A Somerset Lad

Books are increasingly treated with contempt, unread, tossed around, damaged. Few students have any conception of the power of books and how vulnerable they leave themselves in their obsession with social media. There was a feeling of sadness in gathering books from the floor and realizing how much truth and freedom would be lost when their dependence upon electronic platforms became complete.

Looking back over words from C.J. Sansom’s novel Lamentation, there is a sense of how much the power of books was once appreciated.

The barrister Matthew Shardlake, the main character of Sansom’s novels set in England in the days of Henry Tudor, fears the dangers his books might bring him. When books were so precious, the pain someone must have experienced to burn their own must have been intense.

Sansom describes a scene, set in the summer of 1546, when the health of Henry VIII was in serious decline, when the safety of his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, was by no means certain, and when literature that reflected Protestant thought was considered subversive:

I went upstairs, and unlocked the chest in my bedroom. My heart was heavy as I looked at the books within; several were on the new forbidden list and must be handed in to the city authorities at the Guildhall by the 9th of August. After that date, possession of any of the books would attract severe penalties. With a heavy heart I lifted out my copies of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, and some old commentaries on Luther dating from twenty years before. These books had been my friends in my old reformist days; one of them had been given me by Thomas Cromwell himself. But . . .  I had decided it was definitely better to burn them privately than hand them in and risk my name appearing on a list of those who had owned forbidden books.

I took them downstairs, lighting another candle from the one in the kitchen, then went out to Agnes’s neatly tended vegetable patch behind the house. There was a large iron brazier there, used for burning weeds and other garden rubbish. It was half-full, the contents brown and dry after all the recent sun. I took a dry twig from the brazier, lit it with the candle and dropped it in. The fire flared up quickly, crackling. I looked around to ensure I was unobserved, then, with a sigh, I took the first of my books and began tearing out pages and dropping them on the fire, watching the black Gothic script I had once read so carefully curling up.

Books were subversive then, and the printed word still has the capacity to ensure that the truth is heard. Websites might be taken down, news broadcasters might be injuncted to prevent them from reporting stories, but words printed on paper are harder to destroy, can lay hidden for years, can endure long after electronic media have become corrupted.

The day when the printed word disappears will be a day of encouragement for the sort of people who in times past forced the burning of books and persecuted those possessing forbidden publications.

The book is a bastion of defence for the truth, the students would look blankly if I said such a thing.

Yes, I know, there is no such thing as a seagull, they are simply gulls, but having grown up with the word, it is hard to let it go. A younger person might reasonably point out that the association of some gulls with the sea has become tenuous. Some gulls don’t even appear to live near water, either the sea or a river.

Lying on the northern edge of Cheltenham, the school is distant from the sea and some miles from the River Severn, which runs to the west of Gloucester. Unless you count the ponds in Pittville Park, there is no open water nearby. Yet there is a flock of seagulls that frequents the school grounds and that returned with enthusiasm when the students returned after lockdown. Lunchtimes provide many opportunities for snatching scraps dropped by careless eaters of food bought in the school canteen and kiosk.

The school grounds are extensive and below the expanse of grass now marked with the lanes of a four hundred metre running track there is the rugby pitch which is now in a summer slumber.

The creation of the flat rugby pitch must have demanded excavation at some point and there is a slight ridge running down to the touchline. The ridge is shallow at one end and sufficiently deep at the other for those sat below it to be out of sight to those closer to the school buildings.

Students concealing themselves from sight are a cause for concern to members of staff on duty, so it was that the disappearance from view of two twelve year old boys prompted a feeling of need to wander down the field.

A large litter bin lay between us and an absence of students and the prospect of scraps had drawn a gathering of gulls. Some of the gulls wandered close to the top of the ridge, whereupon the two boys came running into sight trying to catch the unwitting birds. Of course, there was no prospect of a twelve year old boy catching a wily old scavenger and even the boys laughed at their efforts.

Watching their efforts was a moment of unexpected joy. Chasing gulls was a ridiculous laughter inducing activity, but to have the energy and the enthusiasm to attempt it seemed the sort of thing that might have been expected of schoolboys before their spirits were possessed by mobile phones.

The Year 7 students suggested that the list of things for which people crave included immortality. They thought people wanted to live as long as possible.

Had I remembered to do so, I would have shared a story from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. The story is of Harry Truman, who was a man significant for anyone who thinks about the inexorable process of ageing and craves for immortality.

Harry Truman lived on his 54 acre farm at Spirit Lake in the state of Washington. Eighty-three years old, he had served in the Great War and had been a bootlegger during prohibition. Following the death of his wife five years previously, Harry Truman lived alone with his sixteen cats.

Harry Truman’s farm was close to Mount Saint Helens, an active volcano that threatened to erupt. Other people had been evacuated to safety, but he refused. The volcano might never erupt, his house might be looted, but, more significantly, this place was his life.

The authorities pleaded with him, but he was obstinate in his desire to remain in the place that was his own. The police contemplated arresting him, but Harry Truman had already attracted publicity and television images of uniformed officers removing an old man from his home would not have been good publicity. In May 1980, Mount Saint Helens did erupt and Harry Truman and his cats disappeared.

There is something very life affirming in the story of Harry Truman, the sense that he recognised the difference between being alive and living. Atul Gawande’s concern is with life that is worth living, his descriptions of nursing home care are familiar and, sometimes, chilling in their incisiveness.

The medical emphasis on preservation of life, which is sometimes a promotion of craving for life, can sometimes fail to ask questions about what that life means. Harry Truman retained the autonomy to take his own decisions, others of his age may not have the physical health or the cognitive capacity to retain independence, but who has the right to take decisions on their behalf?

Having worked in rural communities, the question of retaining one’s independence is often as much one of attitudes and expectations, as it is of physical or mental capacity. In one place, a ninety-three year old woman would climb onto her tractor each morning, and people expected her to do so because she had always done so.

How many older people could remain young because they were expected to stay young? Harry Truman remained on his farm because he was expected to remain on his farm. Is part of the answer to having a life worth living in what we expect, from ourselves and others?

Expectations can both pull us along and allow us space to be ourselves. Medical and nursing care are no more than ancillary activities to the business of living a life worth living. Craving to simply stay alive is not living. Perhaps it is an easier call to make when you are twelve years old and death is a remote prospect.