Nicholas Corder - Writing Your Own Life Story

Nicholas Corder

Straightforward Guides
www.straightforwardco.co.uk

Straightforward Guides

Nicholas Corder 2016

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British-cataloguing-in-Publication-Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84716-649-4
eISBN 978-1-84716-694-4
Kindle ISBN 978-1-84716-695-1

Cover design by Bookworks Islington

Printed by 4edge www.4edge.co.uk

Non-Fiction

Escape from the Rat Race Downshifting to a Richer Life

Learning to Teach Adults An Introduction

Successful Non-fiction Writing

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Staffordshire and the Potteries

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Cumbria

Writing Good, Plain English

Creating Convincing Characters

Fiction

The Bone Mill

Plays

Nigels Wrist

Jacobsons Organ

Cash and Carrie

Star Struck

A Midsummer Nights Travesty

Shagathon

Bingo Royale

Fire in Her Belly

Talent

Catching Lightning in a Bottle

Twilight Robbery

When you teach, you always learn more from your students than anyone else. So, this book is for all those students who have helped shaped the ideas that have gone into this book.

As ever, Im indebted to my wife, Pauline, who keeps me going with cups of tea and coffee, reads early drafts and encourages me when the going gets tough.

Id also like to thank Roger at Emerald Publications, who sticks with me as an author, despite the vagaries of the publishing world.

Lastly, but most importantly, Id like to thank you for either buying this book or borrowing it from the library. You are a person of taste and refinement. I wish you the best of luck with your project.

Summer 1919. A troop carrier pulls away from its temporary mooring in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is carrying soldiers under the command of General Ironside, destined for the White Sea port of Archangel. Here, they will fight in support of the White Russians, the Tsarist force that is attempting to wrest control of Russia from its new communist leaders.

Amongst the men on board, most of them already hardened by several years of fighting, is Sergeant Frederick Corder of the Royal Engineers, an exiled Londoner. He is essentially being paid a bounty for this trip, which he needs in order to have enough money to marry Ethel Pepper. Fred, a big, burly man, built like a rugby forward, is already a veteran of the Great War. He walks with a slight limp. He has been wounded in the knee and his left leg is now bent at an angle that gives him the nickname K-leg amongst his fellow NCOs.

In fact, shortly before my fathers death I asked him where my grandfather Fred had been wounded.

In the knee, said my father.

No whereabouts in France?

I dont know, said my father. I never asked him about his war and he never asked me about mine.

It was like this for men of those two generations, called up to fight in global conflicts. They talked little about these events. But this much I do know. Somewhere in Northern France or Belgium, Fred was shot through the knee and fell onto the barbed wire, providing a convenient human bridge for the others in his platoon to cross German lines.

Family lore also holds it that Freds father was a violent alcoholic, who despite an excellent job in the House of Commons, drank his family into poverty. Fred himself is prone to sudden and irrational mood swings. He enlisted in 1913, as soon as he was old enough to run away from his troubled home. He certainly managed to establish a distance between himself and his family, whoever might have been at fault for this schism. When we came across him in the 1911 census, he had several brothers and sisters my father had never even heard of. Somewhere in here is a juicy tale of a huge family row whose details we will, alas, never know. Indeed, Fred never speaks about his childhood, save to lecture his own children on the dangers of alcohol.

So, there are scant details of Grandfather Freds life. But among the tatty possessions that have been passed on to me is a photograph album that must have been started by him. It dates from an era when fewer photos were taken. Some of the pictures on the same page have intervals of 20 years between them. But amongst the handful that date from the 1910s are a couple of Fred, posing with fellow NCOs outside the Nissen Hut at a transit camp that also doubled as a convalescent camp. There are even a few pictures that date from the under-reported North Russian campaign.

Now, according to my late mother, by pure coincidence, amongst the crowds of well-wishers gathered on the quayside to cheer the ship on its way to the Baltic is a slim local lad called Roland Wood. Roland is one of six children living in the then fashionable West End of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is training to be an architect. He too has served in the Great War, but as a volunteer. He now wears a moustache to hide the scars left by shrapnel wounds, sustained whilst a young Second Lieutenant in Belgium, where he had been left for dead during a futile advance by the Northumberland Fusiliers. He has spent the last two years in and out of sanatoriums, fighting to regain the use of an arm that his father begged surgeons not to amputate.

Roland and Frederick were my grandfathers. They didnt meet on that day in 1919, but had to wait until 1951 when their youngest children, my parents, were married. Both of them died young by modern standards. I never knew Frederick and have only the faintest childhood memory of Roland.

The two men were ordinary lads, not untypical of their day and age. One was fortunate to live in relative affluence at a time when most city-dwellers lived in conditions that would horrify us today - their house was one of the first to have electricity in Newcastle. The other was unfortunate to have been reared by a desperate, alcoholic brute, but lucky enough to be intelligent, able and ambitious. They probably had no realization that they were living in extraordinary times. Both were lucky to have survived the greatest slaughter of young men in European history.

Readers of a certain age will surely remember the smoke-filled silences of the men who belonged to the generations who fought two wars. They rarely spoke about what had happened to them. One of my uncles used to relate a funny tale about meeting up with his two brothers on the beach at Dunkirk. This was the only story he ever told. Apparently, amongst the other things that happened to him was that he had to bury a baby on the beach. But all of this is just family stories, half-remembered, half-understood and, quite possibly entirely mythical.

If only we had more information about our own families. Wouldnt it be great if they had left behind something for us to read? How much better we might understand their lives and, thus, how the past has come to make us.

Like Fred and Roland, we all leave a few doodles of our own across the margins of history. In Fred and Rolands case, there are some stiff, formal photographs, usually in uniform, a few medals, a cigarette box. For years, my study wall boasted the clever, well-drawn copies of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Goofy that Roland drew for my mothers bedroom wall in the 1930s, that had been passed around the family for generations of young children to enjoy and somehow, as is the way in families, found their way back to me. They are now in the keeping of my great-nephew Charlie. Theres not much else.