Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

My First Eighty Years

A Warning

page break

A Warning

Recently three friends were, in my presence, discussing the 1913 strike. Each of them had been intimately associated with that event. Each had a clear and retentive memory, yet on the essential facts of that piece of history each differed.

Again, the police tell us that from six eye-witnesses of an accident they will be given six varying accounts of what occurred. How then can history be implicitly believed? And memoirs, which are a microscopic portion of history, must lie under the same suspicion. No one account can be entirely accurate. I am not suggesting that memoirs are deliberately falsified. For my part the temptation is to make the telling tedious by introducing too many explanations in the interests of truth. So, as every one of us can see life from his or her angle only, the best any one of us can do is ‘to draw the thing as he sees it’. This shall be my endeavour.

My thanks are due to Joan Ostler, who read the proofs, and to Mr John Pascoe, for arranging and selecting the illustrations. I am sorry that so few photographs survived and that, of these, one or two of the most interesting were too faded to be reproduced.