Who remembers tarmac bubbles, bloody knees and dirty fingernails?

Mondays writing course included an exercise where the group leader Jim Hinks collected together suggestions for our most memorable childhood feeling, texture, smell, sound and general word.  Then he set us off writing about our childhood and frequently announced the provided words at random for us to incorporate. 

Funny how writing exercises can take you somewhere different.  I ended up describing horse riding escapades.  I remember going horse riding, back when the town I lived in was mainly fields and a half finished housing estate - not the sprawl of suburbia it is now – I was maybe seven or eight.  There was a farm, and for a few quid I used to join a convoy of sluggish ponies tramping around a waterlogged field.  I don’t remember asking to go, the whole situation was very foreign and for as long as I did it I never became confident enough to enjoy it.  The dusty smell like our airing cupboard, and the smell of urine remind me of the stables.  A fear of the huge animals and anxiety at their fusty breath and grasping gums.  The carpet-texture of their coats and word I didn’t understand which described either some kind of leather accessories or a travelling speed. 

I was allergic to horses, as with most things, as a child – but my mother didn’t realise for months, not even when my eyes swelled to raspberry coloured donuts, or even when I’d sneezed myself into a hot, suffocating nosebleed.

Strangely I hadn’t thought about any of this until the writing exercise.  It’s funny what you forget.  Whatever happened to popping tarmac bubbles, falling over, and dirty fingernails from upturning rocks and discovering insect communities?    And most of all – navigating the geography of the town slowly, step by step, paving stone by paving stone.  I knew points on my journeys better than I know anywhere now, because I sat on the pavement or dug in the sand.  I knew how things felt, smelt and sounded. Now everything is too quick, and I’m only ever outside because I’m between two places, or I’m running.  I guess the paradox is the world is getting smaller – with globalization, world travel and the internet – but we might know our own corner of it less and less.

Thoughts about heritage

There’s a part of Bolton where I park when I don’t cycle in, it’s about fifteen minutes from the centre of town and the university where I work.  It is a series of streets of terraced housing, I don’t know how old, but late Victorian I guess.  There’s a mill, gasometers, a couple of other old bits and a few factories.  The area always reminds me of what the whole town must have looked like at one point and I can’t help thinking about the houses history.  This must all sound very boring, but the houses many of us live in have histories of their own, especially terrace streets.  Any one house might have seen brutal poverty at the end of the nineteenth century, family deaths during the First World War, and deaths in mining accidents in this area.  Deaths in the Second World War, unemployment during the depression, even bomb damage in the Second World War, and all manner of issues since then.  It just struck me that the framework we all live in predates us, and has existed around all kinds of lives, and whilst we think of it as ours, our house, our workplace, in another fifty years we might be forgotten about and very different lives be existing in ‘our’ places.

I was looking through some records of the Pretoria pit disaster - December 1910 - as some of my written work recently has been inspired by it, and I found that as I live in number thirteen on my street, a miner died whose home was number twelve and three miners died (possibly a father and two sons) at number fourteen.  This isn’t like standing in Durham Cathedral and thinking some Middle Ages carpenter worked on this or that, this is sitting in my own bedroom and trying to imagine the lives of someone sitting here a hundred years ago finding out about the death of four neighbours in one afternoon.  I wonder if that meant a husband did come home to this house? And sat dumbstruck in his chair, face still smeared with coal dust, hands bruised and chipped from hard work trying to work out what happened.  And maybe a mother had to hush her kids up in respect for the grieving through the walls.

We are stuffed full of information these days, internet, TV, film, novels, magazines, and I often wonder how before all of that when there was just the occasional newspaper and an oral tradition of stories and memories – what did people know that we’ve now forgotten?  I think they could tie themselves more to their own past, and to each other in a community.  I think they shared more experiences and that gave them unity and empathy.  I must admit I’m envious of lives lived with space and much less stimulus.  The focus of a hobby, the understanding of distance when many journeys had to be done on foot and the feeling of belonging to one place. 

So my question is; we’ve gained a lot, but have we lost anything to history?