A Family Background
I will begin with my grandfather Jim Maguire (my mother’s father). When he was my age now (early eighties), he recounted his own life and what he knew of his parents’ to me over the course of many visits I made to the house he retired to, which was around the corner from my parents’ home in Lytham, Lancashire. I was the first in my family to go to university and he took a shine to me, seeing in me aspiration and application. He singled me out and in an act of symbolically passing the baton he gave me his many letters, postcards and mementoes that he had kept all his life. This was what would spark my desire to archive my own life, tell stories about it and look back to make some sense of it all.
The story Jim told began ...
