Life stories

     As a preface to this post, I suggest you go over to Cornflower Books and read about Trixie Pearson.

Now, that story seems to follow on neatly from all the excellent comments you left when I asked "Who do you think you are?" recently. What I'm getting at is that when I knew Trixie Pearson as Mrs. Walsh, 'all' I knew about her was that she was an Oxford-educated teacher; I had no clue about her background or the fact that she was, as Jane Robinson puts it in Bluestockings, "one of the most popular, shining girls of her college generation". She didn't wear her life story around her neck for all to see; her early life, her achievements were not some sort of badge of office by which those she met could categorise or define her.

    How would she have answered the "what do you do?" question which plagues many of us (as those comments the other day reveal)? She might well have said simply, "I teach", and the conversation could have moved on, but there's a whole world of meaning in those two words alone, and the effort and talent which got her to the profession in the first place isn't even hinted at. Would that I had the chance now to talk to her about her past, but sadly she died a few years ago.

     My point is a simple one: what interesting and complex creatures we all are! No, we may not be a Trixie Pearson, remembered in a chapter of a book, but we all have 'life stories', achievements, skills, characteristics which set us apart, make us distinctive in some way, and they may well not be obvious - especially to us! So as an exercise in appreciation, let us be self-regarding for a moment and think about our own 'back story', the bigger picture that lies behind the "... and you are?" question.  

Comments

[Marina McIntire]

Oh, my! Thank you for that. I had more than one "Trixie Pearson" in my life. I can only hope that I served that function for at least one other young woman. And, yes, my back story has a few wrinkles and interesting twists itself. Thanks for that reminder.

[tea and cake]

I know! When I answer 'housekeeper, on a private estate' people say 'oh' and move on - never knowing, unless they ask, the 'back story' that brought me here. I always try and remember to ask people more questions, and am tickled by their stories - it is fascinating.

[Mary]

Reading this post, I thought of my mother, born in London in 1909 and required to go to work at 14 in order to support the family. Though formal education stopped at an early age, she was a prodigious reader all her. One particular interest was the history of the American Indians. We once attended an event at an Indian village in Andarko, Oklahoma where my mother sat down the with Chief for more than two hours discussing Indian history. He didn't want her to leave because he was so excited to speak with a British woman who knew so much about his tribe.

I know she would have loved to have had more formal educational opportunities, but she certainly made the best of her circumstances.