Happily Ever After

..Happily ever after.

That’s the story, but in this case,
The wolf wins,
Jack the Giant Killer falls

No youngest son outsmarts the shadows;
in this case the most that can be said
of those left
of those eager to believe
of the listeners at the doors of faith,
yes the most that can be said is
And they lived…

I wrote this for my son Theo when he died, nineteen years ago. The (for me) unfortunate concurrence of National Happiness Day and National Storytelling Day on his birthday prompt me to post it. Not every story has a happy ending.

Not many people have seen it, and I hope the few new people who do now aren’t upset by it. It stands, I guess, as a remembrance that Happiness is not (or should not be) a smug thing but a springboard for compassionate action, and that for millions of people their lives are far worse than mine, and for millions the sadness of losing a child is a painful reality. And as it is this afternoon I have chopped logs and chased away the shadows, and am typing tentatively as I watch a kestrel on the top of a tree in our garden, I rejoice in my family and my dear friends, but…

Shelving

After years of accumulating homeliness, leaving my Brookes office was a dreadful thing to do; hasty, almost punitive. We left for Greece the day after my Brookes contract came to an end, with thoughts of Prospero set adrift echoing through my reading. My books of magic – of Wild Spaces Wild Magic – were set up, but the rest was just boxes of stuff.

The boxes were sulking when I returned, but with a bit of coaxing, they began to find ways into the study. Joe helped by taking me to Ikea and then helping with building the shelves. I did that job I had called “tonking”when I was a library assistant: setting the shelf heights by sorting out the supports or tonks. And after that it was shelving.

I decided to divide the books into “children’s literature” and “lecturer-type” books, with Wild Spaces Books on their own, starting with Molly Bang’s Picture This, through some (but not all) the Robert MacFarlanes, ending with Z is for Jack Zipes. There were boxes of liturgical and Biblical books – a very nice Liber Usualis, for example, and my battered Greek New Testament – too, but I set them to one side. I looked at the children’s literature and set to. They were in boxes roughly alphabetically, so that a pile of Anholts came out together, and more Mairi Hedderwick than I thought I had; but they weren’t in strict order, and there were gaps. This means that books that had not met for years suddenly were leaning against one another: Sheila Cassidy’s retelling of the Creation was up against Michael Foreman’s eco-committed texts on one side and David Almond’s Skellig on the other. More arrive and these congruences shift: Roald Dahl and Lauren Child budge in; Noel Langley’s Land of Green Ginger, with its rather dubious racial stereotypes, squeezes in with Virginia Kroll’s Masai and I. It’s a bit like rush hour, but they all do get in.

Size is an issue, and while I create “Outsize” shelves, for a while it looks like MacFarlane and Morris’ The Lost Words has no home, until moving the Little Tollers downstairs makes space in Wild Spaces Wild Magic, between Landmarks and W G Hoskins The Making of the English Landscape. Some of these juxtapositions are just right.

Biblical and liturgical find a home like the sparrow in psalm 83.

The grown-up books fill higher shelves, partly in case grandchildren want to browse the lower ones for books that are “for” them, but here it begins again: for a good while, Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices snuggled next to Rob Pope’s English Studies, until Francis Pryor arrived with Steven Pinker and the Opies. Julie Fisher rested against Ralph Waldo Emerson for a while (or was Emerson the one doing the leaning?); Caspar Henderson and Geoffrey Grigson met briefly, as did Jackie Musgrave and T H White.

It’s all a lovely conceit, as if this crowded Tube train of office shelving means that Simon Schama and Chris Stringer will get chatting as their covers touch, or Katharine Briggs
will strike up a conversation with Jane Carroll as they squeeze together. But of course they won’t. It may be that George Monbiot does talk to Sara Maitland, but they don’t do so on my shelves. Here, that’s my job. Because if this blog has point beyond a rather vain showing you (dear Reader) round some of a really quite small collection, it is this: books “talk” to each other only in the person who reads attentively and makes connections. We become passionate about this idea or that, but it is the reader who is in a position to connect playing outdoors as the Last Child in the Woods with the Hermits and the New Monasticism of the eleventh century (Louv and Leyser). Alcuin of York reminisces O quam dulcis vita fuit dum sedebamus in quieti … inter librorum copias, but I might respond O how sweet life is, Blessed Alcuin, where we sit and read in quiet and let the ideas inspire and jolt and fizz and mix…

We are where the debate takes place, where critical thinking emerges. Not reading alone, but thinking and speaking and mulling and writing – and maybe reshelving our ideas in a different order from time to time.

Nativity Plays…

…are always poignant, partly because Christmas brings its own nostalgias, regrets, hopes and fears. Julian Grenier in Inside the Secret Garden has posted a really lovely incident of a child who overcomes a sadness with a sense of wonder: “He had held onto something that was fascinating him, despite his upset, and he had wanted to share it with [his key person] once he felt calm enough.” Maybe that ‘wanting to share it’ is why I’m posting what I’m ending this blog post with now.

To explain: this post fulfills a promise to separate people I meet on Twitter: Bosco Peters (@Liturgy) and Zoe and Andy from Saying Goodbye (@SayingGoodbyeUK). Bosco, a priest in NZ, maintains this website, and Saying Goodbye can be found here. Their interests (hardly the right word) coincided recently when Bosco posted on mourning the deaths of infants. They coincide with mine too.

What follows is the contribution I wrote eight years ago:

Lully Lulla: For Theo, Four and Three Quarters at Christmas

A Christmas might-have-been

Whose eyes like tunnels let down into dark

Let me go to this place or that perhaps

To snowy possibilities where that hand

Is slipped in mine, and off we go:

Me unbegrudging, happy of the chance

To revel in the play, in cheap mulled wine,

Sit on the cramped school chairs, be proud

As one small tea-towel stumbles on his line.

Did I see him there? Perhaps

Some small Christmas ghost

That Dickens overlooked sits with me still

(or always); then yes I saw him there.

If not, I saw his absence only;

He was not here except

As a dim shape ahead of me

In this great blizzard of regret that for a moment

Blinds my steps to Christmas.

They can also, of course, be funny, charming, fraught, competitive… Boscos’s blog has a link to something I think is an exemplary use of video – and a real baby!

A front page

This is a picture of me in Port Meadow, Oxford, perhaps an ambiguous choice of picture for a web-based resource, since (as technology stands at present) for most people reading this is an inside activity

And as a web-based activity, I ought to point out the links to the side here; they will lead to things as diverse as the Play Council and the Rule of St Benedict. Is this the only site that has them both? Until I write the book, it may be… Some of them are there as a way of “bookmarking” them – but really, I suppose, to show the kinds of things I look at on the computer when I’m not working and when I am.

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