I wanna tell you some stories...

MERVYN EDWARDS FOCUSES ON PERILS THAT MAY LIE IN WAIT FOR AN UNWARY HISTORIAN

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When the full version of this story appeared in a book of mine, referring to the wife, my friend declared that I'd achieved something that no-one else had ever done. “You’ve married me off’ he laughed, adding that ‘my lady’ was the woman he had been living with at the time. It taught me not to make assumptions and always to ask for clarifications.

Not even Newcastle-born author Vera Brittain (1893-1970) wrote with complete sureness of touch. She included a note in her 1933 opus Testament of Youth admitting to being fearful of ‘numerous inaccuracies through queer tricks of memory’.

That said, no one has been a stauncher advocate of oral testi-mony than yours truly and I’m a firm believer that ordinary people are generally very good at filling the gaps that have been left by history books, documents, parish registers and the like. In any case, oral testi-mony - much like mainstream his-tory is as much about explaining the past as collecting evidence. I always refer to an interview I did with Geoff Weaver (born 1939) many years ago. He was keen to explode the myth that children of previous generations were little darlings.