Mixed blessings

Those of us born in England after the middle of the last century have been privileged to live in relatively prosperous and peaceful times. We may have had our trials and tribulations and seen many changes but, until COVID19 arrived, our lives had not been touched by famines, plagues, or world wars. For most of us it came as a shock to realise that we were not immune to such events, our science and technology was not invincible. Each of us had to cope as best we could. For me, the writing project I’d begun in 2019 helped keep my mind occupied but, in some ways, it was a mixed blessing.

Researching and writing about 1918 had given me a different outlook on the current pandemic. While I had great faith in modern medicine, I could see many parallels in the way things were unfolding and they made me uneasy. On the plus side, my research was a wonderful way to escape from harsh reality and gain a little perspective. The libraries and archive centres may have been shut but the internet was a fantastic resource, rich in facts and photographs that helped bring the era, and Northam, the area I was writing about, alive. The online local history groups were a great source of inspiration.

One Facebook group that was especially helpful was called Memories of Old Northam. Finding pictures of familiar landmarks as my grandparents must have known them helped me understand the world back then. Much of what I learned would only ever be background to my story but it stayed in my head and coloured the way I looked at the real world I walked through. My Pappy had talked of roads of packed dirt and tramlines, filled with horses and carts and a toll on the bridge across the river. Now I could see it for myself, albeit, mostly in the form of sepia or black and white photographs.

Another invaluable resource was the online version of the Kelly’s Directories of the day. I could see the kinds of shops there were, their names, and even who ran them. From them I knew for certain that my grandparents had lived in Radcliffe Road, so that was where I set my story. The old Ordnance Survey maps of the time, another wonderful online resource, showed me how different the shore line was. A photograph of the timber pond at the end of their road, with the old bridge in the background was especially poignant. This was where my father must have played as a young boy.

In a hundred years a lot had changed but so much remained the same. In the first days of July 2020, I walked through Northam often. For once I didn’t take photographs. Instead I carried those old photographs around in my head and they often seemed to shimmer in the background of the places I walked past. When I saw the old gasworks, a sight that must have dominated my grandparents world, I imagined trams, horse drawn carts and men in flat caps. I crossed the little railway bridge and I imagined the men who built it, standing proudly for a photograph, and the horse drawn vehicles that would later cross it.

When I walked along Milbank Street, I imagined the terraced houses with doors opening straight onto the street, the waterside industries, the shops and pubs on every corner and the regular floods that made this area a difficult place to live. Most have long gone but the characters who inhabited Northam seemed to come alive inside my head.

It struck me that the men returning from the battlefields in France and Belgium would have walked around with images of another place and time in their heads too. They’d come home, many of them wounded, all of them scarred by what they’d seen, but home had changed while they’d been away. When they looked at the once familiar streets, the images in their heads would not have been old photographs. They would have been the horrors they had left behind. The mud, the rats, the ruined towns and the dead.

To get an idea of what it must have been like for those men, I’d immersed myself in Richard Van Emden’s wonderful books. They were filled with first hand accounts of the soldiers who had been there, how they felt and how they coped. None of them would ever be the same again and, like my grandfather, the memories would plague them until the end of their days. I imagined them crossing the River Itchen and seeing those water filled shell-hole lakes on the Menin Road. When they heard the rumble of thunder did they remember the whiz bangs dropping? Did their local church transform into the bombed church in Albert, where the golden virgin tumbled but didn’t fall?

It was no surprise that they couldn’t forget. The real miracle was that most of them managed to carry on despite their memories. Somehow they fit back into the changed world they found at home. They dealt with the scars of the war and the losses of the pandemic and most didn’t even talk about it. On the face of it, their stories are too horrific to even imagine, but the fact that they overcame so much makes them stories of hope. Perhaps, with the right attitude, such adversity brings the blessing of strength and perspective. Hopefully, the same will apply today.

If you like what I write and would like to help me keep doing it, you can now buy me a virtual coffee by clicking on the little orange coffee cup at the bottom right. If you’re interested in my historic novels, Plagued is available now on Amazon.