Are you fundamentally the same person you were when you were a child and/or a young adult? How, if at all, are you different? These are fascinating questions to approach for anybody and not only writers. And when, as senior citizens, we look back at our younger selves, how accurate are our memories? How far do our memories reflect our wishes in middle or old age? A Facebook page, of which I am a member, dedicated to memories of Thames Ditton, Surbiton and Kingston, is full of expressions like: "wonderful times" and "happy memories." I always wonder how accurate these comments are, after all, it often seems that the past is a better place than the present, doesn't it? Maybe I am making something of nothing here. This is pretty harmless stuff really. Maybe it is, but imagine an individual who idolised his father and has even chosen his/her profession in order to follow in father's footsteps? What happens next? My God - I have just found out that father was not the man I thought he was. In fact, I have based my life on a person who did not even exist - an imposter!
Such a scenario presented itself to the eldest son of Alec Wilson in yesterday's episode of Mrs Wilson on the BBC. It seemed to me that if we make the past a foundation for our identity, we are standing on very unsafe ground. But equally, we are opening up the possibility that the past can be rearranged to suit current needs (minorities aiming to get independence from a greater power, for example, usually wildly exaggerate aspects of their history and culture).
Usually, society condemns attempts by an individual to falsify the past in order to create an identity for himself/herself. And yet, isn't this something we all do? We create or embellish a past life that, in the end, we come to believe was true. This is my story, I say, and I know because I lived it and I can tell you that my memories are wonderful and that it was like that - honestly!
So - we all become writers in that we create our own stories for consumption. In the case of Alec Wilson though, there is a bigger problem. Not only did he live several lives at once, he was also an undercover agent in WW2 and his work, we are led to believe, saved hundreds of lives. That's alright then, isn't it?
We like to think that we know our children, our partners, our parents and our friends. Do we? Perhaps it is the image they portray that we know. We have come to believe the stories they tell of their past, their parents, their siblings are true. And if we find out that we have been lied to, the relationship will probably end. After all, the person we knew did not exist even if s/he did save lives in WW2. It seems then, that Shakespeare was wrong! We are not such stuff as dreams are made of! We are the product of the stories that we dream up and then tell about ourselves. It is all fiction really, we are all writers and the writing will never be done. (apologies to Siegfried Sassoon.)
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