Spoken Lives

Listen to people chatting in a café, the noise of cups, the gasp of a coffee machine making a background rhythm to the rise and fall of the narrative; the gentle murmurs of verbal correspondence soothe and lull, without the necessity of personal input. That for me is the beauty of books in which people tell their personal stories; reading them is like listening at a distance; I'm not involved but am captivated by the language, the naturalness of ordinary people speaking out their lives.

All the better if there are photographs of the speakers., as is the case in two of the books I am writing about tonight. Seeing the faces of the speakers adds depth to the experience.

“Forgotten Voices Of The Great War” is by Max Arthur, in association with the Imperial War Museum, published by Ebury Press London in 2003. It was put together from tape recordings of veterans of the First World War from both sides, describing how they were recruited, their training and their experiences on the Western Front and in the Gallipoli campaign. We have read of these horrendous events many times before; they never fail to shock – the waste, the total destruction, but above all the terrible innocence and ignorance of the recruits of all social groupings in believing that the war would last at best a month or so, at worst, maybe a year. Most signed up at the recruiting centres, but some British were actually recruited at the music halls; others were moved to enlist by the finger pointing poster of Kitchener. Germans described the elation of arriving at the Front in trains and being greeted with adulation and flowers; what shocked me most were the women. Mothers wept with pride as their sons marched away; young women, who didn't have to go to the front themselves, handed out white feathers to those they saw in civilian clothing (even soldiers on leave).

Rifleman Norman Demuth of the London Rifle Brigade says:

“As well as being given white feathers, there was another method of approach. You would see a girl come towards you with a delightful smile all over her face and you would think to yourself, 'My word this is somebody who knows me.' When she got to about five or six paces from you she would suddenly freeze up and walk past you with a look of utter contempt and scorn as if she could have spat. That was far more hurtful than a while feather – it made you curl up completely and there was no replying because she had walked on.”

Now when I read about the women left without men after those war years, I don't feel the same sympathy, even though no doubt not all women were like that. Later, with the draft, it was different....and I know they were different times, but one hopes that people would never be so easily led again. Then into the mind come images of body bags flown in from Iraq....Afghanistan...whence next?

Heinrich Beutow was a German schoolboy in 1914. “My memories are those of a child of course. I was in a small German garrison town in 1914 and I remember very well the tremendous enthusiasm. ....I shall never forget the day when they marched out to the trains. All the soldiers were decorated with flowers, there was no gun which did not show a flower. Even the horses I think were decorated. And of course all the people followed them. Bands playing, flags flying, a terrific sort of overwhelming conviction that Germany now would go into war and win it very quickly.”

Kitty Eckersley, a mill worker in Clayton, near Manchester, described how her young husband joined up: They went to a show at the Palace Theatre: “...when we got there, everything was lovely. Vesta Tilley was on stage. She was beautifully dressed in a lovely gown of either silver or gold. But what we didn't know until we got there was that also on stage were Army officers with tables all set out for recruiting. She introduced those songs, 'We Don't Want To Lose You, But We Think You Ought To Go' and 'Rule Britannia', and all those kind of things. Then she came off the stage and walked all round the audience – up and down, either sides, down the middle – and the young men were getting up and following her. .....I don't quite know what happened but she put her hand on my husband's shoulder – he was on the end seat – and as the men were all following her, he got up and followed her too.” Sounds like mass hypnotism, doesn't it? Followed by what we now know was mass murder.

In “Catching Both Sides of the Wind”, by Anita Jackson, five black pastors in Britain in 1982 speak about their lives. This book was published in.1985 by the British Council of Churches, London, and it turned up on the shelves of the recycling centre in lovely condition. Once again, as in any conversation, some things stick out. It's hard to know what is the truth. I found one of the pastors more frank than the rest. The others all seemed to be trying to convey how much less permissive a society it was in the West Indies than in Britain when they arrived during the 1950s.. In their former homelands, according to a couple of the pastors, the church educated and the people looked up to them, and were quite conservative in their behaviour. Reverend Robinson Milwood, a Methodist Minister in London says

"....let me go back and make clearer what I mean by black values. A black value in family life is that the child leaves his family home only for his own home......The permissiveness in Western culture now means that little value is placed on respect for elders in this country, and this has been the main reason for the gap between the black young and the parent generation....There is a clear-cut hiatus between black adults and youngsters in this country,.....”

Pastor Ira Brooks, a Pentecostal Minister, says:

"In the West Indies there's no such thing as a child being born out of wedlock being unlawful. It was common for a man to cohabit with a woman, and she was his wife. And people didn't see anything wrong with that until different standards made it a disgrace to live like that.” He went on to say that people of his generation in Britain were often fearful that their children would find out what life in the West Indies had really been like.

What is the truth? No doubt, as usual, it is somewhere in between the two poles. As with information gleaned from café conversations, who knows? Sometimes we tell it as we want it to be. Appearances seemed to matter a lot. A brother of mine worked in a factory in London as a young man, and laughed as he told me about some of his fellow West Indian workers, who arrived in suits and with briefcases containing only their sandwiches, changed into working clothes, then did the same in reverse at going-home time. It was important to them that neighbours and relatives believed they were office workers for prestige purposes. In the book,there are pretty bleak stories about the way even black pastors were treated. The police, all the pastors were agreed, were not helpful to the black man. Of course they were talking in the 1980s about thirty years earlier, when they had come to Britain. However, the feeling seemed to be that in the 1980s not much had changed. Sometimes it seems from news reports on TV even now that things haven't changed all that much. Most of the pastors hoped to go home eventually, although as one said, their children being British was a kind of a trap for them, because the children had no desire to go back to their parents' homeland. Landlords exploited them, what is new about that tale? Furnished flats had smelly beds bought secondhand, anything was good enough for black tenants. The Irish shared that experience. Thank goodness for modern tenancy laws. But these are the things you don't read about in history books, and yet they are the stories of people, and surely are more important than events. It seems to me that most history is actually the history of politics and warfare, with anything else incidental. I myself did not realise that oral histories of ordinary people's lives were something fairly recent. Now that I think about it, of course it was the advent of the tape recorder that brought these stories to the fore.

“Dublin Street Life & Lore – An Oral History” was written by Kevin C. Kearns, and published in 1991 by Glendale Publishing Ltd., Dun Laoghaire, Ireland., and I found it at a book sale some years ago. It's full of stories told by elderly people who lived and worked in the city of Dublin from the beginning of the last century. Here are the voices of lamplighters, dockers, postmen, chimney sweeps, pawnbrokers, street dealers, newspaper boys, jarveys, even fortune tellers. Some of the reminiscences are surprising.  This is Lizzy Byrne, Moore Street Dealer, at the time of the book aged 82, talking about the Easter Rising:

“..I remember the Rebellion...1916. I was playing on Henry Street when that happened, beside the Post Office. We didn't know what it was, we were too young. We heard the shouting and people got all excited. They were afraid for their life! We locked ourselves up for nearly a week. You'd be afraid to come out. It was only fighting between two certain crowds, you know. But we let them go on with it and it only lasted for about a week.” That is quite a casual description of the Rising that led to the foundation of the new Irish state.

There was one particularly sad memory, told by Willie Murphy, a docker 79 years old when he speaks in the book. He is describing the 'readings' dockers had to endure every day to have a chance of work. The stevedore stood calling out the names of those who would have work that day, calling his own family and relatives first, and this was the 'reading':

“At readings men had it in their minds that there was something at home wanting on that table. And if they didn't get a job that just put them down in the depths. Heartbreaking. It's true.....you could see the tears in their eyes. And they'd run from one read to another cause there'd be readings for other ships. Like some of them we'd call cross-country runners cause they could run that fast to get to another read. As soon as one reading was over you could see them run...” It doesn't bear thinking about, what it must have been like, how soul-destroying, how crushing on self-esteem. No matter what things are like now in Ireland, they are better than that. Also let's not forget that they are still like that in other countries, something we shouldn't forget when immigrants come to us in hopes of a better life.

There was humour too. This is Mickey Sheridan, a 68 year old Jarvey in 1991, talking about another old Jarvey:

“,,,And one old chap, Barney Doherty., had a big old heavy horse under the cab. It should have been under a plough and not under a cab. He wasn't a smart-going horse. So the fare he had in the cab put his head out and says, “hey, jarvey, will you put on the lashes? I can walk quicker!”. And he'd three articles with him. So Barney opened the door and says, “if you can walk quicker there's the path..and there's your three articles of luggage to keep you from breaking into a gallop!” Oh, they were characters.”

I lost a book friend two days ago, the second in a year. He's been a friend for a long time, but not what you could call a really close, see-every-day kind of friend. When we were in touch, it was usually to do with books, and we could talk about them for hours. We would ring each other if we heard of a book sale; he had a friend who ran a bookshop in Dublin, and if I needed a book I would ring him and he would ring his friend to see if he could track it down. One time I was looking for a really obscure title called “The Confessions of Zeno”, an English translation of Italo Svevo's “La Coscienza di Zeno”. This was in the days before you just looked it up on the computer and bought it online. I had searched and phoned everywhere without success; a few minutes after I rang him, he got back to me in great glee saying that incredibly his friend in the bookshop had actually had that very book in his hands when he called, and in the afternoon he brought it to my house still elated over the coincidence. A major part of Svevo's story is Zeno's efforts to give up smoking. My friend shared that problem with Zeno. In November he told me he was dying and the day before yesterday he did.

In life he was a soldier, and later a fireman. One story he loved to tell was about how, going to the fire station one morning in his uniform and halted at traffic lights, he spotted a car going on fire. Leaping out of the car he grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran over and put the fire out. The astonished driver said to him “My God, you fellows certainly are quick”.   He was funny and clever, a wonderful raconteur and unpublished writer; but above all, he loved books. If there are celestial libraries, I will know where to find my two friends when I make that journey myself. Does that sound strange? I can't help noticing that nature has her reasons, for everything . After we have left our teens and twenties, we are not so fast on our feet any more; younger people beat us at most types of active sports. Even if we are very fit, we were probably fitter when we were younger. It is the same with all animals – the older become slower. There is no longer a need for speed. If this is not true of all people, it certainly is of most. Also at a certain age, we stop reproducing, especially if we are women. Once again, this is a physical part of our lives declining because we have fulfilled that part of our destiny. But right up to the moment we die, we can study, read, absorb information of all sorts. Is this some shortsightedness on the part of nature? I think not. And so let us all, eventually, adjourn to the Great Library.