티스토리 뷰
Nain's stories of fishermen, settlers and cobblers taught me that people from my past had shaped my present. It's a gift I'm passing on to my daughter
My grandma gave me a gift that she promised no one could ever take away. She was right. I still cling to it today. decades later. She told me who I was, she unlocked the past.
For our family, history was never HMS Victory and Magna Carta. History was our story. It was who we were. A family making its way, clinging to shared values, laughing at the same jokes, buffeted by the mighty, sent to fight on battlefields far from home, but always trying to shape a course towards a better future.
History was the stories told to me by my grandmother, Eluned, who died deep into her 90s this summer. To us she was Nain. A towering matriarch born in colonial India to Welsh parents whose life was swept along on the swirling currents of the 20th century and ended up living most of her life in Canada. When Nain told us grandkids stories of the past, she was giving us the gift of self-knowledge, she was grounding the galvanic miracle of our existence in solid, steadying earth. At the family farm in north Toronto, we crowded on to a hammock strung between two beech trees or huddled round the hearth as she told stories, just like her Nain had done 60 years before.
Our Nain had been trapped in Canada by U-boats in the Atlantic as an 18-year-old and married a medical student, Robert, who had collided with her as she came out of the biology faculty and sent an armful of books flying. He offered to take her for a milkshake to apologize. You couldn't get a decent shake in Toronto, he told her, but he knew a place... three hours away. Six hours and two milkshakes later they were in love. It was a turning point in her life, and in mine. And now, I realize, in the lives of my children.
History was why I was tall ( like great-grandpa Snow) and pale (pasty folk from the Mull of Kintyre, Dorset and County Cork), living between rural Ontario and urban London in the UK (great-great-great grandpa MacMillan emigrated from Argyll; his Canadian descendant, my mum, met my British father at an otherwise uneventful press conference in Montreal), having a higher-than-average chance of developing lung cancer (granny Pringle and her twin sister). It was why I spoke English, had a Scottish middle name, traveled on a Canadian passport, had a big nose, bad teeth.
The present, I realized, is simply the visible bit of a vast procession involving you and countless others that reaches back to the past and surges off towards the future. It is like standing on a tight bend in a canyon watching a river crashing down rapids. We glimpse it as it flashes past, emerging from and disappearing into the unknown.
Nain's gift to us was to make that past a little better known, but she wove together stories to inspire us too. She told us of our ancestors' achievements whether real, embellished or outright imaginary. She told us how her father had stayed up all night at Hammersmith hospital to fight incendiary bombs during the blitz and the terrified, immobile patients below were told not to worry. "Sleep well, Dr Carey Evans is on the roof." How old Gramps MacMillan had to walk to school in the snow without shoes. A career in medicine had been both his ticket out of provincial drudgery but also into the hell of casualty clearing stations on the western front.
Great-great Taid, David, and his brother, lost their father and their house and moved in with their uncle, a cobbler in Gwynedd. The shoemaker wanted the boys to have a better life and he taught them maths, calssics and other subjects they needed to get into the grammar school. Every night, after they went to bed, he taught himself the next day's lessons. They never realized their apparently erudite uncle was never more than a lesson ahead.
Great-Grampie MacMillan had been in the trenches: he had been a tough dad when he got back. Our Gramps was in the navy during the next war and he ploughed the north Atlantic, a German torpedo away from death for months on end. These experiences shaped their characters. As a child I followed my grandfather, shadow-like, learning from him, copying him, as we worked in the woods, or extracted wooden frames dripping with honey from the beehives. As I did so, I was making parts of his history my own.
Like characters in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the echoes of our ancestors reverberated through us, Nain insisted that my cousin got her studiousness from a great-great aunt i Wales, a pioneer for women's education; my love of politics apparently came from great-great Taid. These people were from the past. Her past. Our past. But they had built our present and they were alongside us as we shaped our future. The stories changed and grew with every retelling. That made the past somehow malleable and meant our stories could be changed too. By us. Nothing was preordained.
Eventually, Nain's stories dimmed as her once unstoppable life force waned towards the end. Now they are gone. The only way to fill the void she left is to pass on her gift, to cuddle my daughter tight and tell her our tales of fishermen, settlers, preachers, cobblers and queens.
History is not who they were; it is who she is, and can be.