I had an interesting piece of correspondence this week. Well, two actually. One from a cousin in Perth, Western Australia. Another from her mother, my auntie, who lives in Beal, six miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Both wished me a happy birthday, which was lovely. But here’s the thing. It wasn’t my birthday. This was 2 April, and my birthday actually falls on 29 January.
But they weren’t entirely wrong. Not really.
Alec Ross does have a birthday on 2 April. It’s just that that particular Alec Ross happens to be my grandfather. He was 55 years old – my age now – when my auntie was born, and 57 when faither appeared. The confusion came about because auntie Maggie still records her father – my grandfather’s – birthday on the calendar held up by the fridge magnet. Just habit, you know? “Happy birthday Alec. I wish we’d met. I reckon we’d have been pals, in the way my lads, Magnus and Lachlan, are tight with your son and my father, John.”
So I did the maths. And what I love – what really blows me away, and I don’t feel old –
is that I have a grandfather who was born in 1888.
The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.
History echoes
On the other side of the family, my Nan-nan was obsessed with Bertrand Russell. I’ve maybe – definitely – inherited that. Old Bertrand was many, many things: polymath, philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. But however impressive a résumé that is, there’s something else about him that, in terms of interest, takes him off the charts.
In an idle lockdown moment, I found a video of the great man recorded sometime in the 1950s, in which he talks about the childhood conversations he would have with his grandfather, the former Prime Minister Lord Russell. He recalls being told stories about his involvement in the 1832 Great Reform Act and the Irish Famine. And then, almost nonchalantly, he mentions that his grandfather, being sympathetic to the cause, travelled to Europe to meet Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1814. It seems scarcely believable, until you do the maths.
Similarly, a friend in his 70s once told me a story about being at a funeral when he was a wee boy, whereupon he met an old man who told him that, when he was small, he had met a man who remembered as a child meeting a man who’d been at the funeral of Robert Burns – in Dumfries. In 1796. I’m not kidding.
We tend to mentally compress time when it falls within our own lifetimes, and extend it when thinking about past generations. In 1913, for example, tens of thousands of American Civil War veterans gathered at the battleground of Gettysburg, the shadows of the mid-19th century looming large and long into the 20th. Indeed, the last of the Civil War widows died during the 20th century. The past is often a hell of a lot closer than we thought, and it’s later than we think. And both things can be true at the same time.
In his novel The Go-Betweens, LP Hartley writes: “The past is another country. They do things differently there.”
It isn’t. And they don’t.
More on society.
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