It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley – probably. Sadly, however, I am still stuck in Salterhebble, which is nearly as bad as being sleepless in Seattle, in its own way... “Stuck inside of Calderdale with a mobile phone again,” as Bob Zimmerframe might have put it.
All that is stopping me going home is the lack of someone’s signature on an official document. I have been waiting for this for two weeks now. I realise, of course, that signing official documents is no small thing. It must be done with due weight and consideration, and not undertaken lightly.
First, you have to go into the forest and gather some oak galls, then pound them in wine vinegar to make your ink; then you have to catch a goose, pluck one of its wing feathers, carve the stem of it into a nib shape with a very sharp knife (a pen knife, in fact) and stick it into hot sand, to harden it so that you can write with it. Finally, you need a sheet of stretched goats’ vellum, always assuming that there is a convenient stretched goat to hand.
You now have all you need to sign away someone’s life, as in the case of Charles I or Mary, Queen of Scots, or to draw up a will or a charter, or to record the daily round of baptisms, marriages and funerals in your parish. At least, that is how they used to do it in those dusty old parish registers I used to pore over in the Humberside County Record Office, documents that had lain in some East Yorkshire parish chest in the vestry for four hundred years or so, before I came to study family history.
Historians of the future (if any) studying my release from hospital will not have such a tactile experience. All I am waiting for is one signature on a laser-printed document. One sheet of A4 paper is all that stands between me and home. Well, that and the snow. Advent has decided to wear its traditional raiment again this year. White is the colour this season, lying crisp and cold on field and fold, discomfiting the sheep and the lowing beasts. And, in a slightly less biblical phrase, bringing travel chaos to West Yorkshire.
Despite the snow, though, my hospital gear has been delivered at home. We are now the proud loaners (but not owners) of a hospital bed, a commode, two banana boards, and a riser/recliner chair, the latter of which list has already been christened as a scratching post by Kitty. She likes the embossed, embroidered velour fabric, apparently. If she carries on, she is going the right way to end her days as a Davy Crockett hat.
The dogs have mixed reactions to the snow. Zak charges across the cricket field at Armitage Bridge, doing Charlie Chaplin-style skidding turns at every opportunity. Tig tolerates the snow, plodding through it, doing her “I’m a faithful old dog, I am” routine. It is amazing, though, how her speed increases at the proximity of home, a warm fire, and dog treats. Freddie hates the snow and ice, because it gets stuck in his fur and makes him cold, so half the time he worries at it with his teeth.
The snow’s been disrupting Debbie’s teaching, too. Her first ever class of examinees should have sat their test on Thursday night, but, because of the snow, it has been postponed for two weeks. So now the learners have two more weeks to forget what she has taught them. Oh well. I have also been studying. In my case, still reading “Four Quartets” as a devotional exercise. That phrase makes it sound like something unpleasant, like wearing a hair shirt or one of those spiked Opus Dei garters sported by Ruth Kelly and the scary albino monk from The Da Vinci Code. In fact, far from a penance, it has been a pleasure to re-read what I regard as the crowning achievement of T. S. Eliot’s poetic career, and to see new things in it. (I always think that the hallmark of a really great poem is that you can take something new from it at every reading.)
Last week I wrote about Little Gidding and the sense of community, and the week before about Burnt Norton and the importance of doing good when you have chance to. As Si Kahn puts it in his song “What You Do With What You’ve Got”
“It’s not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It’s not just what you’re given
It’s what you do with what you’ve got.”
Spookily enough, this week’s sermon in the hospital chapel featured Ivor Novello’s song “The Land of Might-Have-Been”. Since Novello wrote this ten years before Eliot and Emily Hale visited Burnt Norton, I wonder if there is any chance that Novello’s words were jingling residually around in Eliot’s brain, that day as he walked in the rose garden?
“Somewhere there’s another land
Diff’rent from this world below
Far more mercifully planned
Than the cruel place we know”
This week, I have been re-reading “East Coker”, and thinking of the importance of family. Eliot’s family originated there, and set out for the New World from that sleepy Somerset hamlet. I have actually been to East Coker church, where Eliot’s ashes are interred, following the same route as Eliot did when he visited:
“…the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village…”
In his own quest for his “roots”, he reaches the conclusion that
“In my beginning is my end”,
a sentiment which is revived, both in the poem itself and in his memorial stone in the church, as
“In my end is my beginning.”
In terms of my own family history, these lines (which Eliot adapted from the last words of Mary, Queen of Scots, coincidentally) have added resonance for me, because one of the things I have now had provisionally confirmed, during my long stay in hospital (though finding this out was neither the cause, purpose or intent of the stay) is the presence in my family history of Muscular Dystrophy, and the likelihood that it may indeed be the cause of my own underlying mobility problems.
It is potentially a hard thing to discover that the family you are proud of, the genetic tapestry which has produced you, over the centuries, may be flawed or holed, or unravelling at the edges. I have always drawn inner strength from the fact that I am descended from the Fenwicks, with their proud Jacobite tradition in the North-East, but some of them, undoubtedly, maybe even my own mother, passed on this debilitating gift to me. It is like finding that the water in a familiar and trusted well suddenly tastes brackish, but this is not the fault of the well-diggers. You can’t choose your relatives, and, however embarrassing your family are, they are still your family.
It has not been a sudden, blinding revelation, as I have lived with the encroaching effects of my legs not working properly since the late 1970s, in the days when I first began turning the parchment pages to find those elusive donors of my genetic profile. I had long suspected that the previous diagnosis of “a childhood polio” for my troubles was questionable, especially since no-one who was around in my childhood, including me, could ever remember me having had polio.
The Rudds, of course, my father’s stock, were all blissfully healthy Norfolk yokels. Well, as healthy as you could be in those days, what with rickets and an agricultural depression every other year. I could imagine them being like the dancers depicted in East Coker:
“Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth”
One such agricultural depression undoubtedly drove them to Hull, where there was trade, commerce and industry, and where you could be your own man and bid farewell to “turmut hoeing” in the fog and frost and touching your forelock to the Squire of Saham Toney. I have been to Saham Toney church, and stood on the very spot, before the altar, where my ancestors would have stood to be married, and imagined the village choir and the church band intoning rustic harmonies, but, sadly, there are no commemorative blue plaques there commemorating famous Rudds. Because there aren't any!
I think, though, that if I want my own true “East Coker” moment, it would not be travelling back to rural Norfolk, nor up to the Borders in search of Jacobite Fenwicks, it would be to go back to the wide suburban avenues of Hull, where my parents both lie. Hull has changed amazingly since I used to live there. It has undergone that process described by Eliot where:
“In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.”
But the cemetery behind Chanterlands Crematorium is relatively unchanged, with its trim acres of gravestones and its public memorials to people killed in the Hull Blitz and the R38 airship disaster, and if I want a timeless moment I will go there and stand by the rose tree that covers the ashes of my parents with its municipal shade, and wish them well in the realms of limitless light.
So far, God has been a bit absent from this Epiblog. This is partly because I know he wants something from me, but I don’t know what. He left a message, asking me to get back to him. So I am waiting until his purpose becomes clear. Like the reason why God should arrange for my family to pass me defective genes, it is one of those questions which I suspect I cannot answer at the moment, because my nose is too close to the tapestry to see the whole pattern.
It has been suggested that my purpose might have something to do with writing. It has also been suggested (by my wife, actually) that I have no purpose whatsoever, and that when I come home from hospital, I will just be a supernumerary mouth to feed, and a drain on the household resources! Any suggestions as to what I could do, would be gratefully received, especially as going home in a wheelchair makes me feel a lot less useful than I used to be. Will I ever stand on the shores of Kilbrannan Sound again? I know, of course, that it is better to have a full life than a happy one, and that unalloyed joy would soon pale, as Prince Harry says in Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1
“If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work”
But it would be good to think that something pleasant lies ahead, after 2010.
Perhaps I could be a prophet, like John the Baptist, living in the wilderness on wild honey and locusts. I am not too sure about the locusts, though: I prefer my grasshoppers free-range. I think I would have to have a pact with the locusts similar to the one I currently have with the fish. If I don’t eat them, they won’t eat me. Wearing a suit of camel hair sounds quite swish though. Hardly vegan, of course, unless the camel died of natural causes, and there is the problem of what to do with the humps. But I am sure that a talented designer could make Humphrey’s humps and mine coincide in the making up of the garment.
Whatever I do, I mustn’t lose sight of the objective. We heard today in the sermon about how God apparently strives in his kingdom to bring about a state of perfection between man and nature:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
And that, I guess, is what we are all looking for. Each of us is a small brick in the kingdom of God, and eventually, every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low. What my part is in making the crooked straight and the rough places plain, I do not know. In the meantime, though, in this quiet period before Christmas, for me at least, I will draw sustenance from my roots and prepare myself for what happens next. As for 2011, I will have to draw on Eliot one last time, for now.
“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise”
And in the meantime, I will post a picture of a leopard and a wolf enjoying each other's company. Well, almost. And in the meantime, as it almost says in the Book of Timothy, God is working his porpoise out.
No comments:
Post a Comment