Memories of a village, somewhere
What do you remember about the place where you were born? Especially if you didn’t live there for a long time, and you haven’t been to visit for an even longer time. Does the place change shape with time?
I’ve started reading Causeway, by Linden MacIntyre. In part, to prepare myself for his style, when I get around to The Bishop’s Man which recently merited the Giller Prize. His retrospection on the village where he was born, taken some five decades after the fact, is an inspiration. After all, I was also born somewhere, if my parents are to be believed. My memories are clear, have angles and corners and everything needed to draw a map. The only point of contention is that I moved away before I could read or write, so any recollection is my own version of an oral history.
A small point of precision. I was actually born in a city, in a hospital, unlike my father who came into the world in an upstairs bedroom. But, we lived in a village. An important precision, because I wouldn’t try to describe a city, especially one as large as “in Town”. The village existed because the trains ran through there. A junction station, where engineers actually had choices to make (or a schedule to follow). Everything else in the community depended on the when and to where of the departure board, with its chalk predictions.
Not only were there steel rails, but there was also a river. Not too big, not too small; a dandy spot to catch a stringer of trout for supper. My grandfather did that, a lot. I’ve seen pictures, and I’ve received stressful remonitions because I dared to wander down the garden path to see where he spent time with a long fly rod. The river was just large enough to merit a bridge; the trestle, in the vernacular. Given the alignment of the roads, there were actually two bridges in the village, but one was hardly big enough to matter.
So, here we are, at the junction of two clay roads and some steel rails. A village big enough to have a couple of stores, a post office, a gas station and (at one time) a bank. All considered as second string to the station where the real affairs of the world took place.
