Guest Blog by Sarah Hilary - Finding Inspiration in Family History

It’s a humbling experience for a writer to discover words written by people in extremis. People without recourse to what we take for granted – pen, paper, food, freedom – who nonetheless are compelled to write, even when the act of doing so is a punishable offence which must be kept hidden at all costs.

Until recently I was in the habit of complaining quietly to myself when the light wasn’t right in my office, or if my favourite brand of notebook wasn’t immediately to hand. ‘How can I write under these conditions?’ was doubtless prompted by an unconscious desire to avoid work on that particular day. Then I discovered a series of diaries written by men and women interned by occupying forces during the Second World War, a period of time when my grandparents and mother were prisoners of the Japanese, suffering captivity for nearly four years.

Finding this writing was a revelation, not least because it demonstrated that the imperative to write is not the reserve of writers but can strike anyone with an urgent sense that they have a story to tell, words which must be heard and should not be forgotten.

In one instance, the writing I discovered was nothing more than signatures. Dozens and dozens of signatures. The names of every woman and child in the prison camp, written on a tea-towel and embroidered into place, the dates of internment stitched at the top. To see my grandmother’s handwriting as part of that testament was extraordinarily affecting. I wanted to abandon all other writing projects and focus on finding out everything I could about her experience. Did she know she was signing her name as such an astounding testament? Did she believe she’d survive to tell her story to grandchildren and great-grandchildren? How was she feeling at the precise moment when she wrote her name on the cloth, and her child’s name?

Some of the words written by internees have been preserved in museums (the tea-towel is part of an archive held by National Museums Scotland) but these stories deserve to be resonating right now. People risked their lives to record these details. The accounts are alive with colours, scents, tastes. You couldn’t hope for better examples of the old maxim ‘show, don’t tell’: unsentimental even inconsequential chatter that takes you right under the skin of the authors, directly into their lives.

On scraps of paper or cloth, concealed under stones, in the hems of skirts and under floorboards – these diaries survived thanks to the ingenuity of their authors. To read them is a privilege, and a responsibility. You feel the weight of the words, and want to add your own. This is inspiration at a gut-level, life-changing. It’s altered the way I feel as a daughter and grand-daughter, and the way I feel as a writer.

It’s exciting and daunting to take custody of family history in this way. I hope I can do justice to it.



Sarah is an award-winning writer whose fiction appears in Smokelong Quarterly, The Fish Anthology 2008, Prick of the Spindle, The Best of Every Day Fiction, and in the Crime Writers’ Association anthology, MO: Crimes of Practice. Sarah blogs here.