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The Imperial War Museum鈥檚 free series, Making a New World, opens tomorrow, including a Room of Voices called 鈥淚 Was There.鈥� Recordings of people who lived through the Great War, made towards the end of their lives. It鈥檚 always striking how few middle class voices survived: officers led from the front.

I was taken with William Littleboy鈥檚. 鈥淥n Armistice Day, a band came out, played very slowly, obviously from memory, the hymn, Now Thank We All Our God.鈥� Armistice Day didn鈥檛 immediately benefit William. He remained in prison, a conscientious objector.

One of many privileges of having my hundred-year-old father live with us is his memories from earliest childhood. The bad-tempered cook hiding a lump of coal in everyone鈥檚 porridge before quitting her post. Singing in the first recording of Nine Lessons and Carols from King鈥檚 Cambridge, ninety years ago this Christmas Eve.

Also a conscientious objector, he appeared on this programme on the anniversary of D-Day. How vivid his senses remain! The nightingales singing with such sweet melody, as the Medical Corps waited anxiously to embark for Normandy. His first sight of the other shore, a young Canadian floating in the sea.

A few weeks ago I started publishing a daily blog about our daughter鈥檚 illness, going back twenty years. I committed almost nothing to paper at the time. But every day, more and more comes back to me. What my brother was wearing on Boxing Night, 2001. The exact words my daughter used when she begged to me rescue her from hospital.

Like most people, I鈥檝e forgotten the vast majority of my life. But not what matters. I still hear, verbatim, the words spoken by someone I barely knew, one Monday morning in Oxford in early February 1977. 鈥淵ou do realise I鈥檓 madly in love with you.鈥� Reader, I married him.

When I was a teenager I challenged an older Christian. How can we have confidence in the Gospels? They weren鈥檛 written till years afterwards; no one made notes at the time; they all describe different details.

In her introduction to The Man Born to be King, Dorothy Sayers dismisses the ink and acrimony expended by scholars on the different accounts of the Resurrection. The playwright, she says, 鈥渋s often surprised to find how many apparent contradictions turn out not to be contradictions at all.鈥� Just what you鈥檇 expect, of eye-witness accounts. They make, she explains, 鈥渁 coherent narrative without the smallest contradiction or difficulty,鈥� if you simply 鈥渕ake a trifling effort to imagine the natural behaviour of a bunch of startled people.鈥�

Different witnesses relaying different details can attest to their authenticity.

Members of my family, reading my blog, recall apparently conflicting aspects of the same event, until we realise the viewpoints are compatible. The I Was There recordings are also fascinating for their differing perspectives. Did they dance in the streets, or weep? Was it a joyous occasion? Or tragic? An anti-climax? Or simply far too late...

It was all these things, of course.

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