My Favourite Story: The Lives We Didn't Lead
I wanted to share this story and recording because it’s always felt special to me. I think of it as a kind of Rosetta Stone for a group of stories I pieced together in care homes. Kristin Milward read it beautifully. We recorded it in her flat, as she lay on the bed, and I recently used AI to improve the sound quality, removing the noise of passing cars and children playing outside. I’m still not sure whether I prefer the honesty of the original recording, but this version draws more attention to the words and performance, without the distraction of those stray sounds.
It’s a sad story, really about missed opportunities and what could have been. Before the recording, Kristin and I talked about a gesture Sylvia made - a brushing-away motion as she recalled her husband’s death - and her remark: “Lots of people were in the same boat.” Clearly, she was referring to the tens of thousands of other women like her - women who lost their husbands or partners in the war, people whose lives were changed forever.
That gesture of brushing away the past stayed with me. These small physical acts—gestures, silences, glances - often carry more emotional truth than the words themselves. It’s a shame the stories never made it to the stage.
Like most of the pieces, this one is a collage, assembled over several weeks of brief conversations. What’s important isn’t always what’s said - it’s often found in the gaps, the contradictions, and what’s left unsaid. There are many unanswered questions: Why was Sylvia’s father having secret meetings with Japanese men? Why the urgency to get married - was it simply that her fiancé was about to go to war, or did she already know she was pregnant?
The story blends fragments of past and present, overlapping and intersecting. It’s fascinating that, at the end of a full life, what Sylvia remembers most clearly are events from her early twenties. These may have been the most vivid and meaningful years of her life, but they also align with what psychologists call the “reminiscence bump” - the tendency to recall more memories from adolescence and early adulthood (roughly ages 10 to 30) than from any other period.
Earlier in my work, I might have tried to smooth out the inconsistencies - as if memories should be neat and reliable - and shape the story into something more polished, with tighter pacing and a clear payoff. But Kristin chose to let the piece stop, and I think that decision was exactly right. It remains one of my favourite stories and performances.
