Writing memoir is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary….

Or, to put it another way, in memoir the ordinary is so often also the extraordinary.

I was talking to a 91year old lady called Maud the other day, and she was trying to convince me her life had been very boring. She’d been born in Manchester, she told me, and had lived there all her life. She’d done nothing particularly adventurous, she added, she’d been married to the same man for 70 years until she’d been widowed recently, and the furthest she’d ever moved was two streets away from the house she’d been born in.

Except, Maud added, when she was five years old, in the second world war, she had been evacuated. She described getting on the train with a label round her neck, and waving goodbye to her parents, and holding tightly to her younger sister’s hand, only for them to arrive at their destination and be sent to separate homes and not to see each other for the whole time they were away, apart from in the school playground. She couldn’t remember quite how long they were away for, and that made sense to me. As a child, I recall that time felt different to how it has felt in all my years as an adult. Slower, longer, stretched out, without the adult structure of time being marked. (The older I get, the more the opposite happens - time gallops these days.)

This childhood experience of separation is an extraordinary thing in itself and would require years in therapy attempting to process these days, but there’s more. The couple who took Maud in were a very nice childless couple, they were very kind to her and treated her as if she was their daughter. Which was nice, she said, but the problem was, when her parents decided they couldn’t be separated from their daughters any longer, and came to collect them both, the couple who had Maud didn’t want to give her back…

I’m really hoping Maud is going to write her memoir, because I’d really like to know what happened next.