The Voice That Thunders, page 18
It brought home to me that, though we may be the lantern bearers, we are not the lanterns. When Wilfred Lancaster summoned me and told me that he wanted me to know what he knew, I was put into a spiritual turmoil by the implications of his changing from teaser to teacher: of giving freely what he had hitherto kept close. I asked him: “Why me?”
His reply to the question may be translated as: “Because not many people round here now would know the value of what I have to say; but you do; and I trust you to handle the material and to be true to it and to me.” His actual words were: “Because you’re the only one of us left, Alan, with the arse hanging out of his britches.” It was Wilfred’s greatest compliment, and my proudest charge.
A story for you. A crock of butter for me.
* * *
1 Children’s Literature New England: “Writing the World: Myth as Metaphor”. This lecture was delivered at Trinity College Dublin, 13 July 1995. (An extended version of an address to the Story-telling Festival given at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1 February 1985.)
2 Founded by Robert of the ophicleide, whose grandson, my grandfather, would be blowing the E flat cornet at this event.
12
The Phoenix Award Acceptance Speech
IT GIVES ME the greatest pleasure to accept this award: greater than you could possibly know. But first I must admit to a misdemeanour. You have not given the Phoenix Award to the complete text as it was written; so I shall try to make amends by reading you a portion of The Stone Book, transcribed from the original manuscript.1
I always date each day’s writing, and put the time of the start. Therefore, we have, in the relevant section: 11 June 1975. 15.11. “Father came down from playing his music to mother. He sat at the table with Mary and sorted the stones she had picked with little Esther that day.” And so on, until: “Father took a stone and broke it. He broke it cleanly down the middle. The inside was green and grey. He took one half and turned so that Mary <01.18. Thursday 12 June 1975> could not see how he rubbed it.” The manuscript flows, with only one word corrected, for two pages, until: “‘And I’m asking parsons, if it was Noah’s flood, where was the urchin before? How long do
The next sentence is dated forty-five days later: Sunday, 27 July 1975. 19.49. “‘That’s what comes of reading,’ said Old William. ‘You’re all povertiness and discontent.’”
There you have the complete text. It may not be literature, but it is a document which I treasure.
What had happened was that, as I was writing, Katharine, my thirteen-year-old daughter, had interrupted by calling out, “Can you come a bit quickly?”
My wife, Griselda, seven months pregnant, had haemorrhaged. The house where we live is remote. I remember flashes of what happened. I dialled for an ambulance, then for the doctor. The ambulance arrived, having travelled nine difficult miles, twenty minutes later. The doctor arrived at the same time. Griselda was rushed to the ambulance. The doctor stayed with me. He told me that my wife would probably survive, but he could say nothing for the child. There were three other children to be distributed safely before I could go to the hospital, fourteen miles away. The blanks in memory, and the utter calm I manifested, and the moderate speed and the care with which I drove to the hospital indicate shock. And what happened next must have been also an aspect of shock, but with strange results.
I found myself sitting in an ante-room to the labour ward. And I was holding both the manuscript of The Stone Book and a pen. The real world had been anaesthetised; but the world of Mary and Father and Old William was untouched. I looked at my watch, noted time and date, and continued smoothly with the sentence that had been invaded some five hours earlier. I was again interrupted, to go into the labour ward. And again I found myself sitting, this time by the bed and holding Griselda’s hand and talking quietly, that world still in shock, while my other hand went on with its work, noting time and date, and, I saw later, logging the contraction times within the text. Then the birth, and its aftermath and concerns overcame even the ruthless hand.
I drove home in the early summer morning to find a house that looked as if it had been attended by the mad axe-man. Three days and nights of practicality and concern went by without sleep. After forty-eight hours, the baby, Elizabeth, was declared to be out of danger. I found myself sitting in a chair, with no crises, and no immediate problems. I realised that I had not been to bed for three nights, and rejoiced in an ambition achieved. I had conquered the need for sleep. Thirty-six hours later, I woke up, creased by the chair. And every reaction had set in, so that I could not write again for six weeks. But, before I passed out, something had happened in connection with The Stone Book that I have to recognise as an example of Jungian synchronicity.
The Stone Book itself had grown from a long-held need to celebrate the language and culture from which I came, and that had had no voice in literature since the fourteenth century and the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Chapel is ten miles away; and my father did not need explanations when I read the text to him in the tonalities of modern Cheshire dialect.
The characters of The Stone Book are my historical family. I have traced the Garner name on that one square mile of Cheshire hillside to a William Garner, who died in 1592; which is not bad for landless peasants who needed no documentation. And if a peasant family is in one place in England in 1592, it is safe to infer that they were there long before.
All through my childhood, every Sunday night was spent in the lamp glow of my grandfather’s cottage, as his sons and their families paid their respects. No one takes notice of a child sitting under a table. And so randomly by osmosis, I absorbed the history and anecdote of a clan.
When the idea for The Stone Book struck, all I had to do was to tap, and rearrange, those memories. The holes I filled with a novelist’s experience. So The Stone Book is historically correct, and, where history fails, the emotion is true.
After I left the hospital on the morning of Elizabeth’s birth, the day staff came on duty. The nurse who was attending to Griselda asked whether she was Alan Garner’s wife. Griselda sighed in resignation and owned up. The nurse then revealed herself to be my cousin Rita, whom I had not seen for thirty years. Rita went on to say that her daughter had always read, and reread, my books: not simply because of the ties. She actually liked them. As a result of this enthusiasm, the previous week her grandmother had given her a photograph of a family group, taken in 1890, that consisted of our joint ancestors, gathered around the seated patriarch, Robert, and his wife.
Rita asked whether I should like to see the photograph. Griselda, mere hours after the trauma of a premature birth, showed the reflexes of a writer’s wife. She asked Rita, who lived next to the hospital, to go home and bring the photograph before I returned.
I arrived at the ward, no longer desensitised to reality, to find myself looking, for the first time, at Robert and Mary. I knew, intellectually, that it was a print from a glass plate that would have called for a thirty-second exposure without a blink from anyone in the group. But, emotionally, I saw the intense gaze of my people focused on me, demanding in silence, across almost a century, that I speak for them. They must not die.
Instantly, the whole of what is now The Stone Book Quartet precipitated, complete, a super-saturated solution, scarcely to change. I did not have to think, but to remember, and to use my skills in its shaping.
When it was finished, I thought that I had got it wrong. I had lost my writer’s objectivity and had spoken in a voice that few would understand or find of any interest. It was too personal. Yet, of all that I have written, so far, The Stone Book Quartet has brought in the most deeply expressed responses, from all manner of people, in every part of the world. The question is always the same: how did you know it was like that for me? I can only wonder. Is the way to a universality best found by going straight through one’s own being? It would seem so.
And that is not all. The unsought things have happened, that could not be foreseen, yet humble the writer, and make all the prices that have to be paid be as nothing when set against the gains. Of these, what I treasure most is that a teacher at an Inuit village school in Northern Canada used the books as a class reader with the children who were growing up between worlds. Their response led her to develop a project in which the children talked to their families, especially to the old, and gave new life to the traditions of their own dying culture. The children found a place that was theirs, and the old were restored to respect.
I took the battered photograph away, made a high-quality copy for Rita and kept the original. It was essential. If Elizabeth had gone full-term, Rita would have been on holiday when she was born, and there would have been no photograph to summon me. In my own post-traumatic state, I felt the command to get this, if nothing else, right. Yet I still had it to do. When it was finished, I asked my father to read the typescript. I had never done this before. I had always given him a copy of every book, but he gave me no reason to believe that he had read them, though his pleasure was obvious. This time, though, it was his displeasure that was to the fore. He read. And immediately he demanded to know why I had let the family skeletons out of the cupboard, and who had told me, in such detail, about them. It would have been impossible to have tried to explain. But my joy, in the sense of a purpose accomplished, was complete. The areas of my father’s extreme irritation, I do not call it anger, were the parts that the novelist, not the historian, had written. A family of manual craftsmen had been served by a different craft of the hand. The earliest surviving example of writing by a Garner is that of another William: a scratched cross.
It is a tradition bordering on mandate, within the craft families, that each generation should do better, or at least other, than the one before. I was the failure. But, by granting this award, you have marked the journey from the signature of a cross to the symphony of a stone. And the travellers in between, and I, thank you for it.
* * *
1 This lecture was delivered to The Children’s Literature Association of America, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, on 7 June 1996.
13
Call a Spade a Spade
Knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel: (Hamlet).
Act I: The Finder’s Story.
IN THE SUMMER of 1953, my last term at school, I was sitting in the Manchester Central Reference Library. I should have been annotating Wecklein’s edition of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, but had become engrossed in Dr J. D. Sainter’s The Jottings of some Geological, Archaeological, Botanical, Ornithological and Zoological Rambles round Macclesfield: (Macclesfield 1878). Page 47 had me hooked. It described the recent finding by miners of a number of grooved stone hammers, or mauls, in an old surface working, “from three to four yards in depth”, near the copper mines at Alderley Edge, where I lived and had grown up.1 The hammers were quite distinctive. They were used as doorstops in the cottages and farms of the area, and I had found three myself on the Edge. (In later years, I learnt that identical artefacts are common where early metal-working has taken place. Those that I have handled, in Ohio and in Armenia, were all in a Chalcolithic context.) What was so interesting about Sainter’s record was that among the hammers lay “an oak shovel that had been very roughly used”. Sainter illustrated the shovel, back and front, opposite page 65, and to my excitement and bewilderment I knew that I had seen that “shovel”, and seen it often. But couldn’t remember where. I knew only that it was familiar.
Days later, in the way that such things happen, I was thinking about something else when I “saw” the “shovel” and where it was. I rushed to Alderley Edge Council School and cornered the headmistress, Miss Fletcher, who had taught both me and my father, and cried: “The shovel in Miss Bratt’s room! Where is it?” Miss Fletcher, used to my manic ways, said: “I don’t know, Alan. Let’s go and look.” We went to Miss Bratt’s room, a nineteenth-century Gothic gaol, where I had been incarcerated in my second year of the Infants’ Department at the age of six. Sainter’s shovel had hung on the wall, immediately to the left of the door, next to a cupboard. The wall was blank, but the hook was still there.
“I remember there was something,” said Miss Fletcher. “We’ll ask Mr Ellam.” We found the caretaker. “Oh, ay, there was summat of the kind, wasn’t there?” said Billy Ellam. “But we had a big sort out when Twiggy retired, and most of it went on the tip.” “You couldn’t!” I yelped. “I’ll tell you what,” said Billy Ellam. “If it’s not on the tip, it’ll be under the stage in the hall.”
I squeezed into the twelve-inch gap below the stage, lighting my way with Billy Ellam’s torch. The space was filled with coconut matting, high-jump posts, Miss Bratt’s fire-guard (we still use it at home as a towel rail), baskets, boxes, hoops, balls: all the clutter of a village school. I was lost to sight, and Miss Fletcher called anxiously after me, but I persevered, turning everything over systematically, in this exercise in educational speleology. Soon contact with the outside world was lost, as I worked my way into the dark. And, at the end of the understage crevice, the last object there, I found the “shovel”, with the label identifying its provenance still (just) adhering. There was no room to turn around. I had to find my way back blind, pulling with my toes and pushing with my one free hand.
“Well!” said Miss Fletcher. “I think it’s finders keepers. I’ve never seen anything like that performance in all my born puff!”
I took the shovel to the Manchester Museum, but did not get past the desk. Despite my protestations, there was “no one available to comment”.
So it began. I knew, from experience, my parents’ habit of disposing of anything they didn’t understand, or think of worth, and that compelled me never to leave the “shovel” at risk. It went with me all through the army, occupying the centre of my kit bag.
The British Museum declared it “possibly a Tudor winnowing-fan”.
It was with me at Oxford. The Ashmolean was not interested and promoted it to a “child’s toy spade: Victorian”. The conditions of its finding were ignored. I stopped. There were other things to be done. So I kept the Tudor winnowing-fan and Victorian child’s spade safe and bided my time. I knew instinctively and later intellectually, that the object was of considerable archaeological importance and trusted that one day I should find the sympathetic ear.
Eventually, the ear belonged to Dr John Prag. I baited the trap with some “Celtic” stone heads, for the recording of which he was responsible at Manchester. He came to see the two that I had. I showed him the shovel. The trap was sprung. And I shall never forget the sense of achievement as I formally put the shovel into his hands and care. The rest is prehistory.
I remain awed by three aspects of the matter: the tenuousness of the thread of survival; the unscholarly attitude of many archaeologists, who seem to work on the principle of, “If I don’t comprehend it, it can be of no significance”; and the importance of the human ageing process.
I had not changed my story since I was eighteen years old. It seems a pity that we have had to wait forty years before I was sere enough to approach with any authority the university I had tried first. And I was fortunate in meeting the open mind of a John Prag. In my tetchy dotage I would urge all archaeologists not to dismiss the young. They do, at least, have better eyesight; and are capable of squirming through the lumber of a village school.
Act II: The Curator’s Story.
JOHN PRAG, The Manchester Museum
1991.85. Wooden spade: the blade long and narrow with a steeply rounded end; one side of the blade missing, and an old split running with the grain between this break and the handle. The handle is short, and tapers to a point: possibly part of it split away, ? in antiquity. Probably oak. Max. total length 59.4 cm, length of blade 33.4 cm; max. length of handle 26.5 cm; max. extant width 12.3 cm. From excavations at Alderley Edge, 1875: presented by Alan Garner. Thought by Boyd Dawkins to be Bronze Age: dating confirmed May 1993 by accelerator radiocarbon dating OxA-4050 as 3470 + – 90 (uncalibrated) BP 1520 + – 90 BC, which, when calibrated, gives a range 1888-1677 cal BC.
(From the Manchester Museum Accessions Register)
The date copper was first mined on Alderley Edge in Cheshire has long been a matter for speculation. Archaeologists (as opposed to mining historians) have generally leaned towards the Bronze Age: the date was first proposed, tentatively, by the Manchester geologist and prehistorian, Professor William Boyd Dawkins, who visited the site in 1874, when the Alderley Edge Mining Company Ltd. were carrying out clearance work prior to opening new adits at Brynlow on the south slope of the Edge, and who then carried out a further investigation of the site. The miners, like many local people before, and like Boyd Dawkins and his successors Darbishire, Roeder, Graves and many others, found great numbers of grooved sandstone hammers, and it was apparently simply on the basis of their crudeness that Boyd Dawkins suggested that the mines must be early, and therefore of the Bronze Age. Similar arguments have been put forward for other sites in Britain and elsewhere, where independent evidence has nearly always been lacking. The question was reconsidered in Current Archaeology 99 by Paul Craddock, who noted that at least two recent writers had cast serious doubt on the prehistoric date for Alderley and other sites, on the grounds of insufficient evidence (C. S. Briggs, PPS 49, 1983, and G. Warrington, “J. Chester Arch. Soc. 64, 1981”); Briggs went so far as to reject the Bronze Age C-14 date achieved for the Mount Gabriel mines (County Cork), on the grounds that it was from a single sample in a potentially confused context.
