A many coloured land
Apr. 15th, 2008 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringRemember the film (and play) "The History Boys"? Well, I met one of the original history boys a few days ago. When I saw the film, I thought it unlikely. Teenaged boys simply do not behave in such a witty, perceptive, intelligent way.
I've now revised my opinion. Having met the man, I make no doubt at all that the boy was pretty much as shown. And, like the play's insight into history, I'm looking at my life and experience in a new way.
Here in middle England on the Welsh border, my history is all about me. Maybe my specific ancestors didn't come from here exactly. Saving further research, I simply do not know. But in Australia my people don't go back more than a couple of hundred years, if that, and before 1788, it's all Australian Aborigines, who might have existed for tens of thousands of years, but have and had no history of it. Besides, fine folk though they are, they are not my folk.
England is where some of my people came from, and if they didn't live in Shropshire, they would have lived in places very similar. This landscape of meadows and ruined monasteries, copses and cathedrals, this green and pleasant land. It's my land in a way that Australia can never be.
Of course, modern Britain is not my land at all. When I buy something, I hold out a handful of coins for the shopkeeper to rummage through, just as I do in the USA or Thailand. The politicians and their politics are unfamiliar, equally disturbing, equally smooth-talking. It's a foreign land, and I'd have to live here for more than a few days a year to feel at all familiar.
But the past is a different country. It's my culture, the land of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, of kings and queens and 1066 and all that. Swallows and Amazons, Biggles and Enid Blyton. All those novels of boarding schools I read as a child. They are all here.
Today I'm leaving the rolling green countryside of Shropshire for the bricks and stone and cement of London. More history, more places familiar from a thousand books and films and games of Monopoly. Fleet Street has a lot to answer for, and Trafalgar Square is more than a place to trip over pigeons.
I'm sorry to leave Shropshire and my sweet hosts. "You're ripping a hole out of my heart," I told Mrs FB when she left for work. If only I could freeze this past couple of days and bring it out again and again. Walk through the dingle over the river, gaze at the sunny stones of the old abbey, take a pint of bitter in a pub five centuries old.
But I'm off to London, and then back to Canberra. Back to my own land and my own family. I'll live on memories for a year or so before I return to England.
I've now revised my opinion. Having met the man, I make no doubt at all that the boy was pretty much as shown. And, like the play's insight into history, I'm looking at my life and experience in a new way.
Here in middle England on the Welsh border, my history is all about me. Maybe my specific ancestors didn't come from here exactly. Saving further research, I simply do not know. But in Australia my people don't go back more than a couple of hundred years, if that, and before 1788, it's all Australian Aborigines, who might have existed for tens of thousands of years, but have and had no history of it. Besides, fine folk though they are, they are not my folk.
England is where some of my people came from, and if they didn't live in Shropshire, they would have lived in places very similar. This landscape of meadows and ruined monasteries, copses and cathedrals, this green and pleasant land. It's my land in a way that Australia can never be.
Of course, modern Britain is not my land at all. When I buy something, I hold out a handful of coins for the shopkeeper to rummage through, just as I do in the USA or Thailand. The politicians and their politics are unfamiliar, equally disturbing, equally smooth-talking. It's a foreign land, and I'd have to live here for more than a few days a year to feel at all familiar.
But the past is a different country. It's my culture, the land of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, of kings and queens and 1066 and all that. Swallows and Amazons, Biggles and Enid Blyton. All those novels of boarding schools I read as a child. They are all here.
Today I'm leaving the rolling green countryside of Shropshire for the bricks and stone and cement of London. More history, more places familiar from a thousand books and films and games of Monopoly. Fleet Street has a lot to answer for, and Trafalgar Square is more than a place to trip over pigeons.
I'm sorry to leave Shropshire and my sweet hosts. "You're ripping a hole out of my heart," I told Mrs FB when she left for work. If only I could freeze this past couple of days and bring it out again and again. Walk through the dingle over the river, gaze at the sunny stones of the old abbey, take a pint of bitter in a pub five centuries old.
But I'm off to London, and then back to Canberra. Back to my own land and my own family. I'll live on memories for a year or so before I return to England.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Lovely, reading this.
Date: 2008-04-15 10:36 am (UTC)I have no ancestors from England but, thanks to books (and you, for pointing this out!), I have a hunch we are all related somehow. Related by book!
no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 07:46 pm (UTC)Do enjoying the varied travellers' tales. Keep it up - Please!
Hugs to you both.