The Keeper of the Locks by Clare Mulley

I love my family. Last year, for my birthday, among other things my mum gave me a well-wrapped cigar box celebrating the Brussels Grand Prix of 1910. It made a light parcel and did not rattle when I shook it, but inside was something rather wonderful.

First was a card that said ‘Mary Smith, nee McCombie, 1895-1984’. I was slightly nervous that I might be facing my grandmother’s ashes but instead, below the card, were two chestnut-coloured ponytails, each tied with string. As a schoolgirl, Mary had worn her hair in plaits. In 1911 when she went out to work, aged 16, she had bunched her plaits at the neck, or curved them round her head. But by the 1920s she had a fashionable flapper’s bob and she kept her hair short for the rest of her life. So at some point she must have decided that her long hair was too much trouble and rather regretfully cut it off, or perhaps it was with a sense of liberation that she had her hair chopped, shocking her rather staid aunts as she marked her transition to adulthood and independence.

Mary as a schoolgirl

Mary with her hair up for work.

I have noticed that when a lock of hair is treasured in a film it is usually lush and shiny, and does not look very real somehow. Not so these girlish bunches, which have split ends and several knots, very like my daughters’ hair which I brush and plait most mornings before school. But her long hair must have held great value to Mary for her to have hung on to it all her long life, and clearly the keepsake resonated with my mother too, who could not bear to part with her mother’s treasured bunches either.

Mary’s bunches.

 

With nearly 100 years in a box, the hair has now taken on even greater significance. My own daughters squealed rather delightedly at this family relic from a woman, a great grandmother, who they had never known. But my husband was rather less convinced. ‘Thank goodness it is not a finger’, he said, ‘or even a set of teeth. Perhaps, if it must be kept,’ he added, ‘it could be put to good use, in the mix for some renovating plaster for our walls, or the stuffing for the piano-stool’. My family, he seemed to be suggesting, might be quite capable of keeping anything, and in this he is probably right. Now, however, this box is not just full of hair, it is full of historic-hair, family hair that has been loved and valued by two generations already. Its significance is in its preservation as much as in its DNA. So now I am the keeper-of-the-locks, which sit in their box on the shelf with my prettier old books, some of which themselves were given as school prizes to various great uncles and aunties.


This year my mum, who has clearly if unofficially given me the job of family historian, wrapped me up another of Mary’s treasures; a medal engraved on the back to ‘M McCombie, 2nd Place, Open Competition Girl Clerks, April 1912’. My granny had come second in the country for her civil service entry exams that year, or at least of those girls taking the exams at the ‘Civil Service and Commercial College’ at 1, 2 & 3 Chancery Lane.

 

Mary’s medal, front and back.

A medal seems a much more reasonable thing to keep than some old, slightly tangled hair. Medals are earned rather than grown after all, and they were not once actually part of a human being. But perhaps clever Mary had just as much pride in their hair as her exam results. And, I have realized, it is only the two things together, the hair and the medal, that start to hint at the whole woman behind them, Mary Smith nee McCombie, a smart woman who made her own way in the world, but who also rather romantically refused to ever throw out the long hair of her childhood. Perhaps that is a combination that has a certain power of its own, something to emulate, as well as something to preserve.

   

Mary later in life, with her hair still bobbed.

THE 50th ANNIVERSARY GAUDY AT ST HILDA'S COLLEGE, OXFORD by Adèle Geras

I was going to put up the following poem at the end of this piece but conscious of the fact that sometimes people don't read the whole post, I'm putting it right at the top because I want all visitors to this site today to see it. It's published here by kind permission of its author, Wendy Cope, and it is copyright to her, of course.

REUNION

Fifty years have passed since we first met,

And forty seven since we said goodbye,

Embarking on our adult lives – and yet

You are the same, it seems to me. Am I?

Five decades of life, of ups and downs,

Of love and marriage, work and motherhood

And here we are, back in the world of gowns

And college food and essays – and it’s good,

It’s very good, my lovely, clever friends,

To travel to the past and find you here,

To share just one more evening meal that ends

In someone’s room - before we disappear

Into a future, where I’m sad to know

It’s over. It was over long ago.

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On Friday, September 20th, 2013, I travelled by train with my old friend and contemporary, Wendy Cope, from Cambridge to Oxford. We were bound for the Gaudy Dinner, and I had been looking forward to this day for many months. I had filled in the place on the form where it asked us who we'd like to have on the same corridor, as it were, and I just listed all my friends. The result of this was: we were all next to one another which made things very pleasant and facilitated the drinking of cups of tea, gossiping, and generally made all of us feel as though were were quite at home. Anne had the best view and she called us along to look at it.

We had tea. We found out what people had been doing for the last 50 years. We remarked on how very little we'd changed in spite of looking completely different in so many ways. We changed into our glad rags and made our way from Milham Ford, where we were quartered, past South to the new Jacqueline du Pre building. 36 of us were there. Someone from the College took a photo and if I ever get hold of a copy of it, I will post it here on this blog. The Principal addressed us. I can remember being quite intimidated by the Principal in 1963 but now it struck me how young and glamorous she was. She told us about life at St Hilda's since the men had arrived. Their tally of Firsts had gone up and everyone seemed happy with the arrangement, but I rejoiced that the college had been single sex when I was there. Am I an old fogey? I suppose I am, but honestly, if there were men around in the early morning before I had my make up on, I'd have been very disconcerted.

Everyone sat with their old chums. We didn't make an effort to speak or interact with women whom we'd not known when were were young. Was that bad of us? Was it natural? I don't know. What I do know is: it was delightful to catch up with those people we did remember with fondness. Anne, Ann, Wendy, Sian, Liz, another Liz and Esme. We spoke of those friends who were no longer with us, and Wendy made a toast to 'absent friends.' Tamara couldn't be there and neither could Jenny but they'd sent apologies and it's quite possible that now we've all met up again, we might do so informally some other time.

Here's a picture of us during the dinner. It's not a very good shot but if you look carefully you might just see my mugshot staring down from the wall. We were invited to send in a photo on our application form and it was good fun to see everyone displayed like that. After dinner, back we went to Milham Ford. I can honestly say that the only time I was in this building during my time at Oxford was to do Laundry. All the washing machines etc were in there...I lived for all three of my years in a building called Hall, which I always thought of as the main building, but that was perhaps a bit solipsistic! On Saturday morning, I got up early and took a photo of one of the splendid St Hilda's trees

...and went and stood under the window of the very beautiful room I had in my first year, just so that I could photograph the view I had every morning.

And finally, the gates. I've taken two shots of the gates. The first, to set them in context and to show how high and imposing they were....

...and the second to draw attention to those wicked spikes and the general dauntingness of them as things to clamber over in the dark. But I did. I, famous for not being able to climb for toffee, as we used to say; well-known for never having got over a single piece of gym equipment in my entire school career, used to get over these gates. Climb right over them: up one side and down the other. I have no idea at all how I did it. I must have been young.

Going Back: N M Browne

So - still no new historical fiction but a month of wallowing in the past nonetheless.
Earlier this month I taught a residential course at Lumb Bank with all its framed hand written Ted Hughes poems and walked the short but steep road into Heptonstall to the churchyard where Sylvia Plath is buried - her grave a mess of dying flowers and pens - a huge jar of them spilling out onto the gravel. Ah yes the past is all about people.

The land all round is witness to the changing industrial fortunes of the North West. The valley is cut with vertiginous stone steps, to allow the mill workers access to the mills from miles around and in the valley the chimney stacks stand like Rapunzel’s fairy tale tower.They were tough those mill workers. I was there in glorious unseasonal sunshine but the weather can be rough there. Winters are raw and Lumb Bank itself can be cut off. Food has to be brought in on sledges and human backs. It was easy enough to see the ghosts of mill girls in shawls and clogs hauling themselves up over the hillsides and home after a long shift.

Elsewhere the slag heaps that I recall from my childhood are covered in unlikely looking vegetation and the stark bleakness of the landscape I remember is softened by trees, the dark millstone grit of the buildings cleaned so that it is more ‘green and pleasant land’ than the ‘dark satanic mills.’ Mind you I did see it on a very good day. I was last in Hebden Bridge in about 1979 in my exotic gap year job of trainee accountant. I got food poisoning from a dodgy Cumberland sausage and never went back, but the town is now affluent looking, boasting the kind of vegetarian, vegan and organic caffes which would have given short shrift to any kind of processed meat product, contaminated or otherwise. Ah yes the past is all about economics and land use.

Back in Burnley my childhood home, the post industrial picture looked bleaker, of the hundred or more mills listed in 1891 only a handful remain and while the air is the better for it and the stone cleaner it is twenty first in the list of the most deprived areas in Britain, with a declining population, and higher than average rates of unemployment. As I drove through the run down town centre I was disoriented by my memories of other shops, other buildings that made it hard to see the present through the past. I couldn’t see ‘Dorothy Perkins’ where I had a Saturday job. Did mounted police still escort football fans through the town centre on match day?

The terrifying round-about where I learned to drive is quiet and civilised, scarcely the life threatening, multi-laned, Piccadilly Circus of my memory. My former primary school St Pauls’ is still small and neat, but my childhood home is unrecognisable - some idiot chopped down the huge weeping willow that was the best thing about it. My secondary school has been demolished - perhaps to bury its poor reputation and behind every building lurks another, painted a different colour, housing a different family.

Thirty years is a long time - the past is all about change and nostalgia.