Most life stories are almost lost. They live in one person’s memory, in a few photographs, in a parcel kept in a drawer.
Every life carries small objects that hold whole histories inside them. A photograph. A letter. A pair of hand-knitted mittens. This is the story of one such object, and the journey it led to.
When I sat down with her, she brought out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string…
Inside was a body belt made from a flour bag, stitched into little pockets for a soldier’s belongings. A small Bible. A notebook and pencil. A cigarette case. Cigarette cards. And a pair of hand-knitted mittens.
The mittens had her grandfather’s initials embroidered on them.
She told me she had wondered about those mittens all her life. Had they come from home? From a Red Cross parcel? From some kind woman who would never know where they had ended up? Had Martin himself stitched those initials, sitting somewhere in Belgium, thinking of the wife and two little girls he had left behind?
Martin Henry Collins was a bombardier with the Australian Field Artillery. He was killed in action in Belgium on the 21st of September, 1917. He was twenty-seven years old.
He left behind a wife and two little girls. One of them grew up to be my client’s mother.
That parcel was almost all her mother had of him.
Her mother’s great wish, all her life, was to visit her father’s grave. But her health was poor, and the journey was beyond her. So her daughter promised that if her mother could not go, she would go for her.
In 1980, she made that journey.
She told me about arriving in the small Belgian town. About how quiet it was. About the British War Graves Commission directing them to a florist before driving them in an official car. About the endless rows of white headstones on either side of the road.
About finding her grandfather’s grave, with a small posy of wildflowers already laid on it, placed there by local schoolchildren who choose particular graves to care for.
She told me about the daily service at the Menin Gate. The town falling silent. The bugle sounding. The six thousand, one hundred and sixty names of Australians with no known grave, recorded on the walls.
And she told me about the long drive back to Brussels, thinking about what she had done. I had gone for her. I had stood where she had longed to stand. I had seen the grave of the father she never really knew.
She is in her eighties now. The parcel still exists. The mittens are still inside it. And until we sat down together, the story of the parcel, and the journey, and the schoolchildren laying flowers, lived only in her memory.
Now it is written down.
That is the part of this I value most.
A life carries hundreds of small moments like the mittens. A flour-bag belt. A grandfather’s initials. A promise made to a mother. A bugle at dusk. Most of those moments are never said aloud, let alone written down. They live in one person’s memory until that person is gone, and then they are gone too.
When I sit down with someone to write their life story, my role is to ask the questions that bring those moments to the surface, to listen carefully enough to hear which ones matter, and to put them on the page in language that does them justice.
I do this for older people who want their own story preserved for their grandchildren. I do it for families who want to capture a parent’s or grandparent’s story before it’s too late. I do it because these stories are the inheritance one generation gives to the next, and once they are written down, they are safe.
If there is someone in your life whose story you want preserved, I’d love to talk.
More at synergyscape.com.au/work-with-me
