Authors Electric

Chrissie Harris – the cover girl for Golden Duck’s forthcoming publication NOT Forgotten Lives: Felixstowe 2017 – is 103 years old. This means she has already survived twenty Prime Ministers (not counting repeats) two world wars and any number of domestic and international crises.  I find it comforting to think of Chrissie, living "happily confuddled" in a Felixstowe care home, as I write this on General Election day, June 8th 2017.  Elsewhere there's a pervasive sense of political and economic insecurity and the threat of terrorist attack still officially classified as “critical”.  I’ve never met Chrissie but I’m certain that she is a very wise woman.That's not just because, at this stage, she may be taking the long view about the relative importance (or not) of staying up all night to watch election results which are going to happen anyway... but mainly because Chrissie had the great good sense to write down some of her own life recollections before "conf...

Back in the mid-1980s when Mum was newly widowed and I was still a bookseller, she helped me select and arrange the stories that made up When I was a Child , my first book. They were not my stories or my childhood but were essays that had been contributed to the annual Age Concern Essex Essay Competition organised, since 1951, by Miss Kay Kidner of Essex Old People’s Welfare. Miss Kidner was rather a remarkable woman, daughter of a rhubarb farmer from Wisbech and a old-fashioned do-gooder. And what a good thing she had done, recognising as early as 1951 that the old people who she met in her professional capacity had valuable human stories to tell. I went to see Miss Kidner because I'd been feeling the lack of anything I could sell in my shop for my older customers, especially those whose eyesight might be failing. The Age Concern essays, all of them stored respectfully in the Essex Record Office, were a revelation and I immediately asked for permission to select and publish som...