My Childhood: Fact or Fiction?

Don't decide to base your first novel on your childhood; especially if you lived in six countries and didn’t keep a journal! 

I started writing this book 13 years ago and I’m about three quarters of the way through. I’m not lazy, I have been published many times in the intervening years but the novel always goes on 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 it called it a novel because although based in the facts of a period of my life I have had to make-up conversations and events to fill in the gaps in my memory. After all, the main character (me) is only five-years-old when the story starts! But I really should learn to call it a memoir, as all memoirs are crafted in the same way; the story is 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 - there are many online groups and forums dedicated to reminiscing about being a services/military child in the 60’s and 70’s so there is an eager market for memoirs such as mine. But of course, this is also a curse. I know how important those experiences are to my fellow brats (an abbreviation of the army term British Regiment Attached Traveler) so I feel it’s my responsibility to be as factually accurate as I can be.

I'm not just describing my life, I'm chronicling a way-of-life; the life of a military child in the 60's. I take comfort in the fact that all any memoirist can do is recount the way in which they interpreted (and now reinterpret) the events and dynamics around them. Even within a family, each player deciphers the same shared-experiences differently. But imagine the pressure of knowing that not only my siblings, but a generation of onetime brats are likely to be questioning my version of events! 

Many of our family photos have been lost, I'm the eldest child and my parents died whilst still in their fifties so I have little to go on. It’s my unreliable memory of the geography of the places that I lived that holds my writing up the most. Even with the advantage of the internet so much time has gone by that I’m now viewing a completely different planet. Frustratingly, old maps do not track my footsteps as the Maurader’s Map does for the characters in Harry Potter. I know that my peers will be forgiving but it will no doubt jar on a reader if I say I turned left to get to the Malay village, when in fact I could only have turned right.  But then again, their retrospective GPS could be as sketchy as mine is. Here’s hoping! 

Needless to say my second book will be an actual novel, set in space, and the main character will keep a journal that she first wrote in when she was five-years-old. Because she's a smarter cookie than I was.