Autobiographies and Budapest.

Autobiographies are tricky things. You wouldn't include what you want to keep secret, and would tell your own version of events favourably to you. So they are not the whole truth and may be nothing like the truth. The trouble is we tell ourselves our own autobiographies in our heads, in denial of uncomfortable bits of truth, blaming ourselves for nothing or everything.

I found Sheila Handcock's autobiography The Two of Us touching last year, her description of her life with her husband John Thaw, and his death. The second volume now out is Just Me. I have found it hard going until she arrived in Budapest, on a singles tour. Her account is self mocking, which helps her be more honest than usual. She asks awkward questions, and is not satisfied with unsatisfactory answers. And this embarrassed her fellow travellers, she thought.

So what about Budapest? Her one week tour gave her no answers, just things that people were not saying. First a fellow traveller from Halifax spoke disrespectfully about 'Pakis' and she challenged him: that led to an uncomfortable discussion about immigration. Then she visited and off-tour museum of the secret police, where torture implements were on show and secret files. She asked a guide, who would not talk about it since members of her family had been incarcerated and tortured there.

Unsatisfied, she stayed on a further week. She found the Holocaust Memorial Museum and was greatly moved by its contents, photographs by zealous Nazis of the selection and the whole killing machine. Children being selected for death. Murder on an industrial scale. But no one in Budapest would talk about it; better to pretend it had not happened.

The museums revealed the meaning of public statues that had puzzled her - shoes by the river; she found these commemorated those who had been shot there and pushed in the river. Those who had resisted. Those who had tried and been unsupported.

Sheila had been open to new understanding, and pursued socially difficult knowledge in spite of discouragement. That otherwise civilised people can turn on their fellows so terribly; and that otherwise caring family folk can turn a blind eye so easily. In considering our own autobiographical accounts, there will be things we find uncomfortable, and must not be met with silence but addressed. When did we not support a victim or face a bully, even in some much less offensive situation? And more importantly, how have we learnt from our past so that what kind of people we are, and will be, is transformed.