92: Penny Bernard

Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Penny Bernard who gets to wallow in heritage and nostalgia as part of her job translating archaeology for school audiences.

We discover that one silver lining in what has been a challenging year for everybody is that Penny has been able to follow her dream of going to art college. We also learn about her family Tudor dinner party and how she finds that children are better at following Covid guidelines than adults.

Penny talks about how her family defines itself by its myths and histories, but she explains why this can be suffocating. She can trace her ancestry back to Somerset, and we learn that she was once kidnapped in Albania. Her earliest memory involves forget-me-nots and a traumatic memory involving wet hair, and she tells me why she thinks memory is an artful lie.

Penny talks about what happened when she found her younger diaries and how myopic they could be, and she reflects on how there are dangers with relying on Facebook to tell us what we did in the past when that functions as a shop front.

Penny grew up in Bermuda and loved being in the water, and she explains that she has reservations about going back as it might spoil her memories from the time. England when she returned was not like a Ladybird book as she was expecting, and she tells me why she hated Surrey and likes the notion of the glamorous outsider.

We talk about her panto group and her motivations and passion for writing and performing that every year, giving old fairy tales a new twist. Penny reveals that at school she played Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca and she talks about how she was cross with the Mills & Boon pastiche element of the latest Netflix version.

We learn why Penny looks back on her time at St. Andrews with horror and she find out about the nightmare she had the night before she met her husband (previous guest Simon Kirchin) and why friends and family were convinced this was the man she should marry.

Penny talks about hypnotherapy and how it made her confront some unhappy memories for the first time and how it is not possible to feel nostalgic about them but that it is important to seize back the narrative.

At the end of the interview we learn that Penny has stayed in touch with people from school with whom she has shared trauma and we learn why she is starting to look forward more than she used to, and why her greatest contribution to humanity is instigating the building of proper loos in Stonehenge.
Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and Penny Bernard and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.