The Voice That Thunders, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alan Garner
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
1. The Edge of the Ceiling
2. Aback of Beyond
3. Achilles in Altjira
4. A Bit More Practice
5. Oral History & Applied Archaeology in East Cheshire
6. Hard Cases
7. Inner Time
8. Potter Thompson
9. Philately & the Postman
10. Porlock Prizes
11. The Voice in the Shadow
12. The Phoenix Award Acceptance Speech
13. Call a Spade a Spade
14. The Beauty Things
15. Fierce Fires & Shramming Cold
16. The Voice that Thunders
Appendix: Oral History & Applied Archaeology in Cheshire
Copyright
About the Book
Alan Garner is an exceptional lecturer and essayist. This collection, taken form the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.
The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England’s best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here. This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country’s history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer’s own life. Alan Garner’s account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.
About the Author
ALAN GARNER was born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934, and grew up in Alderley Edge, where his father’s family have lived for more than three hundred years. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, after which he began writing his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, at the age of twenty-two.
His books include Elidor, The Owl Service (winner of the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal), Red Shift, The Stone Book Quartet (winner of the Phoenix Award of America in 1996) and, most recently, Strandloper.
Also by Alan Garner and published by Harvill
STRANDLOPER
For Griselda
The Voice that Thunders
Essays and Lectures
Alan Garner
“A person doesn’t need to go to college to learn facts.
He can get them from books”
Albert Einstein
“Doing’s a hard school, but a fool will learn at no other.”
Joseph Garner, 1875–1955, whitesmith
INTRODUCTION
This book is made from various attempts to record the excitement that has attended life so far. Spread over some thirty years and now put together as one statement, they may show the progression, or otherwise, of a writer’s thought, and the environment that engenders and shapes, but must never appear in, the work.
The texts are the full texts as they were written, though not always as they were presented. Lectures are constrained by time and the patience of an audience, and articles are subject to an imposed length.
I myself have edited occasionally here, but, I hope, honourably. When dealing, over time, with linked themes, it is natural if for once something has been said definitively to use it again. Therefore in this context I have avoided the inelegance that would engender. There are other kinds of repetition that may be instructive; and I have held my pen and kept them in.
So here, for me, are the building blocks of what matters. It is a map of a journey that has been made possible by the friends, influencing minds and helpers that have brought me to this point. To try to list them would be prodigal of paper beyond the reckless, and would face me with choices to defeat Solomon; for I have been most fortunate in the net of fellowship through life and around the world. Better that both fellowship and trees stand.
A.G.
Blackden
14 January 1997
1
The Edge of the Ceiling
MY NAME IS Alan Garner, and I was born, with the cord wrapped twice round my throat, in the front bedroom of 47 Crescent Road, Congleton, Cheshire, at Latitude 53° 09'40" N, Longitude 02° 13'7" W, at 21.30 on Wednesday, 17 October 1934. My mother was a tailor, and my father a painter and decorator.1
My mother’s family were talented cranks, on every side; lateral thinking was a part of their equipment, and those that got away with it were respectable as well. Even the names are odd. There was a great-aunt Sophia Pitchfork; and a great-great-grand-uncle, J. Sparkes Hall, an inventor, of 308 & 310 Regent Street, London, Bootmaker to Her Majesty The Queen and Their Royal Highnesses The Prince and Princess of Wales. He designed the elastic-sided boot, and demonstrated his English Cottage or Test House (which became the traditional nineteenth-century worker’s kitchen fire-cum-oven-cum-boiler) at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. His brother, Edward, designed and built church organs in Birkenhead.
Perhaps a more typical gene was represented by the third brother, who was Professor of Systematic Memory, or Polymnemonics, on which he delivered lectures, “copiously illustrated by Novel, Curious, Extraordinary and Interesting Experiments (Schools at halfprices)”.
In the eighteenth century, the Halls cover their traces, but documentary fragments and early photographs suggest that a pawnbroker Hall, of Plymouth, had fashionable tastes; and so my great-great-great-great-grandmother may have been West African.
My father’s family is quite different. They have been craftsmen for centuries. They have married locally, under strict cultural tabus, and have lived in the same house without a break of tenancy. My cousin lives there now. The house stands in a small area called The Hough, on the slopes of Alderley Edge, a wooded sandstone hill above the Cheshire Plain. The Edge is a Beauty Spot in summer and at weekends, but its long history and prehistory make it unsafe at all times. It is physically and emotionally dangerous. No one born to the Edge questions that, and we show it a proper respect.
So there are three main elements in me from the start. Families on the one side gifted, unstable, and, on the other, skilled, steady. And a hill that Garners have inhabited, and worked, for as long as anybody knows.
Born in Congleton, raised in Alderley, I have lived, since 1957, seven miles from both, near the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, in a mediaeval timber-framed house on a site that has almost certainly been occupied by the living for seven thousand years, since the Mesolithic period, and by the dead as well. The mound that the house stands on is one of a group of tumuli. If I have any real occupation, it is to be here.
Therefore, I have spent the whole of my life, so far, on the Pennine shelf of East Cheshire. It is an area that encompasses most of the landscapes to be found in Britain. Within twelve miles, I can move through fen, dairy and arable farms, to sheep runs and bleak mountain tors. And, in this particular place, I find a universality that enables me to write. Everywhere is special, in some way. It was not imperative that I should be born in Cheshire; but it was imperative that I should know my place. That can be achieved only by inheriting one’s childhood landscape, and by growing in it to maturity. It is a subtle matter of owning and of being owned.
The landscape of childhood is itself unremarkable, for the child. Lack of any concept of things being other than they are found to be brings to childhood an innocence that hindsight can abuse. When we comment on the resilience of children, we should remember that what may now appear to have been brave or terrible was possibly unquestioned at the time. It was certainly unquestioned by me as an individual and by the generation of village children to which I belonged.
“God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, make me a good boy and don’t let the war end. Amen.” I gabbled that prayer every night from the age of six until God let me down in 1945, when I was nearly eleven. We were not a religious family. The first three pious requests were taught by my mother, who was enlisting the Holy Trinity as a child-minder, and the last bit was my own, because I had worked out that peace would axe my favourite wireless programmes.
The knowing innocence of childhood makes something peculiar of war. Lack of experience turns it into a bright game. There is no responsibility, no foresight, no sense of deprivation. The child is free to take what he wants from the mess; and the child is a callous animal, with little built-in morality.
For us, the past was something called Pre-war. It seemed to have been an age of plenty. Adults would thumb through old mail order catalogues and talk of the good days. If the past was Pre-war, the future had no name. We were living in a geological time span called the Duration.
The nearest I came to an understanding was that I was between two periods, of which adults were aware, but I could not be: the Eldorado of Pre-war, of which I remembered only the vivid yellow and the taste and shape of a banana, and a return to an Elysium after the Duration: a “once and future peace”. I felt no sense of loss.
We l
Next morning we would swap our shrapnel and barter for sticky incendiary bombs that were more like bicycle pumps than fireworks. For some reason, shrapnel that had been “hot-found” was worth more than “cold-found”, though there was nothing by which to tell the difference now. It was a matter of unquestioned honour: the only instance that was never challenged, in my experience of childhood.
The Polish pilot would have been our greatest prize, but we lost him. His fighter was in trouble, and he crash-landed. He was dead when we arrived. We could not get the cockpit fully open before the fire reached the ammunition, and we had to leave his goggles and make do with a yellow handkerchief that had been around his neck. But the blood was real.
Our war was with the evacuees. We had them from Liverpool, Manchester, London and the Channel Islands. The worst were the Islanders. They were silent, foreign, could speak a secret language, and would not go home. Manchester, Liverpool and London fought dirty, but were scared both of woods and of open spaces. For us, a field was certain refuge from pursuit even if it were empty. The possibility of a cow lurking in the cropped grass was something that no townie would risk.
The adult plans for what they called the Home Front (there appeared to be no Home Back; or, if there was, it did not concern them), were varied and improvised. My mother concocted the following stratagem against invasion while my father was guarding us from the Hun in Rhyl.
I kept a bag of pepper by the door, next to Mum’s poker. They were for the German paratrooper. When he knocked on the door, I was going to throw the pepper into his face, Mum would hit him with the poker, and then we would run upstairs and commit suicide by hurling ourselves head first from the bedroom window. That the window was only some nine feet above the ground, with stone mullions that would have made “hurling” a problem did not make either of us question the efficacy of the scheme.
As for political understanding, I relied on the propaganda of the Beano and the Dandy: Musso the Wop (He’s a Bigga-da-Flop), and Adolf and Hermie (The Nasty Nazis) in their endless search for food. “I have der pain in der breadbasket.”
Peace, I thought, came when a sailor gave me a banana. But it was green. He told me that it was not ripe. I put it on the mantelpiece and watched it every day. When it was the yellow I remembered, and the smell was as I remembered, I peeled and ate it in a Proustian orgy. At that instant of biting into the fruit, I knew that the Duration was over. By colour, taste, smell and geometry, a banana, for me, bracketed the Second World War. Then everything changed.
The Belsen films were shown at our cinema. Although children were forbidden entry, we had always known the free way in. I saw the films four times. The not-dead corpse in the black skull-cap, picking over his shirt and grinning at the camera that had come too late; the bulldozer ploughing its graceful, hideous choreography into the mass grave. It was right for us to see this, to remind us that what we children were playing was being played better by adults, because they were bigger and had more toys.
Everyone will have been affected. For me, I am not afraid of the dark, and the blackout gave me a childhood of stars. But I do wish that air-raid sirens were not still used to call out the fire brigade. Also, to grow up in an improvised world, where others are trying to kill you, develops an ability to distinguish between necessity and luxury, to arrive quickly at priorities, to survive.
My children are secure in a way that we never were. They are in a saner world, though it is not sane yet. And there is a factor to consider. The Blitz, the bag of pepper, the dead pilot meant little. Belsen made sense. At the age of ten, I realised what all the fuss had been about. It was about the ovens and the people inside. Before seeing them, I knew a lot of facts, but could not give them a context. Then, within minutes, the facts came together in an image and I was violently wise. My children and their generation have not had that shock; yet they are better informed than I was, and they are better informed because they have watched television.
Rubbish, though it very often is, trite, though it nearly always is, there remains an argument for accepting the medium of television as the main cultural development of the century. It removes more barriers than it creates, and exposes liars more clearly than any previous news machine. As long as politicians and generals continue to fear the lens, and there are men and women willing to be killed serving it, future cameras may arrive in time for the not-dead corpse in the black skull-cap.
I find this hard to explain to many people, who say that the world is getting worse because what they see on the news is so terrible. I try to explain that what they see has always gone on, but they have not been able to see it as it is happening, edited, focused. If a camera had been around to record how Athens dealt with an Aegean island that objected to paying taxes, the Parthenon and our model of Western thought would have been put into a different perspective indeed. This century has moved the portrayal of war from static engravings, with no corpses, in the Illustrated London News, of events long gone and in another country, to a young girl running naked in napalm into your house, in high-quality colour, and now.
Television removes barriers. My attitudes in childhood were partly the innate callousness of an infant, and the war ended when I was on the threshold of adolescence, ready to become more aware of other people. I maintain that children now are more aware, more humane, because they have learned more through television than we did by living in an isolation that happened to be punctuated by random, and occasional, violence close at hand.
I would say that television presents facts and offers interpretation in a way that involves every area of our lives. Of course it can be, and is, abused; but I had to grub among old cigarette cards to extend my knowledge. Set that against what is available now. Rubbish there was, is and ever shall be. What has to be educated is choice. That is the difference. My children are richer in mind and spirit than I was, and from that richness grows compassion.
Let me stress that I see no miracle, no sudden generation of angels. But, where I tried to snatch the pilot’s goggles, the next children may not let him put them on.
So, while Leningrad starved for nine hundred days and Belsen conducted its roaring trade, my childhood was happy, along with the other village children; and, in addition, unaware that all children did not commonly live as I lived, I spent ten years in two worlds.
The daily landscape for me was a bedroom ceiling in a brick cottage, with a porch. It became the house of Elidor, and the porch the entrance to the Mound of Vandwy, “night’s dungeon”, because it was out of that porch my father stepped one January in the pre-dawn blackness and disappeared to join the army while my mother and I cried, certain we should not see him again.
The bedroom was whitewashed, irregular plaster, steeply pitched, with rafters and purlins and ridge exposed. And I lay on my back beneath it through three long illnesses: diphtheria, meningitis and pneumonia.
I had no brothers or sisters. The Second World War came and went. The family survived. There were no tragedies. But the isolation caused by physical weakness and paralysis must have been increased by the more general isolation of a house threatened, bombed, blacked out. When I was bedfast, the rhythms of day and night were not imposed on me. Rather than sleep, I catnapped, or was in coma. Reality was the room.
The view from my window was, for five years, glued over with cheesecloth against bomb blast; but, even unrestricted, it was no more than a length of road where little happened, and which was closed by the spire and weathercock of a Victorian church, on which my great-great-grandfather had worked, and later became a running stitch through The Stone Book Quartet. Sideways rolling of my head made the spire wobble, the houses insecure, and people on the road change shape. I knew that the uneven window pane was the cause, but it still gave the room the greater reality. The ceiling did not wobble when I rolled my head.
