Heyy guys i need a 3 min speech on topic is mom and dad outdated nowadays
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Summer 2009. I am driving through Herefordshire countryside, listening to tape-recordings of my father's voice. It is almost thirty years since he died, and left them to me: all the old stories of his time in India. He was there as a sugar planter in the thirties; at the outbreak of war he joined the Indian Army; after the war he met my mother, gone out with the Women's Voluntary Service to cheer up the troops, as she put it. They fell in love at first sight, and were married within three weeks. For both of them, India was the defining experience of their lives. Then, in 1947, with Independence, they came home to England to start a new life.
My brother and I grew up with India as the great sunlit background to our own lives. We knew about the Himalayas and the soaring vultures who slept on the wing; about the tiger who came padding out to drink in a jungle pool by moonlight while my father sat watching in a tree. We heard the endless stories of the sugar cane plantation in Cawnpore – the Big Bad Buffalo who trampled it and the cutters who sold their cane to my father, who rode hundreds of miles every season and whose horse once got stuck in quicksand. So it went on. And that was before all the war stories.
My father talked, my mother wrote. She had kept diaries in India; she kept them all through our country childhood. But mostly she tried to write a novel: about setting out for India in the wake of a broken heart and finding the love of her life. We grew up with a lot of stories about that, too.
Some of all this was magical; some of it was exasperating. Children have their own preoccupations and they don't want always to be hearing about the past. But with age comes your own looking back.
By 2009 I had reached the age of memoir. As it had been for my parents, the past was now precious and important, and, like them, I wanted to tell a story. So I listened, at last, to my father's voice as I drove through ravishing countryside. Back in London, I set about transcribing.