A Somerset Lad

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1984, I read most of Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Iron in the Soul, the third volume in a trilogy called the Roads to Freedom.

A piece of existentialist fiction, it is set against the background of the defeat of France and people waiting on fine June days for the arrival of the invader.

On Sunday, 16th June 1940, Mathieu, one of the characters in the novel, ponders his situation:

That’s just about it, thought Mathieu: a fair bugger. He gazed into nothingness, and thought: I’m a Frenchman… and that’s a bugger, he reflected for the first time in his life; a fair bugger: we’ve never really seen France: we’ve only been in it. France had been the air we breathed, the lure of the earth, having plenty of elbow room, seeing the kind of things we do, feeling so certain that the world was made for man. It has always been so natural to be French, the simplest, more economical, way in the world, to feel that one is universal. One didn’t have to explain things; it was for the others, the Germans, the English, the Belgians, to explain by what piece of ill-luck, by what fault, it had come about that they were none of them quite human. And now France is lying on her back, and we can take a good look at her, can see her like a piece of large, broken-down machinery. And we think — so that, all the time, is what it was! — an accident of locality, an accident of history. We are still French, but it no longer seems natural. It needed no more than an accident to make us realize that we were merely accidental. Schwartz thinks that he is accidental — and no longer understands himself, finds himself embarrassing. He thinks — “How comes it that one is French?”; he thinks, “With a bit of luck I might have been born a German.” And then his face takes on a hard look, and he sits listening to the approach of his adoptive country. He sits waiting for the coming of the glittering armies that shall gleefully celebrate his change of heart; he sits waiting for the moment when he will be able to trade our defeat for their victory, when it will seem natural to him to be victorious and German.

Last week, I finished the novel. It felt an accomplishment, since January, I had wade through the other two parts of the trilogy and had come to knowm Mathieu

But Mathieu changes.  He was a member of an auxiliary unit and might have sat resignedly waiting for capture, but instead he and a friend deicide to join three French regular soldiers and to climb to the top of a church tower and attempt to halt the German advance by 15 minutes. Mathieu shoots two German soldiers. His comrades fall to German bullets and the tower is blown to pieces.  It is the end of Mathieu’s part in the story.

On Monday, I read that Sartre never intended the novels to be a trilogy, but instead there was to be another novel. Parts of the fourth novel had been published in 1949, but only after Sartre’s death in 1980 was the novel put together using fragments and notes that Sartre had left behind. I ordered a copy from Waterstones and it came today.

In a twist that did not seem to match with the unremitting gloom, Mathieu is not dead but is in a prisoner of war camp and becomes once more the central figure of the story.

It seemed an unlikely comeback, there is almost a sense that even Sartre needed a hopeful ending.

‘The Beatles will be remembered long after Abba have been forgotten.’

It was an assertion with which it would have been hard to argue.  It was the late 1970s and Abba were at the height of their popularity, but the point was made that The Beatles were a cultural phenomenon while Abba were just a pop group.

However, while Abba broke up in a manner as rancorous as the break-up of The Beatles, the pop nature of their music seemed to allow it to endure.

In 1999, it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the success of Abba’s song Waterloo at the Eurovision Song Contest.  There were wishes expressed that the band might re-form for a concert.  Hopes were immediately crushed. band members commented that they were now middle-aged and not the twenty-somethings they had been a generation before.

The lack of any prospect of them ever playing again did not seem unduly troubling, it would only have been an exercise in nostalgia for those who were middle aged themselves.

But an odd phenomenon seemed to be emerging. Abba were not going away, it might have been more than twenty years since they had last recorded a song or performed a concert, but their popularity seemed undiminished.

The musical Mamma Mia! highlighted the music of Abba, but it would not have enjoyed such success if the songs were not already in the hearts and minds of those who went to see the film.

Why did their success endure?

In conversation one day with a friend who was a DJ and whose love was Northern Soul music, Abba came up in conversation.  He was unstinting in his praise of them, ‘They were pure professionals. Pure pop, but pure professional. It’s a pity the broke up in the way they did. Everyone of their songs was rehearsed and re-rehearsed, recorded and re-recorded until it was exactly right’.

Pure professional. Perhaps that was the secret for the songs are both diverse and distinctive and yet they have a discernible Abbaesque quality about them.

The assertion that The Beatles would long outlive Abba was contradicted in our school sports hall last Saturday morning.  A sponsored 24 hour rowing marathon was taking place. The young women of 5th year had been present since 5 a.m, they were tired and physically drained from turns on the rowing machines. Suddenly, around 7.30 am, the sound of the opening bars of Abba’s Voulez-vous? filled the hall and every one of those girls who were not rowing ran to the centre of the hall and joined in a joyous dance, loudly singing the lyrics of the song.

It was a moment of pure happiness, a sense of something indefinable. Abba forgotten? You should have seen them when Dancing Queen began.

There was a poetry in the hymns we sang at High Ham Primary School.  Apart from the entirely banal When a knight won his spurs, the choices from our hymnbook were weighty in theological and literary terms.  Even to someone who had few religious inclinations, there was imagery and imagination in the lines we sang.  There were words we did not understand, words that might have prompted pondering even among adults. There were rhymes and alliteration and the sort of poetic devices our teacher tried to teach us.  Lines like which wert and art and evermore shalt be linger in the memory more than fifty years after standing in that long gone classroom.

Perhaps such childhood experiences helped create a sense of timelessness, a sense of living at every moment all at once, a recalling of distant memories with a realism so vivid that the linear order of events can become confused. The boy at High Ham school is much a part of the present as are the subsequent incarnations of him, the child being the father of the man and all that stuff.

Stepping out of the car at the house that has been the family home for the past fifty-seven years, there was a moment in which all the moments seemed gathered. Perhaps it was the sense of the approach of Easter, perhaps it was simply the sound of silence and birdsong after the noise of Dublin.

The landscape of home has been inhabited for two millennia, the mosaic floor from the Roman villa lies in the county museum.  There are people who claim to have seen legionnaires passing through.

Turning toward the door, the thought occurred that the number of years when such moments might occur was much less than it had been.  How many more times might I drive the road from Fishguard to Somerset? How many more spring evenings might there be when arrival is greeted by birdsong and tranquility?

In a moment, there came the realisation that it didn’t really matter, it didn’t matter what decade it might be, none of it mattered if time was all at once.

I smiled recalling Miss Rabbage sitting at the piano in the junior classroom. The hymns, the timeless hymns, Now thank we all, our God was among them.

. . . keep us in his grace,
and guide us when perplexed,
and free us from all ills
in this world in the next.

This world, the next world, the past world, which wert and art and evermore shalt be.