The right book at the right time, by Peter Leyland

The right book at the right time

In November we lost my brother-in-law, Nicky, quite suddenly - a stroke from which it seemed that he would never wake up. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister Pen, said she had felt that he was ‘slipping away’. Yet he was a fit and active man, still working as a market gardener, and he had once been the proud owner of two Clydesdales, named Tommy and Morgan, draught horses that he had cared for for many years until their own deaths; so I was surprised and shocked for he was only six months older than I am. In August this year my wife and I had been with both him and Pen, choosing books at Logie Steading in Scotland, a bookstore where he had once himself worked part-time.

 

I had chosen a few books during that visit, although they were not books that were particularly memorable; and this would have had no consequence except that following my brother-in-law’s death, I needed something which would ground me in my understanding of what this loss might mean. It was therefore fortunate that I responded to a casual email from an academic group, The Raymond Williams Foundation, which I had previously been in contact with about research on adult education. The group happened to be advertising the give-away of a selection of books written by adult educators from the past.

 

The book I chose to receive was a novel called Border Country by Raymond Williams himself, the son of a railway signalman who worked near the Welsh border village of Pandy where he was educated and from where he went on to Abergavenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Raymond Williams also served in the second world war as an anti-tank captain and afterwards became an adult educator, working at the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra Mural Studies and eventually being elected as a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He wrote several books relating to literature and culture and worked for the Workers’ Educational Association for some time as a tutor. This is an organisation I know well from my own teaching within it as a tutor myself, a role that was a formative experience for me, hence my interest in the book that Williams wrote.

 

The book when it arrived was a faded and somewhat battered Penguin edition of Border Country (pictured above) with a drawing of a signalman on the cover and costing 5/-. (I am old enough to remember life before decimalisation in the 1960s and I knew that this would have been about 25p in today’s money.) I began reading it a little hesitantly, hoping that it wouldn’t fall apart before I got to the end and wondering whether it would be worth the relatively small sum that I had sent by return for postage and packing. In the end it was more than worth it, and the story it told helped me to come to terms with Nicky's death.

 

This story, to summarise briefly, is about the relationship between a father and son in Wales beginning just before the time of the TUC’s nine-day General Strike of 1926 and leading up to the growth of education in the1950s. It begins when Mattew Price, a university lecturer, is returning by train to the village of Glynmawr where his father, Harry Price, has collapsed at work and been found lying on the floor of his signal box. (This has been the result of a stroke, although we do not really know that this is the cause until the end of the book.) His collapse has followed on from a typically arduous day working the railway signals, work which consists largely of a process pulling and pushing heavy levers to co-ordinate the operation of the signals, so that the numerous trains may pass by each other freely without blocking the track or colliding. It requires intense concentration for short periods followed by lengthy pauses between trains, a process which we would now regard as being highly stressful.

 

As I read the book the sadness which I was experiencing about Nicky's death seemed to fall away and I became at one with the characters and the situation that they were living through. The book’s style is one of moving backwards and forwards in time, so that we learn a great deal about the Price family, particularly about Harry’s father and Mattew's grandfather, Jack. We also learn about Harry’s marriage to Ellen and the birth of Matthew himself who is known as ‘Will’. There are some wonderful descriptive passages:

 

The narrow road wound through the valley. The railway, leaving the cutting at the station, ran north on an embankment, roughly parallel with the road but a quarter of a mile distant. Between road and railway, in the curving course ran the Honddu, the black water. On the east of the road ran the grassed embankment of the old tram-road, with a few overgrown stone quarries near its line. The directions coincided, and Harry, as he walked, seemed to relax and settle. Walking the road in the October evening, they [Harry and Ellen] felt on their faces their own country: the huddled farmhouses with their dirty yards; the dogs under the weed-growing walls; the cattle-marked crossing from the sloping field under the orchard; the lone fields in the line of the valley, where the cattle pastured; the turned red earth of the small thickly-hedged ploughland, the brooks, alder-lined, curving and meeting; the bracken-heaped tussock fields up the mountain, where the sheep were scattered under the wood-shaded barns; the occasional white wall, direct towards the sun, standing out where its windows caught the light across s the valley; the high black line of the mountains, and the ring of the sheep-wall. (p.32)

 

Matthew is shown staying on in this ‘border country’ as his father seems to be making a recovery, but this is brief and we are soon very aware that Harry is not getting any better. There is a sub plot about Morgan, a former signalman colleague of Harry, who after the failure of the general strike in 1926 has decided to leave ‘the box’ and work in the more lucrative business of supplying and storing goods for the surrounding villages. Morgan had asked Harry to join him in this enterprise, but Harry had refused, preferring to say with the railway despite his struggle to provide for his family during the strike. The railwaymen had agreed to halt their own work in solidarity with the 1.2 million locked-out coal miners who had called the strike for better pay and conditions. Morgan had repeated his offer to ‘Will’ who was about to leave school, but Will had also refused as he wished to have a career in the world of education, a world unrelated to that of the Welsh valleys. In this sense the book is the story of the ongoing argument between work and education which would seem to reflect Williams’ own experience, and which is related to the ideas of groups like The Workers’ Educational Association which I referred to earlier.

 

 

As I reached the end of the book it became clear to me that Harry had suffered a stroke much as my brother-in-law had done and, although the difference was that Harry had survived for a little

longer, the similarity enabled me to reflect that such events are a common feature of life, and something to which many are prone across the years and even across centuries. (The book was published in 1960.) It ends on an elegiac note, after Matthew is shown weeping in the bathroom while his father’s body was lying in the mortuary awaiting cremation. The minister, Arthur Pugh, reads from The Bible to an assembled line of men in black suits who had been his family and friends; the women are sitting around the room with a place left for Matthew by his mother:

 

‘A time to cast away stone, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence and a time to speak.’ (p.327)

 

In the new year my wife and I will go to Forres in Scotland where her sister, Pen, is beginning the process of grieving for Nicky, a process which I hope we will be able to help her with.  

References  

Border Country (1960) by Raymond Williams

Cover Drawing by Charles Raymond, Penguin Edition (1964)