During the summer of 2015 I focussed my energies on the past. Specifically on showing visitors round The Apprentice House at Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, and on developing a school visit package for the World Heritage Castles of North Wales. I have also been reading around these subjects and Waterloo. Finally I have enjoyed reminiscing with an old friend who lives overseas about our time together in Coventry in the early 90s, half a lifetime ago (or 25 years anyway).
I have always found learning about the lives of people in the past fascinating. I like to compare how they did things and what they did and achieved and ate and lived and believed with my own life. These comparisons never cease to amaze me: I think of ordinary people who lived in earlier eras as amazing and incredible. Maybe they were, or weren’t – we may never know – but to survive, let alone thrive intellectually, financially, personally, emotionally, physically, spiritually seems remarkable to me given the conditions and harsh realities of everyday life and work in previous centuries.
Some of the visitors on the tours at Quarry Bank tell me of their experiences as Apprentices at Mills. A few tell me they remember receiving the same remedies as I have described. Others like me try to put into words the images they have in their mind following a detailed guided tour of the House, as they try and fit the elements of those children’s lives together – food, rest, work, punishment, education, health, clothes etc.
To me it doesn’t matter which era you are learning from, the main thing to try and find out is what it was like living in those times, in that place. I do this all the time. I love the fact that history has Story within it’s very name. Stories bring the past to life. Stories of people. I am really enjoying reading about the lives of two fictional Roman soldiers and their adventures around Europe and North Africa, set in actual places and events from that time (author Simon Scarrow). I like the My Story diary series written for children, where fictional, ordinary youngsters describe their role and what they witnessed at well-known historical events. Most of my educational heritage work involves bringing the documented and archeological evidence alive for children, communities and adults. It becomes storytelling, telling the stories of ordinary people using the documentary and artefactual evidence to support the narrative. An ex-teaching colleague of mine was a fantastic musician who wrote a song about the 100 year-old walls and bricks of the school building telling their story, what they’d lived through in the tumultuous and ever-changing 20th century. Of course there is always a danger in the creation of that story: it is my interpretation of that evidence, my version of events. So just as in the Dangers of a Single Story (see earlier blog) regarding a place, so the same goes for a time.
I am always bowled over by the concept of time travel. This is since the rebooting of Doctor Who in 2005 by Russell T Davies who wrote such narrative, personal and emotional stories. It was the characters we sympathised and empathised with, fell in love with or wanted to hate. They weren’t always human, but as me and my young family watched the stories unfold through the Doctor’s human companions’ eyes and through our tears and laughter, the same question came to mind every time: if you could change one thing in the past, what would you do? This is also the premise of Ben Elton‘s latest book, Time and Time Again. I literally find it mind-blowing to think that if one thing, just ONE thing happened a few seconds earlier (or later) than it did, the knock on effects to everything else happening would be huge: nothing would be exactly as it is right now: imagine not meeting her at that time and place; imagine crossing that road too late….
We all know how lucky we are, how privileged our lives are, how lazy we’ve become and how fast everything is changing; but I am continually intrigued by how people dealt with ordinary and extraordinary tasks, events and ideas in the past. Within living memory is another intriguing aspect too – my wife’s parents did not have a telephone at home at all when she was young; some children today do not know what a telephone box or a vinyl record is for. I used to watch snooker (Pot Black) in black and white – or should I say I knew which ball was black and which was white, but all the others were shades of grey! Which also intrigues me about the past – love, relationships and attitudes to sex, including homosexuality, marriage and unmarried mothers etc.
This all leads up to those fundemental questions of being, of human existence: How did we get here? What has changed? Why has it changed? Where did I come from? I enjoy programmes on TV like Who Do You Think You Are? and Long Lost Family. They show us through real stories what life was like for people like you and me, and put into context why certain decisions were made by those people. I would love to be able to ask my mum about the war or my dad about life in Australia in the 1930s. Knowing who you are and where you come from helps provide a secure sense of belonging and confidence. The people who made me and who made them etc did this, or that. And survived.
This is the essence of history, and the purpose of researching, preserving and exploring heritage and the past. We interpret the past in order to explain the present and place ourselves and our lives in context so that we can influence the future. The next fundemental questions of human existence are Where are we going, and Where am I going? And the future is ours to shape in the knowledge of what has been before.
sledgent64 