Epiblog for The First Sunday After Trinity

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the departure of Owen back to Wales and the official end of summer, as the weather once more turns to storm and tempest, and no more Bank Holidays now til the end of August, the focus has once more turned to work inside the house, and catching up on the ever-present paperwork and the to-do list.

Kitty’s “to-do” list probably reads something like A) wake up B) have breakfast C) snooze by the fire D) repeat steps A, B, and C, above, as necessary. She’s been aided in this by the fact that we, too, have been feeling the cold enough to re-light the stove. As I sit typing this, for the second week running, I’m wearing a fleece top, a hat and a scarf indoors, although at the moment I don’t actually have a hot water bottle [that may change, though, later].

We haven’t seen much of Zak and Freddie, the weather keeping them nearer to home, or rather keeping Granny nearer home, which amounts to the same thing, since where she goes, they go.

My unofficial menagerie has dwindled to a few birds, the jay being notable by its presence, and Isaiah the squirrel, who has been visiting every day to take advantage of Freddie’s being elsewhere and raid the bird food. Brenda hasn’t actually been seen in person for a few weeks now, but someone or something comes and eats the food in the early hours of the morning. I hope it’s still Brenda, but I am so knackered by the end of the day these days that sitting up and watching for badgers til the early hours is just not on the cards at the moment. I keep the faith, though, and keep on putting out the food, I hope she gets at least some of it.

Debbie’s been busy catching up as well, now that half-term is upon us. However, we have still managed some house and garden related tasks. We’ve been to the garden centre and replaced some lost plants. Possibly most importantly, from the point of view of my mobility, Debbie, and later Jonathan and, indeed, Granny, bless her, moved the massive stack of old bricks down the side of Colin’s so that I can, now, get all the way out of the drive of our side, across the front of the house, down Colin’s side, and, with the addition of a decking ramp (to be constructed), into the garden for the first time in two years. I’m looking forward to planting the new Ceanothus near Russell’s mosaic, as that was one of the things on my hospital “bucket list”.

I’ve also planted some herbs in seed trays and they’re currently in the process (I hope) of germinating in the collapsible polythene greenhouse. If the weather forecast for next week is to be believed, though, we’d better watch out that it doesn’t live up to its name!

We’ve also been moving more stuff around in the creation of my new downstairs “office”, and it was in the course of one of these sessions of going through old stuff and sorting it out into the categories of “keep” or “ditch” that I found several copies of a massive family tree that I’d drawn out in 1979, one that goes back, in fact, to 1679, on one of its lines. Since I haven’t been able to get to any of my family history research stuff since before I was ill (first, because I was too busy, then because I was ill, then because I couldn’t get upstairs, then – after Owen fixed that one – because I was too busy again) I looked at these with considerable interest. So much so, in fact, that I was tempted into going online and augmenting the detail with new stuff. It’s a common misconception, though, that family history is all available on line these days, it only really applies to the post-1837 civil registration GRO indexes and the censuses, 1841 to 1911. Once you get beyond that, you still have to go back to the county record office and look at the original records (or maybe microfilms of them) for Barton in the Beans or Great Snoring or East Coker, unless you’re fortunate enough to find someone else has already done it.

I was quite impressed, though I say so myself, with the amount of legwork I’d done, back in the days when the internet was just a glimmer in Bill Gates’s eye and the TV was black and white and only on three days a week, and Ena Sharples was still stuck under the viaduct in Corrie. [That’s “Corrie” as in Coronation Street, not the small village on the Isle of Arran, by the way. That Corrie doesn’t have a viaduct, although it does have a wooden seal, perched on a rock in the harbour].

Once again, I was struck by the dichotomy between the two halves of my own particular makeup – the Rudds, on my father’s side, a large, sprawling family, originating in Downham Market, Fordham, and Hilgay Fen, drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, by the thriving, bustling, boom town of Hull in the mid-Victorian era, then to the docks, in the instance of great-uncle Ernie, who rose to be secretary of the Humber Amalgamated Steam Trawler Engineers and Firemen’s Union, and even in some cases, to the waves themselves, in the case of my great-grandfather, who was buried at sea after dying on board his ship, far from his home on Hessle Road, off the coast of Morocco, in 1906.

The Fenwicks and the Walkers were, by contrast, largely landlubbers, with the exception of Thomas Fenwick, who became a Humber Pilot. They were useful things like plumbers, glaziers and bricklayers, and, lawdy lawdy, how we could do with some of them (or at least their genes) right now. They were things like postmen and policemen and ploughmen, “farm servants” and grooms. They came, and tilled the soil, and lay beneath, as Tennyson might have said, in fact did say, but not specifically about my ancestors. Yet it was this, the more socially-acceptable side of the family tree (the Rudds were always viewed slightly as ne’er-do-wells) that supplied, somewhere along the line, the faulty, wonky, genetic mapping that has now ended me up in this wheelchair.

And which, if truth is told, probably mean that my own stay on the family tree, before I fall off the twig, is perhaps going to be potentially shorter than it otherwise might have been. I’ve been feeling my place in history fairly keenly since I rediscovered this document, fascinating as it is, sometimes when you look at the family tree you can feel the weight of all those dead people up above you, pressing down on your shoulders, the responsibility you carry. Especially at a time when we’re about to run up to the summer solstice and the turning of the year towards winter and darkness again, without really ever having had a summer. Maybe I should have drawn my pedigree diagram the other way up, with me at the top, then, like Newton, I could have been the one standing on the shoulders of giants.

Coincidentally, this week, I’ve been reading Lyndall Gordon’s book on T. S. Eliot. A truly excellent if weighty tome (literally, I have to prop it up on the pillow beside my head to read it in bed. I know I studied the man for three years already but in those days the lit crits were by people like Helen Gardner, F. O. Matthiessen, Northrop Frye, and B. C. Southam, so I thought I’d better catch up on something more recent, and of course this led to me re-reading once again the Four Quartets, especially, in view of the family history angle, and my ruminations last week on the nature of the English landscape, East Coker:

In my beginning is my end. 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.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Is an introduction that could have been specifically written with genealogists in mind, I suppose. As is the passage which says:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Sometimes, if I am fortunate, I can look at the family tree (or at least contemplate my place in it) and feel not terror at the demise of everybody and everything, but instead almost love, not necessarily for the family, but the sort of comfortable, generalised, accepting love that comes of long habituation. The same sort of frisson I can get (sad git that I am) from reading those copperplate names in the flyleaf of Grandma Walker’s Bible. The family tree – yours and mine – is both a symbol of transitory living and yet of permanence; a paradox, maybe the same type of eternal glory that Wordsworth saw “dwelling in the light of setting suns”. The moment comes, and goes, like fleeting sunlight. Or, in the words of Ezra Pound, in his Cantos:

A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide's change.

I suppose it comes down at last to accepting my place in history, such as it is: when Eliot says that

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored

I can empathise with that, since our house has appeared in several of those categories, having crumbled, been extended, destroyed and restored, but not necessarily in that order!

Anyway, it’s tired, I’m late, or vice versa, and I haven’t even touched on the Trinity yet, though maybe the idea of change creating permanence, or vice versa, has something to do with it. All I am capable of at this time of night is to say, along with John Henry Newman

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!

And top it off with tonight’s collect from the Online Lectionary, which apparently ends with Matthew 11.28-30

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Anyway, the accounts are calling and next week I am afraid it’s a case of back to the grind, labouring and being heavy laden with a vengeance; although I don’t have any fields to plough or nets to haul, as such, there is only something like three or four weeks of term left and then Debbie’s course will all end and then we’ll be back to the long financial drought of summer (whatever the actual drought’s doing) coupled with trying to sort out what new courses, and where, she’ll be teaching in September, so I’d better get cracking and sell some books. If it hadn’t been done already, (since it’s such a great title) I’d write one called “Collecting Dead Relatives”.

Or, as the car stickers entertainingly encapsulate it, “Genealogists Do It In Trees”.