8. And so, as the Narrator lay idly woolgathering on the banks of the river...
The eighth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls the numinous days of his childhood.
And so, as the Narrator lay idly woolgathering on the banks of the river, I found myself thinking back to the ragged recreation ground next to my grandmother’s house, the place where much of my own early life played out…
Little more than a plain expanse of grass that stretched at a gentle gradient alongside the road that ran out of town, it was somehow imbued with the sense of promise that commonly attaches itself to cohorts coming into bloom. Seemingly endless time and the chance to play all day long – football, cricket, foxes and hounds, games of the imagination – to witness the world’s bright magnificence, its thrilling veracity, and later to feel the ebb of the earth, as the sun dipped below the trees and shape and form dissolved into magical darkness.
And I could see the faces of my friends in the gloaming, I could make out the black silhouettes of the tall oaks pinned against the purple sky, and I could picture the bats that made the dusk their own, as we scattered beneath them, screaming with delight, hands frantically waving above heads, afraid they’d get caught up in our hair, all the while ignoring the calls of parents to come home, because then the spell would be broken, and that would be worse than anything.
Further down the hill, a patch of wasteland known colloquially as ‘the dirt mound’, which was where we’d imagine ourselves as space explorers cast away on distant planets, or soldiers braced for enemy attack. Beyond that, a cemetery, surrounded on all sides by iron railings, which the older boys would jump once the gate was locked for the night, then sneak about and scoop up handfuls of the rough emerald stones that covered the graves. And the younger kids, me among them, would follow at a safe distance to watch their incursion, though never too close, in case the old caretaker, who lived in a small cottage near the entrance, heard them and rushed out brandishing a shovel, garbling something about grave robbery and calling the police, sending them rushing away in the dark, giggling, and breathless.
Even then, I knew this place was connected with death, despite not really knowing what that word meant. Once a week, I’d pay legitimate visits with my grandmother, who’d go to lay fresh flowers and water the plot of her father, Alfred, whose lichen-covered headstone was carved in the shape of a book, with the words ‘Fell asleep, 4 May 1943’ inscribed onto its rigid pages. Only later did I find out that Alfred didn’t ‘fall asleep’ but was blown to bits by one of the bombs that fell on our little town during the heavy air raids that year. To my ingenuous mind this was where Alfred ‘lived’, even though I realised this wasn’t ‘living’ as I ‘lived’, or my grandmother ‘lived’, but some bodiless, subterranean existence which he shared with those buried around him.
I was sure I’d visited this realm in my dreams, in which indeterminate shapes came and went, hovering between life and death, sometimes breaching the barrier between the two worlds for reasons that remained unclear, like the soldier who once appeared in the back bedroom, but who was nothing more than the translucent green pocket of his army fatigues floating above the bed. And so, the cemetery became a place of fearful fascination for me, touched by a kind of palpable charge that kept me coming back even in later years, when I’d go to tend to his grave alone and talk to him of my teenage travails, still somehow convinced that he could hear my voice.
My other favourite haunt was also connected to the bombings; this time, the old air-raid shelter, called simply ‘the shed’, which remained intact, if a little decrepit, at the bottom of my grandmother’s garden, a storehouse for rusted tools, cobweb-covered furniture, and numerous other unloved objects that my family had picked up over the years. This became one of several discreet places in which I’d hide away from the grown-up world; spaces rich with fertile aromas, that spoke of a secret, sacred and sensual power, where being alone meant being in the presence of something else, unseen, barely understood, yet palpably real.
The Narrator refers to a similar feeling in relation to certain rooms in the Combray house, where he describes ‘a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution.’ I remember reading this, and suddenly recalling that exact same sense of something existing beyond what was in front of me, something so clearly there, that to a child’s mind its presence seems obvious, but that slips away as we pass into our adult years.
These kinds of metaphysical revelations, tied to the idea of place, are a key pillar of Proust’s work. For the Narrator, the world is forever hinting at such mysteries, which are all the richer for their evanescence and evermore thrilling for their strange familiarity. Out riding in the carriage of his grandmother’s old friend Mme de Villeparisis one day, he catches sight of three trees in the distance to which he feels strangely drawn, ‘phantoms of the past, dear companions of my childhood, vanished friends who were invoking our common memories. Like ghosts they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life.’
Then, a few moments later, as the carriage passes by:
‘I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: “What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish forever into thin air.”’
Finally, the trees now behind him, he reveals the full extent of his loss:
‘And when, the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and ceased to see them, while Mme de Villeparisis asked me what I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as if I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or repudiated a god.’
Spurred on by passages like this, I found myself having to renegotiate the memories and experiences of similar feelings of immanence from my own past. The cemetery, the air-raid shelter, the back bedroom, and all the other places where another reality seemed to assert itself during my childhood, lit up my mind afresh, leaving their elusive scent in my nose once more, returning the suggestion of a secret knowledge long since forgotten.
Or was it? As I was reading one day on my way back from work, I recalled my first ever visit to Norwich Cathedral, not long after I’d started university. I remembered how it evoked those same feelings in me; and how it quickly became a place in which I began to explore the strange possibility of articulating a wholly inarticulate faith. I can only describe this faith as irreligious, although still deriving its impetus from the religious instinct, but finding its expression in secular forms, in faint connections between the material world and the unfathomable universe, in great works of art, most notably at the time, in Shakespeare, whom I’d dutifully taken to reading each day now that I was a student of literature: ‘And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’
Reignited by the cathedral, I felt sure that this feeling, carried into adult life, might perhaps become an agent of moral strength and empathy, an impediment to terror and oppression, a bulwark against what Jung referred to as ‘the coming evil in the world’. To my young mind it seemed that the reality we’d created – a regular birthing pool of chaos and destruction – had sprung from a lack or disavowal of feelings such as these, a failure to grasp the truth of the singular unconscious force which pulsed through all human beings, which must surely be acknowledged, sanctified, and placed above material instincts if we were to persist. True equality, says Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov (another book I’ve come to treasure), ‘is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man.’
And so, like the ‘three trees’ and like the spire of Saint-Hilaire, which ‘seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence’, the lofty steeple of Norwich Cathedral soon became a point of cathexis for me, an immovable symbol of life’s grand binary, towering above the city, as much a reminder of death, mystery and our irrelevance, as it was of our endeavour, ingenuity and enduring – if unlikely – importance.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.