Swan River by David Reynolds Page A

off with a flourish, turned and said, ‘I’m astounded that you two have spent all day reading my mother’s diary. What do you make of it?’ He took out his tin and started to roll a cigarette. My mother put down her paper.
    â€˜It’s interesting…I liked reading about Uncle George when he was seventeen, but her life seems to go on the same every day.’
    â€˜Well. Life can get like that. Most of the world’s population do repetitive tasks day after day just to survive.’ He glanced at my mother. ‘I think at that time she probably was a bit fed up. She had to be a housewife before her time, looking after her father and two brothers instead of a husband and children.’ He lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘It was a shame, but she coped. She was a tough woman.’
    Deborah was staring upwards with her hands behind her head. ‘You don’t get much idea of what she thought about. It’s mainly one thing happened and then something else happened.’ She looked at my father. ‘She says whether she likes people, or doesn’t, but she doesn’t say whether she’s happy or unhappy or just going along without thinking about it.’
    â€˜Yes. It’s more a record of what happened than anything else.’ My father leaned forward. ‘There are about twenty of those diaries and I read them all years ago, but that’s my memory of them. Even when terrible events occurred like my father’s drinking and eventually being thrown out, she just records the facts... It’s almost as though she’s not involved.’ He sat back and pulled on his cigarette again. ‘Do you think you get a good picture of what daily life was like, though?’
    It was my turn to answer. ‘I can see the routine and the different things they had then and the things they didn’t have – ’
    â€˜You see, the thing is,’ my father interrupted, ‘she wasn’t really a writer. She didn’t have the imagination to express things as they really were.’
    â€˜But she didn’t need imagination. She was there,’ I said.
    â€˜Perhaps imagination is the wrong word.’ He pulled on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. ‘But I think, you see, that good writers, even if they write a made-up story, tell the truth better than someone who just recounts facts…and it’s probably having a good imagination that helps them to do that.’ He then talked about Jane Austen, about whom I knew nothing, Charles Dickens – I had read A Christmas Carol at school and seen the David Copperfield serial on television – and Robert Louis Stevenson – I had read Treasure Island . He seemed to be trying to say that these people told the truth about the world around them.
    I couldn’t quite see it: Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Long John Silver seemed like imaginary people to me.
    â€˜But they come alive in your mind, don’t they?’ my father said. ‘And does Uncle George, aged seventeen, come alive to you?’
    â€˜No. Not really.’
    Deborah shook her head in agreement.
    â€˜That’s my point. There’s something truthful about Scrooge and Bob Cratchit.’ He forgot about Long John Silver. ‘There were people like them. In fact, there are people like them.’
    The clacking of my mother’s knitting needles stopped and she turned to me and Deborah. ‘The best example I can think of is a man called Robert Graves. He wrote two marvellous books about a Roman Emperor called Claudius, but he wrote them as though they were actually written by Claudius.’ My father was nodding enthusiastically. ‘He imagined what Claudius thought and felt and those books give a better picture of what Claudius and life in ancient Rome were like than anything else. They are better than history books because they seem so real.’
    My father lent