On 5 May 1973 my wife and I became engaged. That was the day Sunderland won the Cup Final. My wife's parents were ardent Black Cat supporters. We figured that if Sunderland were to win, her father would say yes to anything, and if they lost he'd be past caring. Reader, I married her. And married into her North East family. Her father was from Consett, her mother from Wearside. They hadn't lived in the North East since the war. When I arrived on the scene, they had retired to the Yorkshire Dales. But the region was in their blood. My initiation into North East culture included being presented to the family matriarch who lived in Sunderland and of whom everyone seemed in awe, and an evening drinking in a well-known watering hole just down the road where the only females to be seen were serving behind the bar. (Brown ale, you ask? I'm not saying. It would be a cliché too far.)
To a young Londoner it was all very strange, even exotic. I'd only visited the North East once before, as a schoolboy applying to Durham University to read maths. I've never forgotten the November afternoon I got out of the train at Durham station. It was bleak and grey, the kind of day the North East does so well. Above the rooftops huddled below I took in the apparition of the Castle and Cathedral not, it seemed as the light began to fade, anchored to the bedrock of their acropolis but floating ethereally above. I walked through the darkening streets up to the Castle where I was to spend the night before my interview. I wondered how I had come to be so far from home. Did it cross my mind that one day this would be my home? Not for a moment. I didn't go to Durham University in the end. But the seed of my fascination with northernness had been sown.
A decade later, we were living in rural north Northumberland. That repeated north I found to be both romantic and unsettling. I'd become Vicar of Alnwick. It was my first incumbency. I came to love the place and its people, and to cherish the memory of the ancient Christianity that flourished in Saxon times thanks to the Northumbrian saints like Oswald and Aidan, Cuthbert and Hild. But I won't deny that living and working in a northern country market town posed challenges to a young vicar brought up in the metropolitan suburbs of north London. Was this because any small town was inevitably a more self-contained world? The empty landscapes were sublimely beautiful, but their silence and remoteness could feel unnerving at times. Or was the discomfort due to its northernness, a culture shock that would wear off in time? (It took three decades, I was told, even to begin to belong up here near the Scottish border.)
We went away, but the pull of Northumbria was in my blood. In time we found our way back like returning exiles. "It's marvellous to be back in the North East" I heard myself say at my installation as Dean in Durham Cathedral. I wrote many blogs during my thirteen years in Durham, so I won't say more here. Except to recall one conversation I had with a college principal during my first year as Dean. "Michael" he said, "you'll never understand this Cathedral or the North East until you've been to your first Miners' Gala". So it proved. I began to feel (not just observe) something of the bonds of loyalty and solidarity felt among the North East's mining communities, forged by the shared perils of mining, the common experience of disaster, the loss of livelihood and dignity when the pits closed and the frustration that their people had been all but forgotten about in London where power lay and decisions were taken. I also learned how old wounds ran deep, such as the bitter memories of the miners' strike of 1984 that so divided workers and their families.
Finally (to bring the story up to date) we retired four years ago back to rural Northumberland. We live in what was once a pit manager's house, named after a Tyneside collier ship that went down in the 1880s. It’s right by the railway, Britain’s earliest east-west route that was open when Queen Victoria came to the throne. The River South Tyne tumbles down from the North Pennines a hundred yards away. How very North Eastern. St Cuthbert was here too, once upon a time: the medieval church up on the hill is dedicated to him. It was probably built to commemorate one of the halts made by his community as they travelled the North in the ninth century with the remains of their saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels looking for a permanent resting-place. But an even more ancient story is told here by the Roman Wall as it strides through our parish on the crest of the Whin Sill. There's nothing like the presence of antiquity to put things (like Brexit) into perspective, especially when you find you have what looks plausibly like a substantial Roman stone mortared into your garden wall. Who are we and where have we come from, it seems to ask as I gaze out at it out from the kitchen window. I want to reciprocate with the same question. If only stones could talk!
********
These memories have been stirred by reading Dan Jackson's enjoyable new book The Northumbrians: North-East England and Its People - A New History. (Point of order: do you hyphenate North East or not? When I published my own book on the Christian heritage of the region, Landscapes of Faith, my publisher decided that we wouldn't. So out of habit, I don't. The cover of Northumbrians hyphenates but Dan Jackson's text doesn't. Read what you like into that.)
I've loved this book. Perhaps I've read it too quickly because it is so readable. Its take on the North East is refreshingly different from so much other writing on the region. For all that it's called A New History, it doesn't follow any kind of timeline. Nor does it linger especially on landscape, architecture, literature and art as ends in themselves, rather, for what they tell us about the people whose land this is. For the book is a study of people and communities: at work and leisure, in war and peace, in learning and politics, public life and industry, and not least, in the ordinary days where life is lived in home and countryside, city, town and village.
Dan Jackson can write about these things so well, not only because he is a good historian but, much more importantly, because he is a native Northumbrian himself. He writes as a local from inside the experience of North Easternness - you can smell it in his prose and sense that he knows what he's talking about. He is ready to share his own experience of what it is like to grow up and live in the region - inhabit it, I mean, in a way no incomer like me ever can. So this is a very personal book. It's clear that he loves the North East and is proud to be a Northumbrian. But he doesn't rhapsodise as some literature is prone to do. He knows it too well, is too alive to its paradoxes, struggles and real pain, not least due to the steep decline in heavy industry that once made it the power-house of the nation. The book is all the better for having been written from the perspective of a critical friend.
If I had to recommend a book to someone moving to the North East for the first time to help them orientate themselves in a strange but beguiling land, this would be it. I could have done with it forty years ago. I might suggest that they begin by reading the first and last chapters. The opening chapter sets the scene and explores what and who we mean by the idea of "Northumbrian". The closing chapter ponders what the North East is becoming in the twenty-first century, what we should celebrate in the region, and what could be different and better. You'd expect me to say that I was particularly interested in the discussion about why our region voted so decisively for Brexit in 2016 (and before that, against the setting-up of a regional assembly in 2004). What's so helpful here is to begin to understand how the wider context of North East history, politics and culture have all played a part in shaping its assumptions.
For me, blown into the North East as a migrant from the south (and not properly "English" at that, having a German parent), Dan Jackson raises important questions about place, identity and belonging. I suppose I am one of Theresa May's "citizens of everywhere" who has called lots of places "home". She disparagingly went on to say that this made us "citizens of nowhere". But that's a non sequitur. It's true that part of me would love to apply the epithet Northumbrian to myself. I've lived and worked in the North East, retired here and God willing, expect to die here. So I envy Dan Jackson his authentic Northumbrian identity and the sense of place and belonging that come with it. But I know that it can never quite be mine, any more than I can still call myself a Londoner, except as identifying my place of origin. His book has helped me to see that.
My own relationship with the North East is more complex, perhaps because it's also coloured by an ever more insistent awareness that I am not simply British but European. But I can say that there is no other part of England where I would rather find myself at this late stage of life. There's nowhere alse that the bonds of affection and adoptive loyalty have ever run so deep. Which is why I've found so much to treasure in this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment