The Scrivener: More Than A Funny Smell
…Some years ago, a close friend was sinking into depression and felt that his life had been pointless. ‘I feel like a candle burning in the dark, and when I go out nobody will ever know that I was here.’ Well, I had to cheer him up somehow, didn’t I? I told him, ‘Ah, but even a candle leaves a funny smell after it’s been extinguished’…
Brian Barratt measures out major historical events using the generations of his own family as a yard-stick.
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Generations are strange things. Three generations before me, great-grandfather William Barratt was born in 1816. He had a bookshop in London. He and his first wife produced three children. Two of them died in babyhood.
A Family Bible has the touching inscription:
Mary Barratt died
March 6th 1842 aged
1 year and 9 months and
was Registered at Mr Fortesques
Surgeon Smithfield Bars, was
Buried in the New Bunhill
Fields Burying Ground
on the 13th of that month.
William Barratt himself died the same year. There were terrible cholera epidemics in those times. Graveyards were literally overflowing and had to be closed. You can discover the fascinating story of New Bunhill Fields if you have time to search on the Internet.
Great-grandfather William Barratt’s birthdate and mine are separated by 120 years. He was three generations before me, near the middle of the Family Tree chart when I started work on it. I was near the bottom of the same chart.
I am now in the middle of the chart. There are three generations after mine. The arrival in 2006 of a great-great-niece has elevated me in the ancestral order. Our birthdates are only 70 years apart. That sort of thing happens when you become an Uncle at the age of 11. As I said, generations are strange things.
What sort of world did Mary Barratt leave when she died in 1842? We know that cholera was raging in over-crowded London, but there were some high points in that year, for instance:
* Queen Victoria took her first journey by steam railway, from Windsor to Paddington.
* W.S.Henson designed an aerial steam carriage.
* Hong Kong was ceded by China to Britain.
* Crawford Williamson Long, in the USA, used ether as an anaesthetic during surgery for the first time.
* Sir Arthur Sullivan was born.
Now, 164 years and seven generations of Barratts later, the world is a different place. OK, the aerial steam carriage didn’t get very far, but we still love Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music. Hong Kong has been given back to China, which is developing as the major world power. Steam railways still run in some places but most of our rail travel is now powered at high speed by diesel and electricity. And thank goodness we have the benefits of sophisticated anaesthesia during surgery.
Meanwhile, we have starvation on a massive scale, enormous refugee problems, HIV-AIDS, greenhouse gases, and fundamentalists of several religions spreading ill-will, and more. For millions, there will be no next generation.
Some years ago, a close friend was sinking into depression and felt that his life had been pointless. ‘I feel like a candle burning in the dark, and when I go out nobody will ever know that I was here.’ Well, I had to cheer him up somehow, didn’t I? I told him, ‘Ah, but even a candle leaves a funny smell after it’s been extinguished’
Perhaps my great-great-niece will become such a candle for the world in, say, eighty years time, when this millennium is drawing to its close. Let’s hope that she, and countless others, will leave more than a funny smell.
I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers’ hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world. – Rabindranath Tagore (an extract from ‘The Crescent Moon’ - Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, London, 1936/1973.)
© Copyright 2006 Brian Barratt
