memory. ‘I were right pleased and ran home to tell my mum. And she went to see my teacher. When she came back she told me I couldn’t go.’

I’ve heard this story a hundred times and know how Nellie punctuates it. After a pause she says, ‘There were a uniform and she couldn’t afford to buy it.’

Nellie lost her education for the sake of a suit of clothes. Instead she left school at fourteen and worked in cotton mills around and about Oldham until sometime in the nineteen forties she met my father, Hughie Williams, The Last Cowboy in Wrexham.

The experience of an alcoholic mother gives Nellie a lifelong prejudice against drink. She rails against modern girls. ‘I used to go drinking only three times a week,’ she sniffs, ‘not like they do nowadays.’

I’m missing something. If three times a week is moderation, the boozing of contemporary women must be awesome.

As a result of her modest visits to the pub, Nellie met Hughie, who had three kids and a wife ‘no better than she should be’. Hughie’s wife had ‘fancy men’ and was in the habit of selling the furniture while Hughie was at work and spending the proceeds on immoral purposes. Years later I meet her at my brother Denis’s house when she’s in her late forties. She seems a pleasant though rather brassy woman. Her current ‘fancy man’ is a florid type with the air of a publican and they have a nice daughter who looks strikingly like my brother Jack. In some vague way she’s therefore a relative but I don’t recall her name, assuming I ever knew it.

‘And then I fell for you,’ Nellie says.

The expression ‘falling for’ a baby is conventional but captures the accidental nature of pregnancy in Nellie’s youth (though she’s twenty-nine when she ‘falls’). It also has echoes of ‘fallen women’. I can feel the lives of Nellie and Hughie teetering on the edge of chaos and disaster. Nellie is unmarried and ‘fallen’. Hughie is a country boy cut off from home, hard drinking, quick-tempered and out of his depth. Denis and Jack are shuttled among relatives. Anne is put in a children’s home. Hughie, Nellie and Little Jimmy take a mouse-infested room in Greenacres Road and try to build a life from scratch.

My parents ought to fail. I can’t really understand why they don’t except that there’s something fundamentally sound about them. Nellie is thrifty. Both are hard-working. Neither is vicious. They have good hearts and generous natures and I never doubt they love me. Still, I don’t like my father’s fiery temper and at the age of five think the man who sells shirts at Bradleys Gentleman’s Outfitters, Mumps, is nicer than my dad. (For information, Bradleys’ trademark is a Cheshire cat and the father of my friends John and David Parry works there.)

Nellie scrimps and saves and borrows fifty pounds from her brother Joe, and, when Little Jimmy is two, she and Hughie buy a house in Warwick Street for four hundred and fifty pounds. It has a dilapidated roof which, mortgage apart, is the source of a seventy-five pound bill to Machin the builder that will haunt her memory as the biggest debt of her life. Yet it proves a blessing. Her financial management impresses Hughie and he raises her ‘wage’ so she can pay off the debt and never afterwards reduces it. It marks a growing confidence between them that will outlive their blazing rows.

Despite poverty, money has no grip on Nellie beyond a practical thriftiness. Her lack of interest in material things is sublime. Fifteen years after she buys the house in Warwick Street, she sells it to my exotic Italian Auntie Anna (who married Uncle Bobby the communist) for scarcely more than she paid, and gives her free credit as well. The market price of the house doesn’t interest Nellie. She never liked the place and won’t take more than her own notion of what it’s worth. Similarly in old age she refuses the pension credit to which she’s entitled and gets annoyed when I press it on her. It isn’t a matter of pride.

‘I won’t have it,’ she says. ‘I don’t need it.’

And she’s right. She doesn’t need it. She’s given away anything superfluous and lives very simply in a house that smells of mothballs, the last that she and Hughie lived in together. She subscribes to the National Lottery but only with an eye to giving any prize to charity.

‘I won’t give to you,’ she says pointedly. She won’t give it to my children either. She explains: ‘I don’t hold with having a lot of money. It doesn’t do you any good.’

She saves out of her small pension then gives the savings away to charity or in small presents. ‘I do what I can,’ she says and shrugs. Her notions of money reflect the prices of thirty years ago and trivial sums seem large to her, but only as amounts to wonder at. Since she buys nothing, they have no real meaning.

All her measures are set by the smallness of her life. It colours even her notions of luxurious living, which are bizarre.

‘She bought a tea towel,’ she says of someone or other. ‘You know – the sort you can hang on the wall.’

Of someone else: ‘They have a bit of money behind them. They live in a bungalow.’

Nellie is uncertain how far her own experiences reflect the general world. Sometimes she assumes a false universality.

‘You can always buy sugar cheap at Dixons,’ she says to my Aunt Doll from Shrewsbury.

Dixons was the grocer at the corner of Warwick Street. In the days before supermarkets, it was one of a chain of half a dozen in the Oldham area. For Nellie, however, there are Dixons’ stores from Derby to Delhi.

In old age she tends to the other direction and expresses surprise if she encounters in Stockport something she knows of in Oldham. This can take bizarre forms.

‘Ee, there’s a chemist!’ she says in wonder (she refers to Boots the Chemist as ‘Bootsies’). Or it may be shoe shop. Or, sometimes, she asks what kind of shop she’s looking at, and, when I tell her it sells mobile phones, she shakes her head, marvelling that such places exist.

She has an addiction to laxatives and a store of folk wisdom.

‘Don’t go out with your hair wet!’ she tells me.

She repeats her good advice every time we meet. Spells always work better if they’re repeated.

‘You shouldn’t drive your car when it’s dark, Jimmy.’ She fixes me with a witch’s glare. ‘Now remember: you drive carefully.’

I’m fifty-odd years old and have been driving for more than thirty years. Still, you never know: those words ‘you drive carefully’ may work their magic.

Oldham, in Nellie’s opinion, is a place of fantastic danger, especially as she grows older. Pensioners are habitually murdered in their beds and nary a one ever gets home with her pension.

‘It’s bad round here,’ she says, then contradicts herself, ‘I wouldn’t want to move. I’ve a lot of good neighbours.’

Apparently it’s far more dangerous for me. If I drive to Oldham at night, I’ll be dragged out of my car, beaten up and left for dead with my hair wet.

Nellie’s sense of danger comes from the natural timidity of the old but also from her reading of the local paper. She’s can’t put a context to the stories of mayhem she devours every day. She assumes the extraordinary reflects the habitual, and has no idea of how things may be elsewhere than in her hometown.

‘You drive home carefully,’ she says.

‘Mum, I’m only going ten miles to Stockport. Next week I’ll be in Bombay.’

Her eyes glaze over. ‘Hmm... But you drive home careful.’ She pokes my chest. ‘And don’t stop for no one. It’s bad round here.’

Nellie’s world has no history except the personal. Broader history isn’t real. She’s vaguely aware of it, but the facts mentioned in the romances she reads are confined within the covers, simply parts of the plot. The reign of Charles the Second and the Regency Period are just settings. Nellie can’t tell you how far apart from each other they are or which came first. No analogies can be drawn between past and present because the past has no structure. Its incidents are specific and contain no lessons.

Who is ‘the Old King’? No one except Nellie ever uses the term to me, though she says it as if it’s a title known to everyone.

‘That were in the time of the Old King,’ she says in order to place some incident. If I’m explaining something to her, she’ll ask: ‘Were that in the time of the Old King?’

Logic suggests there’s a ‘New King’, but Nellie never refers to him or indicates she’s aware of any kings other than