BACK TO BACK-TO-BACKS

Priceless recollections of family's failed attempt to escape slums

- CARL CHINN, SOCIAL HISTORIAN & AUTHOR, DELVES INTO BRUM'S PAST

HOW many times have you heard someone say, "I could write a book"? And how often has someone mooching into their family's past wished that some distant ancestor had done just that put it all down and breathed life into the stark names of kin listed in the registers of births, deaths and marriages.

Each and every one of us does have a story to tell, a story that embraces not only our own life but also the lives of those bonded to us by blood, friendship and acquaintance. Each and every one of us could and should write down all that we have heard, seen, felt and experienced.

But the belief that we should do so is seldom followed by the action of writing. For so many of us, we are pushed away from bringing out the book of our life by pressures of home, work and a variety of involvements, leaving our life story in our minds where only we can see it.

The person who actually does write it all down is rare. Yet for all that they are exceptional, they're not part of an elite separated from the mass of us; rather they reach out to all of us through the commonality of their experiences and the sharing of them with us.

We identify with their childhood games and scrapes; we see our moms and dads and nans and grandads in their descriptions of their relatives; we feel their rush of joy as they recall their courtships and happy days; we taste with them the bitterness of hard times; we hark alongside them at the sounds of factory bulls and wheels on cobbles; and we smell as much as they do the acrid air of industry mingling with the tantalising whiff of fresh bread.

Fortunate are the families whose elders have passed on their stories, elders like Shirley Farley, born at Loveday Street Maternity Hospital in 1936 to Ruby and Jack Pettifer. Like many couples they were still struggling with the hardships of the Depression and Shirley spent her earliest years mainly in the care of her father, giving her a close bond to him that was never lost.