In the immortal phrase - what is truth? Events are remembered in such different ways by those who took part in them. The above photograph was taken at a children's party at the Dry Dock in Newport to celebrate the Queen's coronation in 1953; sixty four years later I'm sure that if you asked any of participants about what happened on that day, you'd get as many different responses as there were children there and many would contradict one another.
Yesterday an old school friend - who is also a writer - came to lunch and we were amused to find that we are both working on a memoir which will in part cover the same time and many of the same events in our lives. I shall be fascinated to see how differently we recall and document those times and happenings, what different slants we put on them. And if we diverge widely on the actual "facts" - whose truth will be the truth?
I am reminded of work I did with older people with dementia a few years ago, helping them to write their life stories. Sometimes family members would question how the person described a time, a place or an event in their past - "No, that's not how it was - she's got that wrong." But I firmly believe that truth is relative - relative to the person whose truth it is, especially in that situation. We all make sense of our experiences, integrate them into our personal and world view, in our own ways - which is what, for me, makes autobiographical writing such a fascinating genre.
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