This is a bit of a free-form post, I’m afraid. Stick with me and we’ll see where I get to. It’s really a jumble of thoughts I haven’t put in order, and comes in part from my mention a couple of nights ago of family tree research. It also comes from something that came in the post today.
Nearly ten years ago I first mentioned Arthur Berry’s Lament For the Lost Pubs of Burslem.
I mentioned that the piece had been printed in The Listener. Ten years later, I finally got hold of a copy of that edition of The Listener, the kind of magazine that just isn’t printed these days. As well as Arthur Berry, that edition also contained a short story by Beryl Bainbridge and a poem by Seamus Heaney.
I got to thinking about the Lament and why I liked it. I sometimes post similar things in this blog and my old one which, when I look back at them, seem to have striven for an elegiac quality. See, for example, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, from 2013.
I haven’t really written much about some of the material coming out of my family history. I only have the bare outlines of some of it, but it involves life in the Northumberland and County Durham pits, working the Cleveland iron-ore seam, agricultural labour in Hertfordshire, the slums of nineteenth-century Nottingham, death from Typhus in Cumberland, and more. There was also my Great-great-great-grandfather, John Heaney, invalided out of the Dragoons when he became too fat to sit on a horse. That’s all before we get to the twentieth century and. of course, we’re already twenty years into the twenty-first century: how did that happen?
Maybe what’s on my mind is to do with being an old fart, and the sense of time passing and worlds disappearing; the sense of loss of something that continually slips away from definition. I don’t mean that in a mordant, melancholic way, and I’m not going to go all Roy Batty on you. I think it has something to do with a sense that, all being well, someone in a century and a half will look back on my life in much the same way as I look back on the Mortons in Nottingham and feel an unbridgeable gap. They might find a copy of this blog or some of my other stuff, much as I wish my ancestors had left diaries and journals (one I know who did, destroyed them all before her death), and see me as something more than a name in the records, or a fading photograph in a tattered album.
I think it also has to do with both my kids now being adults and making their own ways in a world very different to the Derby and East Kilbride I grew up in, and the Edinburgh I started work in. I think also, and I’ve resisted writing this until now, part of it comes from the hidden stress of the past few months of the virus–an increased sense of personal mortality.
Hmmm. I probably ought to revisit this one and order my thoughts more.
***
Music: This is a modern folk song by Matt Armour dealing with much the same things as I’ve been pondering, but so much better. The song is sung unaccompanied in a Fife dialect, and all the better for that.
For the morn will be their day, what will be their way
What will they mak’ o’ the land, sea and sky?
Man, I’ve seen awf’y change, but it still seems gae strange
To look at my world through a young laddie’s eyes.
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