Individual memories are more precious

Harley 2022-03-04 08:01:38

Everyone is a pattern in an annual ring. Historical events, big and small, have experiences. This experience is often different from textbooks, or richer, or understated, or more painful.
When the whole country celebrates the end of the war, the father who lost his son seems out of place, but he will not be written into history; when the bombs are flying all over the sky, the children in the countryside are still eating delicious pears, what is war, He didn't know...
that one person's life was no different from the lives of 10,000 people.
The pear pits that the teenager spit out on the farm ignored by the war will grow into a big tree in the small courtyard where people are different decades later. Time does not fool people, and neither can people fool time.

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Extended Reading

Ethel & Ernest quotes

  • [first lines]

    Raymond Briggs: [voice over] There was nothing extraordinary about my Mum and Dad, nothing dramatic, no divorce or anything, but they were my parents and I wanted to remember them by doing a picture book. It's a bit odd really, having a book about my parents up there in the best seller list among all the football heroes and cookbooks. They'd be proud of that, I suppose, or rather probably embarrassed too. I'd imagine they'd say, "It wasn't like that," or, "How can you talk about that?" Well, I have, and this is their story.

  • [last lines]

    Raymond Briggs: [with Jean, looking at the full grown pear tree in Ethel and Ernest's back yard] I grew it from a pip.