A few weeks ago, The Things Left Behind was still a collection of separate stories.
There was Tommy Benson and the recording of his First World War memories. Joan and Ken, whose wartime romance survived separation across continents. Walter West, whose working life could be traced through family memories, old photographs, a ledger and the objects he left behind.
Now those three stories have become one book.
The Things Left Behind: Three Stories from a Family Archive brings together three branches of my family history and the fragments that survived them — photographs, diaries, recordings, documents and ordinary objects that might easily have been overlooked.
The project began with a question I kept returning to:
What can the things people leave behind tell us about the lives they lived?
Sometimes the answer was found in an official record. Sometimes it came from something far smaller: a diary entry, a photograph tucked away for decades, a reference written for a young man starting work, or a ring that still survives in the family.
And sometimes the record simply stopped.
Where that happened, I allowed myself to imagine the human moments between the known facts — always rooted, as far as possible, in family memory, surviving evidence and historical context.
Three stories
The King’s Shilling — Tommy the Schoolboy Soldier
At just sixteen and a half, Thomas Benson enlisted for the First World War.
More than seventy years later, he recorded memories of the Somme, Delville Wood, his wounds, the men around him — and the skylark he heard singing above the battlefield.
That recording became the heart of his story.
Joan and Ken — Romance Over Continents
Joan Bass and George Kenneth Greensit met in Hitchin before the Second World War.
War separated them. Ken was sent to India and Burma; Joan served in the RAF at home.
What remains of their story includes photographs, memories and Ken’s tiny wartime diary — complete with letters, scraps of paper and the small things he chose to keep while thousands of miles from home.
Walter the Grocer — A Lifetime in the Trade
Walter West spent almost his entire working life in the grocery trade.
I knew him as my grandfather, but researching his story allowed me to meet the young Walter too: the boy beginning work, the husband and father, the shopman behind the counter and the man whose working life left behind ledgers, photographs and memories
And now it is a book
This week I ordered the first paperback proof copies.
That feels slightly surreal.
For so long these people existed in fragments — in boxes, albums, stories and remembered conversations. Now their lives sit together between two covers.
The paperback is 122 pages, printed on cream paper, with photographs from the family archive throughout.
A Kindle edition has also been prepared and should be available within the next 72 hours, with a hardback version currently in development.
But the part that matters most to me is not really the format.
It is that these stories have been gathered.
But the part that matters most to me is not really the format.
It is that these stories have been gathered.
That Tommy’s voice has not disappeared with the old recording.
That Joan and Ken’s wartime separation has not been reduced to a few dates.
That Walter is remembered as more than simply the grandfather I knew.
Their stories remain because, somehow, the things they left behind remained too.
And now they have become a book.
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