Category Archives: heritage

Sunshine Nostalgia

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So summer is here in the UK.  Or Spring.  Or that weird spring-summer thing we have every year in May after the snow and before the rain – and the cloudy school holidays. 

It makes me feel nostalgic.  I smell coconut suncream and meaty barbeque smoke and I’m transported.  I’m a boy cycling up and down the street in front of our old house in Daisy Hill.  Those long summer Sunday nights before school, and the long weeks once school had broken up.  Or I’m a teenager in an un-tucked school shirt kicking a football around.  Or chatting up the girls and swigging beers at messy house-parties trying to look cool.

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Pre-Christmas Tradition

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My mother needs no excuses to start cleaning.  She spent my childhood shaking her head at my assembled plastic, toy soldiers, or tutting at my lined up matchbox cars.  But at this time of year I can almost – decades later – still hear her saying – ‘Right, it’s time to have a clear out and make room for the new toys you’ll be getting!’  Almost a bitter-sweet feeling combining cleaning my room with the promise of gifts!

And this week, as instinctive as a squirrel burying nuts, I began to itch with the sudden desire to overhaul my room.  Really I’m not getting that much stuff, but I like a good clear out.  that’s an understatement – I love a good clear out.  What is it that makes throwing things away feel so good?  Between ebay, the bin and the charity shop I reckon I’ve shifted about 40% of everything I own, if not more.  Add that to my clothing clear out of a couple of months ago. 

 

 

I mean, who needs a VCR these days? and if I get rid of the VCR then I don’t need thirty videos under my bed collecting dust.  I had virtually every love letter, bank statement, pay-slip and publishers rejection letter I had ever received!  Really. In a drawer whose bottom was slowly collapsing.

Life now feels simpler.  Need a stapler?  I know where it is – bottom shelf near the Delia Smith cookery bible.  Need a biro? there’s a cup full of them on top of the chest of drawers, need a dog-eared second-hand novel to read?  erm…go to the library I’ve thrown them all out.

I don’t think we need half of the things we keep for a rainy-day, and I doubt it’s just me who feels suffocated the more things I own (it possibly is just me, tell me it’s not just me!)

I need a notepad, a laptop and a camera.  A few different lenses and a sketch pad and pencil would be added cherries on the cake.  But two shelves full of shoes?  and every colour of craft paper you could dream of.  Well it’s all gone now anyway.  And if it doesn’t sell on ebay I’ll have to get a skip because it’s clogging up the dining room.  Does anybody else carry this Christmas-cleanup tradition from their childhood?  I used to empty all my cupboard space and under my bed and then on the day itself I’d get shiny new stuff to replace it all. 

I’ve never been one for buying needless stuff, I’m not materialistic, I’m a doer (I’d like to think) not a haver. But even I get swamped a bit by choices – shall I read, play computer games, watch DVDs, go on the internet, write, draw…or another million things.  And say I choose drawing, should I use pen, pencil, charcoal, oil pastel – and if I decide pen drawing, should it be on coloured paper, textured paper, in a sketch pad on loose sheets…and on and on until I’ve wasted half an hour setting up – then I start resenting the mess.

 Now I have one book next to me, one pile of stories to update and edit, and….no DVDs to watch (oops I think they ended up under my bed.)

So do you have any traditions for this time of year.  Do you feel the need to clean house and do those DIY jobs before the family descend?  And, for those deep thinkers, why the heck do I get a good feeling throwing stuff away/giving stuff away?  I can’t think of an anthropological reason why I should, but I feel superbly happy at my new sparse existence.

Thanks for reading, comments welcome!

A photo, print, poem and piece of prose

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Inspired by a suggestion from Lou at I Hug My Books, I’ve tried, in this post, to put together each various element that I am interested in - a photo, a piece of art, a story and a poem.  It was an interesting project, looking through my work and discovering that themes I use in my poetry, prose and art don’t always overlap, although history does make a regular appearance.  Obviously my photography becomes the hardest element if I pick a subject vaguely historical.  I overcame this by learning from one of my favourite photographers Willie Doherty and replicating the photos of Northern Ireland he makes that don’t show specifics but rather the eerie possible locations of secret meets, ambushes or bombings.  Comments are welcome, and thanks for looking.

Poems

Bandit Country
 
 
In Tullyvallen breezed grass is a crouching man
By the fence through the darkness shuffling.
A leaking gutter springing droplets, tapping
On the uneven concrete are footsteps,
The last few up to the back door.
 
In Tullyvallen a passing taxi driving revellers
Is a minibus full of farmers in balaclavas
Retribution from the other side of town
Did it pass and fade, or stop?
A nocturnal assassination – a dog’s howl.
 
 
Patrol
 
 
We marched out towards Newry
To the New Road we hurry
From Crossmaglen’s high walls
Out over dark moors.
Boots wet and blisters
Wind deafens our footfalls.
 
Lino Print and photograph:

Excerpt from a recently published piece of prose:

The New Road is ahead, the Lead Scout Dawson is to my right, he climbs the hedge first and crouches.  As I’m crossing he gives a signal – a raised hand – and we all drop low.  I’m astride of the hedge but I slip down on the intended side and click the safety off on my rifle.  The road is too quiet for this time in the morning.  Dawson dashes ahead and I keep an eye both ways whilst the others get over the hedge at different points.

Dawson and I move North West in the direction of Tullynavall.  I keep my heavy SLR on instant – safety off – we march with safety on in case someone trips.  I can feel the rest of the section behind me, I pray they stay quiet.  Dawson is listening to his ear-piece, there’s a Puma somewhere and it’s spotted something on the road, I become more alert, I breathe quietly, hold my rifle high, my eyes burn into the distance.

We stop.  The gun group with the GPMG has crossed the road further back they will try for high ground.  The rifle group is on our side and the command group is behind.  Dawson gives a thumb down to me, we freeze, he’s spotted something.  We wait; on the November breeze I hear  fragments of voices like jigsaw pieces.  Dawson pats the top of his helmet.  I go to him. I can feel the mud beneath me, giving under my weight, slipping.  Newry is still five and a half hours in the opposite direction.

The Lieutenant is watching through his rifle sight and me and Dawson are still on point.  Then the Lieutenant covers his face with his hands and points straight up the road.  It’s the signal to go; we run low and quick a few metres and then come down again.  My whole body feels like it’s shivering but my hands are steady, my mind is empty.  The mud is wet, the sky is grey, I take it all in.

Now I see what the Puma reported, a brown Ford Cortina, parked across one half of the road, and a figure, nothing more than a black bullet shaped silhouette, an illegal checkpoint.  Contact.  We can’t get closer to the car to see what’s beyond without compromising ourselves.  Signals are waved across the road and the bushes respond with a ‘ready to move’ gesture.

When an engagement begins you go blind to everything other than the threat ahead and your mates on each side of you.  Guns rattle in fits and jerks, and at different tempos, the GPMG is deeper, like a chain being run quickly over stone, like a ships anchor unravelling.  It is over as soon as it started, the fields echo gun-shots and the crows caw. 

‘Rifle group go,’ the Lieutenant shouts.  Assess, run, cover, fire, that’s our tactics.  ‘Gun group go.’  There is the rattle of fire again and then it is quiet. 

There are four dead at the roadblock, the Cortina is knackered.  The rifle group move on up the road, the gun group fans out and me and Dawson take a minute pretending to look observant whilst Sergeant Bloom and the lieutenant disarm the bodies and searched them.  You feel like shit afterwards, heavy and tired and hungry.  It was drizzling and we had a five hour romp to go.  Now my hands really are shaking, I click the safety on with numb fingers and lick my dry lips.

 

Our Age-Of-Distractions

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It’s an old topic for me, but do you ever take notice of the town you live in?  I admit it’s something I do more since getting older and hitting thirty.  Now I can’t get from point A to point B without standing for ten minutes and wondering what some palatial Victorian building used to be, before it was a Pound Shop.  I can’t pass a post box without taking a photo of it  and marvelling that it’s stood there for over 120 years with who knows how many different kinds of people popping post into it – World War One soldiers home on leave, Boar war wives posting fresh socks to South Africa and starving marchers walking from Jarrow in the thirties, sending a postcard back to tell their families they’re fine.

This week, with Manchester Meanders shortlisted for the MBA I discovered another shortlisted blog, The Pubs of Manchester  which has certainly reminded me of the heritage surrounding us.  Is it just me, of when you see the old black and whites of grumpy factories and bedraggled slate roofs, do you feel a sadness?  When I see old industrial scenes I always remember the smell and feel of my late granddad’s old house in Withington, the dusty tea leaf kind of smell and the nicotine stained walls.  Regime and uniformity were more important then, life was lived around rules, habits and schedules.  Even TV stuck to certain schedules instead of the constant squirt of drivel we know today.  I’m not saying the past was perfect (what a cliché) with its domestic abuse, drink driving, homophobia and other isms, but something about the fact a whole different world has almost completely disappeared makes me very unhappy.  I’m not going to start wailing about Carlos Tevez and todays demonstrations in New York, it’s just that the past is important and I feel like I have to search Greater Manchester myself trying to make some sense of it.  I have to try to patch together an idea of my ancestors and the lives they lived, and what they’ve passed on to me, meanwhile thanks to my comprehensive education I can talk for an hour on the Romans, the Vikings, the Nazis and the Spanish Armada.

I got in my car this afternoon, in this mood, and drove around Leigh, Westhoughton and Atherton, taking lots of photos and getting out and having a walk around too.  In Westhoughton there’s a huge area of desolation where there used to be open cast mining.  It’s the location, funnily enough of the oldest colliery shower-block in the world, and it’s still standing.  I walked into the mucky countryside which the council have tried to establish on top of the slag-heaps and theundulating ground and there was a fire burning somewhere and it was raining and it all felt very depressing and atmospheric. And in the middle behind a mesh of barbed wire and over a very abnormally orange stream, there was a lonesome telephone pole and four horses standing still in silence.  I know they’re not pit ponies, it’s the eighties since these mines were working, but it felt timeless.  I fed them an apple and wondered how many people had walked into this landscape and wondered what life would have been like before our age-of-distraction. 

Lots of cultures value the past and their ancestors but I get the feeling we’re not all that bothered.  So I took some photos and tried to make them look retro, and I wrote a poem for your Sunday evening pleasure.  Have you discovered your family’s history, your local heritage, your national past?  Do you marvel at signs left over from another era, or do you think it’s best to move on, plug your I-pod earphones in and try not to think about anything? (A bias question perhaps?)

History Lessons
 
 
The kind of history schools teach is shite
A history of facts and figures, and I ask what and why
And it is Hitler – and they say ‘so we don’t forget.’
Instead of our past they learn Jews and Krystalnacht
They can list Auschwitz deaths but not Pretoria’s or Peterloo’s
They don’t know that their granddads died, what they did, or didn’t do
So we won’t forget and repeat –  but – since World War Two
There’s been more killed than those five-point-two million Jews
From the Polish pogroms when those Jews got home to more abuse
And Poles living in their homes dispatched them in the woods.
Russian allies slipped four times as much at least
Up the Road of Bones, to the gulag cemeteries.
In fifties China Mao’s Great Leap Forward
And another forty million people dead.
Then across to Indonesia five or six million died
In the sixties – almost as many as Hitler’s genocide.
What do you call four million Vietnamese?
Burnt in napalm sweeps of jungle incinerating trees
Over borders in Cambodia two million died
At the hands of the Khmer Rouge nineteen seventy five.
 
So genocide has happened ever since around the globe
Genocide continued before the Jew’s had even got home
So why do British kids not know their history?
Of collapsing mines, closing mines, front lines and hard times
Of means tests, unions, rationing and picket lines
Of grandparents and their parents trying hard to make things better
So their offspring won’t have to work as hard and suffer
Forgotten – folks who built our roads, and tracks and trains and rivers
Working six days and on the seventh thanking God for all he’s given.
It’s sad about the Jews but what about voting, war and oppression
Empire, cotton, pubs and parks and LS Lowry’s impressions.
The school kids think evil comes in one shape and size
It’s German, dressed in black and has bespectacled eyes
And when America dropped bombs on Japan it couldn’t do otherwise
And likewise it was for freedom when they fought the Vietnamese
And now,  the war in Afghanistan must be right?
Who knows, since the history they teach in schools is shite.
 
Thanks for comments etc.

>Thoughts about heritage

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There’s a part of Bolton where I park when I don’t cycle in, it’s about fifteen minutes from the centre of town and the university where I work.  It is a series of streets of terraced housing, I don’t know how old, but late Victorian I guess.  There’s a mill, gasometers, a couple of other old bits and a few factories.  The area always reminds me of what the whole town must have looked like at one point and I can’t help thinking about the houses history.  This must all sound very boring, but the houses many of us live in have histories of their own, especially terrace streets.  Any one house might have seen brutal poverty at the end of the nineteenth century, family deaths during the First World War, and deaths in mining accidents in this area.  Deaths in the Second World War, unemployment during the depression, even bomb damage in the Second World War, and all manner of issues since then.  It just struck me that the framework we all live in predates us, and has existed around all kinds of lives, and whilst we think of it as ours, our house, our workplace, in another fifty years we might be forgotten about and very different lives be existing in ‘our’ places.
I was looking through some records of the Pretoria pit disaster – December 1910 – as some of my written work recently has been inspired by it, and I found that as I live in number thirteen on my street, a miner died whose home was number twelve and three miners died (possibly a father and two sons) at number fourteen.  This isn’t like standing in Durham Cathedral and thinking some Middle Ages carpenter worked on this or that, this is sitting in my own bedroom and trying to imagine the lives of someone sitting here a hundred years ago finding out about the death of four neighbours in one afternoon.  I wonder if that meant a husband did come home to this house? And sat dumbstruck in his chair, face still smeared with coal dust, hands bruised and chipped from hard work trying to work out what happened.  And maybe a mother had to hush her kids up in respect for the grieving through the walls.
We are stuffed full of information these days, internet, TV, film, novels, magazines, and I often wonder how before all of that when there was just the occasional newspaper and an oral tradition of stories and memories – what did people know that we’ve now forgotten?  I think they could tie themselves more to their own past, and to each other in a community.  I think they shared more experiences and that gave them unity and empathy.  I must admit I’m envious of lives lived with space and much less stimulus.  The focus of a hobby, the understanding of distance when many journeys had to be done on foot and the feeling of belonging to one place. 
So my question is; we’ve gained a lot, but have we lost anything to history?