Fiona and I are enjoying a very few days of calm at Horseshoe Cottage, before I head south again next week to bring the Anna M home for the summer. I use such moments of peace on the Gannetsway to look back, at the risk of sounding a bit like Peig Seyers – ‘I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge' - with her litany of death and hardship on the Blasket Islands. I was astonished to discover that my two oldest grandchildren, even during their school days at an Irish speaking school in Dingle, had never read Peig, who has apparently been banished from the curriculum nowadays. Their Irish teacher said that though her language may be beautiful, her stories were all too miserable for young people. I call that sad! It’s over forty years since I read her, but what I recall is the courage and resilience and sheer joyfulness that shined through the writings of those people, living as they did so close to the ‘fractal frontier’.
I have been recounting how my family history was affected by the tide of evil that swept Europe in my parents' and grandparents' time. After WWII, when I grew up, life settled down in England as the demons appeared to be banished. Yet of course the old Irishwoman, who never spoke a bad word of anyone, was spot on in her reply to the wag who asked her what she thought of the Devil: "I'll say this for him - he's never idle!"
Wait, there is a message of hope in all this. That security you may think you missed out on was superficial, and the cracks that are opening up in it these days will yield new life. That old Devil is beaten, forever!
From the Fractal Frontier, V.
I’m sorry that I shall have to carry on referring to that terrible double-act event, as I see it, World War parts I and II. It had most radically marked the generation who brought me up! In trying to understand Teilhard and his legacy, I revert again to firstly considering his experience as a stretcher-bearer for 4 years during World War I; I shall have to quote the following passage at some length. It also expresses in a dramatic way what I mean by the Fractal Frontier.
‘I'm still in the same quiet billets. Our future continues to be pretty vague, both as to when and what it will be. What the future imposes on our present existence is not exactly a feeling of depression; it's rather a sort of seriousness, of detachment, of a broadening, too, of outlook. This feeling, of course, borders on a sort of sadness (the sadness that accompanies every fundamental change); but it leads also to a sort of higher joy . . . I'd call it `Nostalgia for the Front'. The reasons, I believe, come down to this; the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also sees emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life - and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the individual living the quasi-collective life of all men, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the individual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on things in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did, the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless it is indeed an exaltation. And that's why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it." (The Making of a Mind, p. 205.)
Sitting in the comfort and security of English middle class life in the second half of the 20th century, what could one possibly make of this exaltation in the midst of what now appears to most of us as mere senseless carnage? Yet at the time it appears to have been not unusual. Teilhard himself ventures to speak for his comrades, and whole nations after all had sent their young men off to that war with great enthusiasm. One thinks of Padraig Pearse’s apparently repulsive words:- ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield’.
Sitting in the comfort and security of English middle class life in the second half of the 20th century, what could one possibly make of this exaltation in the midst of what now appears to most of us as mere senseless carnage? Yet at the time it appears to have been not unusual. Teilhard himself ventures to speak for his comrades, and whole nations after all had sent their young men off to that war with great enthusiasm. One thinks of Padraig Pearse’s apparently repulsive words:- ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield’.
A generation later, men like my father seem to have had an ambivalent attitude. Theirs had indeed been a different kind of war; technology was more advanced, and the gung-ho sense of glory had dissipated, despite the fact that it could be more convincingly represented as a struggle between Good and Evil; but Dad fought the war out of a reluctant sense of duty, with absolutely no enthusiasm, as far as I could make out. On one of those rare occasions when he said anything about it, he told me with a quiet pride that he never consciously killed anyone, only popping off a few rounds in the general direction of German patrols in France early in the war. Luckily he always managed to be where the fierce fighting wasn’t, not just in France as I have recounted, but for example kicking around in the desert sands of Palestine with a few lads waiting to ‘stop’ the Germans if they came down through Turkey to attack the Suez canal and Egypt. They were what was known as a ‘tripwire’. Fortunately it didn’t happen.
It always puzzled me that the great British army never made use of the fact that he spoke good German, especially at the end of the war. I can only conclude that either he just kept quiet about it, or the Army was remarkably slow to recognise something useful in the line of communication. Anyway he always seems to have been an odd bod after his regiment was blown apart early on. He had three pips on his shoulder towards the end of the war (going by a photo, denoting a captain I think but I never heard him refer to it), but I would say he couldn’t wait to get out of the army and settle down to the married life that had been so brutally interrupted, just as it was beginning in 1939.
Down at Rye harbour when I was growing up, he belonged to a little community of sailors with small boats, tied along the old wooden jetty that had been built during the war for RAF sea-rescue boats. The highlights of the season (holiday cruises excepted) would be the odd sail over to Boulogne of a summer weekend. There would be a bit of commerce on arrival with a purveyor of duty-free booze, a convivial meal Chez Alfred, a trip to the boulangerie in the morning for croissants and baguettes, and maybe Mass if my mother was of the party, then back home again to a final session boozing and yarning in the boats before another week’s work began. Here if anywhere, these men whose consciousness was so heavily shaded by war might try a bit of living with their memories, and also assuage their vague loss of and need for exaltation.
Down at Rye harbour when I was growing up, he belonged to a little community of sailors with small boats, tied along the old wooden jetty that had been built during the war for RAF sea-rescue boats. The highlights of the season (holiday cruises excepted) would be the odd sail over to Boulogne of a summer weekend. There would be a bit of commerce on arrival with a purveyor of duty-free booze, a convivial meal Chez Alfred, a trip to the boulangerie in the morning for croissants and baguettes, and maybe Mass if my mother was of the party, then back home again to a final session boozing and yarning in the boats before another week’s work began. Here if anywhere, these men whose consciousness was so heavily shaded by war might try a bit of living with their memories, and also assuage their vague loss of and need for exaltation.
One of the more notable members of this little fraternity was Jack Hilton, an Anglo-Irishman who had a nice wooden ketch built by Tyrell’s of Arklow. He had been a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, had a farm in Sussex which judging by his hilarious accounts of his dealings with his bank manager was of doubtful profitability, and a certain air of never having succeeded in settling down after his experiences in the skies. One Friday evening in the dark, when my Dad and myself (aged about 14) were making our way along the wooden catwalk to the boat in preparation for an early start the next morning, what should we encounter but policemen pulling something heavy up from Hilton’s boat. The headlights of their car revealed the bloated red face of poor Jack, who had killed himself in his boat by taking the exhaust pipe off his engine and leaving it running…. So much for Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few!
Perhaps, however, Jack Hilton was finally unhinged by the fact that his friend Jack Merricks, who owned a beautiful little pilot cutter, had recently been washed off his boat and drowned on the dangerous Rye bar while trying to rescue another yachtsman. When I think about it, he was the first of a rather long list of people, whom I have known personally, who have died at sea. How come this by no means puts me off sailing? Even as we try to domesticate the sea, venturing on it if possible only when the sun is dancing on little waves, do we not in a way still relish the odd wee taste of its destructive power?
There was another Anglo-Irishman in that little community in Rye harbour, who let their stiff upper lip relax as they sat around in their little boats in jeans and sweaters, drinking and smoking their pipes and chatting; mind you they were a far cry from the gin-palace mob who have largely taken over the image of yachtsmen today. He was a James Hamilton, whose father had been a small land-owner in Rosbeg, Co Donegal. Jimmy had plenty of tales of an idyllic childhood in that magic place, but it ended with his father taking to drink, and his uncle being shot dead by the IRA in the barber’s shop in Ardara, when home on leave in British army uniform. He made a voyage to Australia before the mast on a sailing clipper, then aged 18 was called to the trenches shortly before the end of the First World War. After the war he became a police officer in East Africa, and had plenty of stories about that too. There was nostalgia in him, but a remarkable absence of bitterness and indeed a zest for life, which he seemed to have picked up long ago on that wild and rugged coast of Donegal. He never went back there however, because ‘it is all so different now’.
Exaltation, enthusiasm à la Teilhard, was now constrained among those men to being out on the sea on a breezy day; the brotherhood that went with it now largely confined to their fellow sailors. The nearest that I myself can come to making sense of the afore cited passage from Teilhard is to substitute my early experience of fishing for his infinitely more dreadful experience of the Front. But any kind of exaltation was rare indeed in the grey post-war years of England, while the great British Empire was melting away like an ice-berg in the North Atlantic. I fear that cynicism and indifference have only increased their chilling hold on the numbed souls of men since, as indeed Teilhard foresaw they would. Where can we now find the motivation to undertake the massive task of building the new global civilisation that he also foresaw, and that the ‘onward march of technology’ demands? It seems to me that we are going to have to take our chances again on some version of the Fractal Frontier!
Perhaps, however, Jack Hilton was finally unhinged by the fact that his friend Jack Merricks, who owned a beautiful little pilot cutter, had recently been washed off his boat and drowned on the dangerous Rye bar while trying to rescue another yachtsman. When I think about it, he was the first of a rather long list of people, whom I have known personally, who have died at sea. How come this by no means puts me off sailing? Even as we try to domesticate the sea, venturing on it if possible only when the sun is dancing on little waves, do we not in a way still relish the odd wee taste of its destructive power?
There was another Anglo-Irishman in that little community in Rye harbour, who let their stiff upper lip relax as they sat around in their little boats in jeans and sweaters, drinking and smoking their pipes and chatting; mind you they were a far cry from the gin-palace mob who have largely taken over the image of yachtsmen today. He was a James Hamilton, whose father had been a small land-owner in Rosbeg, Co Donegal. Jimmy had plenty of tales of an idyllic childhood in that magic place, but it ended with his father taking to drink, and his uncle being shot dead by the IRA in the barber’s shop in Ardara, when home on leave in British army uniform. He made a voyage to Australia before the mast on a sailing clipper, then aged 18 was called to the trenches shortly before the end of the First World War. After the war he became a police officer in East Africa, and had plenty of stories about that too. There was nostalgia in him, but a remarkable absence of bitterness and indeed a zest for life, which he seemed to have picked up long ago on that wild and rugged coast of Donegal. He never went back there however, because ‘it is all so different now’.
Exaltation, enthusiasm à la Teilhard, was now constrained among those men to being out on the sea on a breezy day; the brotherhood that went with it now largely confined to their fellow sailors. The nearest that I myself can come to making sense of the afore cited passage from Teilhard is to substitute my early experience of fishing for his infinitely more dreadful experience of the Front. But any kind of exaltation was rare indeed in the grey post-war years of England, while the great British Empire was melting away like an ice-berg in the North Atlantic. I fear that cynicism and indifference have only increased their chilling hold on the numbed souls of men since, as indeed Teilhard foresaw they would. Where can we now find the motivation to undertake the massive task of building the new global civilisation that he also foresaw, and that the ‘onward march of technology’ demands? It seems to me that we are going to have to take our chances again on some version of the Fractal Frontier!
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| Peig's village on the Great Blasket. |
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