'... the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it.
It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper,
the sale of a house, the price of a ring.' - Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
The Parade's Gone By is the story of everyday life in Britain in the twentieth century, inspired by the diaries of a man who lived from 1878-1974. My father discovered the journals in a musty old chest at an auction when I was a boy. If you like the idea of being a time-traveller then you may like this book, for it is an eyewitness, day-by-day account of the lives our Great-Grandparents led.
The story of the twentieth century has been told many times and we are familiar with its broad strokes - Edwardian England, the Great War, the General Strike, the Blitz, Rationing, Rock & Roll, the Sixties. This book tells this wider story but shifts the reader's gaze from the political, economic and historical to the local, colourful detail of ordinary family life.
Thomas Sibley was a travelling salesman born in London in 1878. He kept a diary for every day of his life from 1900 to 1972. When he was born Jack the Ripper was prowling the streets and when he died the Moon landings were already old news. His journals are the equivalent of cine-film of everyday life in Britain in the twentieth century: he describes the streets, shops, cafes, music halls, cinemas, boarding-houses, seaside towns, food, drink, visits to the doctor, holidays, illnesses, Christmases, births, marriages, deaths.
This book is not a biography of Sibley - it is our national story told through the saga of three generations of an ordinary family. The diaries are used as stepping-stones, each entry akin to an artefact discovered by mudlarks on the Thames foreshore, acting as gateways to the wider world.
Sibley may have had a walk-on part in our national life but his story has epic moments. He held his drowned father in his arms beside the lake in Victoria Gardens, Hackney in 1901. He pressed his young lover Annie against a wall in Ullin Road, Bow, and kissed her deeply. In 1915 he saw Zeppelins turn the sky electric white above London. In 1920 he swam in the sea and watched the minstrels on Brighton Pier. In 1941 while his wife lay dead in his front parlour a German bomb tore his house apart. On his deathbed in the 1970s he took up his diary from 1900 and read of his younger days, when he rode a carriage through the streets of London with the fire of youth in his eyes.
History comes most alive not in the anecdotes of the great, the good or the famous but in the beautiful triviality of the ordinary - how our Great Grandparents spoke, thought, loved, how they spent their days at work, their evenings at play. And perhaps the perfect expression of social history comes to us from the diary. For it is only when we move our gaze from the broader pageant to the intimacy of the individual do we hear and feel the true beating heart of our national story.
