We used to have my grandparents over for Christmas Day. I
didn’t realize my grandfather was nearly blind or that his deafness dated from the Somme, and can only remember the frustration of watching ‘The Towering Inferno’ while he sat
four inches from the screen and turned round after an hour to ask in a hoarse
whisper, ‘Is there a fire?’
Yes, I hate myself now. But it wasn’t only my grandparents’ own history that I missed, and I was always puzzled when at the end of the meal my grandfather would raise his glass and make a solemn toast to ‘Absent Friends.’ The gravity whizzed straight over my childish head, and it was many years before I realized we weren’t just drinking to family in Canada for Christmas, but to people who were actually dead.
But there's more to this than any one individual's recollections. Ritual is a repetition of acts
performed in the same way over the long parade of years, and in its performance
we are opening the door to history. That the Commons doors should be slammed in
Black Rod’s face at the opening of Parliament derives from the 17th century, that
the Lord Chancellor should sit on the ‘Woolsack’ goes back to the 14th, and when
we see these things done then we’re watching history.
We saw it in July when the board at Buckingham Palace
announced the birth of Prince George. We can see it every day – in the lowering
of a flag, the wearing of a Judge’s wig, the Changing of the Guard. When a
Latin Grace is recited at High Table, when monks chant Plainsong, when a bugler
plays the Last Post, then we are hearing it too. And when we take communion, or
drop a penny in wishing well, or even say ‘Bless you’ to someone who sneezes,
then we’re not re-enacting history, we’re living it for real.
Popular wishing well in Kyoto |
It’s perhaps this last which matters most to historical novelists. It’s true we spend our time recreating worlds profoundly different from our own, but when we want to engage our readers’ emotions then we concentrate most on those things that are the same. Love, death, friendship, betrayal – everyone can identify with these, and empathize with those characters who experience them. I would argue that the same is true of ritual.
When someone ‘tempts fate’ by a careless
remark I may not say ‘Absit omen!’ and ‘spit in my bosom’, but I might well cry
‘Don’t say that!’ and jump to touch wood. Different actions, but when Robert
Graves described a character doing this in ‘I, Claudius’ then the jolt of
recognition was just the same.
And as the centuries roll on it gets easier and easier. There
are Christian churches where the readings still come from the King James Bible
(1611) and the communion service is conducted by the 1662 Book of Common
Prayer. There are (secret) places in England where Morris Dancing isn’t a
re-enactment, but continuation of a tradition handed down from generation to
generation to keep alive the pagan ritual. My own favourite annual Fair is the one at Bampton in Devon, which
has been going on even before Henry III granted its Charter in 1258. It’s not a
quaint re-enactment like a Victorian ‘Christmas Fayre’, it’s a real county
trade-meet which has quite simply never stopped.
The Bampton Mummers at this year's Charter Fair |
Ritual has a way of surviving, particularly when it’s fun. I
doubt we’d really bother to ‘Remember, remember the 5th of November’ if it didn’t
have fireworks and a bonfire thrown in – but we do, and it’s one of our
strongest links to the past. In the Sussex village of Lindfield they even have
a Guy dressed like Fawkes himself and the Lindfield Bonfire Society lead it to
its doom with 17th century speeches and cries from the crowd of ‘Down with Popery!’
But it’s not just Guy Fawkes we remember now, any more than
it’s only Christ we think of at Christmas. The ritual has entered history in
its own right, and ‘Bonfire Night’ links us to other centuries simply on the
grounds that we have all celebrated the same thing. I remember experiencing a
moment’s ‘double-take’ when Sergeant Timothy Gowing in the Crimea wrote of the
Battle of Inkerman (5th November 1854) ‘That was keeping up Gunpowder Plot with
a vengeance!’
It can even apply beyond the specific event being commemorated.
Bonfires and fireworks were around long before Guy Fawkes, but it was my
experience of November 5th that made it easy for me to write about them.
Describing a display in 1640’s Paris for ‘In the Name of the King’ I had to
remember that the fireworks were white rather than coloured, and arranged
mainly in static set pieces, but the effect on the crowd was one with which we’re
all familiar. They made the same noises of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, and my rustic
narrator noted with wonder how ‘men with hardened faces and swords on their
hips turned suddenly into children.’
From Claude Lorrain's Firework Series (1637) |
It has the power to touch us like nothing else. This little video of Christmas in 1914 is only two minutes long, but it contains one image
that hits me like a kick in the stomach.
For me it’s the hats. The tins of pudding are unfamiliar to me, as alien as the trenches themselves, but those hats are identical to the ones that fall out of crackers at every Christmas table in Britain. Their remembered flimsiness is suddenly so vivid that the jollity becomes unbearable, everything so real and immediate that I want to reach into the screen and grab the men out of it, anything to save them from the horrors that only we know lie ahead.
And Christmas is full of such ambushes, each a little
sensory pool of memory to trap the unwary. The glittering decorations, the trees
and fluttering candles, the taste of turkey and mulled wine, the smell of cinnamon
and mince pies, the tearing of paper, the sound of carol singers, a Salvation
Army band, the snap of crackers and the laughter of children. Even (heaven help
us) bloody Slade. Memory catches in every particle of it, and the older we get
the more we find nothing has been lost. If ritual is the doorway to the past,
then on Christmas Day it’s gaping wide open.
And to history too. Mince pies may no longer contain meat –
but a recent culinary experiment proved that few could tell the difference
between the modern pie and those created by Mrs Rundle 160 years ago.
Health-and-safety may have killed the idea of charms in the Christmas pudding,
but crackers still contain their substitutes – just as they in turn are the
modern equivalent of ‘pulling the wishbone’. It’s true that many of our
Christmas traditions date back only as far as the 19th century and Dickens, but
some are far, far older, and carols like ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘The Holly
and the Ivy’ are mediaeval in origin. The sole surviving manuscript of ‘Adam
lay ybounden’ is dated to the fifteen century, and the song itself is believed
to be even older. Listen to such things, and you won’t be going back just to
your own youth – but to the childhood of Henry Tudor.
Fragment of the surviving MS of 'Adam Lay Ybounden' |
That doesn’t always help when we’re writing about places
with their own traditions, but my own favourite Christmas ‘ingredient’ is
universal to all the so-called ‘Christian countries’. It’s rarer now, and
whether we personally experience it depends entirely on the town or village in
which we live, but to me it’s the most magical of sounds, and one that spans
the years like no other. In 17th century Paris it would have been uttered most
dominantly by the voices of Marie, Jacqueline, Gabrielle, Guillaume, Pasquier,
Thibaud and the Sparrows, but the same kind of sound rang out from besieged
Sevastopol in 1854, and can be heard today in every city in Europe.
This sound. This. You don’t need to be Christian to
appreciate the gladness of this, or to share in the experience that’s been enjoyed across the centuries by rich and poor alike. This is the very sound of
history, and if December 25th takes us back down the tide of memory, then in my mind it does so to the sound of Christmas bells.
***
A L Berridge's much less sentimental website is here.
Her shameless appeal to Christmas charity for soldiers without graves is here.
The rest of her is probably somewhere else scoffing mince pies.
Thank you for this lovely post.
ReplyDeleteHaving grown up in middle America it strikes me how our traditions diverged a few hundred years ago, yet how many we share.
Too bad about the overloaded hotels. We expect so much at Christmas and it's easy to be disappointed.
Lovely post, which I'm glad to have inspired! I didn't know about the Bampton mummers in Devon. We have our own Morris men in Bampton in Oxfordshire - several rival groups in fact. I loved the story about your grandfathet; "is there a fire?" made me smile. Bless him.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Petrea! I'm very ignorant of US customs at Christmas, but it would be fascinating to see how they developed without the 'Dickens factor' that so heavily influenced our own. More Research Needed...
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks, Mary - for the inspiration too. Mummers are an extraordinary phenomenon, and I once stumbled across a Somerset group for whom it is clearly more than a religion. I think Ngaio Marsh may have had a similar encounter once - have you read 'Off With His Head' (published in US as 'Death of a Fool')?
And the winter solstice is tomorrow. Just saying...
The sound of church bells IS Christmas to me although I am an agnostic. If I can I always try to listen to the bells on BBC RADIO 4 on Christmas morning as well as The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve. I can always smell Mince Pies baking even if they're not and remember family Christmases past. So many memories.
ReplyDeleteLovely post Louise, thank you, and spot on about church bells. We live next door to the village church so get to enjoy them all year round!
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ReplyDeleteLoved the sound of the bells,Louise. Cold, wet, dark and miserable where I am at the moment so that really cheered me up. Thank you!
We definitely have "the Dickens factor"! Dickens toured America and is still very popular here. "A Christmas Carol" is performed every year, everywhere, it seems. We love the guy.
ReplyDeleteMy mother made mincemeat pies but I think even then (the 1960's) there was no meat in them.
Church bells, yes. Paper hats, no. You have the crackers, we have stockings. And the mummers! We don't have them but I would love to see them.
I just read about this, speaking of "the Dickens factor":
ReplyDeletehttp://bit.ly/JLR6C8
Lovely post, Christmas is definitely a bitter-sweet time.
ReplyDeleteLast night I went to a Carol Service at Bolton Abbey church in Yorkshire. Beyond the stone altar wall in this small and charming church, the nave continues because the church is part of the great, ruined Bolton Priory itself. Standing there, listening to the mix of age-old carols and readings, certainly linked time now with time past.
Where I live, the rituals are different. We've just been through the summer, not winter, solstice. Christmas is as likely to be a barbecue followed by the beach as a hot lunch. The bells are there, of course. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI have my own rituals, as it's not my holiday. They involve making a picnic lunch and enjoying it on the beach in the oompah of a new book. But the Christmas tree is everywhere, though we have our own evergreens here - last year, someone brought one to my local beach ad planted it in the sand!
The Bampton Mummers! Lovely to have a reminder of them (grew up in Stoodleigh and rode in Bampton every week). Our rituals are multicultural here in the Middle East - the compound is like the UN. Last year, I had Carols from Kings blasting on Christmas Eve at the same time as the evening call for prayer. Happy Christmas!
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