 BACK |
063 |
The motorway unrolls ahead of me like a tapering dirty grey bandage. Overhead downlike clouds flaunt their backcombed furbelows and drift across the mountainous backcloth in a lazy slow-motion palais glide.  I drive alone and the wheels thrum regularly on the breaks in the road surface. Later, descending a meandering road through a pass between two soaring escarpments, I glance at the Drayton walls that snake and bend as they follow the contours of the hilltops above me. I ponder about the torturous labour involved in the construction of those demarcations hundreds of years ago. Sturdy Cumbrian hill-farmers or their labourers dragged themselves up the steep inclines, pulling the halters of their reluctant mules, their panniers heavy with cleaved rock. With great skill and infinite patience the hillmen laid stone upon stone and slowly formed the four-foot high walls. They used no mortar. Each piece of rock would be deliberately and carefully chosen, then positioned in place to link into and become an element of the supportive matrix of this unique form of territorial boundary and sheep enclosure. The hills of Cumbria and Wales are covered with these dry masonry walls and they remain as a monument to the doughty men who constructed them.  I am on route to the funeral of a dead friend, but my mind is on the walls and the men who built them. The bulwarks have withstood the wild winds of the harsh northern winters. I think of the long dead hill men with their callused hands - the hands that built the walls. Those regular piles of rock are their only memorials. The walls are their labour crystallised and evident. Marx's dictum was that profit is 'crystallised labour.' Are not these walls the 'fossilised labour' of those departed ones? Perhaps if Marx had restricted himself to producing an economic analysis of capitalism without being prescriptive, he would be held in more regard in this modern age? However, many other philosophers could not content themselves to stay clear of political involvement. I think of Plato and his 'Republic,' which exerted considerable influence for centuries. Here is the turn off for Lake Windermere and then the car speeds past the Lakeside Haverthwaite Railway and the huge black engines belching grey steam.  I return to my philosophical musings. There was Heidegger, whose inauguration speech was widely declared an affirmation of Nazism. There was Bertrand Russell who involved himself in the nuclear disarmament movement and that dreadful Frenchman, Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, whose theory of racial determinism had an enormous influence upon the subsequent development of racist theories and practices in western Europe and many other countries. At last here is Greenodd where the route takes me alongside a stretch of water of the Irish Sea. It is a small arm or inlet of Morecambe Bay. The sun flickers on the rippled water and white wading birds rootle among the driftwood for tasteful molluscs. Entering Ulverston beneath the towering folly of the pretended lighthouse, The car weaves its way through the constrictive streets of Stan Laurel's hometown. Stopping for traffic lights, I spot the Laurel and Hardy Museum and find the road to Barrow in Furness. Arriving in Barrow I drive through the dirty beige gates of the cemetery and proceed slowly to the crematorium. My watch tells me that I am half an hour early, so I park the car and take a stroll through the rows of graves that lie in morose rows in the mid August sunshine. There's an unexpected sprinkle of summer rain. I take cover beneath a gnarled tree. Later I stand before the grave of my present wife's first husband. I see his name in chiselled letters. Strange that I took his place, and strange in addition, that in view of my greater age, it is more than likely that my name will appear on a similar grave before my partner Clare's. A lark sings its blithe song as I reluctantly mount the hill back to the crematorium building. It begins to rain again and I join a small crowd of disconsolate mourners at the chapel entrance. I chat with those I know, although it is twelve years gone since I last met most of them. I used to be the manager of the Mobile Home Park where they now live, and I sold most of them their present homes. After the arrival of the hearse, we fall in behind Betty's coffin and slowly walk into the chapel. Sylvia and another lady support Mike. His eighty years lie heavily upon him and the sudden loss has left him grief-stricken and physically weakened. The chapel is barren of ornament other than for a modest wooden crucifix behind the bier. The minister intones a prayer and follows with a tribute to Betty's life which is very moving in its simplicity. He talks of her superior skill as a ballroom dancer, of her youth as a millgirl and the cotton dust that gave her the emphysema that brought about her eventual death. 'I would like to ask Julie to sing for us,' he said. 'This is very unexpected,' I say to myself. A young woman who had previously been pointed out to me as Betty's niece steps to the altar and stands before the coffin. She is dressed in a velveteen jacket with padded shoulders and an ankle-length matching skirt. The organist, a mousy looking woman with huge ornate curly spectacles roosting on the end of her roseate nose plays a short intromission which is uncommonly pedestrian, but what follows is truly tremendous. Julie's voice bursts out and soars up into the roof beams. Her beautiful soprano voice is finely modulated. It resonates from the bare concrete walls and rings in the ears with an awe-inspiring intensity. The vocalic phrasing is crisp yet flowing and her reaching of the high notes is effortless and relaxed. I recognise the piece as 'In paradisum' from Fauré's Requiem and the hairs on the back of my neck hike up with the emotional and physical effect of the beautiful euphony. It was worth driving a hundred miles each way just to hearken to this. My heart beats out with exultation. Tears of unrestrained delight stream down my face. I try to wipe them away unobserved. 'Jud was really upset in the chapel wasn't he?' someone says as we file out. 'He was breaking his heart crying.' 'Yes,' answers the other,' I didn't realise he was so fond of Betty.' 'I enjoyed that girl singing the hymn,' says a third. 'Oh yes!' the second replies, 'I forgot to mention to you, Julie sings with the Royal Covent Garden Opera Company, didn't you know?' |