69. October 25th 1854: 'Into the Valley of Death...' NZ Connection to the Charge of the Light Brigade

'Stormed at with shot and shell, White horse and hero fell.'  [From 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.]

They turned out at 4am and, as the sun rose, dissolving the mist in the valley ahead, James realised that the trap would be sprung that day. He retraced mentally the steps followed, the directions agreed upon, wanting to spot the mistakes, to know what might be, should be, learned from their collective madness. If not for himself and those with him – it was patently too late for that - then for others who might follow. For others would follow, that he knew. Perhaps for generations to come. Even if only for the sake of the historical record. They would want to pick over the entrails and know how he, of all people, had contributed to such a disaster, remembering him, not by his many victories but by this one cataclysmic defeat. Jealous rivals for preferment, journalists with bloodhound noses for bad news, political nobodies seeking electoral advantage, emotional voyeurs who, like uninvited funeral guests, took vicarious delight in the misfortunes and distress of others, all would give their verdicts. Reconstructing that day. Inventing stories. Grand stories of hubris and folly, and vignettes of cowardice and bravery in the face of death. Second-guessing motivation. Allocating blame. Wise after the event.

If it was to be defeat, James thought saddling up, then let it be one last glorious defeat that would be immortalised in history and poetry for generations to come. How would he be remembered, he wondered? Would only his mother mourn? Would he provide the lead his troop of dragoons expected? Disappointed that Joshua, his favourite charger, was lame and had to be left in the camp, and fearing his own cowardice, he reluctantly mounted Boadicea, his tetchy white mare, and led A troop to their allotted place at the right of the line. A mile away at the end of the valley the Cossack battery was waiting. When the order was given they advanced at a trot but within a few hundred yards came under fire and broke into a gallop.

His mother was never to know that it was that tetchy white mare Boadicea who made James a hero that day. Frightened by the shells bursting around her, she bolted. Straight at the Russian guns.

---

Captain J.A. Oldham was the first of the Light Brigade to get among the Russian guns at Balaclava on October 25^th 1854. He was last seen wounded and bleeding in the smoke that hung in clouds over the battlefield, standing by a legless Boadicea, ‘his sword in one hand and his pistol in the other… His dead body was never found, and his grave is therefore unknown.’ After the battle a Russian officer came to the British camp under a flag of truce to arrange for the burial of the dead. “Who was the brave officer who rode a white horse and led the charge?” he asked.

The story of Captain Oldham’s horse is told in the 1911 regimental history of the 13^th Hussars in these words: ‘This white mare was notoriously a brute, and on the occasion of the charge bolted – luckily, straight at the Russian guns.’ I particularly like the ‘luckily’! I invented the names of the horses but that is all. Captain Oldham’s brother was killed in New Zealand in an attack on a Maori pa. Wounded, he pressed on ‘in spite of all suggestions that his wound should be attended to; a few minutes later a second shot killed him.’ Who would be a mother?
 

 

67b. Memories (supplementary post).

See comments on blog 67 for origin of these photos and piece of text.

“5^th January 1982. We’ve left Malvern on our way to High Wycombe and we’re going to Oxford. Just waiting on the weather forecast which I think’s real worth recording.

We’ve driven through Oxford and seen all the marvellous colleges and buildings of the university - it’s a huge place – some very old, some very new. I don’t know where we are now, we’re driving through a little town (yawn). People scurrying everywhere. The skies are about to burst open again with lots of flood and pestilence and snow. They are forecasting snow all over England again tonight.”



Wednesday 6^th January
“Well, wrong wrong. It’s a beautiful day. It’s Wednesday the 6^th of January and it’s taken quite a while for us to get organised to get out. Got two carloads and we’re off to High Wycombe and Maidenhead and then we’re going to Windsor, I believe Queen Elizabeth is expecting us for luncheon...

We’re now in the grounds of Windsor Castle looking at St. George’s Chapel. It’s a lovely fine day but it’s freezing in the air. It’s taken us about an hour to have lunch in a cosy little pub called The Mad Englishman. Took about ten minutes to get a cup of tea there but it was nice when we got it. Had my photograph taken a couple of times already with the bearskin people."

68. Me and My Dad

 

Me and My Dad c.1948

 

My Dad was a maths and science teacher who became a missionary school teacher in Nigeria and later the Southern Sudan. He was invalided out of Africa in 1943 with cerebral malaria and after the war was over went to theological college and trained for the priesthood. The rest of his working life was as an Anglican parish priest firstly in Bath, Somerset, then in Kilburn, London and finally in Malvern, Worcestershire.

To my way of thinking Dad was troubled by his need to keep his faith constantly in mind in the way he lived his daily life, incessantly worried about 'being right with God' and finding divine guidance for every little decision that had to be made. He seemed to me to find it difficult to lighten up and have some fun. In the words of modern business speak and spin doctoring, co-opting a religious vocabulary, he was always 'on mission', always on the lookout to helping others (a great quality) and to 'bearing witness', spreading the word of God (proselytising, which I personally found embarrassing and tiresome).

I read a piece by Diana Wichtel recently in the New Zealand Listener [September 14 2013] about Hugh Laurie the actor. 'Since his run as the irritable and unorthodox Dr House ended,' she writes, 'Hugh Laurie has moved on to play another man caught in a purgatory of his pain in the movie Mr.Pip...'  In his interview with Diana Wichtel, Hugh Laurie talks about his upbringing and the attitudes towards fun that it had imposed:

It comes from a very old sort of Presbyterian instinct that if something is enjoyable it can't be of any value. That pain is the only road to virtue or good work... I've tried very hard to shed that because I know that is mad.

Although my mother was the Presbyterian, my father was 'low church' and more sympathetic in temperament to some of the non-conformist practices of churches like the Methodists than to the elaborate rituals of 'high church' Anglicans. Our childhood Sundays, days without games, were dominated by communion, morning service, Sunday school and evening service. For a boy who just wanted to play cricket or kick a ball around in every spare moment it was hard to concentrate on bible study and being quiet for much of the day.

I found Dad to be very judgemental. How can you be otherwise if you are constantly having to find forgiveness for things - both in yourself and in others? You have to believe in sin to believe in forgiveness of sin. I did find Dad pretty inflexible in his judgements. It was Mum's contention that this mental inflexibility was a product of his cerebral malaria and that before that life threatening illness he had been much better at taking on board new ideas than he was subsequently. And yet he continued to be very alert in other ways, his mental arithmetic games when I was a kid being great fun - yes, he was fun at times back then. But arguing with him? I felt that really was a hopeless cause.

The paternal warmth and sensitivity my siblings found in my Dad was never particularly apparent to me. I think he felt awkward with me and I with him and I enjoyed the company of my Uncles Joe and Geoff a lot more, but that was easy because they weren't in my face about how I lived my life. Dad and I were essentially strangers, something I explored in my poem "The Tennis Racquet" (see blog 53) where the irony is, that in defining who one is in relation to a parent the simplistic alike/unlike binary means that the parent is still the point of reference for the characterisation of yourself. The parent has you either way. Fortunately the reality is far more complex and we are not just the mixed up sum of our parents' genes and predilections, however imprisoned we may feel by them on occasions. We can and do strike out on our own and create our own personae, build our character in interaction with the world as we experience it. However alike or unlike Dad or Mum I may be, it has not been a reference point for me - well, not for years anyway. Whichever traits and values of theirs I have taken on board are now comfortably embedded in who I am and I have learned to live with them and not to look for them to explain (or excuse) my own inadequacies and failings. Mum and Dad did their best, given the context of the times in which they lived, they loved me in their way and they allowed me to break free - you can do a lot worse in parents than that.

And I think, in trying to understand our parents' impact upon us, we underplay the context of their times - their social history and enculturation, their parental models, their expectations of different roles for men and women within the structure of family. Dad's life after all revolved around his work and the fact that his home was his office was something we all had to adjust to. And, OK, if he was distant from family matters much of the time (except when we went on holiday and had to all play at family), who is to say, in the greater scheme of things, that he was wrong to be so. Parishioner problems simply were more important, more immediate, more demanding than our childhood concerns. Dad was a great parish priest who helped people enormously and always went the extra mile for them. That was his vocation and I greatly admired his dedication to it even when I no longer shared the faith that drove it. It was Dad who comforted the mother and daughter on the Loch Fyne steamer when the husband and father had jumped overboard in front of them to drown himself (successfully) and Dad who kept in touch with them afterwards. It was Dad who visited Freddy Mayes over all Freddy's years in different prisons around the country, just as Elizabeth subsequently did up until Freddy's prison death earlier this year. You don't have to accept the beliefs to value the behaviours they generate.  

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For more on my Dad see these blogs:

•   8.  A Place to Stand, a Place to Sit [17 November 2011]
• 16.  Mum and Dad's Golden Wedding [15 December 2011]
• 19.  In London, In Love [27 December 2011]
• 21.  "Why Me?" The History and Mystery of My Bronchiectasis [30 December 2011]
• 24.  Jesus v Lenin; the Unlicensed Tongue of a Teenage Boy [13 January 2012]
• 53.  Adrift on Poetry [24 September 2012]; poem: "The Tennis Racquet".

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67. Memories

“After Harrods we went to Evita which was really good, we’ve been playing the record for ages. Not as colourful as I expected but that was quite a thrill to see the show. We had a lovely dinner at Le Bistro, a little French restaurant in Drury Lane, where the theatre was."

This excerpt from Mary's tape of our 1981-82 trip to Los Angeles and Europe reminds me of how few memories I have of the trip other than those that are on film or tape. Even some of those are a surprise to me – I had forgotten that we went to see Evita, just as I had forgotten that in Los Angeles we saw Elizabeth Taylor on stage in Little Foxes. Indeed I am racking my brain to see what I can remember other than what’s on record, and it’s very little. I remember Mary throwing up at the bottom of the Vicar’s Close in Wells and again outside the terminal at Charles de Gaulle when we are waiting for a taxi to take us into Paris. And I remember our visit to the L’Oreal head office, just before we visited the Paris Opera. It had been organised by a friend of Mary's, L’Oreal’s New Zealand managing director, and was the remnant of the month she originally arranged to work there as part of her leave from the tech. But we  were given the kind of frosty supercilious bum’s rush reception that some Parisians had so effortlessly turned into an art form for country cousins, and were in and out of the offices within twenty minutes – not even a cup of coffee. Mary was disappointed and I, knowing how much she had been looking forward to it, was disgusted but said nothing.

Beyond that I can remember little, no matter how hard I try. In fact the harder I try, the less it seems I can remember. Nor do the tapes and photographs prompt additional memories of our visit, though they do trigger amazing recall of other times spent in some of the places – happy memories of Covent Garden, for example, buying gifts to bring home, enjoying the buskers with Sharon, and of working at Harrods in my teens, right down to the name of the buyer in the fruit and vege department my second Christmas there (Mr. Croft) – but nothing about other things that Mary and I did that winter. It’s as though, beyond the recorded stories, there’s just a void.

No wonder archaeologists and historians have such difficulty reconstructing the past. There are so many stories that could be told just from the source materials that exist, source materials that are mere fragments of a larger whole. We take snapshots of the celebratory events in our lives for the public family record – Pat and my wedding, Ruth and Trevor's wedding, Stuart and Jutka's wedding, Robert as a newborn baby, Nicola on her third birthday, Mum and Dad’s Golden Wedding celebrations, Sharon and my honeymoon in Tahiti, our Mediterranean cruise, our holidays in all their variety – and we retell those narratives of the photograph album, happy narratives by and large, narratives of the good times. But we don’t generally take photographs at funerals. We didn’t line everyone up with a professional photographer for a picture of Grannie Deeks' funeral party, even though it was the largest family gathering for years and none of the giggling grandchildren would ever forget Aunty Molly, in her funereal black, slipping and falling into the grave as she threw in her piece of soil.

The trauma narratives, the narratives of the bad times, of accidents, illnesses and deaths, are stored off-record, repressed and hidden, to be dug up by counsellors and psychotherapists and rebirthers for clues to our inner selves. When Sacha was kicked by a horse, I only took a photograph of her smashed-up nose after the cosmetic surgeon had completed his beautiful reconstruction and you could only see two black eyes and a large piece of sticking plaster rather than the gooey mess that I had welcomed from the ambulance at Middlemore Hospital. Such events are generally ignored by the photographic record, which is why I was momentarily shocked when Mum sent me a photograph of an earless Dad, a photo that she, with the fascination of a wartime nurse for surgical procedures, had taken after his cancerous growth was removed and before his prosthetic ear was fitted. They were also glossed over in my letters to Mum and Dad, letters that told of the trivia of my everyday life, the ordinary repetitive routines, the narrative of the normal.

But we don’t necessarily construct our stories of ourselves, our lives, from the normal. We are more likely to try and make sense of ourselves from the special occasions, public or private, celebratory or traumatic, that are permanently imprinted in our consciousness. From the embroidered tale of boyhood heroism as I jump ashore to rescue the family lest they capsize and drown in the River Arun. From private personal events in which we disclose ourselves to ourselves - the care and tenderness I share with Mary after she comes home from her radium treatment full of tales from other patients about the loss of their love lives, the loss of the sensations of passion and arousal. And somewhere in between these public and private lives is the normality of who we are in our everyday selves.

Evita, Harrods.... what strange connections. Are all memories like some vast underground network in which, if you know the interchange points, you can travel to and fro through your personal universe, making connections between everything? Like some holistic Gaia world nestling in a simple geometry of circles and lines, a world where past, present and future share a single time zone?