Imagining, Remembering and Re-Visioning an Historical Novel
I can see my mother riding a horse from her father’s stable on the beach at Folkestone, England. The year is 1916 and she was listening to the big guns of World War I across the English Channel in France where a generation of young British men would die. Perhaps the guns charted the Battle of the Somme in deadly chorus? The die is cast; the narrative set.
At times I want to stand up and salute. I want to seize the wings of patriotism and perhaps mumble words from a childhood tune, “There’ll always be an England.” Then the gods of fiction emerge from the ether and go on about how war is lived, remembered, suffered, endured and reinvented over time. The gods will have their way. The war stories told by the family fire can take on a different look.
I can almost see the embers of war and smell the clouds of chlorine and mustard gas swirling over the graves of the new dead. The chlorine smells like bleach and attacks the eyes, lungs and throat. Men are now choking on the gas. These men use old damp rags dipped in trench water to cover their mouths. Hands reach out for help from this dismal dying pit. Some crawl out of this suffering place and find their way back to England. One solder, bandaged and bent, lived long enough to marry and father three children before dying from the effects of chlorine gas eating away his lungs. Perhaps the last thing he sees or imagines is his seven-year-old daughter reaching out to him, comforting him, holding his hand. They might both be ghosts or images in a retreating mirror. All in the room were looking for God.
The story is told and remembered and remembered again. The father and mother have decided that, if he died, the three children should be placed in a Catholic orphanage, as was the custom. The oldest was sent home after a year or so, suffering from diphtheria. The nuns thought she would die. She survived. The two other children remained in the orphanage for the next ten years or so, rarely seeing their mother except for an occasional holiday visit. The orphanage would cast a long shadow over the adult lives of the son and second daughter. The grandest thing the son every wished for was a ripe English tomato. The daughter decided at fifteen she would never marry.
Our main characters, mother and daughter, have bonded out of love, need and desperation. The Great Depression came, followed by the early sounds of World War II in Europe. The mother was also a lover, giving birth to another daughter during this time of distress. The father’s name is unclear. Family myths and narratives emerge to soften the edges of this tale and place all births under the proper tent of the Anglican Union, paternity intact.
Not long afterward the mother would marry a refugee from Ireland. He was apparently weary of the pig exporting business. Perhaps he was a member of the IRA? The mother left London for Ireland, pregnant, before the September 1940 London Blitz. Her husband joined the police force and was part of the home guard. As the tale is told he saved many lives and walked through fire. The mother would give birth to two more sons during the war, even though buzz bombs and V-1 rockets continued to ravage London. The family was bombed out of at least seven flats. The orphanage son left that place for a stint with the British Army in Japan, checking radiation levels in the killing fields of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cancer would follow him much of his life. He would hardly say a word. The photo album captures the fading whites and grays of time, fashioned memory, and naturalistic tales of pluck and forbearance.
The children would all return home and the new father was counting heads, reflecting on lineage, paternity and the crucible of time. He was looking his wife in the eyes. There are tales to tell, plots to unravel, and truths to be discovered and recast. Chronology invites mythology. Meanwhile, the eldest daughter married an American G.I. and moved to the states. Some of her family would follow later. Others went to Australia. The winds and wounds of war followed. Some men died tragically before PTSD was fully understood. The young men went to new wars and are still nursing their wounds. It has been a century of war, love, and remembrances. Tales have become hardened and have become rote. The family fire burns less brightly now.
The mother on her deathbed said, “It has been hard,” describing generations of war and suffering with British understatement. Perhaps my task is to remember that she made dresses for her oldest daughter’s wedding party out of discarded parachutes. My soul asks: where are the images, symbols and archetypes associated with a century of wounding? What are the stories that have not been told or yet imagined? Is there a chorus of voices outside of time and memory who have not been heard? Will the angels come when summoned?
I have been handed a hundred years of family stories in person, in letters, during family gatherings and in dreams. I consider this ownership an ethical responsibility. My task is to give these experiences an aesthetic, a structure, and point-of-view that will honor these precious memories while in strict service to the gods of fiction.
I think this is what psychologist James Hillman meant in his references to healing fictions, imagination in pursuit of a psychic healing. This is what the soul really wants, to be made whole in the presence of god.
I remember the words of Joan Didion who writes about place: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, sharpens it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remembers it in his own image.”
I have work to do.
