Francesca Rudkin: Are our nostalgic childhood mementos worth hanging onto?

This week I thought I would distract myself from talk of tax, fiscal holes and pledge cards by heading to Tauranga to help my parents pack in preparation for a move from a house into an apartment.  

I am a bit of a hoarder. Not in an unhealthy way. My hoarding is very organised - in plastic boxes and tucked out of sight - but I do hold onto things longer than is practical. Walking into my parents half packed house and observing the number of boxes piling up I realised the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.  

This is not the first time my parents have downsized and they’re very good at having a clean out, and yet my mother still keeps finding children’s paintings, athletics club certificates and school reports.  

Turns out I placed first in the 100m and 400m in 1980 at the Eastern Suburbs Amateur Athletic Club - that’s as good as it got when it came to my athletics career. I played a ‘child’ in the Jill Proudfood School of Ballet Christmas Recital in 1982 according to the programme my mother still had. And I found a Form 7 report card in which teachers had written  “Francesca is an outgoing student who is easily distracted in class.” And “Francesca’s examination result was disappointing. She is capable of better results with more careful revisions and learning the work”.  

Thankfully, in the subjects I loved I was well organised, efficient and competent, and I quote “always makes an intelligent and lively contribution to class discussions”. In other words, they couldn’t shut me up.  

School reports are fun because at the time they’re presented as important documents, but reading them years later you realise the script is often the same - whether you’re doing well or not - and there’s a particular language used by teachers to explain your progression.  

What fascinated me were the two parts of my reports that didn’t require words. One was the grade for Effort - 1 being excellent and 4 being unsatisfactory - and this was a brutal assessment of how things were really going. The other was the number of days attended - in Form 7 I had two days off school.  

In our house, school was simply where you went. Regardless of how sick you were, or whether you felt like going or not. There weren’t extra family holidays tagged onto long weekends. And that tells us something about how much life has changed. 

But what amused me most was that I bothered to gather up all these certificates and reports and bring them home.   

Why do we keep this stuff? I think there’s a moment in every parent’s life when you open a shoe box, drawer or cupboard, and realise you’re not storing useful or relevant things anymore. You’re running a museum, and likely not a well organised one.  

I think the answer is simple. Many parents are incapable of throwing away reminders of their children as children. It’s not about remembering how they did in statistics and economics - in which we’ve already established I didn’t do well - it’s about remembering the child.  

Are any of these nostalgic mementos of my childhood worth keeping? Will they be of any value to my children? Almost certainly not. But while I’m around I’ll continue to treasure the memories they evoke.  

LISTEN ABOVE