A lot of storytellers in Britain seem to turn up their noses at the idea of reminiscence work but it's 'big' in the USA where the common complaint is that storytellers just waffle on about themselves and never tell 'proper' stories. I recently finished a big project which falls into the 'reminiscence' category and would like to offer a few thoughts...

Over the years I've done quite a bit of what could be called 'reminiscence work' although I don't think that term had been coined when I first started, at least I hadn't heard it. My first experiences came long before I was a storyteller, when I first started collecting folk songs. Along with the song would often come a whole stream of memories and information some of which was useful in that it helped put the song into context, some wasn't - at least not obviously. But I gradually came to realise that it was actually all relevant for what it told me about the singer, the location, the times...

The first work I ever did which overtly set out to collect memories was again song based. It was in 1991 - a project called 'A Village Song' which was centred on the village of Bassingham near Lincoln. I worked with villagers to create a collection of 10 songs about their community. Some songs we wrote 'by committee' ie as a group - a class from the school or the W.I. A couple were ideas which individuals gave me and I polished up or put a tune to. Others I wrote from the information I gathered from people in the village. It was a very satisfying project which culminated in a big concert in the Village Hall which was broadcast on Radio Lincolnshire, and a cassette album which sold several hundred copies.

Since then I have done many other smaller pieces of similar work and a few major ones including a community play for which I wrote a script taken almost verbatim from local people's reminiscences.

The latest project, which took a big chunk of the first half of this year, was for Nottingham Playhouse. They were putting on a play based on Raymond Brigg's autobiographical story 'Ethel & Ernest'. They employed actress/storyteller Nicky Rafferty and myself to work with their 3rd Age Group (a theatre outreach club - enthusiasts/supporters of the Playhouse) who in turn collected reminiscences from three other local groups. We then put it all together into a presentation which ran alongside the professional production. The book was our starting point, our inspiration, but we went off at our own angle.

I cannot get over how much the participants enjoyed themselves. Within minutes of starting to talk people were divulging secrets which they'd never told anyone before - "I had to get married you know..." that sort of thing. The outside groups were a bit apprehensive at first because they didn't know quite what to expect, were they going to be 'made' to perform in public? Were they going to be interrogated? But by the end of the first session they were saying that it was 'the nicest afternoon they'd had for years' or they 'couldn't wait to come back next time'. Nonagenarian ladies were joking about sex - "I didn't know anything about it - but I liked it, that's why I kept doing it" and very little seemed beyond the pale.

When we had finished collecting - about 25 hours of tape recordings to be sifted! - we had the job of shaping it into a 45 minute production. To do this we took highlights - stories which had to be told, phrases and comments which were too good to miss (like the one above although I've just realised that did get cut somewhere along the line, but we had enough good material to do 3 or 4 productions!) and subjects which had to be included. Because of the age of our informants a lot of it was about the war years and the periods immediately before and after so that formed the basis of our production although we managed to mention the Coronation and this year's Jubilee to make it topical. We didn't credit any individual with a particular story and often combined ideas from different informants for the sake of 'a good tale'.

Our final production was a combination of storytelling and sketches with some music, songs and sound effects. We did it 4 times in the theatre foyer after the main performance and once to the 3rd Agers themselves and there is a long list of other venues who would like the group to take it to them, although that will have to be a cut down version without Nicky and myself.

Very few of the eight participants (all aged between 55 & 76) had any acting or storytelling experience but they did really well and felt very proud of their achievements. Above all though, they became a tight-knit supportive group; a company in the real sense.

The lesson for this kind of work is that sitting around reminiscing is great fun and of great benefit to the people involved but not necessarily to an audience. Listening can be interesting; but only in short doses. To make something worthy of a public performance, whether that be storytelling, drama or whatever, it has to be deliberately shaped and honed in the way that a traditional story has been by the voices of countless generations of tellers.

Another name for 'reminiscence' is Oral History. The Oral History Society can be contacted via their website. Back in June they held a conference at the Open University entitled 'Staging the Past - Oral History and Performance'. The introductory blurb said: "In recent years the use of oral testimony in the arts, especially in the fields of theatre and song-writing, has led to many creative and varied productions." Some of the first, and still the best, uses of 'oral testimony' came in the Radio Ballads put together by Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl in the late 1950s/early 60s. I am sure you must be aware of them? (If not hunt them out.) They took real speech, the real 'idiom of the people' linked it to songs and dramatisations and used it to tell the stories of those self-same people. It was the first time an ordinary working man or woman had appeared on BBC radio speaking for him/herself rather than reading scripted lines! (Before that even 'live' interviews were scripted and rehearsed.) Singing the Fishing and The Big Hewer and several of the other radio ballads set the standard for documentary radio and have never been bettered even though it is far easier to do it with modern technology.

Bits of local history which have otherwise been forgotten often lurk in the memories of old, and even not-so-old, local people. Hugh Lupton, in his Oracle publication 'The Dreaming of Place' (reviewed in F&F #42) says: "Stories of place are enormous (probably infinite) in number. They are a huge continuum which includes, at one end of the scale, our own personal anecdotes and reminiscences, and at the other the great myths.... An oral historian is as involved with the invisible stories of place as a teller of myths. Both of them are seeking out the truths of people and their places that are invisible to the eye of the camera - the stories at the back of the seen world, the stories of 'what happened once', so strong but so easily overlooked and forgotten."

Some people recognise this and make sure that their knowledge gets passed on. Alan Garner tells how he was summoned by the local 'character' who said "I want to tell you everything I know. I've still got my wits, and I'm in good health, but it wunner always be so, and then it's too late, inner it?" (How often have we waited to ask about our own family history until it is too late and our only informant is too infirm to be reliable?) "You see, there's things I can tell you that aren't in books and are on no maps, and it inner right as we should die and keep it all from other folks."

Sometimes, of course, the oral history is just plain wrong. I remember on my first trip to the north-east, many, many years ago now, being shown a building on the skyline and told the local legend about it. It all seemed very plausible until my guide pointed out that the building had been erected within living memory but the story mentioned the Romans! I wonder whether there are any stories about the Angel of the North yet? How it was put up by aliens or giants?

So, reminiscence/oral history has to be balanced. If you write it off as 'not what we do' you are missing a great source of, perhaps stories, definitely background. If, on the other hand, you stimulate memories but then do nothing with them you've wasted the informants' time

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