the tea set, takes its inspiration from a real life tea set my maternal grandmother won at The Hoppings fairground, Newcastle Town Moor, shortly before WW2. I don’t know exactly how the set was won, but I do know it was carried home in a crate of straw and that the neighbours came out to look. I know because my mother, the real story teller in our family, told me.

It’s also true that many years later, after my grandmother died, this tea set made its way two hundred miles down the A1M, where it was left in a box at the end of the garden, rain melting the cardboard. My mother never would give it house room.

There are a few other details woven into the story that are also true. And I promise to disclose them. But to make it clear, the short story behind the short story here, is an eleven year old child (me) staring down the garden at a tattered cardboard box and wondering how a thing once so beloved, had become a thing now so neglected?

In his 1997 New York Times essay, The Power of History, Don DeLillo says that: 'The writer wants to see inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts, in order to locate the neural strands that link him to men and women who shape history.

I’ve always wondered what De Lillo meant by history. Is it those huge global events like war, tsunamis, pandemics? Or is DeLillo talking about a smaller, more local kind of history that writers (and I suspect everyone else) strive to connect themselves to? As writers depend upon detail to anchor stories, I’m going to go with the latter and suggest that De Lillo is edging towards an explanation of the writer’s desire to get inside the heads of those men and women who hold the most influence in shaping our personal histories, i.e. our parents and closest family.

Recent advances in neurological science have proved how fundamental the early years are in shaping personality. So equipped with that information, plus the writer’s urge that DeLillo describes (which others might term as plain nosy!), the narrative of the tea set or its story engine, is powered by my doomed-to-fail quest to delve into the mind of my maternal grandmother. To try and imagine how she might have thought and behaved, and in so doing link myself back to that other facet of history: those great global events. Because my maternal grandmother lived through perhaps the greatest global event in living memory, WW2. More than that, she lived through it as a young woman, her prime years, a time of life when we are the most engaged and the most alive.

And this is why fiction is so important. Why it works. Why in fact, I believe it can be a more reliable narrator of history than factual accounts. You’ve heard the phrase, History is told by the victor? Of course, you have. But there’s no victor in good fiction. No hidden agenda. Just an honest and pragmatic attempt to tell it how it was.

The war would have profoundly affected my grandmother’s character and the close relationships she had. Men were sent away to fight, women stayed home and tried to keep going. Plus her own parents, my great-grandparents had lost close family members during

the previous war, WW1. All this would have shaped her as a person. And the person she became, became the person who shaped my mother. Who then went on to shape me ...

And here, reader is where reality stops, and fiction starts.

Because more than this I don’t know, and I never will. Conversations with my mother about the relationship she had with her mother are tenuous and hesitant. I tiptoe on eggshells. I suspect, my mother doesn’t understand herself the heart of what happened to her mother, or why they were never able to form a functional relationship. All the main characters have long since left the stage.

So how do I start? And if I have to fabricate the story, how can I possibly claim the role of a reliable narrator, as I just have? If I really wanted to know what it was like during WW2, shouldn’t I just read another biography of Winston Churchill? Or watch WW2 in Colour? No, no! A thousand times no!

Human emotion is constant. Glance through any volume of poetry written in the last ... let’s keep it neat and say the last two thousand years, and this will become immediately clear. Humans, homo sapiens, will always be subject to jealousy and lust, anger, shame, pride, joy and the myriad other emotions that form our psyche. This fact is the writer’s most reliable tool.

Plus, for this story, I was lucky enough to have the primary historical source of my mother’s memory, which for certain perfectly preserved moments, remains alive and vivid. Remember I promised to reveal those details in the tea set, that are true? Hal Doolin, at The Hoppings, Town Moor Fair for example? He was real. And the Belgium man, at the ammunitions factory in Birtley? He too existed and so did his long-lost lover. (Amongst my great-aunts acquaintances, there was, once upon a time, a postmistress who fell pregnant to a Belgium during WW1. She did give the baby up for adoption, and it was handled as casually and locally as the story describes.)

So now you begin to see the story behind the story, the tools used to build that link, the bridge back into history. The constant human emotions to draw character, a primary source of memory and real life artifacts. Because just as the story details, amongst our family collection there is a photograph of a great uncle, lost over a century ago to WW1 and his name had been written on the back, in a neat penciled hand. And of course, that most important artifact of all, the tea set itself.

After that, it’s research. As essential to a writer, as a hammer to a carpenter. Trolleybuses existed of course, but I have no idea if my grandfather ever used them. And likewise, there are no family stories that involve my grandmother leaning over a back fence listening to Friday Night is Music Night. But as the programme began in 1953, when most households didn’t have a TV but did have a radio, it’s a pragmatic enough assumption that she might have. That the familiar opening theme tune might have floated over the top of my mother’s head as she sat on the back step of the kitchen.

So here I am, as DeLillo would say, working my way closer to those ‘dreams and routine rambling thoughts,’ of the ‘men and women who shape history.' Our personal histories. What would a young woman, widowed before she was ever really married, trapped by single-motherhood and stuck in a claustrophobically small house with her mother-in-law, have been thinking as she listened to that tune on a light Spring evening? I’ll never know, but I do know that fiction brings me closer than any biography or big-budget documentary series ever will.

I’ll finish where I started, with the tea set.

It did come inside eventually when my older sister set up her own home. It's still there, occasionally in use, not intact, its origins barely remembered. I asked my sister and she had no recollection of how it had first lived in the garden, or where it had originally come from. Proof if ever proof was needed of how fragile and tenuous our personal stories are. Which is all the more reason to try and reconstruct them, no matter how partial the result will always be.