My Childhood: Fact or Fiction?

Don’t decide to base your first book on your childhood - especially if you lived in six countries and didn’t keep a journal.

I started writing this book thirteen years ago and I’m about three-quarters of the way through. I’m not lazy. I’ve been published many times in the intervening years, but this particular project is forever shunted to the back burner. Take a guess at what I was working on moments before I distracted myself by opening a fresh page on this blog…

I’ve always called it a novel because, although it’s rooted in the facts of a period of my life, I’ve had to invent conversations and events to bridge the inevitable gaps in memory. After all, the main character - me - is only five years old when the story begins. But really, I should learn to call it what it is: a memoir. All memoirs are crafted in the same way. The story tells the truth of the life being described, but by necessity, it cannot all be true.

My father was in the Royal Air Force - a blessing that meant my childhood was designed for adventure. Another blessing is that there are countless online groups and forums devoted to reminiscing about life as a services or military child in the 1960s and 70s. There is, it turns out, an eager readership for memoirs like mine.

And yet, this is also a curse. Those experiences matter deeply to my fellow brats (the Forces acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveller), and that sense of shared history comes with an unspoken expectation: get it right. Be accurate. Don’t muddle the details.

I’m not just describing my life - I’m chronicling a way of life. The peculiar, transient world of a military child in the 1960s. I take comfort in the fact that all any memoirist can do is recount how they experienced, and now reinterpret, the events around them. Even within one family, each person deciphers shared moments differently. Still, there’s a certain pressure in knowing that not only my siblings, but an entire generation of former brats, may quietly question my version of events.

Many of our family photographs have been lost. I’m the eldest child, and my parents both died while still in their fifties, so I have little tangible material to draw from. What slows me down the most is my unreliable memory of geography. Even with the help of the internet, so much time has passed that I’m often researching what feels like an entirely different planet.

Frustratingly, old maps don’t track my footsteps the way the Marauder’s Map does in Harry Potter. I know my peers will be forgiving, but it will undoubtedly jar if I describe turning left to reach the Malay village when, in fact, I could only have turned right. Then again, their retrospective GPS may be just as sketchy as mine. Here’s hoping.

Needless to say, my second book will be a proper novel. It will be set in space. The main character will keep a journal that she starts writing in at the age of five.

Because she is, quite clearly, a much smarter cookie than I ever was.