Love what you know

I got up this morning to find Dad in a bitter blank fury, railing against “immigrants” and the policies of the past for bespoiling ‘his’ Easterby. “There was a time when Easterbians were proud to be Easterbians,” he said angrily, with hot-eyed bitterness.

It’s just been announced that cut-backs in education in Easterby will mean 400 job losses among teachers and nursery nurses and Mum is worried about her job. If she loses it then she and Dad are fucked and I don’t see how they’ll be able to afford to keep me at Uni. Dad worries more about Mum’s health than anything, because the greater the hardships the greater her levels of worry.

He lashed out with blind, angry bewilderment and declared that Enoch Powell has been proved right. It was announced the other day that Easterby has the third highest birth rate in the country, which is about the only thing that’ll keep Mum in a job, because it’s the Asian women who have their kids the fastest. I’m not too worried about Uni.: the main problem if I did leave Uni. would be seeing direction and justification in my life.

I’m going to Watermouth on Sunday and so today was taken up in part with preparations for my departure. Dad and I drove down to the Parcel's Office at the station with my trunk (and cheese), which cost me £7. Dad told me that Mr. Tillotson hasn’t used the trunk since 1937 and the early years of his marriage.

It was a hot day, a last evocative glimpse of summer before we are swallowed up by the wintry weather, and as we drove up Gilthwaite Road the moors away beyond Keddon basked under pale blue skies and I wished I were miles away over the horizon, walking amid vastnesses.

After dropping my trunk at the station we called up to see Nanna B., but she was out, so Dad and I went for a walk around his old haunts when he was growing up, stooping by an old wall overlooking the last of Kerforth’s common land, now a weed-filled field sweeping down towards Iredale's Mill, in whose dam one of my relatives once committed suicide.

Nearby, partly hidden by trees, Dad pointed out the dark squat shape of an ancient cottage where John Wesley once stayed and preached. New housing has encroached on the old, but the skyline beyond Flaxhall Top, punctuated by the silhouetted steeple of Flaxhall Church, can’t have changed much since the turn of the century when Dad’s Dad was a kid. There was a tinge of poignancy and hidden sadness in the way he showed me Charnwood’s dam, where another distant figure from the family’s past ended his life, and old Kerforth abattoir, soon to be demolished, now derelict and boarded up.

We skirted the fields and took a small snicket that ran alongside Iredale’s Mill. Dad showed me the spot where as a kid he would lift the large stone slab of a hidden well and gaze down into the cool dark depths. The mill, once empty, is now in use again and the clackety-clack of machinery was somehow reassuring. The path ran between red-brick sheds and yards full of building materials. Here when he was a lad, Dad told me, sheep grazed and over there, the farmer kept his horses, whose restless night-time snuffles unsettled Dad and Uncle George as they returned home from the pictures. No. 59 Pollard Road, where they grew up, looks empty and semi-derelict now.

We wandered back up through Kerforth and along the main street, passing the house where Dad’s Dad lived after the suicide of his father (to this day we own a sepia-brown photo of him looking like Al Capone, standing in the doorway, fag in mouth); the Wheatsheaf pub where one day in 1917 my Great Uncle Ernest slapped his newly awarded Military Medal down on the bar promising, “It’ll be the VC next time!”: he was killed in France a month later; no. 52, where Dad’s Auntie Florrie was found dead one morning, so thin and frail that George had sat on the bed for fully ten minutes reading the ‘paper before realising she was lying there next to him, lifeless, while upstairs her sister Olive rooted about for the insurance papers. The whole of the Martindale and Watkin family histories—great chapters of them at least—have run their course within those few acres of old Kerforth.

N.B. was still out when we got back to her flat so we made a cup of tea and watched the Liberal Party Conference for a while before leaving (David Steel quoting Cromwell: “Know what you fight for, love what you know”). We made a trip to pick up Mum from school, but she’d gone, so we returned home feeling that somehow the day had slipped wastefully by when perhaps we could’ve gone somewhere.

When Mum came home from work deadbeat as usual, there were more niggles between her and Dad, as there often are nowadays. “I think we’re seeing too much of one another,” sighs Mum wearily, and then complains to me that she doesn’t think Dad is doing enough to relieve his isolation at home. A few weeks ago they’d both been full of enthusiasm about adult education classes and had even gone to the trouble of getting all the forms, but Dad backed out at the last minute, limply saying £17 per year was too expensive (the creative writing classes were free!).

It’s almost as if he’s scared of making any commitment and frightened to break the routine his life’s fallen into. He never meets anyone apart from Mr. Tillotson across the road and does nothing but write his diary and tend his newts and toads, although he’s often saying “I wouldn’t mind doing so-and-so,” and so on. “He’s just hot air,” says Mum, but I’m no one to harp on about lack of effort and motivation, and it’s obvious who I’ve inherited it from.

Stu, Pete and Shelley have all rung in the last day or so. Stu asked if he can kip on the floor at Jervis Terrace while he finds somewhere to live. The accommodation situation in Watermouth sounds pretty bad. Pete rang up just to talk and Shelley said she might be suffering from hepatitis; she doesn’t know yet. I’ll see her on Sunday evening.

I’ve casually started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the last couple of days and I think Nietszche has a lot to offer.