The Hungry Years Revisited

I stand upon the shore of a wide sea
Whose unknown depths profound I soon must cross
When the last sand of life runs out for me.
The clouds have fled. I look back on my life
And find it brighter than I was aware.
David H. Smith (The Parting)

THE SEA VENTURE was a greasy spoon on the Harbour Road in Warwick, Bermuda, next to the Darrell’s Wharf ferry stop, and within walking distance of Warwick Academy where I was taking my GCE “O” Levels.

I never really mastered the art of studying for examinations; if I attended a class and took notes, that was it. I would not reread my notes or do further research from other sources, even if requested and required. I did not take schoolwork home. What I heard and remembered, and what lodged in my mind during the short time it took to summarise the lesson’s points in a few words, was all that I took into the hall or gymnasium where we sat in rows to write about Biology, or History, or Physics, or Chemistry. In fact, I sat eight “O” Level examinations and passed six, and only just managed those by the smallest margin. A year later I picked up the two GCEs I had failed at first: French and English.

Looking back forty-five years, I recall very little about the subjects, the information I was tackling so badly then. I do manage to revisit the classrooms, the looks of my fellow pupils, the teachers, and the layout of the rooms, the dust and the boredom. Right now I can picture my situation in every one of the forms I spent a school year in, and I sometimes dream of what might be thought the best years of my life, spent in grey trousers and a blazer in the winter, and khaki shorts and knee-socks in the warmer weather months. I would be hard-pressed to tell you much about Pythagoras’s Theorem now. In a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Every schoolboy knows that, and that Henry VIII died in 1547. I must have been able to demonstrate that theorem in 1965, in a concise manner. One could not waffle about such things and get away with it.

I could tell anyone trapped by my words in 2010 (one would hope enthralled, dazzled by my genius) a fair bit about the Sea Venture restaurant on Harbour Road. Basically a hamburger joint, it began as a long, narrow room next to a shorter narrow room occupied by Betty’s Beauty Salon. The Sea Venture eventually nudged Betty out of the building and put a few tables where the accoutrements of the hairdressing business had been. The main room at the Sea Venture featured a long counter and one sat on uncomfortable stools there facing the Harbour. However, there were no windows, one looked around cake-stands at the grill and cupboards which housed the tools of the eatery business, and, I suppose, the comestibles that did not need refrigeration. There were three two-seater tables on the road side and one could look out at the passing traffic, but as I rarely went alone or with just one other person, we tended to sit at the counter or in the annexed room.

As a little boy, I’d been taken to the Sea Venture with my sisters on Sunday outings with my father. At home the only meats I recall having were chicken drumsticks, and minced beef made into a pie with onions and potatoes. We might have fish fingers on a Friday. My mother was a most unaccomplished cook. One of my sisters, to this day, tells me she believes our mother prepared nice food. That sister has inherited our mother’s and grandmother’s inabilities in the kitchen and I cannot eat the food she prepares. She can turn anything into sticks and sawdust. My father had not stayed with my mother longer than it took him to get residency status in Bermuda. Perhaps, if she had been able to prepare fine dinners he might have stayed longer. I imagine her bouts of insanity would have scared him off in time. My father never took us to the lodging house he might have been living in (I wonder if he was untidy, or ashamed at his situation) and, so, to the Sea Venture for a hamburger and a Coca Cola. We got to know the original owners of the restaurant, the DeCosta family, quite well.

The hamburgers at the Sea Venture were very good, juicy and not over-cooked, if not very large. One could not get a double burger in one bun, it was not on the menu, and Manny DeCosta would happily sell you two burgers on two buns, but he’d not fool with nature. The French fries, as they were listed in the menu, being what at home we called chips, were delicious and one lathered them with tomato ketchup from a plastic squeeze bottle. One could squeeze mayonnaise and mustard on the burger or hot dog one might order. Coca Cola or a milkshake to drink. They had pies and cakes for dessert, which could be served à la mode. If my father could be persuaded to part with another shilling, I’d have blueberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. That did not happen very often.

Curiously, I managed to be awfully thin into my teen years, despite the burgers and fries and milkshakes. In fact, I was concerned that I was too scrawny and rowed a boat to try and build myself up. The exercise made no difference. I was introduced to steak, pork and beans covered in brown sugar, asparagus, and yams covered in marshmallows, and lavish desserts in the bountiful kitchen of friends, in my last year at Warwick Academy. I started to gain a little weight. I gained something more important: access to books, wonderful books, many, many books. That triggered a passion for reading that has not relented to this day. I often find myself skipping meals because I’m deep into a book. I can write while eating, but I cannot read and manipulate a knife and fork.

Manny DeCosta had sold the Sea Venture during my last year at Warwick Academy; the new owner, Carlos, another Portuguese fellow (we called them Gees, which is probably offensive), hiked the prices. With schoolmates skipping classes or at the end of lesson time I’d pop into the restaurant for French fries and a Coke. Burgers were too costly. I did find another burger joint across the Harbour in Hamilton. The Hawaiian Room had fishnets pinned to the ceiling, and nautical decor. Pretty ghastly, come to think of it. But I could rustle up the price of their Hawaiian Burger (it had a pineapple ring atop the beef patty) and a butterscotch sundae.

During my teens I was mowing lawns and washing dishes for a few pounds a week. Out of those few blue notes I managed to buy a long-playing record album for 31/6 (just over one-and-a-half pounds) and the odd shirt or pair of trousers. Odd, indeed. I was attracted to shirts with floral prints, low-slung denim jeans, suede waistcoats and outrageous flowered ties. I was growing my hair and starting the moustache that I have to this day.

As a child, in England, I’d sometimes go to Wimpy Bars. The little Wimpy burgers were the size of those at the Sea Venture, but, I thought, tasteless by comparison. At the Sea Venture one could ask for all sorts of add-ons: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pickles, and get French fries with endless reserves of ketchup. In Bermuda there is an expression: “Don’t get foolish with the mayonnaise!” which means, I think, don’t go overboard with it. But it was a joke as everyone wanted as much mayonnaise as possible, and on anything.

I spent the summer holidays of 1971 in London, sub-letting an apartment in Earl’s Court. The apartment had an unpleasant and very small kitchen with a meter than was coin-operated. I made only coffee there. In Earl’s Court, near the subway entrance, was a new eatery called The Hungry Years. The frontage was striking: Embedded in the window glass somehow was a life-size picture of a bread-line from the 1930s. The sort of thing one associates more with North America than the UK, The Grapes of Wrath. I was drawn inside and found wood-panelled walls, a dark and quite large room. The Hungry Years served hamburgers. One could order the burgers by quarter-pound increments. One might have a quarter-pound patty (before cooking) on a roll, or a half-pound of meat. If you wanted a pound of beef, you could have it. The burgers were delicious and one could specify cooking time. Behind the bread-line on the windows the clientele stuffed themselves to the gills with what was probably more beef than was healthy.

I’d discovered McDonald’s hamburgers in the USA in 1970, and they were good. I eventually became a fan of the “Quarter Pounder with Cheese”. The burgers at The Hungry Years were better.

And in 1971, at the age of 21, I had my first anxiety attacks while in London. I never knew when I might be rendered immobile, there seemed no logic to it. One day I’d be racing around the English countryside in a friend’s roadster, or I’d be partying happily at a club till all hours, and then I’d try to step out for a morning paper and find myself vomiting on the pavement in a state of collapse. A year later the bad days had taken over, I had no good days.

As I finished school and blundered about in the accounting world, I felt compelled to search for the real meaning in life. For some reason, I thought psychedelics were that door to understanding everything. I wanted to know. I had to know. God might be anywhere. After my panic disorder set in, I looked to religion. A missionary posed the questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And these are good questions. Looking back, I think I’d have done well to ask other questions less sweeping, and might have built up my knowledge a little here, a little there, like GCE subjects, rather than accepting something branded The Word of God. However, I had some hunger for knowledge; if not the good sense to figure out what constitutes knowledge at the end of the day. I went for the biggest burger on the menu.

Some years later I was unwell to the point of being homeless. Not exactly without a roof over my head, except when I lost the plot completely, but in sheltered accommodation. That can be worse than sleeping on the beach or in a park or graveyard. I know. Some days and nights I just walked till I dropped. I ate mainly at a Salvation Army soup kitchen. The meals were nearly always spaghetti with three meatballs, and a reconstituted fruit drink. Only one meal a day. On Friday nights a wagon might bring soup and bread around the back streets. Always pea soup. On a Sunday night the Salvation Army kitchen was closed and a meal could be had at the Seventh-Day Adventist church hall. Always vegetables, no meat, sometimes a little pasta. I lost so much weight (over 50 lbs) that people did not recognise me. At the Seventh-Day Adventist hall the volunteers called me “Pops”. I was the only white person there, and must have looked beyond my years. I was not happy with my nickname.

I could afford to lose some weight, and I’m not sure that my hungry year did me much physical harm. Perhaps everyone should have a gap year like that? Looking back, I appreciate that my mind was well-stimulated by my difficult days.

Today I bring to the table experiences that I believe most of us have not enjoyed, or suffered. The big man cannot understand the hunger of the small man, though he might know the hunger of pure greed. To get bigger. Not just in matters of diet and physical size, but in philosophical matters, in business, in politics, in religion.

Happens I no longer eat meat. I won’t be looking for a better burger. I don’t smoke, haven’t for 30 years, but still dream I’m smoking and do crave a cigarette. And when I smell beef pies fresh from the oven at the Amble Butcher, or when the fragrance (the perfume!) of a bacon butty comes from Jasper’s Cafe, I find myself drooling. Like Pavlov’s dog. We all remember Pavlov’s dog, don’t we? Every schoolboy.

Under the Bomb

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson

IN OCTOBER OF 1962 a group of young girls with their dance teacher drove up to the main entrance of the United States Air Force Base in Bermuda. The mini-bus paused at the gate and the guards, who seemed to be on high alert, surrounded it. There was a great deal of fuss, questions were asked over and over, the armed soldiers were clearly most anxious about these young visitors in their leotards. On the side of the mini-bus the words: THE BERMUDA SCHOOL OF RUSSIAN BALLET.

This was the fortnight when politicking and posturing by three very different world figures with troubles at home brought the world rather close to nuclear war. The Americans had recently put intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in southern Italy and Turkey, all aimed at the Soviet Republics. In the spring of 1961 American forces and Cuban exiles trained by the CIA had attempted to invade the Caribbean island of Cuba and had been turned away by the troops of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara (a clear embarrassment for American President Kennedy). In the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev was struggling with domestic policies including difficulties with agriculture. Hungry citizens are rarely happy. Khrushchev was aiding the Cubans, glad of a client state near America’s underbelly.

Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev were all flawed and dangerous. If religion may be said to be dangerous, this was in part the committed non-religion of the atheistic Communists. I’m not sure that the Kennedys preached their Catholicism as most Americans were a different kind of Christian and didn't seem to trust Papists. One wonders if Kennedy dreamed of restoring Catholic leaders in Cuba, and dreamed of getting praised by the Pope for doing so. Who knows? We know Kennedy lied and cheated. Khrushchev had to tell a few fibs to keep his position as Premier of the USSR. Fidel Castro may have been the most open and honest just then.

So, in October of 1962 the USSR shipped intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Cuba and got found out. Castro, in the style of the totally mad revolutionary you’d think could only exist in bitter comedies starring Peter Sellers, wanted the Soviets to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USA, even though it would certainly mean Cuba being wiped off the face of the Earth. Think about that: Annihilation is good for the Revolution!

Armed submarines set sail, and aeroplanes flew about, with nuclear-tipped devices. The guards at the gate at Kindley Field in Bermuda stopped the School of Russian Ballet mini-bus and worried about little girls not yet in their teens armed only with slippers. And I cannot say that much of this registered with me. I met some of those ballet students a few years later and heard their story. We laughed at it all.

In the 1950s I had seen photographs and film of nuclear explosions. Those wonderful mushroom clouds. The British were setting them off on atolls in the Pacific, I believe. The Americans would light up the sky in Nevada. I would, years later, come across the Down-Winders in southern Utah who had been bathed in radioactive fallout as their military practised the extermination of humanity in the desert to the west. One finds it hard to believe that the devastating effects of radiation could be so conveniently ignored. Was it for the common good?

There is something rather exciting, amazing, about the cloud an A-Bomb or H-Bomb can kick up. There’s art in it. There is natural art in a tornado, in a tsunami, in a landslip. But the nuclear bomb is our invention, and we drop it, or bury it in the sand, having set the trigger and moved sharpish to one side. In the 1950s I recall fabulous sunsets, courtesy of atmospheric nuclear tests. How could a young boy be fearful of that? I never sensed guilt at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the conversation of my elders.

Despite Castro’s malicious goading, Khrushchev did a deal with Kennedy. The missiles were taken out of Cuba and the Americans removed their missiles from Turkey and southern Italy. Kennedy kept his part of the bargain secret, and that made Khrushchev seem to have lost the face-off. Khrushchev was removed from office a couple of years later. Kennedy was unpopular enough in some circles (those conspiracy theories continue today) to take a bullet. Fidel Castro was condemned to a half-century in fatigues. I don’t think even the Russians took Castro that seriously, and he was a constant drain with the need for foreign aid and only the Communists willing to give it.

One woman, it is said, links Castro, Khrushchev and JFK. Lady Jeanne Campbell - daughter of the 11th Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and grand-niece of Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise – was a socialite and foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard. Lady Jeanne was, apparently, the intimate of the Cuban, Soviet and American leaders. Some claim she was the lover of all three. It’s a wonderful story, if true, and would make for a great film plot. In fact, even if it is a fantasy, it would entertain. One of my cousins is married to Lady Jeanne’s daughter. (Her father was American author Norman Mailer who was the subject of FBI monitoring for 15 years after J. Edgar Hoover decided Mailer was a possible Communist sympathiser.) My grandmother rather liked Lady Jeanne, not at all concerned by the exotic history. She also liked Norman Mailer, who was only briefly married to Lady Jeanne Campbell.

I was living in the history of 1962 without being aware of it. My friends from the Russian Ballet were closer to it, but hardly alarmed. Their mini-bus was cleared at the gate and went through to complete whatever business they had on that patch of the USA in Bermuda’s East End. I was told the story in 1965.

Almost fifty years on, we have a few rogue nations, and some dodgy friends, with some nuclear capabilities. Bush and Blair lied about Iraq. However, we do have North Korea – a peculiar, family-run state where the millions seem to take no notice of their fearless leader’s dubious sanity. Kim Jong-il is a nutter. Kim has nuclear devices and missiles, though not many of them. North Korea could take out a very large, populous city in that part of the world. The thing is, the reaction would involve countries with far greater military force. And I suppose that is a cloud I must live under. We all must.

If one is to fear something, best to stick with the knapsack left unattended on the platform at the village station. Report it if necessary. It may just contain history.

Are People Peeing on Front Street?

I saw someone peeing in Jermyn Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
Alan Bennett

THE FIRST MEMBER OF MY FAMILY washed up in Bermuda in about 1880. John William Eldridge was a carpenter with the British Army and was posted to the encampment above the old town of St George. I do not know if the weapons resting on the gun carriages maintained by my great-grandfather's younger brother were facing out to sea, or whether some might have been pointed at vital places on the narrow strip of land making up the archipelago.

My great-grand uncle John married a local girl, Marian Elizabeth Florence Thomas, daughter of James Thomas, a warder, in St Peter's Church, St George's, in 1882. Marian was only 16, and a daughter, Ada Florence Eldridge, was born and christened in Bermuda in 1883. This is all in the Bermuda Government Archives, and I have turned the appropriate pages there.

John, Marian and the newborn baby left Bermuda and returned to England. As far as I can tell, John's family were somewhat unsure about that Bermuda marriage, and the couple were wed again, in London, in October 1885. They never returned to Bermuda.

My father arrived in Bermuda in the summer of 1943. He would have been about 18. Technically in the Royal Navy, my father was an assistant in the on-shore canteen in Bermuda. He was not off sinking battleships and submarines.

My mother's parents, the Lancasters, had originally set foot in Bermuda in the first week of August, 1925. They returned to England a few times with money saved in Bermuda, hoping to make something of themselves back home. My grandfather misjudged the times, or simply didn't have any luck, and lost their nest-egg trying to sell furniture near Blackpool during the Depression. They went back to Bermuda once and for all not long before the Second World War, my grandfather working for the British Forces in the NAAFI. I believe my father worked in some capacity for my grandfather.

I am the result of the unhappy marriage of my British parents. My father remained with my mother (conveniently) for seven years, claimed his Bermudian "status", and that was happy families over and done with. Just in case you thought I was clothed in celestial glory.

Adding up the days, weeks, months and years, I have spent most of my life in Bermuda. I remember best the first twenty years, 1950 to 1970, when Bermuda was a fairly simple place: green landscapes, pink sand beaches, pastel-coloured cottages, and exquisite turquoise waters swirling over purple reefs. Party politics, organized government that took itself too seriously (if nowhere near as seriously as it would thirty years down the road), and the destruction of all that was charming about the landscape in the name of wider roads and broad vistas soured my view of Bermuda. The oleander hedges that had cast blossoms onto the narrow lanes (narrow enough to naturally restrict speed) were ripped up, and outlooks installed. Then buildings were erected to fill the former natural spaces. And now you could conveniently see all these blots on the landscape clearly!

Older hotels, charming and, delightfully, of another world, making them unique and attractive, were pulled down (I watched two of them, the Hamilton Hotel and the Bermudiana, burn down in the 1950s) and hideous cartons were put up in their place. American-style holiday units, horrific anywhere, were encouraged. Within twenty years some of these were already empty, home to vagrants and addicts, stinking of piss and shit. In the past ten years most of the hotels have been pulled down, and condominiums and small clubs have been built or planned. Grand hotel schemes have been touted by Bermuda's current Leader, who also handles tourism and transport, with promises made and broken on a monthly basis.

Even the cottage colonies are closing down. Golf courses and clubs have closed. The City of Hamilton's Front Street was once considered the window of the world (and the British Empire) with fine goods in beautiful shops, with polite and knowledgeable staff. The better shops have shut down, many famous fronts have been demolished and boxy office blocks have filled the gaps. Government decided to ignore the laws about the height of buildings and suddenly ten storeys is not too tall. Even the tourist souvenir shops in Hamilton are closing as Government is catering to maxi-ships which can only come alongside at the former Royal Navy Dockyard. Simply, the cruise operators bring their own hotel (and catering and entertainment) to Bermuda, filled with its own guests, staffed by its own employees. Thousands of tourists who are on these all-inclusive sea voyages (so not inclined to buy much more than a postcard when they reach a port) pour into the Dockyard at once, some, perhaps, wanting to go to a beach. However, the roads and public transport are not up to this.

The little (historic) Town of St George where my great-grand uncle John was stationed is closing down too. And green Bermuda has been paved and concreted over.

It is the business of hotels, like colonies, to be one step behind the times.
Alan Bennett

I recall crime in Bermuda, of course. However, I do not recall living there in fear of my life as gunshots ring out. In 2009, so far, there have been 40 gun-related incidents, 14 people have been shot, and some have died. There have been other murders using machetes and knives. It is gang warfare. The Bermuda Government had refused to admit there were gangs in Bermuda for years. This year the word "gang" is everywhere. Yet nobody, somehow, sees anything. Dozens can clearly observe the murder of a boy at Elbow Beach, yet nothing is seen. Violence on the fields at sporting events is obvious, sometimes it is even on film or caught on mobile phones, but there is no witness.

The gang violence is, apparently, over "turf". The many gangs have carved up a narrow strip of land totalling about 20 square miles. Who the hell wants to sit in his few acres, proud as hell, shooting at anyone who comes onto it, afraid to step out of it? Drugs have rotted the minds of these gang members.

To be right up to date: Many people who attended the Christmas Parade in Bermuda recently felt so offended by the vulgar, violent dancing, language and behaviour, and unseemly costumes of the young girls marching that they hurried their children away and headed home, saying: "Never again!"

Who are these young girls? Who are the young boys in the gangs? They are the children of children in many cases. They are children without proper family backgrounds. "Your daddy's not your daddy, but your daddy don't know…" was an amusing calypso song when I was younger. It's a way of life. The grannies and aunties who raised these boys and girls are church-going, narrow-minded women. They are religiose, rather than religious, seeing evil in gays they don't know, but not seeing evil in their family members that they should know. Bermuda tends to be a matriarchal society at home (so many of the men are simply missing), battling an angry, mostly-male Government. Could the angry men in charge be horribly embarrassed by the boys on the walls? Or is it politically convenient to have an underclass to blame on the British and old history? It is better to have perceived blame than to dispense wisdom?

Bermuda's Ministry of Tourism has the motto "Feel the Love" … I'm not sure that many Bermudians are feeling it these days. How many tourists feel it? I dare a tourist to pause after a Bermudian snaps "Good morning!" at him. My English master used to walk into our classroom and say: "Good morning! The usual insincere wish!" He got that right.

Bermuda is a divided country, ruled by a minority. It was divided and ruled by a white minority when I was a boy. That was quite wrong. It is still divided and ruled by a minority because the Government wants one thing for Bermuda, independence from Britain and an American-style leadership by an individual (not surprising considering the current Leader was an American citizen, and may still be in his heart of hearts), and the people, apparently, want something else. The Leader himself has said that they had to fool the people for their own good. Orwell wrote: "Ignorance is Strength". So, it is wrong, don't you think, to promote ignorance?

"This is your Raja speaking," the excited voice proclaimed. After which, da capo, there was a repetition of the speech about Progress, Values, Oil, True Spirituality. Abruptly, as before the procession disappeared from sight and hearing. A minute later it was in view again, with its wobbly counter-tenor bellowing the praises if the newly united kingdom's first prime minister.
The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptible insects, out came the mynah birds.
"Karuna. Karuna." And a semi-tone lower, "Attention."
Aldous Huxley (Island)

TWO FEET IN THE PAST

Tonbridge Castle gate-house and gift shop

ALBANY: Ask him his purposes, why he appears

Upon this call o' the trumpet.

HERALD: What are you?

Your name, your quality? and why you answer

This present summons?

EDGAR: Know, my name is lost;

By treason's tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit:

Yet am I noble as the adversary

I come to cope.

William Shakespeare (King Lear. Act V, Scene III)

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG BOY spending my summer holidays with my father's parents in the Medway Towns (that sounds better than Gillingham, Kent, somehow, in 2009 when Gillingham is one of the dodgiest parts of Britain) my Nan Eldridge would wake me at five in the morning, and after I returned to my box room from the outhouse there would be a bowl of hot water and a bar of soap and a towel on my nightstand. I would dab at my face, I don't recall brushing my teeth (we were English, after all), get dressed (short trousers, no matter the weather) and head downstairs again in time to join my Nan at the door. We'd wave goodbye to my grandfather (he had lung cancer and didn't get out much) and walk to the coach station. It would not be six in the morning when we got to the office to present our already purchased tickets.

I believe Nan would have had a cup of tea long before she'd wakened me, for she would have prepared one for my grandfather. I remember buying small cartons of milk at the station, which would be my breakfast. Nan would be carrying, as always, a nylon mesh bag and there were paper-wrapped shapes in it. Our lunch. Other passengers on the day trip would arrive, present their tickets and congregate at the door of the bus we were to take to some stately home, some Norman castle, some ancient cathedral, some museum, some circle of very old stones, some gorge, or perilous cliffs. The other travellers, for the most part, would be English OAPs (Old Age Pensioners) like my Nan (about the age I am now). I don't recall anyone from abroad on the tours, and I think all English children shunned such activities for a seaside holiday with their parents.

My Nan (who had the rather grand name Charlotte Caroline Victoria Crow Eldridge) once told me that her father had taken her to the same places she took me when she was my age. That would have been before 1910 and I'm not sure how they travelled, possibly by train as there were a few members of her family who worked for the railway companies. They lived in Battersea and would have been conveniently located for day trips. My great-grandfather John Lavender Crow, who I met not long before he died, was a tiny man, a compositor in London, not reaching five feet (neither did his daughter, Lottie, my Nan, when she was fully grown). My great-grandmother, Jessie Caroline Moon Crow, was even smaller, a retiring woman who preferred to suckle whiskey from a bottle in her kitchen rather than entertain her visitors. The Moons had come up from Somerset, by way of the poorhouse, when Queen Victoria spanned the globe.

Nan knew a fair bit about the places we visited, and I think she must have visited some more than a few times. I cannot imagine my father being trotted off to Salisbury or Ely Cathedral to look at some old tombs and plaques, but his sister might have enjoyed that sort of thing. I should ask her, she has outlived him by many years, lives in Australia now.

Once the coach was on the road, before seven o'clock in the morning, everyone, ourselves included, would unwrap their lunch packets and consume everything. That was expected and I noticed people still doing that when I was in my late teens on a number of tours with my mother when I was at college in the Medway Towns. The last coach tour I took, a two-week rather upmarket affair around the United Kingdom, was quite different: I was the only person not an overseas tourist (Americans, Canadians and people from the Antipodes). That was three years ago, and I was the only person eating on the bus. I'm not sure it was permitted. I didn't venture drinking on board. That posh trip would have been more fun as a moveable feast, but people have weak stomachs nowadays, bus windows don't open, and the operators don't want to be cleaning up vomit along with the crumbs.

I liked the cathedrals best, as did my Nan. We'd read the engraved markers, no matter what strange language they might be in, and admire chipped toes and cracked noses, and Nan would explain how the positioning of the limbs of the outstretched knight, his statue atop his tomb at least, indicated important things about him. His armour might feature a cross, a crusader. There would be coats of arms and standards and mottoes.

I nearly always bought the guidebooks available at the attractions we visited. I also saved tickets and leaflets, and anything that was free that interested me. I even collected leaves and seed-pods. I had a little camera that took horrible pictures, black and white as I couldn't afford colour film and processing. Nan couldn't figure out the camera, so I'd take pictures, out of focus, of battlements and Horse Guards. I wrote up a little journal some days. I did not make up scrapbooks, I just boxed my souvenirs.

At school, history was my favourite subject. We studied British history for the most part, at least until I was about 15 when we did a year on the American Colonies. I liked the history of the British Isles best because I had often been to the places mentioned. My history master expected me to get his top result in the final exams, but I only just scraped by as the papers had mostly been on the American War of Independence and the period "back home" when that was going on. Hardly my favourite era.

When I returned to Bermuda after doing my bit at college in England, my boxes containing the treasures of my boyhood, my guidebooks and notebooks and dried leaves had all vanished. My sister had pitched them out for no particular reason, I was told. My mother wouldn't have done it, and there was only my sister who could have. I rather wished she had only stolen them. Twenty-five years later, while I was travelling in the USA, she stored the family photograph albums that had been left to me in her crawl space on wet earth and they were destroyed. I have no family photographs now.

In fact, I looked around the flat last night to try and figure out what was older than about five years. It was a short list: A grey tweed jacket that dates back to 1989, a friend bought it on the way to see the Berlin Wall coming down. There's a wooden box I bought at an antique fair in 1970 for £40, which was a great deal of money then, in which I keep my mother's birthday book which she started in 1937. I wear a gold-plated ID bracelet my father gave my mother some time before they married in 1947, one side reads "Mavis Lancaster" and the reverse says only "From Dennis" (to think they married!) which I never saw my mother wear. And there is one other less tangible asset that goes way back: My genealogy project.

As of last night there were over 980 names on my "Family Tree". I recently added my parents' first great-grandchild (had they lived) who was born this February of 2009, her parents live in the south of England. And I added, also, Ralph de Stafford, born 24 September 1299 in Tonbridge Castle, Kent, who is my 20th Great Grandfather. Ralph's father, Edmund de Stafford, my 21st Great Grandfather, born in 1272, had been made a Baron by King Edward II. Ralph inherited that title, but on 5 March 1351 King Edward III created Ralph the Earl of Stafford for being an outstanding personage at court and on the battlefields of France (he had a command at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, a battle our class had re-enacted in our history lesson). Ralph was also made Lieutenant and Captain-General of the Duchy of Aquitaine and a Knight of the Garter, an order founded in 1348.

Those noble folks married into all the noble families and I keep finding more titled ancestors, a favourite being Roger de Grey, Baron Ruthin, my 18th Great Grandfather, born in 1290 in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Wales. Note the French names: They were Norman families that came to Britain after the Conquest of 1066.

My father's side of the Family Tree is only back in the 1500s at the moment, and the best we have there are shoemakers of note, if not courtiers. My father used to say he was descended from titled people, but not in my research yet. Though aren't we all in Genghis Khan's remnant? The Earl of Stafford, Baron Ruthin, Baron Codnor, Baron Wilton and others are in my mother's side of the tree.

I'm sure my Nan Eldridge, who loved and encouraged my mother, even at the expense of my philandering father, would be delighted that my history is so alive through my mother. Nan started me on this journey into the past, begun on buses as a boy. She died in 1977, before there were home computers, never heard of the Internet, never considered genealogical research as a hobby (it is mine), but I can imagine she'd trot me off to Tonburton Priory where Earl Ralph de Stafford was buried in August of 1372 to look for his statue. She'd be able to tell something of his achievements from that monument, and might say: "Why, Ross, you have the de Stafford nose."

Blame it on the Boogie

I have seen a medicine

That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion.
William Shakespeare (All's Well that Ends Well. Act II, Scene I)

THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX is today, at exactly 15:43 GMT, and I suppose, if the rain were to ease up, I should head for the nearest stone circle, barrow or oak tree and do a dance. As it is British Summer Time, I must remember it would be about quarter to five that I should get jigging. The folks in Salt Lake City, many wearing funny knickers, should step outside their car dealerships at quarter to ten this morning, their time. If you are in Honolulu, in a grass skirt, knackered from entertaining tourists from the Mainland all night, a quick run around a palm tree at sunrise will suffice. If you happen to be in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West, which will have opened 45 minutes ago, take off your t-shirts and give your best rendition of I Will Survive just before noon.

As the rain is pissing down in Northumberland, unusually, I am going to be reading this afternoon: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Twits in Charge by John O'Farrell. He's the author of a number of amusing studies, including Global Village Idiot and I Blame the Scapegoats. Put him on your reading list.

For a week or so, I have been reading the Impartial History, which began with Julius Caesar having a hell of a time getting four good seats together on the cross-channel ferry back in 55 BC when he invaded the British Isles. It is a big book, factual for all the humour. A critic says of it: As entertaining as a witch burning, and a lot more laughs.

At two o'clock this morning, I reached 1401 AD; Henry IV has just decided that it would not be a particularly bad thing to incinerate the Lollards in town squares as heretics. The Lollards, originally followers of John Wycliffe, who had translated the Bible into what passed as everyday English in 1382, believed that the average bloke might learn to be pious from the scriptures, not just from the priests. In other words, that piety might be developed at home, around the hearth with your family, in your vernacular, rather than struggled with at a church where someone mumbled Latin. Clearly, a revolutionary idea. Henry IV, as we all know from our Shakespeare, meaning it must be so, fell ill with insomnia, became insane, and his face was covered in ghastly pustules, which could happen to any of us. The clincher, however, was the poor, old-at-forty-five, King waking to find his son, the future Henry V, trying on the crown that he'd left on his spare pillow. Seems that torching the Lollards resulted in some bad Karma for the King. We should take note! If you must take your symbol of office to bed, then wear it, or someone will nick it. Uneasy lies the head that doesn't wear a crown.

It's riveting stuff for me. I studied English history generally, in Bermuda, but my high school course was centred on the first Hanoverian monarchs (Georges I, II and III) and, particularly, the American War of Independence, as we call it. O'Farrell suggests that the American Revolution might well have arisen from disputes over standards of British dentistry. I'm enjoying catching up on Boudicca, the Black Death, Stephen and Matilda, Piers Gaveston fondling the crown jewels and Edward II taking a red-hot poker up the bum, and so on.

What a history we have here! I'm sure that my ancestors must have known just a little of what was going on. A friend's cousin's brother-in-law took part in that Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when my great-grandad Eldridge was shovelling pig-shit for his master. I have never, for a moment, considered myself the heir to any sort of baronial title, much less a descendant of some mighty prince of the realm. I know one old queen in Bermuda who has linked himself back to the Plantagenet kings somehow. I'm never impressed when he tells the story. He's a twat, and a shame the Black Death missed his family's no doubt fabulous palace back in 1348.

Amble by the Sea, also known as The Friendliest Port, is historic in its own way. Amble has been ambling along for around 2,000 years, and there are lumps and bumps in the landscape, columns, walls and castles, coins in the fields, and ghost ships sunk in the Coquet Estuary, and the memories of the older folks who've managed to live here despite the winters, all testifying to things past.

Sometimes a bit of history comes to town. Last Saturday afternoon a troupe of Morris Dancers from Yorkshire (that's a northern English county well to the south of us) turned up in the Town Square. I had seen a little note about this in the window of the Bread Bin Bakery, a few doors down from my flat, and decided that if the sun was shining at one o'clock, I'd go and have a look. I've seen Morris Dancing on the telly, and in movies, it's quaint these days. I'm sure the young people think it's just naff. It does appeal to the tourists, I have no doubt, and I fancied some tourist-watching.

So far as I know, I've never seen Morris Dancers live. They were certainly naff when I was a student! I was too busy applying Clearasil to my face, combing my hair forward and wearing flowered shirts and ties from Carnaby Street to watch silly people in top hats, dressed in funny clothes, with bells strapped to their legs, and waving hankies about as they did in Nether Wallop before Noe's Floude.

I hitched Cailean up in his new multi-coloured harness and leash at quarter-to-one as, miracle, the sun was out on Saturday. It was not only sunny, but quite warm. We made our way down to the Square, with the usual stops to meet & greet and pick up the newspapers. At the Square the dancing had commenced. There were eight dancers, two alternates, a fellow playing some sort of squeeze box, and a girl who might have been ten or eleven who was clearly dealing with some developmental handicap. The girl was keeping watch over an upturned top hat with some coins in it placed on the cobbles at the entrance to the Square. The little girl, chubby, her bare bottom hanging out of her white, baggy sweat-pants, stared into some other dimension, her mouth wide open with amazement. I spent the late 1960s like that.

The dancers, all male, were dressed in white tunics and trousers with criss-crossed blue and maroon bands over their chests and backs, and grey top hats with matching blue and maroon ribbons, brown belts—some with mobile phones attached—did not match black shoes, bells were strapped below the dancers' knees. Most of the men were bearded, grey bearded. There was only one young chap, tall, fair-skinned, red-haired, dark glasses, too young to produce even a rudimentary whisker. Most of the group wore sunglasses, as I'm sure they did back in the Middle Ages. Tucked into the belts were white hankies, and there were duffle bags containing what turned out to be long sticks and short sticks off to one side of the designated dance-floor.

There were group dances from various villages in Yorkshire, which were not terribly unalike, one song in someone else's language, and then the leader of the pack said that young somebody—turned out to be the nice-looking lad with ginger hair—would do a solo turn. The group moved back, a tune was squeezed out enthusiastically, and the boy took to the air with his handkerchiefs. Look out, Billy Elliot, there's a new kid on the block. I'm not sure whether the dance was accurately performed, but it was well-done and rather entertaining (yes, like a witch burning) and I was most impressed that somebody of the next generation was going to take this peculiar custom forward. At least, I trust he will. The afternoon's show ended with some stick banging and the red-head did an odd run out of the line-up, swung around the metal sundial in the centre of the Square a few times, bobbed about a bit there—in theatre, this is called chewing the scenery, I believe—then ran and leapt back into the group with a flourish. Of course, we all applauded, scaring Cailean.

The audience, no more than twenty people and my dog, was, indeed, mostly made up of tourists. There had been one teenaged boy wearing a Newcastle United FC jersey, but once the jump-up began, he hurried off into a ginnel at the south side of the Square, no lover of history, pageantry or the arts. That or he preferred a wank.

I discussed the goings-on with a lady from Essex who'd been sat near me. Cailean had taken an interest in her and had climbed onto her lap when it was offered. The lady had suggested she mind him while I took some photographs. My accent, of course, baffles people. Are you Canadian? When you have the town's cutest dog, and an odd way of speaking, you can go a long way.

So, we wondered how regional accents have managed to survive, and whether they will do so in the future, and how long history can last in Britain. And we turned our faces to the sunshine, Cailean too, just like they did back before the Renaissance, and enjoyed the warmth of it all.

The Ghosts at The Gate

THE GHOSTS AT THE GATE

AUFIDIUS: Therefore, most absolute sir, if thou wilt have
The leading of thine own revenges, take
The one half of my commission; and set down -
As best thou art experienced, since thou know'st
Thy country's strength and weakness, - thine own ways;
Whether to knock against the gates of Rome,
Or rudely visit them in parts remote,
To fright them, ere destroy. But come in.
William Shakespeare (Coriolanus IV, v)

IN AUGUST 2008, Gloster Hill overlooks fields of still-green wheat, acres of brown stubble with rolls of golden hay left randomly by some clever harvester, pastures of overgrown grass and gorse and nettles where cattle and sheep graze, and tidal marshes leading down to the mouth of the River Coquet on the North Sea. Hemmed in by the hill, the fields, the river and the sea is Amble, and this has been the home of groups of people for over 1,600 years.

According to the pamphlets at our Tourist Information Office, Amble was an Anglo-Saxon settlement, which would take us back to about 400 AD. In recent years, local farmers ploughing their land, and people digging, for whatever reason, have unearthed Roman coins, some found on Gloster Hill properties. These relics would carry us very nearly 2,000 years into the past, for the Roman Emperor Hadrian visited Britain in 122 AD and he ordered a wall to be built across this part of the country to mark the distant limits of his Empire, the end of the civilized world. He also wanted to keep the Picts in present-day Scotland out of the Roman provinces.

Hadrian's Wall, which is 40 or so miles south of Amble (we are, therefore, that far beyond civilization, you might say) and runs the 74 miles from Wallsend on the River Tyne on this east coast to Solway Firth in Cumbria, was begun in AD 122. Obviously, Hadrian considered it a priority project as it was finished in six years.

The Wall included ditches, turf walls as much as twenty feet wide and about eleven feet high, and trimmed stone walls about eight feet thick and anything from ten to twenty feet high. There were fortlets every mile or so, and over a dozen major forts and encampments, and battlements on top of parts of the walls. The path of the Wall across Northumbria and Cumbria is a difficult walk, keeping to high, craggy, defensible ground. It is quite remarkable.

You can see a fair bit of Hadrian's Wall today, though it tends to be low enough now to clamber over with little effort. The stone has been pilfered during the many centuries since the garrisons were repatriated, and not a few grand and not-so-grand buildings have a bit of Roman Britain in them. The stone above the door may read "Erected in 1861", but in the basement is a stone with "Hadrian (heart) Antinous" scratched on it.

I recently visited an exhibition at the Segedunum Roman Fort in Wallsend that featured a large bronze sculpture of Emperor Hadrian's head, apparently made when he was in his prime. The bronze was discovered in the River Thames in 1834, recovered, and has remained in the British Museum except on this one special occasion. I examined the face carefully. Hadrian was, to my tastes, a most unattractive man. I can only think he was quite honest and ordered the piece to portray him as he was. I had to wonder if Antinous indeed jumped into the Nile, perhaps holding a bag full of bricks. Some say it was a benevolent suicide, but would you fancy waking up next to Hadrian when you are the most beautiful boy in the world?

The first time I saw a portion of Hadrian's Wall, I was on one of those coach trips the United Kingdom is famous for. Our driver pulled off the highway, rolled into a small town, and stopped the bus just outside a petrol station. There, at the edge of the forecourt, was a collection of dark stones, now well-worn and showing no right angles, some ten feet long and a few feet thick, one to three feet high.

"This," announced our guide, a Cockney bloke called Robert, "is Hadrian's Wall!"

My heart sank. The Americans on the tour poured down the steps with digital cameras clicking, and made a fuss of the incredible thing we had come to see, and posed sitting on it for pictures to pass out to their friends back in Arizona where they have only the Grand Canyon to impress them. I once, by the way, stood at the "Bright Angel Lookout" on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. At Hadrian's Service Station Forecourt Wall, my heart sank.

*

ON THE VERY top of Gloster Hill, in Amble, is "Gloster Hill Farmhouse". It must be, as there's a sign saying just that. The farmhouse is quite modern, red bricks with white trim, and has a nice gravel path, a neatly mowed lawn, flowerbeds and some mature trees. Lovely, but there is more.

Towards the east side of the level garden at the farmhouse is a gate. The gate is inside the property, not on the roadside, and in a somewhat overgrown area. And it is a Roman gate. Two columns, dirty grey stone, square, carved, with capitals, rising up at alarming angles to the ground, perhaps ten feet high.

*

STANDS A SENTRY outside a gate on a hilltop overlooking fields and forests and swampy meadows and the cold sea. An icy wind roars in from the northeast, clipping the tops of the near-black waves and arriving unbroken on the hill a half-mile inland. The wind goes straight up the fellow's leather skirt, raises goose-flesh on his arms, makes his eyes water. He's all of seventeen.

His mates call him Janus, for a lark, though his name is Gaius, and he comes from Gaul. He doesn't mind being called Janus. His mother called him Gai, and that's why he ran away from home. That, and to see the known world.

"Frankly," thought Gaius, as his genitals contracted a step further than he'd ever thought possible, and frankly is how he thinks, even though a Frenchman, "I'd give my left nut, if I could find it, to transfer to the Riviera right now. So much for August in Britain! It must be Global Warming. Those dolphin- and tree-hugging folks back in Rome say it's from burning so many Christians back in the day."

So as to take his mind off the extraordinary discomfort he was feeling from his neck down, Gaius got to thinking about his origins. He travelled back in time, and came up short.

The lad knew his parents well enough, and his two obnoxious sisters. He could just remember his grandparents, smelly people - for they were getting on when he was young and farted a good deal. The Romans introduced many people to cabbages and peas, and, of course, the Emperor Claudius had encouraged flatulence; Constantine tried to outlaw the practice, but he was just whistling in the wind trying to do it.

And that was that. Gaius had no books, no personal oral history, no brass plates or clay tablets, Papyrus Post-its had not been invented, not even a tattoo. His history began with passing wind, and his present involved standing out in a surpassing cold, stiff breeze. What would he tell his children? Look at my family nose and lips, and sniff the air. When I am grown old, there is our story.

*

TWO BOYS ARE chasing each other about a bramble-covered hilltop. They have come from the four farms on the east side of the River Coquet. With only 152 people living in Amble in 1801, a census year, it is remarkable that boys aged fifteen or sixteen should have the time off to run about and play, much less the desire. Perhaps it was a Sunday and God wasn't looking? At least they weren't wasting the day badger-baiting behind a hedgerow.

There are two monoliths near the boys, and the game revolves around them for a time. One of the posts, which towers overhead, is tilted somewhat, the other is upright; the ground is a bit spongy from the English rain. There are no trees about, though the rotting sawn-off stumps of some remain. There are wooden buildings down the hill a short way. Because the sun can shine directly onto the Roman gate in 1801, it has bleached white. It is not marble, but it is impressive none the less.

"Antony," said Adrian, stopping suddenly, "do you know anything about this gate we've been dodging around?"
"Not really. My father says that the Romans built it thousands of years ago. My mother thinks it was a decorative structure put up only fifty years ago."
"Do you think an imitation gate would have been built with one post looking as if it might topple over?"
"I believe that might be the hallmark of a good impostor: a flaw, some ugliness, a defect in character." Antony reads books, a dangerous hobby and a hindrance to obtaining basic knowledge.
"So real things would be beautiful and unblemished?"
"At least on the outside. Like actors."
"Aren't actors impostors, then, by their very calling?"
"Not at all. Not if they are playing men. If they are playing gods, of course they could not possibly be treated seriously."
"So, men are not gods?" Adrian is thinking of something that he once read, for he takes chances with books too.
"Neither are gods; not even kings and emperors…"
"And impostors, cracked and with chinks, seem most believable!"
"Adrian, you're catching on!"

*

I SPEND SEVERAL hours a week hunting down my ancestors. My father's people lived in and around London, at least as far back as 1740 when Thomas and Hannah Eldridge began married life together. Before that, we trace back to Battle in East Sussex. Battle is near Hastings, which is how it got its name. 1066 and all that. My mother's family are from Lancashire, and I've got some of those members of my family detailed going back about two hundred years.

At this time of my life my home is in the region of England where the remnants of my father's family now live. They moved north in the 1970s. On my luxury coach trip a few years ago, we drove through Northumberland, where I had not been before, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this northernmost English county. I had expected coalmines, slagheaps and dust. For good or evil, Mrs Thatcher fixed all that and the landscape has been greened over. Trees, absent for millennia, are coming back, surrounding castles, built by William and other conquerors, that have been gathering ghosts for up to nine hundred years. Flat land close to the sea, behind dykes for many years, is being allowed to flood at high tide in order to bring back wildlife that has had no easy place to live.

There are beaches ranging for dozens of miles to the north and south of Amble: soft, golden sand. The dunes are studded, in places, with tank barriers, pill-boxes and guard posts from World War Two.

The Germans were kept at bay, but Vikings invaded this part of the British Isles, starting in 789 AD and for the next 200 years, leaving traces of their language and their genes, and, unfortunately, the feeling that Viking invasions should be re-enacted yearly to amuse the tourists. Last month, when a Viking Horde came ashore at the Amble Sea Fayre Festival, a friend gave his critique, and it was brutal:

"Clearly they could find no decent actors, or people of passable Viking stock. Instead, they must have hired on a group of down-and-out old hippies and given them wooden swords to use on the locals. And the local defenders weren't local either. More poxy hippies. The actual Vikings would not have been so in need of a bath."

No matter the pitfalls, and, perhaps because there are no open-pit collieries, I love it here. While I trace my own direct family members to the south and west, I'm now looking for signs of intelligent death in the northeast.

Many of the ghosts I have heard about are quite routine. You'd expect this: people are routine in life, why not when they pop their clogs? As John Lennon could have said: Can a leper change his spots?

*

IT MAY BE that only truly good people look back. Dictators commission five-year plans and Führers dream of a thousand years. There may be something unavoidably evil in looking forward. "We will fight this war to the end, and win it, if it takes ten or twenty years!" is a way of not saying: "We will kill and kill and kill, even if we all must die!"

Jay's parents, more especially his mother, certainly looked back. It was not only fashionable in 1999 to delve into genealogy, but compelling and increasingly easy.

Jay, however, was not into fashion, and he cared nothing for the past. If he had known any of his personal history, he might still have ignored it.

"We have a great-great-great-many-times in the family called Adrian, lived right here in Amble two hundred years ago. Just found him on the 1801 Census." Jay's mother beamed and hoped to interest her sullen boy.
"Well, that's a naff name. Adrian."
"It's a version of Hadrian, you know. The Roman emperor."
"That's boring stuff. Did Hadrian even come here for real? Did he even exist? Does anything exist? Does anything really matter?"
"He left a wall…"
"Maybe if he'd left a ghost I could care. But I don't. I'm going out."

And Jay, in his grey sweats, grey trainers and grey baseball cap, walked across Amble and up Gloster Hill.

The country lane over Gloster Hill is narrow: an approaching vehicle would have to pull into the brush to allow your own small car to pass. The view is spectacular, there are few trees to block it, and Warkworth Castle is shining in the cold, spring sunlight, a mile or so away. The North Sea is sparkling over the low headland beyond the Coquet Estuary. There are a few geese on the river, and fewer boats. Although it is late April, the year is new.

Jay is not a stupid boy, but his attitude masks any appearance of innate wisdom. The grey baseball cap, pulled down, makes him unpleasant. No sixteen-years-old should be unpleasant, there is everything in the world to live for, isn't there?

Over the fence, through the long grass, and Jay slumps against one of the pillars of the old Roman gate. Standing by the other pillar, though Jay cannot see him, is another young man. A fellow who looks remarkably like Jay, especially his nose and mouth, and who is, as you know, dressed in odd Roman gear. Some sort of re-enactment? I see the ghost of Gaius, so do you, but Jay does not. Attitude, you know.

"I have to do something about those bastards at the high school," Jay is thinking. "They keep saying I'm gay. Teasing me. And I don't think I am."
"I don't much care for being called Gai myself," offers Gaius, but he's not heard this time. "Janus is kind of cool, though. God of the Gate."
"Dylan and Eric got it right."
"Bob and Clapton!" Gaius reads minds—ghosts can, you know—and is a pretty with-it ghost.
"Columbine! Da Bomb!" And Jay pulls his cap down a little further, and thinks of the future.

Not every ghost story need be creepy, but it does help to have a certain frisson.

*

GHOSTS CANNOT HURT us. Remember that Hamlet felt awfully sorry for his father's spirit: "Alas, poor ghost!" If there are ghosts, they may be busy haunting each other. Those risen from the gulags may be worrying Stalin, and millions might be bugging Hitler. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are ineffective ghosts now. On a simpler level, Catherine Howard's spectre is said to run screaming after Henry VIII in a corridor—quaintly renamed "The Haunted Gallery"—in Hampton Court Palace. In November 1541, Henry lost his rag; in February 1542, Catherine lost her head; in 2008, Catherine's ghost is a popular tourist draw at Hampton Court. Nothing more.

We cannot change the past, and I believe we cannot plan to change or create the distant future from the present. For the future, we can only do the immediate with any certainty, and we should get on with that.

Should we live, as a song goes, for absolute pleasure? According to the Bible: "There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour." (Ecclesiastes 2:24). This suggests that we should have some fun, get on with life, not dwell on death, and that it is the best thing we can do for ourselves.
Let go of the ghosts. Let ghosts be dead. Live!

*

I OWE HADRIAN a debt. It may be that I am descended from one of his legionaries: something about the nose, the mouth. I suppose that as DNA research gets deeper and deeper into who exactly we are, a computer somewhere might flag me, along with others in, perhaps, modern Europe, and place us all originally in a forest clearing outside the British Isles. We might have been quite happy somewhere long before Romulus and Remus bade farewell to the she-wolf and went on to fight to the death—the death of Remus, at least—over the founding of a city. Some considerable time after that, a direct ancestor of mine may have joined the Roman army—perhaps just for the uniform, shiny sword, and bubble-and-squeak—and ended up on a boat for Britain. The rest is history. I am history. And, perhaps I'm not.

If I am pure Anglo-Saxon or, gods forbid, a Pictish person, deep down, and not at all European, I still owe Hadrian and the Romans for glass and double-glazing, aqueducts, baths, flush-toilets, home heating, racecourses and concrete. And extraordinary war machines.

I also owe Hadrian for a walk that I enjoy, over Gloster Hill in Amble, made special because on the top of the hill there is a gate: a Roman gate. I don't suppose Hadrian personally ordered it to be built, and it may have been constructed centuries after that Emperor walked and rode in the Northumbrian countryside, but he set things in motion.

Hadrian, bless him, is responsible for this story.