Pauline persuaded me to attend the local history group on 10 October 2024.
She described it as a talk, tea and chairs.
‘You have put the chairs unusually high on the list,’ I said.
‘We are both past standing events.’
The meeting was in Emsworth and concerned shops that had once traded in the town. The speaker used old maps and photographs. I expected to recognise very little because we had moved to Emsworth in 2004, which still made me a recent arrival by local-history standards.
Several people in the audience had lived there much longer. They disagreed about the position of a bakery, the year a grocer closed and whether one photograph had been taken before or after a shopfront was changed.
Nobody was rude. They were exact.
The speaker accepted two corrections and declined a third until somebody produced a dated directory from a bag.
Pauline leaned towards me.
‘You’d fit in.’
‘I haven’t brought evidence.’
‘Next month.’
During the break, we looked at copies of old street plans. I found the road where our bungalow now stood, though the building itself was much later. The map showed me where the road had ended and what had been beyond it.
The second half covered memories collected from local residents. Some people remembered dates. Others remembered who was present, what work cost and which bus they had taken. The differences were kept rather than corrected into one account.
That interested me more than the buildings.
I had family stories with the same problem. Gran Collins and the air raids. The street party in Copnor. The missing afternoon in Weymouth. We had repeated them for years without agreeing on the details.
At the end, Pauline asked whether I wanted to come again.
I said yes.
I joined the group and began attending once a month. I still did not bring evidence in a bag, but I started making notes.