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Why write my autobiography?
I had a Kipling-esque beginning. Born in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a part of India that is now Pakistan, I am a daughter of the Raj. My father was an officer in the Indian Army, and at the time was stationed up near the Khyber Pass, on the troublesome border with Afghanistan. I was born in a British hill station to lessen the heat of summer. Later we moved around the country, wherever he was stationed, so I have many early memories of train travel in India, and of going to Kashmir. During the war my mother died in Calcutta from typhoid, so I was sent ‘home’ to boarding school in England at the age of seven to be adrift in a strange country. My father took me there, then he went back to the army in India to return four years later with a step-mother for me and my brother.
So, with my father, this inarticulate (though verbose) ex-Indian Army colonel, my brother and a duty-bound step-mother, I went to live on a pioneering farm in colonial Kenya. We lived in tents for a year with no running water or electricity, which was a great experience, but I was in a family that was empty of loving care. I had a good schooling in Nairobi, and returned to England for university studies in 1956 and eventually migrated to Australia with my husband and children in 1966.
The turmoil of my early life, the gaps in my family history and the effects of four migrations induced me to write my story. And in writing my story I found that I had been seeking my mother all my life. I knew little about her, and in the British stiff-upper-lip way of my family she was never spoken about. Yet I found her (my) family who owned a Dorset village that included a stately home, and an 800-year-old family tree that included both a famous Dorset smuggler and a British Prime Minister. Also, I returned to Kenya in 2003 to see what had happened to our farm and to meet the people who live on that land now.
I wanted my family to know of my early life, as Britain's colonies have all been independent for many years now, and life has changed irrevocably. Also, while I was writing I pondered the nature of autobiography because it's not necessarily as simple or as truthful as it seems. And, oddly, writing my story has a significant effect on how I now see myself.
I had a Kipling-esque beginning. Born in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a part of India that is now Pakistan, I am a daughter of the Raj. My father was an officer in the Indian Army, and at the time was stationed up near the Khyber Pass, on the troublesome border with Afghanistan. I was born in a British hill station to lessen the heat of summer. Later we moved around the country, wherever he was stationed, so I have many early memories of train travel in India, and of going to Kashmir. During the war my mother died in Calcutta from typhoid, so I was sent ‘home’ to boarding school in England at the age of seven to be adrift in a strange country. My father took me there, then he went back to the army in India to return four years later with a step-mother for me and my brother.
So, with my father, this inarticulate (though verbose) ex-Indian Army colonel, my brother and a duty-bound step-mother, I went to live on a pioneering farm in colonial Kenya. We lived in tents for a year with no running water or electricity, which was a great experience, but I was in a family that was empty of loving care. I had a good schooling in Nairobi, and returned to England for university studies in 1956 and eventually migrated to Australia with my husband and children in 1966.
The turmoil of my early life, the gaps in my family history and the effects of four migrations induced me to write my story. And in writing my story I found that I had been seeking my mother all my life. I knew little about her, and in the British stiff-upper-lip way of my family she was never spoken about. Yet I found her (my) family who owned a Dorset village that included a stately home, and an 800-year-old family tree that included both a famous Dorset smuggler and a British Prime Minister. Also, I returned to Kenya in 2003 to see what had happened to our farm and to meet the people who live on that land now.
I wanted my family to know of my early life, as Britain's colonies have all been independent for many years now, and life has changed irrevocably. Also, while I was writing I pondered the nature of autobiography because it's not necessarily as simple or as truthful as it seems. And, oddly, writing my story has a significant effect on how I now see myself.
A review of Tissue by BlueInk:
Published by Xlibris, 248 pages, (paperback), 9781499020151 (Reviewed: December, 2014)
'Replete with genuine feeling and admirably short on self-pity, Sally Berridge’s engaging memoir captures with originality a peripatetic, sometimes turbulent life.
Born in India in 1937, she was “a daughter of the Raj” whose family for generations peopled the British Empire’s reach across the globe. She first went “home” in 1945, three years after her mother’s death from typhoid; a poignant “Letter to My Past Small Self” captures the bewilderment of a seven-year-old uprooted from everything familiar at the behest of her father Bill, a career soldier whom she matter-of-factly depicts as emotionally remote.
Stepmother Joyce gets credit for taking on two young children and a daunting pioneer existence in Kenya, where the family relocated to establish a farm in 1948, but she was also bossy, and the Berridge family life was cold. Berridge married at 22 while still at university in England, then moved to Australia with her husband and three small children in 1965.
Berridge writes vividly about pre-independence Kenya, hilariously about her ramshackle start in Australia, and charmingly about her devotion to rambunctious grandchildren. Her memories are conveyed elliptically, in non-chronological order that nonetheless makes clear both the basic facts of her unusual experiences and the psychological journey that underpinned them.
Several interspersed chapters show Berridge searching for more information about her mother’s life and death, then discovering maternal relatives in England. She writes movingly in conclusion about how this reconnection to her roots helped her “travel back to Australia to look at my life here with new eyes.”
Part II, “Ideas About Autobiography,” finds Berridge reflecting on the genre. It’s clear that her fresh approach in her own writing grew from extensive reading and thinking about the form, and her summary of pundits from Roland Barthes to Antonio Damasio is unfailingly intelligent. This is a moving memoir.'
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