I want to write like that

7^th September 2013, Guardian Family, a piece on her father. Usual front page story but this time I didn’t feel alienated by the middle class braggadocio of nostalgia and sentimental smugness that usually accompanies these pieces.  You know the formula: he/she was a bit of a colourful character but look at the great success I am.

This time it wasn’t me, me, me, it was accessible, no protective film, no surface tension to break through and no misery memoir either.  Despite and maybe because of this, engaged penetration was allowed.  No clunky phrases but the lightly placed horror of living with a beast and despite that a reverence towards his engagement with the world.  A recognition that a man has passed this way and left his mark.

The reading of this piece accompanied a realisation that it wasn't my class prejudice that prevented my engagement with these narratives; it was the authorial decisions that writers were taking to mask or cloud the real story.  Hidden in Evie Wyld’s narrative was the humanity that would allow any reader entry to it.  Note to self: remember to let them in.

That morning with my running buddy, married to a second generation immigrant of Polish antecedent;  I use the word deliberately because membership of some human clans can be like carrying a criminal record. His mother’s children felt unloved; never a hug, a bedtime story.  This mother-woman had been in a concentration camp at the age of five.  She wasn't  Jewish, it was a labour camp.  Survival, she learned from her own mother, was food.  Energy was not to be wasted on sport or play, it was for work.  Work was not going to set them free, but showing they were strong enough to work meant their captors still felt there was some value in keeping them alive.

The inheritance second generations receive from that type of experience is a set of material values in conflict with a culture they themselves have to negotiate.  S and his siblings always had food on the table.  His mother could feed them, thus ensuring their survival.  But she couldn't hug them. How can one judge such different experiences by contemporary standards?  That we have generations of conflicted individuals who frequently feel excluded from the experience of their peers, coupled with the fact that older generations wish to protect their children from carrying the hurt and grievances of the past, leads to fractured generations unable to relate to each other. And there's the tragedy, we have nothing to hold onto.

Remember the past but don’t become burdened by it.  Your new life is yours to make any way you choose because at least you have a choice.