Neil Sentance: 'Water and Sky' & 'Ridge &Furrow'
In his ironically-titled sonnet ‘Epic’ Patrick Kavanagh wrote about County Monaghan:
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided; who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul!’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones.’
Two short books by Neil Sentance made me think of Kavanagh: they too are about unpromising places which are ‘important’, sites of ‘great events’. Water and Sky: voices from the riverside (2014) and Ridge and Furrow: voices from the winter fields (2019) from Little Toller Press (the first is a particularly lovely production) are about ordinary people in ordinary places. Both people and place come to vivid life again through Sentance’s tender attention to our mental soil. The books examine the world of his family in the Lincolnshire riverlands over many decades, often looping back to particular individuals and incidents, flowing gently like the River Witham itself. While this world has now gone, and there were idyllic moments in the past, there is no soft nostalgia here: the lives Sentance presents us with were often hard and painful.
I bought the books because I know Lincolnshire and thought they sounded interesting. It was only when I started reading that I realised my connection was much more personal. The most important location is around the farm of Sentance’s mother’s family in the modest village of Foston (pronounced fosson) on the border with Nottinghamshire close to the A1. Next door is the more extensive and prosperous Long Bennington, where my parents lived for many years. In the summer afternoons I would cycle around the same local lanes and narrow roads, often meeting and crossing the River Witham. In Water and Sky there is a photograph of George and Hettie striding out on their wedding day, 1919 in their finery, their bridesmaids well behind them on the path from the church: in 2011 my wife and I, recently married, walked down that same path in the sunshine in our own finery following a blessing ceremony at St Swithun’s. My parents are buried in the adjoining graveyard, both having died in the unlovely nearest town, Grantham, which features in the first half of Water and Sky, ‘Town River’.
Richard Benson’s The Farm is well-worth reading, and in his Foreward to Water and Sky he accurately summarises the approach in this book:
Sentance revisits the walks of his childhood, and tells a story of the land around the River Witham through memoir, biography, ‘family lore’ and what could be called psychogeographic drift. He evokes a sense of transition from a rural culture based on meaningful work to one of leisure and commodification, but rather than lament a lost Golden Age, he celebrates the countryside’s muddy reclamations of modernity.
While all these lives were ‘ordinary’, the world’s forces often impinged heavily on them, particularly through war. George William Holmes (he of that wedding photo) walks out of a German barbed-wire stalag in November 1918, a walk which has given him the legacy of TB, and a muted homecoming - his mother had died just an hour before he arrived home. He has to use a bathchair, but never loses a positive attitude to life:
He simply chose to write over the past, on the palimpsest of the life before the war. He made the best of their second chance.
He remembers the family swimming parties in the river when his children are young, finding contentment where it could be found.
But there is still much pain here: the opening piece in Ridge and Furrow, the ironically named ‘Hope Gardens (1985)’, is an 8-page masterpiece of biography, both beautiful and devastating. Frank was married to Lottie in 1938, and they put money down for a mortgage on a house. Then came five years and seven months of bitter service in the Royal Artillery, culminating in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen:
He could smell it on the approach, the mephitic air: some 13,000 corpses unburied outside the barbed wire of the camp, dunes of abandoned humanity dumped under roves of budding trees. He had spent weeks there, in a daze, in suppressed horror, tending the sick and dying, burying the untold dead, doing what he could. He never got used to the clamouring of wasted, twitching hands, beseeching and hope-bled.
On return to England, his nerves are splintered; he and Lottie find themselves too old to have children; he develops TB and spends almost two years in a hospital hooked up to a spinal tap. The account ends with a sickening punch.
Seven more pieces follow in Ridge and Furrow, along with the evocative family photographs which also appeared in the first volume; see this blog post in The Clearing.
In ‘1963: Dreams of the Old West’, Sentance recreates his mother’s early years, full of relentless work, her consoling passion being the Old West on TV and in books (Bonanza, Rawhide, Zane Grey, John Wayne) as she risks two bars on the electric fire, one quickly dowsed when her father comes downstairs. ‘1970: Klondike’ is another moving portrait, this time of Harold, a gravedigger who once a year drives to Betws-y-Coed in Northern Wales with his homemade trailer, a tent and the fireside armchair from his best room. His brother RJ, with whom he used to drink at the White Horse, fell apart mentally, and died two years ago:
Harold had cried like he hadn’t since he was a roaring child, and now spends a few moments every week tending the grave, clearing away the snarling branches, scoping off the marly dust.
There are many such tenderly-recovered lives here, some imagined through the first person. Some of them could have taken different paths, roads not taken (though none as dramatic as the most famous child of Grantham). All of them are linked by a rooted connection to place, as Sentance’s father was:
His knowledge of this territory was deep, his mental maps formed from an early age and accreted slowly over the years. These cognitive maps were multi-sensory - roads not named not numbered, streets lined with trees he’d seen grow up, houses he’d worked in, the cars parked outside, shops he’d known the owners of, food factories and maltings he knew by their smell or engineering works he could recognise from the machinery din, or the sound of its shift siren … He had a story for each one, his method of remembering.
These marvellous books are a wonder of remembering, of attending to the ordinary, of respect for place and the past. In Patrick Kavanagh’s words with which he concludes ‘Epic’:
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
