The weather has been nothing to write home about, and indeed there was no need to write home about it, since we were already at home, and experiencing it at first hand. So at least I saved the cost of a stamp. Sometimes it has been cold and windy, sometimes cold and raining, and sometimes, just for a change, cold, windy and raining. In between times, on the odd bright days like today, Matilda does her daily scuttle out onto the decking, cowers down, looks around, craning her neck, eyes wide with a mixture of terror and curiosity, then scuttles back in again, when something scary happens, such as the wind blowing the branches about.
Underneath, though, under all the dead leaves and the blown-over pots and the fallen branches and the plastic greenhouse still resting at a drunken angle where the wind shook it about then tossed it aside, something is stirring. Something not unlike Spring. At the moment, it’s just a twinkling of an inkling, but there’s a definite sense, some mornings when I look out of my window as I’m transferring into my wheelchair, of the cogs having moved, the gears having shifted. I’ve even seen one or two squirrels scooting about along the bare branches, looking for food. The birds, too, have been busy at the bird feeder, with many small tits helping themselves to the contents. [Google: do you even read this stuff?]
Matilda’s default position, her favourite place at the moment, when she’s not curled up in what is now beginning to be referred to as “her” armchair with Big Mouse and Flat Eric, (her sum total of toys having recently been increased by 100% over Christmas), is just inside the conservatory door, watching the birds and squirrels, where she stays for hours. It’s become known as Cat TV, as in “Matilda’s watching Cat TV again.”
We were all grateful for Christmas, which has turned out, materially and financially, to be considerably better than we feared at one time, and so far, touching wood as I type this, nothing new seems to have fallen off the camper van recently. Obviously, there will be changes and challenges ahead, we’re not out of the woods yet, but at least we have a few quiet days of refuge before it all starts up again.
Unfortunately, the news on the Elvis front isn’t so positive. He’s still pretty much the same, and we’ve agreed with Kerrie to leave him at Danewalk until after the New Year – he’s due to go back to the vet next week, and if the vet signs him off, then he’ll be dropped off with us on the way back. That’s the plan, at the moment, anyway. The idea is that will still give him a few more days to bond with us before term starts again and it all kicks off. It’s very frustrating, but we have to do what’s best for the dog. He’s obviously not responding well to the English winter, but then which of us is? The other day when I rang to check on his progress, Kerrie said that he’d just put himself to bed in their laundry basket, which seems to me quite an intelligent way of keeping out of the draughts. I may even try it myself.
Once again, as with last week, I have no particular witty badinage or dialogue to report as having passed between myself and my wife, we have both been too busy re-charging our batteries and over-indulging for that sort of thing. Although I am normally the cook of the house, and as such, was responsible for the Mock Turkey or “Murkey” Christmas dinner, we did, this week, actually co-operate on a meal and cooked several elements of it together. A very fraught experience, which is unlikely to be repeated any time soon! Though the meal itself (spinach curry, onion bhajis, apple and cilantro chutney, and mushroom rice) turned out fine.
For me, it’s been a bit of a strange week as well. I have been doing stuff which I want to do, instead of stuff I have to do, which is great, and I could easily get used to it, except that it will come as a rude awakening when I have to get back to normal. Also, I have tried to enjoy the week as much as I can, though it has been overshadowed by the fact that tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, the worst night of the whole year. I have never understood why people celebrate New Year’s Eve. I have watched its approach this year with a mixture of loathing and trepidation. I have never much minded being alone at Christmas, because it’s sort of a holy time – difficult to explain, but not in the conventional sense – a contemplative time. Before Deb and I got together, I spent some truly memorable, truly peaceful Christmases entirely on my own, including one memorable occasion when I did my year-end accounts on Christmas day!
But New Year’s Eve is a different beast. It’s the gateway, the Hellmouth through which we have to be harrowed to be able to enjoy next Spring and Summer. It’s got all of the enforced, compulsory bonhomie of the worst excesses of commercial Christmas, without any of the redeeming features of that festival. It’s another year to add to the burden of years you carry on your back, it’s a time to reflect on all that you set out to do a year ago, and have failed to achieve, and it’s, above all, a time when the ghosts and regrets and the people and animals who are no longer with you cluster round and come back to haunt you. I’m not surprised that, faced with that lot, people choose to get hammered to dull the pain. And it carries with it the inevitability of mortality.
But surely, you are probably saying, it’s also a time for looking forward, for planning new things? That’s as maybe, but it’s not much of a compensation, especially in this miserable, cruel, penny-pinching, nasty little country with its inept, evil and stupid government, and the economy on the skids, sliding ever further down the slope of the valley of death. And – to a certain extent – while I will still dream and have dreams, it does become very wearing, very deterring, when you look back and think what high hopes you had – of helping to re-home animals, for instance, or of trying to combat homelessness – and you realise that your impact on those two topics alone has been minimal to non-existent. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”, as Yeats said.
There have been some brief sparks of light, of goodness, in all the darkness and despair: 10-year old Grace McNulty of Wakefield, who lost her father in an accident in August, decided to get her mum to open up their café at Christmas and serve meals to 150 homeless people as a memorial to him. I wish I had a similar capability within me for making good things out of the emptiness and futility that sometimes besets me.
So, if you are looking for an uplifting message to take forward into the new year, I’m afraid I don’t have one. The best I can come up with is “close ranks, and carry on” but that doesn’t really buck you up when you know you’re potentially marching into an artillery barrage and barbed wire. None of us likes this crazy war, Wilmot.
Or rather, this phoney war. I call it that because this business of just doing what I want to do pleasant enough as it’s been is not sustainable and must come to an end, soon. Still, even with New Year’s Eve hanging over me, I’ve done some interesting stuff this week. Interesting to me anyway. Because of that thing about the world going to end, according to the Mayans, I started reviewing my own life, last week, as I wrote about at the time, wondering what, if anything, people would say about me, think of me, remember of me. The Mayans proved to be a busted flush, as we all know, but the process that they kicked off has led to me this week dragging out and attempting to organise all of the family history material that I’ve accumulated but not had time to do anything with.
Therefore, instead of doing accounts and invoicing people and writing the “new titles” page for the web site, this week, I’ve had my head stuck in the archives. And I have made some spectacular progress. Of course, to many people, family history is as dull as the proverbial ditchwater, and of no interest whatsoever. Yet it’s also social history, the history of the sort of “unwritten” people who didn’t get to feature in governments or official documents. I’ve been hooked on doing family history, and have researched the family in a ramshackle way, ever since the day I saw my great-uncle Harry’s name cast into the bronze panel of the war memorial at Brough crossroads, and began to wonder what the letters R.F.A. stood for, and where and why he had died in 1917. That particular journey led me, after many footsteps, to the military cemetery at Etaples, France, with its sad acres of Portland stone headstones, stretching away over the landscaped sward to the horizon in all directions. As Blake said – I have given you the end of a golden string, only roll it into a ball… I am the sort of person who can never resist following a loose thread to see where it leads.
And family history is so damn easy these days. Even though I am not one of those who says disparagingly that “everything is on line” – it isn’t, and some of what is there has to be treated with care and respect – yet the difference between the olden days (1980) when I first started doing family history, and now, is quite remarkable in some cases. Instead of having to go to the actual repositories, a great deal of them have now put at least the catalogue and in some cases, the primary records themselves, on line. So it was that, in a space of about three hours of googling, searching and downloading this week, I now have a complete record, with crew lists, ship numbers and owners, of every trawler in which my Great-Grandfather, Thomas Henry Rudd sailed out of Hull between about 1884 and his death in 1906. Why is this important, in any wider sense? (I can almost hear Debbie’s famous comment on The Mary Rose – “who cares why it sank?” – echoing in the background).
It’s important, I think, for the light it sheds on the trawling industry generally. Looking at the lists, year on year, it’s obvious that there was no set career path. He starts off by being listed as a fourth hand, then works his way up to third hand, bosun, second hand, and skipper. But then we see him going to sea as second hand or bosun in ships he’d previously skippered, so it’s pretty obvious that the owners must have sort of said “you, you and you, take that ship to Iceland” or words to that effect, and the crew were happy to grab whatever came along. There’s also an ever-present sense of the danger of fishing in the North Sea in a side-winding steam trawler. The six-monthly returns are required to mention any major incidents, and stories of masts crashing down, people being washed overboard, engine failures 180 miles off Spurn, and collisions in fog are all there, all in ships Thomas Henry was on at the time. There is even a case of an engineer being caught up in the ship’s engine while repairing it, and dying as a result.
Whatever else he may have been, Thomas Henry must have been both tough and resourceful. Maybe a small tiny echo of the resourceful gene has been handed down to me, I don’t know, but as far as going to sea is concerned, these days I draw the line at the Arran Ferry.
I also managed to find out, in passing, though this was much more recent history, the source of the bomb that demolished the houses on the opposite side of Alexandra Terrace where I used to live in Hull, from 1959-1965. That bomb site opposite our house was my daily vista and playground. In winter, we played football on it, and on Guy Fawkes night, a huge communal bonfire used to blaze on it. In summer, it was our version of Lords, or the Oval (or – more likely – Headingley) with wickets painted in whitewash on the factory wall, and a certain degree of care had to be employed when batting, so as not to hit any of the washing on the communal washing lines, or to smash any windows. The uncertain bounce of a tennis ball on cracked concrete also meant that, if you wanted to spend any time as all at the crease, you had to develop the forward defensive stroke, pretty much the pre-requisite for batting anywhere in England, actually, since many of the wickets even on county grounds can be a bit bomb-sitey on occasions.
It must have been a very different, very claustrophobic terrace when, instead of that wide open space opposite our front door, there would have been another row of houses facing us. All of that complicated matrix of streets that huddled between Alexandra Dock, the Railway and the ceaseless traffic grinding along Hedon Road were narrow, small, dark little houses, almost jammed in back to back, all built en masse in the 1880s to barracks the army of workers needed to keep the docks and the railway fed with labour. So in a sense, that unknown airman of Luftflotte III who erased a row of eight houses with a single bomb on the night of 7th May 1941 did us a favour, giving us a relatively open space for our games 18 years later, though I doubt any of the inhabitants of numbers 9-16 Alexandra Terrace would have thanked him. They were probably aiming for the docks, or the railway; the former would be an undershoot, the latter an overshoot, but on the other hand, it may have been a random jettison. Hull was a favourite place to get rid of any left-over bombs for Nazi planes which had just been raiding Sheffield or Bradford, Manchester or Leeds. On balance I think it’s more likely to have been a deliberate attack in this case, though, because of the significance of the date. Between 7th and 9th May 1941, Hull suffered its most severe concerted attacks of the whole war; hundreds of people were killed, several air raid shelters suffered direct hits, and the entire gas and telephone systems of the city were out of action for many hours.
I guess that, coming from that kind of area, with those kinds of ancestors, if you believe that we are all a product of our own and our family’s past, I ought to be made of tougher stuff, and not sitting here today feeling so wimpy about the future. New Year’s Eve seemed a much more certain time, back in those days, when I was allowed to sit up and listen to all the ships in Alex Dock blowing their hooters on the stroke of midnight. All I can say now is that maybe if I didn’t have all those ghostly generations marching behind me and with me, I’d probably be even more of a gibbering wreck! I do take something from them though. I take the post-war zeal of the people who rebuilt our country on the bombsites; I take the determination to build a new Jerusalem in England’s not so green and not so pleasant land. Those are givens. But I still can’t feel in any way confident about 2013. As far as the future is concerned, God knows. Which is, rather neatly, the title given by Minnie Louise Haskins to her poem that was used by George VI in his Christmas broadcast to the Empire in 1939:
“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.”
I have to say that, for me, at the moment, the most difficult bit of that would be the bit about “finding the hand of God”, but maybe I’ve just been looking in the wrong places.
Today is the feast of St Egwin, whose name at first calls to mind an Anglo-Saxon typo, but was in fact a person in his own right. Born of what passed for royal blood in the 7th century, Egwin entered a monastery and was enthusiastically received by royalty, clergy and the people as the bishop of Worcester. As a bishop he was apparently known as a protector of orphans and the widowed and a fair judge. This is all straight up-and-down stuff if you are going to be a Saint, of course.
The clergy, however, saw him as overly strict, and brought a case against him. Bitter resentments arose, and Egwin made his way to Rome to present his case to Pope Constantine. The case against Egwin was examined and annulled. I have to say that at this point I am starting to warm to Egwin, since one of the few remaining pleasures in my own life is proving people wrong.
Upon his return to England, he founded Evesham Abbey, which became one of the great Benedictine houses of medieval England. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who had reportedly shown Egwin where a church should be built. He died at the Abbey on December 30, in the year 717. The standard hagiography reports that, following his burial, many miracles were attributed to him; the blind could see, the deaf could hear, the sick were healed. So far, so saintly. We could do with a few more like him today. It would certainly ease the burden on the NHS.
Having contemplated St Egwin, I think I have probably come to a conclusion. I don’t mean that I have decided anything, far from it. Not that sort of conclusion, just an ending. St Eggnog the Unready didn’t, I am afraid, inspire me to any great revelations.
Still, once we’ve got through New Year’s Heave, with all its emotional pitfalls and Heffalump traps, there are some potential bright spots on the horizon. It is getting lighter in the afternoons. This will be my first New Year’s Eve since Kitty died, and also our first one with Matilda. Seasons turn, things change. It can’t stay this cold for ever. Spring is coming. We just have to keep holding on, and hoping. Come on then, you ragtag bag of ancestors, get fell in! Lend me your ganseys and your oilskins. Close ranks, and carry on. Forward, the armoured brigade. Tread gladly into the night, and head for the breaking of day in the lone East. Keep tight hold of your dreams, because there are people out there who would take them away from you if they could. I may not be able to find the hand of God, but at least I’m still looking. Meanwhile, yes, add another year to my own ancestral brackets, but let’s leave the right bracket open for a while yet, if possible, please.
Happy New Year, everybody, and may it turn out to be, if not better than we hoped, at least not as bad as we feared.
