There are some compensations for being old: I think that now, as I have reached and passed my 74th birthday (which means I have already completed 74 years and on 20th December 2011 I commenced my 75th). I emit a long, low whistle as I write this. It does seem to be a very long time that gap between 19 December 1937 and now. So, what are the compensations?
Yesterday I was reading a book by Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1930, a fictional account of the 1914-18 war, The Great War, as it is still called, written as autobiography and, without any doubt, heavily based on the author’s own experiences. I came upon words that idiotically kept running through the principal character’s mind as he waited out a fierce bombardment.
They come as a boon and a blessing to men,
The something, the Owl and the Waverley pen.
Sassoon couldn’t remember the second word of the second line. It was part of an advertisement he’d seen in railway stations. Was it The Shakespeare? He asks himself. The Dickens?
Well, it was The Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley pen, and I know that because my Father told me it when I was a very small boy. So I would have been able had Sassoon been nearby, to supply the missing word. It gave me much satisfaction to know that I might have been able to do this. It is of no importance at all but it is strangely satisfying.
The point of this? It is that through my Father, born in 1901, my memory, or my knowledge of the past, in many ways that are important to me, has been extended and this grows in significance as I get older: as one ages the time gap between now and then gets wider and things remembered, or remembered through a parent or grandparent, become somehow, to me at least, more valuable. Old people pride themselves on being able to recall things from their early past and the earlier the better; I'm no exception.
My Father added to his memory things that his Mother told him and she was born in January 1862. Note that. 1862. In January 2012 that was one hundred and fifty years ago! That is a long time. To give an idea of how far back that goes - she was born one year into the American Civil War. She and my Grandfather took their seven children to South Africa at the end of 1898 and came scuttling back in 1900 as the Second Anglo-Boer War gained momentum. My Father was embryonic at the time of their return and was born almost as soon as they disembarked and then there were eight.
When my Father sang songs to me he was passing on not only the songs that were popular when he was in his teens and much later through his life but also songs that he learned from his Mother. My Grandmother played the piano and so did my Father; to my benefit they both seemed to have had interests broad enough to include popular songs.
Things my Father learned from her were passed through to me so the seemingly countless number of melodies and lyrics that swirl around inside my brain are a compendium that goes back, what shall we say, 130 years?
Here is part of a song that I suspect goes back a very long way. Have you ever heard it?
That awful nightmare I seem to see it now
The big camelephantelopepeacockatoopussycow.
Poetry too. I think most of the poetry I absorbed from Father came from his own time but some few may well derive from Grandmother. The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning was written sometime between 1864 and 1889 so was accessible to my Grandmother at a very early age and so was The Inchcape Rock by Robert Southey who died in 1843: it was in print during my Grandmother’s life and was a firmly established favourite in my Father’s repertoire. In those days people memorised poetry and reciting it was a form of parlour entertainment.
A poem that almost certainly derives from my Grandmother is a strange one. I once tried to source it using Google and I found one reference to it: on checking I found the reference was a reader’s letter to a New York newspaper published in the Twenties. The letter asked if anyone knew the origin of the poem! There were no replies. Here it is, as recited to me by my Father:
There are ghosts in the fen.
Ghosts of women and men,
Who have lived and have died
And are living again.
Through the waters they tread,
With their lanterns of dread,
And they peer and they peer
In the pools of the dead.
Other compensations for being old? I suppose that most elderly people would say that they value the wisdom that age brings to them. I certainly feel that but paradoxically that wisdom also tells me that I’m fooling myself.
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