The book and film are the culmination of eight hours of interviews with Alice Mayers, founder of The Story Keepers, an organisation which records people’s life stories.
Mayers set up the business in 2019 after a fortuitous conversation with a friend, who was training to be a career coach and needed a guinea pig. “My background is in museums, where I used a lot of oral history. In that conversation, [my friend] helped me work out that listening to people’s stories and recording them was what I found important and joyful and was something I could do full-time.”
For Mayers, oral history has an authentic quality that written history is not always able to convey. “If you capture the spoken words, you capture much more than just the stories. You capture the time when that person was around because language changes. You also capture their sense of humour, their expressions, their voice, their mannerisms, which are quite familiar, but which are also easy to forget when someone isn’t here.”
As the former education manager of the Foundling Museum in London, which tells the story of the Foundling Hospital for abandoned babies, Mayers says it was “really poignant” seeing how visitors reacted to hearing the lived experiences of the hospital’s former pupils.“I realised that a lot of this stuff is missed by families and it seemed to me that families should be recording their own stories because it’s their legacy and their identity.”
While the 49-year-old isn’t the first person to set up a business for people wishing to preserve their memories, her professional experience sets her apart. “Because I worked in oral history, rather than marketing or filmmaking, for me, the important part is the words that they say.
“My main focus is on helping the storyteller to enjoy the experience of telling their story, to know that they have been heard, that their life is important and worth record-ing, as it is.”
Mayers, who lives in Kensal Rise, North West London, strives to make the interview as relaxed and intimate as possible. She brings with her just a couple of small cameras, which she operates herself, rather than working with a cameraman. Recalling his own interview, Conradi says he “felt anxious beforehand, but Alice put me at my ease, and it helped that I was in my own home, with my wife at my side.”
Caroline Levy, who arranged for her mother, Frances, to record her life story and also took part in some of the filming herself, says the experience was “very enjoyable and relaxing. It was just like having a chat with my mum about our family. Alice was very sensitive and really listened.”
While many interviewees tell their story alone, Levy, a TV producer, says the advantage of joining her mother in the interview was that “we could have an ex-change, nudge each other along and jog each other’s memory”.
Researching their family history also gave them the opportunity to sit together, sifting through stacks of old photos and letters written by her grandfather to her grandmother while on his many business trips. “Mum and I had some lovely times and it brought back lots of memories for her. My grandpa spoke nine languages and took great pride in his Jewish heritage.”
Mayers says that people approach her for a variety of reasons. They might be marking a significant birthday, Mother’s Day or a milestone wedding anniversary. In the case of the latter, Mayers will record each partner’s perspective à la the closing credits of When Harry Met Sally. “We’ll do a little bit about her story and a little bit about his story, the bit when they met and their lives since then. I get to ask questions that maybe they don’t, and they always go: ‘I never knew that about you!’”
Sometimes people contact Mayers when they or someone in their family has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or is in the early stages of dementia. Of one such interviewee, Mayers says: “It was really nice to be able to record him as this full-of-life, vital man. I know he really enjoyed it and he got to say a lot of things I don’t know if he would have said otherwise. To hear him saying: ‘I love them so much’ and ‘I’m so proud of them’ is going to be really powerful for his family.”
Before starting her own business, Mayers did some dry-runs on her own relatives. She decided it was important to record her father-in-law after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.“I wanted to record him at a point in his life when he could capture all those stories and tell them fluently. I want my three children to be able to hear and know his stories in ten, 20 or even 30 years’ time, when they are at an age to want to hear them.”
She is hugely grateful for also having had the chance to record her own father since he died unexpectedly two months after the interview, aged 84. “To know that I could hear his voice, hear his laughter, see his smile was immensely comforting.”
Notably, a large proportion of Mayers’s clientèle are Jewish and her work has included testimonies from Holocaust survivors for The Together Plan, which supports Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. “Everyone in the Jewish community understands we need to record as many [of these testimonies] as we can and learn from them. But there are also the members of the Jewish community who have lived all their life in the UK, and still, there is something inside of them that wants to capture their particular family stories, their legacy and way of life.”
For Levy, the interview with her mum and herself embodies the spirit of something her grandfather used to say a lot: “‘Dor v’ Dor’ — ‘from generation to generation’. This is the essence of these films, allowing the grandchildren to hear first hand about the family’s roots, passions and adventures.”
“Watching the video, it was exciting to recall stories of our family, especially some of the tough times. But survivor instinct, determination and close family bonds enabled us, like most Jewish families, to prosper. These stories are important. They give us strength and inspire the next generation.”
thestorykeepers.co.uk
