An open theme. Choose any memory you would like to write about.
When we arrive in Manali in the Indian Himalayas, it’s a lovely day, cool with sunshine – a relief after the humidity of Delhi. Tomorrow we climb a small peak 4,000 metres (13,400ft) – well small in terms of the surrounding mountains that stretch high into clouds. I’ve been in the Alps but the size … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “Summit”
A few months after the evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, two boys, me aged five and my brother (eight) perched on a pile of trunks at Southampton Docks, while our mother queued to hand in our gas-masks and ration books, The trunks had ‘cabin luggage’ stencilled on them, or ‘not wanted on voyage,’ which meant … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “A Passage To India”
We’ve got a late lecture so you can wait here or the Glanrafon. I’ll hitch out to Caernarfon and come back with the boys –in Tom’s mini-van. We never saw Lindsay again. On the journey back from Caernarfon to Bangor there was an horrendous car crash. No seat belts in the sixties. The steering wheel … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “The Day God and I Parted Ways”
It was my first winter in Glasgow. The snow was yet to arrive. The snow did arrive, in drifts. I had been chauffeured around in Madras, now I had to fend my way in swirling snow in a cold Glasgow, on buses and public transport. Snow was beautiful. The feel of the snowflakes falling on … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “Snow!”
Long before lockdown I was used to aloneness. I was divorced 29 years ago so have had lots of practice. But even during the years of my marriage there were countless lonely, lockdown days… quelling frustration and boredom, trying to fill endless time in foreign places where friends were few and opportunities limited. Two of … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “Piggy in the Muddle”
Back in the 1950s there was little forewarning of sudden changes in the weather. I was at secondary school then, travelling daily along with many others to Monmouth, some eleven miles distant from my home in Ross-on-Wye. At that time the A40 didn’t have the smooth gradients that it has today – there were two … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “Afternoon Snowfall”
My memoir has to be of Princess Diana the joy of her wedding day and Oh, that dress with the long train and the little page boys. What she must have thought going up the aisle of Westminster Abbey to meet her prince. A fairy tale day for all with not a cloud in the … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “A Great Lady”
You sent me a video, last tram, our tram, the family strung along its track from the greener suburbs of northern Sheffield to the back- to- backs nearer the steel works. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers, two spinster great aunts still in the tiny terrace where they grew up with 9 others, all lived along the … Continue reading Your Memoirs – “Last Tram”