Family History 2: Walking in the Land of the Blind

It's all very well my (patrilineal) grandfather documenting his history. But who will tell the stories of my father's mother or my mother's father?

While my mother's mother is still alive, I may yet portray her; but those two have crossed Lethe. Bar summoning my parents or other relatives to recollect their presences, amnesia sets round them. For me, their lives dissolve into myth forged by the scraps of what I understand about them.
How dim are the lights of memory?

(For reference, for the rest of the blog my father's mother will be referred to as sabta and my mother's father as grandpa.)
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Their stories have subtly informed my life. Before I get to that point, spare me a digression:

At a party at Tom C and Aisha's house last night, a guy called Richard, a Cambridge medievalist, asked me questions that avoided the obvious 'so what do you do?' Instead he wondered 'who were you before you were you?' He was intrigued to know how the respondent's sense of self had changed. All I could say was that it was difficult to segment my life that way; then I recounted my transition from sober, politically-interested secondary school student to more colourful and eccentric gap-year student. Not very satisfactory, but then the question is so vague. How can you get back to 'you' before you were you?

With each passing day, I inherit a set of stories from the former me, and I continue some of them, forget about or disinherit others. This is one of many ways in which inherited stories shape our view of life. (I lift phrasing from a review of a John Burnside novel; Burnside is fascinated by never-to-be-told narratives, much as Geoffrey Hill is with "the tongue's atrocities.")

One inherited story is of my grandpa and sabta as walkers. This story particularly interests me because, firstly, I am the only one of my brothers who takes great pleasure in walking; secondly, I find walking stokes the memory, and brands landscapes not only in the mind, but in the bones and muscle.

From the dark ages of my family history, I know that walking runs along two lines of my family. When I was five, I walked up the Eiffel Tower swiftly; dad said I had inherited "mountain goat genes" from my grandpa. Later, our parents would take us on many active holidays. While my brothers would set off on some high octane sport, I would often go walking with my dad, or both mum and dad, and enjoy the Alps or the coast of Corsica, and so on. Later too, I discovered that sabta had also been a walker.

She was born in Stryi in former eastern Galicia, now western Ukraine. She grew up not far from the Carpathian mountains, and walked there often in her youth, before she met my grandfather.

Somehow I imagine later, she took my dad walking. Or else, why did he walk more than my mum, whose father was such a 'mountain goat'? especially as my dad's girth is not so healthy? But I should ask, because maybe it's just that dad would walk a little more.

By all accounts, sabta was a wonderful woman. My mum says, "Most women don't like their mother-in-laws...but I'm very sad you never met her. She was so kind and considerate." Mum also remembers her phrase "Be careful what you possess, or it can come to possess you." I'm very interested in that maxim. One of the pleasure of walking is feeling disburdened from the weighty, dense properties of city.

As for Stryi, I am glad she got out. I once took a tour of Jagiellonian university in Krakov, where Copernicus studied. It's in former western Galicia, now Poland. At the end of our tour, the guide answered questions; somehow she got on to talking about her interest in helping out with the dire poverty in western Ukrainian cities like L'viv. Had she remained, that would have been her plight.

Also the bloodlands. The bloodlands were atrocious. Her eldest brother (she was one of six) died from the Nazis; and if it weren't for the Nazis, the Soviet deportations would have...
They leave me speechless.

My grandpa's story is also interesting. Like me, he studied English at Oxford. He was the first member of his family to go to university, and he went to Brasenose College. Towards the end of his degree, his already severe eczema (which I also have inherited) worsened and he got cataracts. He had an operation on his eyes. The procedure was risky in those days. The procedure sent him completely blind.

Darkly, it saved him. For he could not fight in the war. And he met my grandmother who was a nurse at a special hospital for the blind. To this day, my mum notes that granny (who she's currently looking after) always looked after her husband and put more care into him than any of her children.

Despite his blindness, he continued to enjoy walking (more strangely, he continued to enjoy art!). The absence of light affected his circadian rhythm and he often slept badly, but the rhythm of walking helped. The memory in the bones or along the blood in the legs, it's quite nourishing somehow.

And I've now walked in some of his favourite spots - Coniston Old Man in the Lake District, or across the South Downs Way near my grandparents' home in Sussex.
I owe my independent walking to him, and another (beyond the teachers on maybe half a dozen school trips - Snowdonia, the Atlas mountains near Marakesh in Morocco, the Lyke Wake Walk, northern Lake District, Siena to Rome). My grandpa interested mum's friend Jon B (who convinced her to become a doctor though he decided to study Literature). Jon was apparently interested in the links between blindness and literature - Milton's epic memory, his intensely otherwordly visual imagination; Aldous Huxley's doors of perception maybe; less likely Borges, but no doubt blindness helped Borges conjure impossible infinities.

Jon was willing to lend his cottage ('Curlew Cottage') in Hawkshead to me. I persuaded Alex K to come on a walking trip there. The first was spectacular. The second was a winter wonderland. South Downs Way, Yorkshire Dales. I've also walked in Peru, to the Polish-Slovakian border in the Tatras near Zakopane (with Niklas), Yosemite California (with Nina), Olympic National Park near Seattle (with Zack and Kate), Adetepe in Turkey.

(Ooh - a brown butterfly has flapped onto the chair beside me. Apparently children will remember this summer's abundance of butterflies as they did a year with similarly hot spring in the 1970s.)

Though I cannot bring sabta and grandpa back, through walking I continue their legacy. To paraphrase Wordsworth, I cannot narrate what then they were. Nonetheless, my progress bounds with a hidden, inner ghostmap. A map to the land of the blind, the dumb unwritten stories of my sabta and grandpa.

One day, I hope to have descendants. I hope to be similarly forged into myth. And through my walking, I hope I leave behind a rhythmic memory in blood and bone that will energise them to take up walking too.

Dollsing 1

Outside in West Square, children from Charlotte Sharman sing in unison:

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream..
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream..

 Harmony suggests this crazy sense that we're more alike than we think. At the same time, the lyric (la vida es sueno) pushes against the facticity of our physical existence. This charming innocence seems particularly fitting for the young, and a sense of the idyllic beyond the real. The song takes me back to the ebb and flux of the Isle of Wight.

The Millers' house on the Isle of Wight has many dolls. They are old dolls, possibly older than us (this year's Isle of Wight group). This year, their freakish dollness, both childlike and plastic, was exploited to great effect. Dolls were planted with aplomb all over the house to shock and scare in unusual places - not just hidden eerily in beds, but towel clothed in sinks, with razor blades, or lodged above doors so as to fall on a victim. The name Dollsing was born.

Dolls had an added significance for Emily, as she was meant to be working on her dissertation on dolls and Dickens when she met me three weeks ago. She was interested in dolls as human reproductions, and as a means for Dickens characters to achieve control over their heavily industrialised, patriarchal environment.

In the Shearwater house, dolls were fun, prankish objects. They suggested a previous era, and thus offered a slight sense of release from our own. Far removed from cria cuervos. Not so far from 'row, row, row your boat...'

London Clutter

On return from the Isle of Wight, I've become aware of how cluttered this city is. No sooner have you set eyes upon a rotund lady skidding her feet insistently across Waterloo station, but your next remembered person is a bulky bloke with strident hair (hair-gelled of course) wandering past the Millenium park on Waterloo road as an old lady with a far too heavy sack cycles past...
let alone all the other cars, roadsigns, commercial options, and other distractions that constantly usurp my attention.

Perhaps the confused construction of that sentence overstates the perverse compression of memory induced by metropolitan sensory overload. But it's really weighing on me in this room where I write. The inside of this dining room is an elegant Georgian space with a Turner print hanging over what used to look like a fireplace but is now doused in stack after stack of unread newspapers. It's as if my mum, who is normally a wonderfully industrious and organised person, wants to reproduce the city she loves on the inside of her home. It's really quite Dickensian. And what a contrast it is to the blissful holiday I have just had on the Isle of Wight.

I don't want to forget the long walks with Emily along the shifting-coloured contours of the beachscape. Or the calm friendly immersion of the community at the Millers'/Whitworth's place in the Duver, Seaview. To paraphrase Pete, walking in London cannot be relaxing in that way; you'd be too worried about being run over by a car.