WRITING LIFE
DEFINING memories
How writing her memoir helped Sarah Aspinall reach a better understanding of her mother and their relationship
Sarah Aspinall
Perhaps the first mystery that I encountered as a child began at the time of my father’s death when I was six years old. He had been ill for some years, but within weeks of his funeral, my mother had suddenly flung our suitcases on the bed and told me ‘we are getting out of here’ – ‘here’ being the seaside town of Southport where I’d been born. It seemed that were now off to see a much more exciting world.
Within days we were in New York, and then a motel in the Kill Devil Hills of North Carolina, and soon my BOAC Junior Jet club log book, that the pilots would kindly sign for me on each flight, was filled with exotic names: Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Tahiti…. But the big question only grew in my mind of what exactly where we doing in these places? We seemed to be looking for something, but what on earth was it? What did my mother want?
The other mysteries that hovered over us were more rooted in the distant past. Audrey had been born in poverty in the slums of Liverpool and then evacuated to Southport during the war. From that moment she had somehow taken off and at the age of twenty she’d got herself to New York on the Queen Mary; she had dined with big movie stars, and lived in Hollywood; she had travelled the whole USA with a group of musicians.