John Smith Column: Family memories

Rev Dr John Smith, wc 24 June 2024

My grandfather came to live with us towards the end of the second world war. A flying bomb hit their home which was in any case the last house standing in their road in Woolwich. My grandmother was killed, apparently found three streets away with the gas stove. I never knew her, the odd photograph that I have seen of her showed her to be a poor old thing, worn out by bearing lots of children, ill health and poverty, even though she was only in her early 60s. We – the Smith family – crammed into a small bungalow, grandad had his own room, my brother and I shared, and my sister had to have a small bed in my parents’ room. It was a case of making do and it was what many families did after the war.

There you are, I have told you a story, not much of one but one that many families could tell. If not a story it is a memory and it is memories that I want to talk about.

I used to sit on my grandad’s knee, he would be smoking his pipe and drinking from a glass of Guinness, and he would tell me stories. There weren’t many and I would ask him to repeat them, but despite that I cannot remember a single one. His life as a small boy, in yet another large family, his father a farm labourer living in a row of cottages in the Kent countryside. That is all I know, the stories are lost, there are no memories. I can tell so very little to pass onto my own family, only a bare skeleton of the circumstances of their lives.

Can you?

I ask that short, blunt question to stir you on, to suggest that, if you can gather up the stories from your family, of your life. For when we die, that is one of the most important things we can leave, that we can pass on – the stories that are now memories. You have no control over the DNA in your genes but you do have in the memories of your life – your childhood, your schooling, your relationships, your work, your hopes and dreams, for these are what make you and make the next generation. We do not live in a vacuum.

The difference between my life and those of our grandchildren is enormous. It is so easy for them to think that this is how it has always been. What we have now we so easily take for granted.

No car, a party line telephone, buses – lots of them, trams even, no supermarkets but butcher’s shops and greengrocers, a pub on almost every corner, corner shops, no foreign holidays, no mobile phones, no social media … these are part of my story now, but not in the 1950s and 1960s.

This might sound like a sob story if I’m not careful, but not when the story of our lives is wrapped around the facts. Good and different lives have made us who we are. Stories and memories to be thankful for are not to be lost.