Big life-shattering breaches went unexplained or were distilled down to a Punch and Judy line: Well, she had to choose between him and me, and in the end she chose him. But things don’t ever just happen. Things occur in a particular way and for a reason. Mum never did see inside the folder held in the vaults of the national archives. Here, the past was presented with disarming bureaucratic plainness—a brown folder bound with packaging string. In late 2011, it sat before me on a reader’s desk. For a few minutes I did little more than stare at it. Then, slowed down by a ceremonial sense of how to proceed, I pulled gently on the ends of the string, and the folder breathed out. And I smelt the old air of an unvisited room shut up for the better part of a century. It was like the end of a long flight when you wake in time for the descent through the cloud and look out the window to the startling detail of a place you have only vaguely heard about. And because the detail has a fresh and unclaimed quality, the fevered eye seeks out everything all at once.
What do You think about A History Of Silence (2013)?
