Welcome to my blog which is recording a writer’s life in a weekly update on is professional progress (should there be any) and the life that goes on while he makes other plans.
This week I have been a grandfather, looking after Francis, an eight year old, in his parent’s house in Manchester, while they were working from 8am to 6pm. Ten hours a day for five days. No television, no computer games. Now it is over I can’t quite see why the days seemed so long and why by six I couldn’t get down to writing or anything because I was too knackered. It reminded me of those times as a parent of four spent conserving every ounce of energy to get through the day because even when you are apparently relaxing, you’re waiting for the next call on your attention whether it is to sort out a sibling fight, cook some food, bounce on a trampoline, attend to a hurt, wash or change some clothes, pretend to be King or a fool, jolly the flagging, share a joke, divert some tears. With Francis there is a lot of pretending involved. Mostly I’m Darth John, lord of the daftest droids in all the worlds.
Francis is an only child. He loves stories to the point that most of the day he is living in one. He’ll sometimes sit for hours listening to Harry Potter while creating and acting out fantasies primarily based on Star Wars. If you had to imagine a future writer/director/actor, Francis is your boy. I’ve always thought J.K. Rowling is so successful because somehow she has tuned into and expressed a universal story-telling archetype. Francis’s love of story is a product of the same innate structuring of the mind. At his school he has studied a book published in 1916 called ‘The King of Ireland’s Son’ by Padraic Colum in which:
‘In vigorous and rhythmic prose, the author recounts the adventurous wooing of Edelman, the enchanter's daughter, by the King of Ireland's son, and relates the many strange adventures they had on their journey home, weaving many short tales from the Gaelic tradition into the fabric of the narrative.’
I would never have tried to read this to my own children – although I did read them Lord of the Rings – yet the class of 8 year olds have lapped up the structure of it because it is an archetype they recognize, or at least Francis does. George Lucas and Spielberg have, I believe, based their work on the archetypal myths, particularly the hero myth, as identified by Joseph Campbell, Jung etc. And, I suppose, my own characters, less heroically, follow much the same trajectory, or should if they want mass appeal.
One day I took Francis and his friend Jake to a forest where they’d been a couple of weeks previously on a school trip which had been truncated, for Francis, when he’d fallen head first onto some rocks in the river. Our plan on the return journey was to work on a dam that Francis had begun before his accident. After quite a long trip there, the kids jumped out and made their way down a forest path to a little bridge where they’d played Pooh Sticks previously. Hungry, they sat down to eat the first of their sandwiches and then began to explore. By the bridge was another path that cars could drive down if they needed to get to any of the forest properties. After a while a car stopped and the elderly couple in the front watched the kids playing for 5 minutes before the woman climbed out and started shouting out to Francis to ‘stop pulling up the trees’ and to ‘go away from private property.’ It was a puzzling tirade in a forest marked out by public footpath signs and housing a Visitor’s centre. Unfortunately if there are two words that press my buttons they are ‘private property.’ Even at 14, Proudhon’s ‘Property is Theft’ struck a chord with me and a lifetime of incidents of being rudely disturbed by gun toting loud shouting landowners has riled me beyond measure.
About 15 years ago, when I was in my forties, I was in a field in Devon when I suddenly became overwhelmed by nostalgia for my parents and began to cry. At the same time the landowner appeared with his gun and two howling dogs and began shouting at me to get off his land. When he finally got near he bellowed, “What the hell are you doing here?” “If you must know,” I replied, “I’m missing my mummy and daddy and I can’t stop sobbing. Will you please leave me alone?” And he did.
To the woman I was rude. Which probably upset the kids too because they’re not used to that sort of thing in adults (I think). She called me ‘an ignorant bastard’ and drove off with her husband. Francis was traumatized. For five minutes he wouldn’t speak. When he did, his mood had changed completely and it was all I could do to persuade him to carry on and when he did he grumbled on and on about private property until I felt like saying ‘for god’s sake, that’s enough.’ Finally he and Jake climbed up nearby hillocks to look for the termite hill their teacher had spotted. Just then the woman’s husband leaned over the fence of his house and shouted at them to come down and ‘leave nature alone’. This time I said, “Please, they’ve been looking forward to this for ages, leave them alone.” And he did.
Twenty minutes later, Francis was swinging across the river on a rope swing with a broad grin on his face and shouting, ‘Geronimo.’ I don’t think any child ever could have looked happier. The Dam building wasn’t that successful. As Francis pointed out, I lacked the skills of a beaver. We’d taken spades to dig up mud to act as cement but they broke straightaway. The boys went back to the rope swing; I sipped tea from the flask and noticed each half hour as it passed. I discovered later that Francis had had a similar experience of the property owning class a month ago when playing with his father in a stream outside his other grandfather’s house. Surely these petty tyrants appear in the traditional children’s literature that Francis is so fond of. If I really had a readership I could send you off to identify the right story for me and thus armed, I’d return to Francis with a heroic rather than insolent response to the greedy bastards who usurp the right that is truly all of ours. As Rousseau put it:
"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
No comments:
Post a Comment