It’s good, someone said, to tell the old stories. We were sitting after a workshop, eating picnics or coffee and cakes, and coming down from ‘writing to order’. We talked about childhood. We talked about Wind in the Willows and Tales of the Riverbank. We talked about my personal journey into this fellowship of poets-and-people.
I haven’t yet found a name for what we are, in that group. Not least, because I still marvel at that word “we”…that I have become part of this whatever-it-is. Officially these are a series of workshops; unofficially we know it is a writing group that is porous at the edges. Intuitively, I feel it is something else entirely.
I don’t like the word “collective”. It sounds too political, but there is a school of thought that says the personal is political, and that any opinion could be subversive. And all the polemics have me reaching for a dictionary and asking define what you mean by…
You see? Polemics and politics have pulled me away. I started to talk about telling the old stories.
I wanted to say how important the stories are. We talk about childhood. We talk about loss. We talk about memories and games and fun and frivolous things, and we think that they are not important, but they are. They are fundamental. When we tell our stories, over and over and over, we are setting down our roots.
A tree does not send out a single femmer rootling and hope to hold the hulk that it will become. It sends out a squadron of tendrils, and tells them to knot themselves into each other and into the ground and hold firm. It sends out messages to the mycelium network that already inhabits that space asking for help and holding and space in which to grow. It says I am oak, or I am ash, or I am willow, or I am a foreigner here and not sure by what name you would call me, but I am tree.
This is what we do when we brave the strangeness of unknown people and start to tell our own story. We say I am stranger here and not sure by what name you would call me, but I am human.
We say this, even in the land of our birth, because we are all foreign to the people who do not know us. And until we tell our old stories, they cannot possibly know us.
We tell our stories to root ourselves, to find our home ground, irrespective of how far or not we are from the geographic placing of it. Home is not a place. Home is our personal history. We feel at home with the people who know that history. We carry our home not on our backs but within our soul, our heart, our memories. We carry it within us. I have lived in Norfolk for most of mylife. I came in 1981 and have spent two separate years away since then. I came back. I stayed. I have lived here for 40 of my 60 years. It is both home and not.
It is home in that sense that I would not move now. I would not go west as I once wished to. I would not go back north. I am rooted here.
And yet…and yet… I know that my ancestral roots are in the mines and the farms of Wales and the mines and farms of Weardale and south Durham. My genetic roots are in working the land and digging beneath it, with a leavening of the wayward sons who insisted on going to sea.
My DNA, then, is also in the severing of roots, the buying of bicycles and escaping the towns. It is in the joining of merchant and military navies and sailing away. It is in the army. It is in those who followed the work to the factories of the Midlands and Slough. It is in the need to wander and explore, and in the need to find security.
We tell ourselves stories to root ourselves to the place we belong. That is the received wisdom.
There are times that I feel that in my family we tell the old stories to explain why we want to go away, or why we have washed up (for now) where we are. We tell them to ourselves to try to understand why we have stayed.
We tell them to learn who we are.
We tell them to share who we are.
I wonder about the oak and the ash and those messages their roots send out into the network. I wonder what the mycelium do with them. We know that they connect tree to tree; they share nutrients at need; they send warnings. I wonder if they do more than that. I wonder if when some uncommon seed takes root, the network starts a kind of amber alert flashing a need for information
from some distant place for what it might be that this stray rowan or gingko or cedar will need in order to be strong.
And I wonder if the reply comes back not in the shape of recipes, do- and do-not lists, but in the shape of stories. I wonder if some older tree sends its memory down the line and that is sufficient. Perhaps some ancient cedar in some other part of the land says: this is my story; I hope it helps.
That is another reason we tell our stories. Not only to root ourselves, but to say that this is what we have experienced and maybe something in here resonates and can be useful. We tell our stories to preserve whatever mystery may be within them that deserves not to be lost. We might not know our own secrets, but that doesn’t mean others cannot decode them in their context.
We tell our stories to preserve what matters, even when we do not recognise precisely what that is.
These days I believe we also tell them because we know the current trajectory does not have a happy outcome, and we want to find the way back. We know that those rose-coloured memories are not of rose-scented days, but we also know that maybe somewhere back there was something that we missed, that would have made the way forward less destructive than the one we took. We do not want to actually GO back, we just want to find the missed turning on the path so we can look at the map again and figure out how to cut across to the road we would have been better to have
taken.
And let’s not forget: sometimes we tell those stories just because they make us smile. They lighten the mood, they bring laughter, joyful recognition of how absurd we can be.
Whatever your old stories are: tell them. Be brave enough to speak them with abandon, whether you do so in order to hold on to that past, or in order to let it blow away. Tell your stories. All of them.
When I think about the people I have lost, what I miss most is the stories they used to tell.
