Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
MY AUNT HAS TURNED ONE
HUNDRED
A few weeks ago I went to an
event of a sort which would once have been a rarity, but which now is becoming
more commonplace - at least in the
Western world.
I went to my aunt’s 100th
birthday.
My aunt was born in the year
of the Gallipoli campaign.
My aunt has all her marbles.
She has only recently moved into a rest home, she can still chat in a lively
fashion about the extended family, and knows all the names of her nieces and
nephews and cousins and all their children. When I talked to her, she set me
straight on aspects of my Lowland Scots ancestry, about which I did not know. She
quite abashed me by her alertness, and I have many decades to go before I reach
her age.
Of course my aunt is a little
infirm, requires help in getting up and sitting down, and would not be able to
run a marathon (she is 100 years old, for goodness’ sake). Otherwise, she is
the picture of health.
Naturally, I had to wait my
turn to talk to her. She was seated on a sofa in the centre of a room in her
daughter’s house. Admiring family members were chatting and eating and drinking
around the room. All were waiting their turn for the privilege of joining her
on the sofa and talking with her. If she were a more pretentious person, she
could have adopted a regal posture.
My aunt is my mother’s younger
sister. My mother died in 1994 at the age of 82. If my mother were alive now
she would be 103. She was born in the year the Titanic went down. In comparison, I think of myself as young,
reinforced by my whole psychological formation as the youngest member of a
large family. Despite all mature reasoning, a part of me will always be the
little brother of my older siblings, and my foolish mind often begins with the
assumption that I am a youngster in any gathering of adults.
But at my aunt’s birthday
party, a counter-thought established itself. Here I was circulating among
cousins (many of them grey-haired or bald) and comparing notes with them about
children and grandchildren, and travel plans, and memories of things that
happened half a century ago. The young teenage grandchildren of one cousin were
yipping around outside and splashing in and out of a pool.
Suddenly I had a flashback to
my maternal grandparents’ Golden Wedding celebration when I was a young child.
It was around about 1960.
I was tall enough to see over
the top of the tables where the nibbles were piled, they being my chief focus
of attention. I was of an age when I could slip between conversing adults, as I
came up only to the adult midriff. And as the speeches and as the talk went on,
I wondered who these old people were and what all their boring talk was about.
They all seemed so ancient. The impression I have (I cannot recall in detail
conversations I heard in childhood) was that they grew up in a world of legend,
far removed from my time. I was too polite a child to use such a term, and I’m
not sure that it had yet been coined. But what I thought was that these people
were old farts.
Click.
I come out of the flashback
and realise that, to those happy kids playing around outside, I now am one of
the old farts.
What they cannot know, of
course, is that I am really still a teenager only playing at being a patriarch
and mature adult male. And that was probably the psychological disposition of
those ancient forebears I saw as a child.
At this point, I could
reflect on time and how it concertinas us and how relative our perceptions of
it are. To a child, twenty or thirty years ago is prehistory. To you and me,
twenty or thirty years ago is yesterday. My one-hundred-year-old aunt may have
a Victorian name, Laetitia (the same name my grandmother had). But she is my
contemporary, not a figure of legend.
None of this depresses me,
for in ageing I find I continue to be the person I am, and will continue to be
until death or senility (whichever comes first) gets me.
Some time ago I wrote a poem,
which touches on similar themes. Here it is.
THE
TRAIL
True history
has a trail. Not just
the bubble of
the moment but
the strings
tied to your feet, in
ancestry,
paternity, uncle- and aunt-ship
and those who
survived a time
before your
own, but can still live it
in your time,
recalling, explicating,
seeing things
in the present
of yourself.
And in your brain, too,
1966 is not
just 1966, but what
you have
brought to that table.
So it’s ‘66.
I’m fifteen
or thereabouts
and watching
on Sunday
afternoon television
(single-channel,
black-and-white)
an English film
from 1951
called I Believe in You in which
a do-gooding
probation officer
with plummy
voice
saves
proletarian youth from crime.
And I’m thinking
“How old,
how very old, this film is!
You’d never have a lead now
played by Cecil Parker, or
the audience asked to like
these snobby types.”
Not that
I put it into
words like that.
(I’m redacting.
You understand.)
I mean I had a
sense the world
had changed,
and even, un-rebellious,
on a sofa, in a
living room, I knew
this was the
60s
and the film
was an antique.
So now I’m
stunned to find
the gap from
film to me was only
fifteen years;
and fifteen years
is nothing in
my life now,
taking me back
only to
1999 when I
knew what I know
and who I know
and was already
me as much as I
will ever be.
And I’m
thinking of the trail,
the strings,
those things
clutching the
grown-ups
in 1966, the
older ones who thought
this film
something they’d just seen
yesterday at
the Bijou,
modern, like
them. And 1951
was last year.
And outside the pub
old RSA types
still in their heads
fighting
Tobruk, and not having
to ask why
Matapan Road was called
Matapan Road
because that was
their recent history
and they dragged
the trail into
my time
and theirs.
No comments:
Post a Comment