Nostalgia can be a poisonous affectation. It’s all too easy to use the wistful, often wilful mis-remembrance of the past to reduce the past to a coddled egg; good to eat but with no future. Real history is troubling; often leads in two directions, and ambiguous to a fault. On the other hand, the sense of rootedness in a place, or in a community in which the two ideas often overlap, is foundational to our practise of being human. You’ll probably think I’ve lost the plot if I write about Cornbrash, Brandon Hill stone and Bath stone and yet the glimpse of a building made with any of these three will as good as a six figure OS grid reference. They would not just signify districts but the era they were built in and the likely social class of the people who lived in them. Add to that a dialect, a particular way of sounding a troubling “r” in Gloucestershire, or a single sentence in Bristolian would tie the speaker down to something like a parish. There’s a sawmill in Wick and when I go there, I could curl up on the counter like a cat – I feel so at home. This isn’t something you can fake. You’d have to live not just any lifetime, by my lifetime to pick up the resonances.
I understand this better now than ever as I’ve learned about plants, where they grow and what they prefer to grow in. As I child I learned to love lying under beech trees growing on a moss covered bank on the boundary of our grandparents’ smallholding. My mother’s whole vocabulary of local names was learned amongst the winding lanes of the Chilterns. We looked in vain as children to see what Granny Perrin’s nest was, and why our mother could see it when we couldn’t. Even the roads had their own language of shiny flint pebbles, and hiding in the depths of woods once worked by bodgers who turned chair legs and wheel backs was Margaret’s Beer Shop where we could drink cherryade as a treat. I came to know what I now understand as acid heath, on Rodway Hill as slowly I came to understand how localities have their own unique floras.
Mendip is famous for its abandoned lead mines and again there are plants that can survive heavy metal pollution and environments which have their own special designation, Calaminarian, which is how the calamine lotion that our mother dabbed on our chicken pox spots brought zinc from the ore into Mr Ladd, the chemist’s armoury. Nowadays my old friends are the pavement scoundrels, constantly harried by the council’s strimmers. The poor council workers don’t seem to know about tap roots and seeds, or annuals and biennials and so they knock em all down like skittles and within a fortnight they’re up again. Then, of course there’s the riverbank with its own royal flush of perfectly adapted plants. Stones, dialects and plants store the local memory as certainly as books. Footpaths and shortcuts, streams, hiding places abandoned dramlines and climbing trees marked our territory and as we spread our wings, our bikes were the means by which we invaded and occupied other peoples’ places.
So much, then, for a rather lyrical take on the sense of place. The Greeks might have dignified it as the genius loci but we were unconscious of our hefting. It was just home as far as we were concerned.
A couple of nights ago we watched Peter Hall’s film “Akenfield” which I’d seen years ago but completely forgotten. I read the source and inspiration for the film , Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield” when I was in my twenties, along with Henry Williamson’s long cycles of novels, and I read J A Baker’s book “The Peregrine” a little later. In truth I consumed voraciously just about any scraps of natural history writing I could lay my hands on. Akenfield is a groundbreaking oral history of rural Sussex at the beginning of the 20th century and both a celebration of the skills of farmworkers and denunciation of the appalling conditions in which they worked. The extractive philosophy of modern agriculture was cultured in the minds of landowners centuries before the first tractor appeared on the land. I watched most of the film near to tears.
But one of the happier lessons of the film was that whatever happened to them, the farm workers had song. They sang in church, they sang on army service in the first world war, they sang in pubs and they sang as they took the harvest in on wagons loaded high, with the children riding on top as a treat. I suddenly remembered that my sister and I had shared that triumphal ride in Stoke Row one hot summer’s day, and how insecure and prickly our perch was. It was the strangest feeling to recall the stooks and ricks of the days before the chequerboard plastic wrapped fields we see today. That overarching sense of history is disappearing and, because of our failure, we’ll never be able to bring it back.
Some forms of nostalgia are a positive waste of energy except perhaps that we still, we always will have song. Barely fifteen years ago I sat in the kitchen of a farmhouse in one of my parishes and watched, through the window, as a procession of combines, trailers and tractors drove along the lane, headlights blazing, to come in for supper and then go back to harvesting the fodder maize that feeds the cattle. Today we went for a drink in the pub in Doynton. The village has changed beyond recognition but if the flow of traffic could be staunched for a while a couple of horses and their riders persuaded to pass by and a rookery installed to provide the music. If a sunset could be organised to bathe the cornbrash walls with evening light and if the conversation dropped just a tiny bit in volume and we stepped outside, I think we could almost see the ancestors in the shadows.
Yet we still have song. Those who believe that their mission in life is to make life harder for us should beware of our spiritual and revolutionary songs of resistance. They too have a long and deeply local history; often rooted in the sense of place, hidden in the DNA of songs and carols that still speak deeply to the most irreligious of us. Of all the things I miss about my ministry it’s the raucous Christmas carol services, packed to the gills with people who were drawn back year by year into the old ways; the funerals where for a fleeting moment we could believe that all would be well and all manner of things would be well as we sang Abide with me. But perhaps most of all on Easter Eve when I was able to sing the exultet; a long plainsong solo hymn of hope for the coming year.
