Land and its stories by Gillian Polack

When I was a child, my mother (a science teacher) tested her excursions during the school holidays. We didn’t just go to Ballarat (an old gold town in Victoria), then, we visited the town and the museum and then walked through an old mine. We went to Vaughn Springs and panned for gold and gems. I normally sum this up as going to the beach to study the ecology of rockpools, but today I’m not interested in rockpools. 

What I saw when I was a child was what mining did to landscapes. It created tunnels and hills and dredged streams deeper or reshaped them. In one of my childhood landscapes, the streams had been destroyed entirely in the search for gold. I looked at small hills and, as a child brought up on English books, I loved them. Then Mum explained those hills and I found out that, in the making of a tiny hilled landscape, everything had been destroyed. The water from local streams had been targeted to help force the gold out under pressure. Those small hills everywhere were the refuse from the urgent search for gold. There was so much destruction in the old goldfields that it wasn’t until later that I learned how to interpret landscapes. Mining can leave land permanently changed.

Interpretation is important. And one never stops learning. Earlier this year, I read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? This book questioned the way we interpret the Australian landscape historically. I realised that I’d factored mining into my interpretation of agriculture, but hadn’t considered the wider ramifications of farming before the early 1800s in exactly the same place. The mining had obliterated a lot of the evidence of farming, but Pascoe found more evidence in explorer’s journals and records from early European settlement. 

This was in my mind when I went to Amiens this July. I only returned last week, so it’s very fresh.

The cathedral in Amiens. It survived the wars.

I was investigating a heap of things for a heap of reasons, but when I began my research a few months ago, I realised that the debris of World War I lies on Somme landscape the way the debris of goldmining lies on the Victorian goldfields. I needed to understand three periods in that region (the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century, and the end of World War II) but before I could interpret them, I had to understand World War I.

My big advantage in the interpretation is that it’s a centennial year: everyone was willing to talk with me and the museums were stuffed with information. There were pictures of before and after, for example, for bombed sites and for major battlefields. I could take all this out and catch a train and visit a once-destroyed town and check out the fields and wander the streets of Amiens and interpret… everything.

I thought you might like to see some of the things I saw. This is not a complete guide. Not even close to one, in fact. This is one small element and even that element is something I’ll be processing what I saw until I’ve finished the novels I’m working on. Maybe longer. It will take far more than a blogpost to explain that landscape.

My focus today, then, is on the effect of World War I on the area of the Somme around Amiens. I went up to two trainstops away in more than one direction to see what I could see.

The first thing that struck me was the missing places. There are some complete landscape changes in the region. Some of it is the usual (villages deserted because the people moved elsewhere) but in the Somme region, there is a very disturbing type of desertion. The satellite map shows places where trains and roads still do not go. This is the worst remaining parts of the Zone Rouge. The Zone Rouge was much larger a hundred years ago, but the web tells me it will take 700 years before every part of the battlefront region from World War I is liveable again.

The Red Zone is that part of the front line that was so destroyed by battle that it needed to be mended before it could be lived in. I visited part of it that had been mended and looked at maps of those parts that I can’t get to.

This is a street in a torn named Albert, which was rebuilt almost from scratch. 

“You can’t live here, it’s dangerous” was the official word. 

“It’s home,” said the locals and rebuilt.

I visited because that rebuild was so important to me for so many reasons. It reminded me that houses are not the only thing in a hometown. Places of beauty and places of awe make a difference, too. Albert has all of these. It was mostly built in the 1920s, but it remembers the earlier past through its landmarks.

Each place in a ruined landscape makes different decisions or has decisions made for them. I talked to a potter in Amiens, and he told me about his family. Their town was never rebuilt. There’s a museum there, he said, but there are no trains or buses. Also no residents. His family moved to Amiens because there was nothing left for them.

Not everything is destroyed on or near a military front line ,even one as destructive as that in World War I. Amiens was partly destroyed, Bits of it are old. Bits of it are new. Bits of it are rebuilt in older styles, in an attempt to not lose its past. Amiens has an important history and a lot of rebuilders commemorated that history by having houses that have an earlier ‘feel’ or that take  stones and carvings from the rubble and make them part of a home. I have hundreds of pictures of Amiens, because its way of balancing survival and rebuilding and moving forward is very much its own. This means that the city’s character emerges in all the sectors of the town, whether they’re the once-a-citadel or whether they’re tourist sections or whether they’re remnants of the nationally important seventeenth century place.

Amiens added to this complex streetscape as part of its commemoration of World War I. It has photographs of the war telling stories using the streetscape. Those pictures show us who fought; they show us the damage: they remind us that scars do not heal easily.

It’s easier to think that war is past if one lives on the other side of the world. It’s harder if one sees a new house where the family home once rested. It’s much harder still if one looks at a plantation of pines that once held the town one’s family had lived in for generations.

Something that tangles the Somme landscape is the sorrowful tourism for families of soldiers.  People from outside the region want to see the destroyed landscape. Only some of them have interest in the region itself. Right now, there are Aussies everywhere, retracing the tracks of their fallen relatives. It’s become a replacement industry for the region, making up for everything that was lost in World War I and then World War II.

This is not new. The extent of the tourism is something that’s only a hundred years old, but the memory of war in what used to be Picardy is not new at all. This landscape is scarred because of where it is and how rich the soil is. Some of the best farmland. Old cultures, cool people. And so it has suffered in war after war after war. The stuff, in fact, of stories. Some of the great French battle epics are set in this part of France. English-speakers think of the English/French interface. Readers of Dumas think of La Rochelle. Everyone thinks of Paris. But this area has a special history and the landscape is much harder to read because of this history. 

What looks like fields and forest may also be layers of buried sorrow.

'Thumbs Up' by Karen Maitland

I’ve been to two very different exhibitions this month, one was in a village church to honour the men who fought in the First World War, the other was the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall. But curiously I found the same item on display in both – a little good luck charm called Fums Up. It took the form of a tiny doll made of wood or metal holding up a thumb, as a good luck gesture.

These dolls were first made around 1880’s, appearing not just as models, but on cards and china too. Back then they were commonly called ‘Baby Mercury’. But they become increasing popular in the First World War when girls sent these charms to sweethearts and brothers who were fighting in the trenches, to bring the soldiers luck and keep them safe. They were worn as lapel badges, on neck chains or on tucked into pocks. But why were the Fums Up charms thought to be lucky?

For a long time it was one of those popular myths that thumbs-up gesture originated in the Roman gladiatorial arenas. That's largely been discounted now. The thumbs-up sign is probably much older than that. But by the Middle Ages it was recognised as sign of good faith and peace. In some parts of the country, right into the twentieth century, children would make the thumbs up sign to declare a truce in a fight or indicate they wanted to halt a game.

There is saying, still used in some country districts – Here’s my thumb on it. This comes from the medieval custom of spitting on your raised thumb and pressing it against the raised thumb of someone else to seal a sale or pledge that the agreement was binding. It was also used to confirm that a bet had been accepted. Spittle was thought to contain the power of the soul, hence as well as a pledge, it could be also used to ward off evil or to curse someone. Thumb prints were also used for centuries to sign a written agreement if the person couldn't write. Robert Chambers records an incident in 1642 when a Scottish lieutenant spat on his thumb to pledge himself to a dual in which he was then killed. And thumb-licking was also a pledge of loyalty and allegiance. A rhyme recorded in 1724 goes,

Though kith and kin and a' revile thee,
There's my thumb I'll ne'er beguile thee.

If you feared you were in the presence of a witch or someone was trying to put a spell on you, then you could protect yourself by tucking your thumbs into your fists. Many people still tuck their thumbs into their fists for luck, instead of crossing their fingers when they are betting or hoping for good news.

The famous line from Macbeth -By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes was based on an old superstition that a tingle or twitching of the thumb, especially the left one, was a sign that unwelcome company or an enemy was approaching.

Many of the first Fums Up charms sent to the soldiers of the First World War were made of wood which made them doubly lucky. We still say touch wood, even if we don’t actually do it, when we’re talking about future plans – Touch wood, I’ll have the book finished by Friday. This harps back to one of mankind’s oldest and most enduring fears that if we talk about any good thing, something bad will happen to curse it. So we try to avert that, by warding off the evil – touching wood.

British paratroopers of the World War II preparing
to go into action giving the thumbs up sign.

The wood we used to touch would have been from one of the sacred trees- oak, ash and hawthorn etc. because the spirits of those trees were thought to have the power to protect us. Today touching any wood will do. I’ve even seen people touch wood-effect laminates.

Sadly, although I’m sure the Fums Up charms brought a great deal of comfort to the soldiers in the
trenches, not least the knowledge that a sweetheart was waiting for them, it did not keep many of those young men safe from harm. It must have been one of the most poignant things for those grieving families and girlfriends if they found the cheery little doll returned to them among the soldier’s personal effects. Fums Up came home, but they never would.