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.
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