History

First published in Column 8 on the 20^th January, 1993

With all my New Year resolutions behind me – January’s nearly over after all – I can put aside any nonsense about discipline and talk about something nearer to my heart.

The current crop of genealogists, those collectors of historic minutiae, must be wondering if this will be the last generation able to gather real information about the details of past people’s lives.

Human beings used to be able to recite the list of their ancestors, going way back; the present generation is lucky if it knows who its great-grandparents were. Worse still, the day-to-day accumulation of information about our lives is no longer recorded on paper: the universal telephone has made the jotting down of notes and the writing of letters almost obsolete.

During the holidays I read A N Wilson’s biography of C S Lewis; without the vast amount of source material available in the form of correspondence, most of the book would have been impossible.

Like Dickens and Voltaire, whose volumes of letters I came across while prowling around the University Library (almost deserted but for workmen upgrading the place), Lewis wrote constantly and at length. These guys didn’t just write the odd note; Dickens would be writing letters even while working on drafts of his novels. But more important for us: their recipients retained them.

Today things are different. We know from moment to moment what the latest misdemeanour in the Royal household is, or what the present most popular pop-star had for breakfast, because the media keeps us up to the mark.

But the small-scale doings of Joe Bloggs will be forgotten in a few years because Joe has stopped writing letters – or at least his wife has. Taking advantage of the most recent discount in the telephone price war, he will have rung his relatives; the exciting things he did, and the unexciting, will be lost forever.

Why is all this of interest to me at the moment?

During the holidays I embarked upon a process of transcription. Having rediscovered dozens of rubber-band-bound letters I had written to my family twenty-five years ago, I began making a typed copy of them. These letters cover one of the more interesting periods of my life, and one day there may be grandchildren who will find I was more than a dull old dotard. (My children, of course, are too close to find me of any novelty value.)

Why spend time copying old letters? One reason is purely selfish: I rediscovered myself as I’d been at an earlier time, the way I thought, the way I didn’t, the way I was before certain circumstances came along to change me forever – like getting married.

I relived events that were important for me then and remembered again how I felt. The letters covered my touring round the country with the NZ Opera Co, my tripping off to Oz to suss out the music scene, my flying to London to study for a year amongst a group of Kiwi-inhibiting ex-Oxford students – as well as coaching our Kiri before she was known to anyone but us local yokels.

I’ve been keeping a journal now since early 1989, since the night my daughter woke up to throw a rat headfirst down the toilet. Even reading that fairly recent history again has shown us how quickly we forget the details of our lives.

I’d like to encourage people this year to ignore the ads encouraging us to make longer and longer toll calls. Let’s write letters – they’re cheaper. Let’s make records of our lives, before we all become quite anonymous to our children’s children.

The journal started in 1989 continues to this day. There have been occasional gaps of a few days or even a few weeks, but overall I’ve persisted in keeping it. It started out as pages printed out from various computers we owned. It was fortunate that I printed them, as the original digital versions were deleted as we upgraded computers. The journal at that point amounted to 700 printed pages, and later I had then all copied, so that at least there was a paper back-up. Finally I retyped them all back into digital form - roughly 420,000 words – a project that took a number of years. Since then I’ve also retyped all those letters as well as the hundreds I wrote to my mother while I was overseas, and various other odds and ends. But there are still more to go.

Currently, as any regular reader of this Blog will know, I’m turning my old Column 8 columns into blog posts, with some additional notes (like these) and with links. At present many of them only exist as newspaper clippings.

At the time I wrote this column toll calls - that is, calls to any part of the country outside of your own town, or overseas - were expensive, though as I note, the price was coming down. It's ironic to think that now it costs somewhere around $4.00 to send a letter while virtually all calls, worldwide, are free.