Weaving together vividly personal tales

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 Monday, August 17, 2020 - 09:02

*From Foreword of PRIOR TO THIS… a book by Dorothy E. Prior

As a young child, I saw the past as vibrant, rich and exotic — a far more exciting proposition than my own humdrum present. Recent events, distant history, family lore and bedtime stories all jumbled in my mind into a bubbling mythical stew so that the adventures of Robin Hood, my mother’s years at teacher training college and my father’s experiences during the evacuation (I believed to have spent several years living as a baby elephant in Madeira) all belonged to the period I thought of as simply ‘before I came along’ — an exciting world of action and adventure I could never hope to visit.

Dorothy Prior was a major player in many of the stories from ‘before I came along’, and my Saturday mornings as a toddler were spent with her mother, Maudie, in their flat in Cornwall’s Lane. So when Dorothy gave me Prior To This, the family history she had spent several years compiling, I had many reasons to be curious.

What I didn’t expect was to find myself so affected by what I read. After all, despite the popularity of programmes such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ in which celebrities get to explore their own ancestry, I had presumed someone else’s family story would be of intellectual rather than emotional interest. I was wrong.

Stories are handed down through families in much the same way as physical artefacts, and Dorothy has found a way of weaving together these vividly personal tales with historical research and forensic detective work to create a portrait of the past that is full of warmth and humanity as well as scholastic rigour. This is the sweep of history rendered personal. The chestnut harvest fails in Genoa and a brother and sister move to Gibraltar — two of many —economic migrants from the same, tiny corner of Italy. A child Devonshire is born unable to walk and his sailor father sends him post cards from every part of the world he will never get to explore — a collection which lasts into the next century.

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