I never felt I wanted to write a straightforward autobiography. I think it would be impossible to be detached enough to be really honest, and if I wasn’t honest, it would feel unsatisfying. Anyway, I guess I embarrass my children enough without that.

My style is better suited to memoirs – which I regard as short pieces, almost more like ‘essays’, a genre that is long gone, I believe. They satisfy my frequent wish to record my life experiences in some form. So for a good many years, I tried writing some reminiscences, mostly for the family, but also anyone else who might be interested. My paternal grandfather did that, and it was wonderful – I never knew him, as he died in the 1920s. My grandmother, who I also never knew, kept the manuscript and never even gave it to my father. She was apparently a secretive and paranoid woman, or at least became so after her husband died. She also lost her younger son, Norman Kapp, my father’s brother shortly after the First World War. Apparently he had been her favourite. She went to live in Italy, refusing to see her son – my father – or anyone else except her faithful Italian maid, Edvige Dagostin. This lady kept all her papers, so it was only after her death in the 1970s that the local priest packed up the contents of her desk. He traced me through the Public Trustee.

I remember reading the manuscript on a grey November evening, when the children were very  young, but I don’t recall exactly when. It was so moving – a grandfather unknown and long dead, who had written: “ I hope that my future family may be interested in these notes”. I began to cry; it was if he spoke directly to me from beyond the grave, his hand on my shoulder.

I suppose that is in itself rather an interesting story. Sometimes you don’t realise it yourself until you come to record these things.

So – let’s look again at our quilt. A quilt is often made by sewing a line or cluster of smaller pieces together into groups, partly for ease of working. Later these can be put together in larger groups to make a pattern. Occasionally, uttering imprecations, they can be unpicked and re-membered

So on the 27th of December 2008, the day after Boxing Day, I finally sat down to start a few scrappy memoirs; a sort of commonplace book of my life. No real reason to start then and I only know the date because I – unusually – wrote it down precisely on my notes. Not a good night to choose, somehow. It is often a low time, just after Christmas day, but before a New Year with its promise. The fag end of the year, even for a nonsmoker!

Really, I was preparing to remember things for the family tree. We had discussed it as a family over the holiday and agreed it should be more than just a record of dates; it should have little snippets of memories, descriptions, stories handed down orally, research of the social history and other memorabilia. Even so, it did also need to include dates. Rupert set me up for computer recording and asked me a simple and obvious question. “What was the date and place of your mother’s death?”

A complete blank. I absolutely could not remember the date or place of my mother’s death. How odd.

No, not odd. Even as I stammered and changed the subject, I knew that it was opening a very terrible part of my life. A part often visited, particularly in therapy, never wholly healed but a part of tremendous value. Too important to be a small bit of another task. A piece it would be good to write about for my children.

Not everyone looks forward to Advent, the Christmas period, with the unalloyed joy and excitement of all those sparkling, feel-good adverts that we are supposed to believe in!  Christmas has mostly been a happy time for me and I know I’m lucky in that. But I also have had quite a lot of bad years and I sympathise with those who dislike, even hate, the ‘Festive Season’. So – if you wish – you can share the next few blogs or skip them, as suits you.