Thursday, March 8, 2012

Beginnings

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. / Through the unknown, remembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning . . . TS ELIOT Four Quartets: Little Gidding

Burnham Mill in 1947

I was born on 13 November 1954 in a remote and obscure corner of Lincolnshire called The Isle of Axholme. Before the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden drained the area in the early seventeenth century, the wild and inbred natives clustered in low hilltop settlements on an archipelago of small islands surrounded by bog and fen. Even when I was growing up there in the 1950s and 60s, there was still a strong feeling of isolation and apartness. And you couldn't get more isolated than my childhood home. Burnham Mill stood on its own on the high ground between the hamlet of Burnham and the village of Haxey — many miles from the nearest town, Gainsborough, where I later went to grammar school. My father was the miller, my mother did the bookkeeping, and my father's unmarried sister lived in the mill house and kept pigs and chickens and a small herd of Jersey cows.

So, as you can see, I had a rural childhood. Because I grew up in such a lonely spot, I was used to my own company, and would quite happily entertain myself for days on end — walking the fields, watching birds, reading voraciously, writing poems, banging a tennis ball against the brick outhouse wall. I was independent, but did have a small and valued circle of mates (I always preferred a few, close friends to a knockabout crowd, and still do to this day). With my pals I did all the things that country-bred boys did then: climbed trees, made dens in the woods, went birds' nesting, fished the lakes without a permit, camped in the summer, biked everywhere — and later fantasised about taking girls (that strange and exotic species) into the long grass of the overgrown, disused railway embankment. Though what we would have done with them there I don't think we had the faintest idea.

This all sounds idyllic, and, looking back, to some extent it was. However, above the sun-kissed cornfields and red pantile cottage roofs of my country childhood, dark clouds permanently drifted. An authoritarian and manically religious father had brought about in me vague feelings of fear and guilt which were almost paralysing at times. And I was also stricken with an acute self-consciousness which took many years to subside. Nevertheless, by my mid to late teens I was growing into myself, becoming a lot more confident — and getting ready to rock and roll.

8 comments:

  1. Ah, fathers. (Of course, for those of us of that other species, it seems mothers are more the issue.) I am right now reading Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, and have come to a critical point between father and son. The son, it seems has a brilliance for music, but not at all for ordinary business life. The father's reaction to this so far is abrupt, to say the least, and often cruel. I recognize this in my father's relationship to his father, and in you to yours. It's interesting, too, for me me to read what you write in light of your comment on Horst Beckmann's Hat. Of course I had my father's relationship to his authoritarian father much in mind in writing the story, for that relationship profoundly affected us all. You made a lucky escape, it seems to me. You understand, after all, "that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless." We can all be glad for it.

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  2. Thanks for your comment, Susan. I adore 'Buddenbrooks' — indeed, I love all Thomas Mann's works.

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  3. I have only just arrived here, but I can see that your journey will open many doors for me.

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  4. I love your writing. I'm grateful for these peeks into your inner workings, and past experiences, seeing what makes you tick. I guess it is easy to romanticize the past, even though we know it was painful in some ways, or just downright uninteresting at the time (for me sometimes, until I began to wake up to what was there all those years ago). The rich loam of your life is always worth exploring. Thanks for testifying here, I am loving it.

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  5. Very interesting , Robert, with beautiful images of your rural childhood. As the Eliot poem reminds us, our souls are destined to return to the place where the journey began, to walk through the unknown but remembered gate, to explore our beginnings in what may be "the last of earth left to discover." It takes many years, I think, to connect the dots, to become conscious of the fact that the child, with all of his experiences, is still walking with us on this little adventure.

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  6. Thanks Friko! If anything I write here opens any doors for others, it's an immense privilege for me to be a part of this.

    Thanks for your warm comments, Ruth. In many ways I think a troubled childhood rather than a cloud-free one can prove a rich resource later in life — providing it didn't screw you up completely.

    "It takes many years, I think, to connect the dots, to become conscious of the fact that the child, with all of his experiences, is still walking with us on this little adventure." Beautifully put, George. I feel this very much. I am both that child and not that child.

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  7. Very enjoyable reminiscence (by God, I don't think I've ever been able to write that word without the spell-checker's assistance!) here, SW. I relate to almost all of it very well - my Antipodean version was mangroves, wetlands and a one-teacher school... Looking forward to learning more about what those dark clouds carried with them...

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  8. Thanks for this, Goat! Isolation's the same despite the geography, isn't it? Though a few mangroves in my childhood would have been cool.

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