Grandparents and grandchildren have a special relationship. Although my father told me something about being a PoW in the War, he never told me much about his younger days. But in the leisure of retirement, with a small granddaughter who asked endless questions, he revealed much more, not just about the War — but also about what it was like to go to a village school in Dumfriesshire during the Depression, who his teachers were, about his grandparents and, as my daughter’s focus changed to more teenage concerns, how be went about ‘courting’ in the late 1940s. Not to be outdone, my mother then supplied her somewhat different version of events

Like most people, my parents’ story is a mixture of a little involvement in great national events and great involvement in many small private ones. Their story is always interesting, sometimes funny and sometimes sad. As I listened to these tales, the really sad point was that these memories would eventually be lost, or only half remembered by my daughter through fading photographs.

To capture the liveliness of the story, preserve the detail, but above all, project the personality of the storytellers, we began Family Story.