Names, particularly names listed aloud, can produce a powerful litany. Poets make good use of such lists:
William Dewy,
Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
And the Squire,
and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!
Thus Thomas Hardy recalling ‘Friends
Beyond’, but he was by no means the first. The 16th century Scots
poet William Dunbar, in his ‘Lament
for the Makaris’, lists the famous poets of the past whom Death has claimed:
He has done petously devour
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour [makaris: poets
The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three -
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
There are few more poignant passages in
Shakespeare’s History plays than the roll call of the dead on both sides after
the Battle of Agincourt:
Charles
Delabreth, High Constable of France,
Jacques of
Chatillon, Admiral of France,
The Master of
the cross-bows, Lord Rambures,
Great Master of
France, the brave Sir Guichard Dolphin.
John Duke of
Alanson, Anthony Duke of Brabant,
The brother to
the Duke of Burgundy,
And Edward Duke
of Bar: of lusty Earls,
Grandpré and Roussi, Falconbridge and Foix,
Beaumont and
Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale.
“Here was a royal fellowship of death,”
says Henry, as he hands back the list to the French Herald, and this royal
roll-call is made to sound all the more shocking when contrasted with the names
of the English dead whom Henry calls next:
Edward the Duke
of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard
Ketley, Davy Gam, Esquire;
None else of
name …. (Henry V, IV.viii.92-105)
Roll calls can be created from place names
too. In Dylan Thomas’s radio play, Under Milk Wood, the
Rev. Eli Jenkins compares his little local River Dewi with the great rivers of
Wales:
By Sawdde,
Senny, Dovey, Dee,
Edw, Eden, Aled,
all,
Taff and Towey
broad and free,
Llyfnant with
its waterfall,
Claerwen,
Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,
Ely, Gwili,
Ogwr, Nedd,
Small is our
River Dewi, Lord,
A baby on a
rushy bed.
And well before Thomas, A.E.
Housman had gathered together the names of these Shropshire villages:
Clunton and
Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun
Are the quietest
places
Under the sun.
One of U.A.
Fanthorpe’s best-known poems, ‘Rising Damp’, is about the ‘little fervent
underground’ rivers of London. She lists them:
Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet
And these names return to haunt the poem as
the rivers themselves haunt the city, until the last stanza where Fanthorpe
warns:
It is the other
rivers that lie
Lower, that
touch us only in dreams
That never
surface. We feel their tug
As a dowser’s
rod bends to the source below
Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.
Names ‘tug’ at us too. We could all call
own private roll of significant places and significant people. Sometimes it is
their very absence from us, and ours from them, that tugs. One of the most
moving scenes in the recent TV
adaptation of Birdsong was the calling of the battalion roll
at the end of the first day of the Somme, when there was almost no one there to
answer to their name. In the novel itself this moment prompts an extraordinary
elegiac passage, which begins:
Names came
pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the
villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the
blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind
closed doors ….
These reflections on names have been
prompted by a short story I read this week consisting only of place names,
specifically the names of villages and towns in Lincolnshire, Cambridge and
Norfolk encircling the Wash. It’s the final story in Jon McGregor’s new
collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To
Someone Like You. All the stories are set in this part of East Anglia,
which is one reason I bought the book: I lived as a child in this fenland area,
and though it’s now nearly fifty years since I left, the village of Tydd
St. Mary and the fields, dykes and drains between Tydd and the sea are
still – to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence – ‘the country of my heart’.
McGregor’s stories are experiments in the
limits and fissures of language: their force often lies in the resonance of
what is not said, of what slips into the silence either side of speech. So a
story like Memorial Stone consisting
of nothing but names arranged by sound and type (Tathwell to Maidenwell, Bag
Enderby and Aby, Dogsthorpe, Hogsthorpe, Dogdyke and Quadring Eaudike – hundreds
of names over five pages) is in effect a prose poem. Read aloud, it creates the
same kind of mesmeric effect of repetition and variation achieved in music by Philip
Glass, but with this difference: that each name, each village, carries its
own history and its own stories, created from the memories of and about everyone
who ever lived there: parish records, war memorials, roads, schools, houses –
all names .
But there is one name missing from Memorial Stone: Tydd. The villages that
lie around it are there: Sutton St. James, Leverington, Newton, Holbeach (the
coldest place in England last week: -16°C). But no Tydd St. Mary (or St Giles, or Fen or Gote). As I
searched for Tydd I felt disappointed, even offended. Somehow an injustice had
been done. Absurd perhaps, yet this has preyed on my mind all week. But now I
think I have found a way to put things right: I have come up with my own roll
call of Tydd – roads, fields, people, pubs. Here it is:
Tydd
Teed, Earth,
Flint
Roman Bank,
Minerva Farm, Sea Wall
Foul Anchor, Five
Bells,
Raspberry
Cottage, Strawberry
Hall
Tydd St. Mary
Banks, Burrell,
Balls, Bills, Hicks
Jack Buck,
Catling, Cush Knott, Spinks
Tydd Gote
Pedley,
Pearson, Paddy, Pat
Cross Gate, Low
Gate, Common Pit
Tydd Fen
Greendyke, Harold’s
Bridge, Woad Farm
Salt Field,
Oldfield,
World’s End.
[illustrations: (i) Map of the Fens around
the Wash
(ii)
Tydd St. Mary’s Church photo: the author
(iii) Tydd Church in a stained glass window by Tom Denny (private collection)
(iii) Tydd Church in a stained glass window by Tom Denny (private collection)
