It's a strange thing, about artefacts, the personal ones I mean, from the past. Especially at this time when I'm deep into my (probably last) novel. Artefacts bring so much old stuff to the surface. It's like this....
The thing is, my childhood home and all of its landmarks are under the Kangaroo Creek Reservoir, up in the Adelaide Hills, and Mum and Dad split up just after we moved there in 1946. Or so I thought. But as my current project is a "fictionalised" version of a personal memoir of the first 12 years of my life (as I did in "Jemma Raglan"), I need to get the timeline and the facts clear in my head before I get in any deeper. And I need to get the main character's Point Of View right. HOW did that 8 year old see the adult events going on around him?
And okay, this is a piece of writing that will have no commercial value, but I need to do it, capture a way of life that is gone and will never come back - no power, no phones, no sewerage, walk to school 2-3 kms and back through scrub every day, trout in the river, rabbits to shoot, made our own butter, there were hills to roam, oranges to pinch, every 8yo boy had a shanghai and every 13yo boy had a .22 rifle. It was close-to-the-earth living. In the Artificial Intelligence world that's coming it's a record of a Time and an Age I need to leave behind for anyone who has enough heart and soul to appreciate it.
Mum's collection starts in 1923 (she would've been 10-11), with a Second Prize certificate for her "Plate Of Scones" at that year's Kersbrook Agricultural Show, followed up the next year with a First Prize. That tended to set the nostalgic and emotional tone. Then I got into my own bits - Report Cards from 1945 (Grade One) onwards plus my daily (badly) illustrated "diary" entries, my heartfelt (and badly spelt) letters to Mum when she went to Brisbane in 1945 when Dad was there in the Army Hospital (3 times I asked when she was coming home!). And heaps more.
Then I got to studying Dad's diaries properly, which shot holes in all of my recollections of the first 18 months in our Hills home by the river. For a week now I've had to try and get so much stuff comfortable, and with both my older and younger brother now gone, and a couple of key first cousins, there's no-one to bounce stuff off. Added to that, Google AI tells me there was never a house under the reservoir! Clearly digital bullshit. And some time ago I tracked down and contacted my best mate (and partners in crime) from those school years, who's now a biggish wheel, and got the general impression he didn't want to reminisce!
To cap it off, I went looking for my old Primary School teacher of the day, a big man with a short fuse who I (and my 10yo self) have always thought badly of, only to find that he'd been through the trenches of the Western Front as a young man.
So, sitting here re-evaluating just about everything "childhood". And will have to chuck away most of the preliminary drafts, trying to re-visit all those people, places, and times. Life is a funny old business!
Cheers....
Trev
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