I was seventeen, bored out of my mind, and desperate to disappear into theories about anything other than my family.
Christmas at my grandparents’ house meant Chariots of the Gods and Gods from Outer Space, read several times over during previous visits. Mysteries of vanished civilisations. Anything that wasn’t the room I was sitting in.
Christmas morning was quiet, everybody sleeping off the tensions of the night before. The kitchen was the one place with no flying saucer magazines and no arguments in it, just the steady rhythm of somebody working. I found my grandfather already deep into dinner preparation, standing straight as an arrow while dicing onions for the stuffing. Every movement precise and practiced. Knives sharp, cutting board clean.
Why ask an elderly relative about their life?
Nothing noble. I was a teenager with nothing to do and he was the only person in the house not being difficult that morning.
I was a teenager with nothing to do and he was the only person in the house not being difficult that morning.Share on X
Later, in the sitting room, the afternoon light came through the windows with dust drifting in it. He settled into his easy chair, worn brown leather that had moulded to his frame. I took one of the metal folding chairs they kept stacked in the hall closet, the kind with vinyl padding that stuck to your legs.
The physical discomfort seemed appropriate somehow. I was the outsider here, the one asking for something.
You want to know about the war, he said, glancing at me and making that familiar sucking sound through his teeth. It didn’t start with Pearl Harbor for me.
How did the stories come out?
In pieces. Fragments. Sometimes prompted by a question, sometimes emerging out of a long silence.
He’d stop mid-sentence to make that noise with his teeth, straighten his already perfect posture, and then continue with some detail about Shanghai or Manila, places I’d never heard of. What followed would take me years to fully understand, and I didn’t understand most of it at the time.
That’s how this material arrives in advance. Nobody delivers a life in order. You get fragments across several sittings, and the shape is something you assemble much later, usually after they are gone.
What did the cooking mean?
It took several conversations to work out why he cooked with such fierce intensity. Why he always made too much food. Why he watched everybody’s plate to be sure they’d eaten enough.
The abundance of every meal was his quiet rebellion against memories he’d carried for forty years without talking about them.
This man who couldn’t let anybody leave his table hungry had once been starved nearly to death for three years and four months.
Nobody else in that house had made the connection, and I only made it because I’d asked. The behavior was visible to everybody. The reason was available to whoever sat down.
Why did nobody else ask?
Because he was difficult, and the difficulty and the history were the same thing, and only one of them was on display.
Other family members complained about his moods and avoided his presence. That’s not a criticism of them. He was hard work, and there was no obvious reason to think that a bad temper at Christmas was connected to something that had happened in the 1940s in a place none of them could name.
So the person with the most extraordinary account in the family was also the person everybody was quietly working around, and those two facts kept each other in place for decades.
How narrow was the window?
Narrower than anybody realized at the time.
The conversations happened just in time. Years later, Alzheimer’s would steal both the stories and the man who could tell them. For those few Christmas visits when I was a teenager his mind was still sharp enough to trust me with everything that had shaped him, and then it wasn’t.
There was no announcement that the window was closing. There never is. What there was, in the meantime, was a folding chair that stuck to my legs and a man who had been waiting a long time for somebody to be interested.
How do you interview an elderly relative about their life?
Ask badly instead of not at all. I’d no technique and no plan. I was seventeen and bored, and it was enough.
Sit through the silences. The pauses are where the difficult parts are being decided on, and filling them ends the story.
Record it, with their permission. Your memory isn’t up to this and you won’t realize that until much later.
Don’t wait for the right occasion. There’s not one. There’s a kitchen on a Tuesday and a person who’s willing today.
Notice that the difficult relative is often the one with the material. The moods people avoid are frequently attached to the thing nobody has asked about.
He wrote a journal after he came home and it sat in the family for decades. That journal became a book, and the book became the reason I do this for a living. All of it started because a bored teenager took the uncomfortable chair.
The book on this: Behind the Wire is 22 chapters of my grandfather’s account of three and a half years as a prisoner of war, built from the journal he wrote once he got home. No names changed.