If, like me, you keep a notebook(s) of any description, and perhaps wonder what life it may have when you have wandered off into the Great Hereafter, do read on because Elisabeth's Lists A Family Story by Lulah Ellender is a shining example of just how important it might be.
Given her grandmother's notebook, Lulah Ellender has framed her family memoir around the lists that Elisabeth made between 1939 and 1957.
A single book that contains a life story, as the daughter of a diplomat, Elizabeth Knatchbull- Hugesson marries minor diplomat Gerry Young and embarks on the peripatetic lifestyle of the diplomat's wife. It is a way of life Elisabeth has grown up with, she knows what she is taking on. Peking, Madrid, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro will beckon and finally, perhaps the cherry on the cake, Paris.
The diplomat's wife is the ultimate free bonus, the buy-one-get-one-free in the deal, which will require her to set up a home in a house that she will never own, often within the isolated confines of secure compound. She will have to be prepared to move there at very short notice, and when she does arrive have to live up to all the expectations surrounding her competencies as a well-dressed socialite and a charming hostess to a huge crowd of people she doesn't know and whose language she may not speak. Oh yes, and there will be babies who grow into school-age children to cope with too, and whilst there may be plentiful help on hand, no one can experience on a mother's behalf the emotion of dispatching the children off to boarding school in the homeland.
Elisabeth's lists become her best way of being organised and maintaining a modicum of control over a life that can turn to chaos in a moment.
The structure of the lists dispense comfort and reassurance at the time of writing, but now, as a primary source, the lists offer Lulah Ellender the means to investigate and interpret the life of the grandmother she never met...and this whilst her own mother, Elisabeth's daughter Helen, is dying of lung cancer. Through the lives of these two women Lulah is able to confront and express her own grief too. Elisabeth would die when Helen was nine and this book becomes a poignant journey of memory and discovery for both her and Lulah as they explore the life lived. It all makes for fascinating reading. An unknown life of seemingly little interest beyond the confines of the immediate family takes on something special and it has been a privilege to share in it.
This is such an unusual book, one that emphasises the importance of maintaining the practice of keeping notebooks and diaries in a digital age; Elisabeth's Lists instrumental in making sure that I started my own note-taking seriously again. I fear for my descendants when they come to sort it all out though, oh for just one single notebook. I had a sort out of old notebooks recently, no coherence to it whatsoever. Bits written in this one and that depending on mood, time and place, and then there are the 4.5 million words (we estimate conservatively) written on here over the last twelve years, and the years-worth of notes about books I've read. Ye gods.
Lulah's mother Helen, in the final months of her life, writes a list of her own memories about her mother and Lulah does likewise about her own life. I came to with a start and realised I must do this about my own family too. The blue notebook, to the right in the top picture, is the journal Bookhound bought me to write through the last few months of the Tinker's (my dad's) life. I couldn't bear to read it again until recently, but I see now that this is where those memories should be written.
Hilary's voice was almost at a whisper, no one moved a muscle and I could feel my eyes welling up with tears, but in a sense this is exactly what Lulah Ellender has done with Elisabeth's Lists, given a voice and person-hood to someone I may never have known about.