The 'Why' of PETT Archive and Study Centre
reprinted from TC News 2: Summer 2006, pp. 20-21
Several years ago a lady in America rang. Her British-born husband of 20 years had suddenly disappeared from their apparently happy marriage. In going through his things in a desperate attempt to find something which made sense, she stumbled onto a dimension of his life about which she had known nothing: his childhood, and more specifically his time in a therapeutic community, which was mentioned on our web site. What was a therapeutic community? Why would a child be sent there?
Our presence on the Internet also brought an email from a man who had spent time during the Second World War in a therapeutic camp for troubled and troublesome children. His son had found us and encouraged him to get in touch. After a phone call he came up from Essex, with his wife of very many years, to record his memories for the oral history collection on the one hand, and to gather from the archives what he could to help his still-fragmented childhood to coalesce into something coherent on the other. He had been evacuated from the south coast with his younger brother, who was enuretic, leading to multiple placements in homes around Bedford. His parents split up and his brother returned to their mother. Their four year old sister had been evacuated to Gloucestershire, where she was adopted - he did not see her again until she was 18, and did not see his father again until the last years of his father's life. He found himself breaking into a cafe and stealing ten pence worth of stuff, then in the therapeutic camp, and then in a training ship approved school - "horrific, brutal establishment, absolutely brutal... I've still got cuts on my body now" from other boys who came in the night with razors "as you slept in your hammocks" to create terror. Fourteen boys drowned one day in a single escape attempt. He was a lovely man, with a successful marriage, family and career, and felt he owed much to the Camp. What could the archives tell him?
The telephone rings. It is a young man who has to find someone or some way to prove that he was in a particular therapeutic school, now closed. He is emigrating, and he needs the information to get a job in the new country.
A middle-aged daughter rings for her mother who, in her 90s, is trying to settle the story of her brother, who disappeared into the pre-war mental health system wreathed with unsatisfactory family stories. The daughter's distress at an infinite hall of blank walls evaporates when we share what we have; and it is clear that something more than the uncle or mother's lives have fallen into place.
As archivists we - or some of us - sometimes speak of archives as 'forms of social memory', as if archives fulfilled the role within society that memory does within an individual. To some extent that is the case. A group or society that distorts, neglects or loses its records becomes like the person who is straight-jacketed in their own narrow and self-confirming story of the world, growing increasingly irrelevant, or destructive, or incapable of creative change, and determined by external forces; or who ceases - like an Alzheimer's patient, or a person with dementia - to be, except by the grace and definition of others. But memory is a very particular and dynamic aspect of a human being's presence and belonging in the world. Its richness, its definition, its accuracy, depth and accessibility determine who as well as how we are. Archives are different. They are not memory in and of themselves, but substitutes and adjuncts to memory. Where memory fails, where it is absent, or where it has been distorted or dismembered by experience, archives can step in. A disturbed childhood, an obscuring family narrative, an apparently meaningless act, a moment of time with no foundation can acquire, through archives, something of order; of meaning; of grounding; even of healing.
The stillness of things falling into place does not last long. The new or renewed capacity for curiosity and moving-on kicks in almost immediately. 'Getting there' with the enquirer can be an emotional roller coaster for the archivist - perhaps a subject for another article. More difficult is not getting there. But the rewards of being an archivist in a charity which holds records of broken and disrupted lives, when that noise starts up - of the past falling into its place and new things growing - is immense.
Craig Fees
Planned Environment Therapy Trust