by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
When I was ten years old, I went with my class on a history field trip to Attingham Park, an 18th Century Hall and 4,000-acre estate located about 25-minutes drive from Shrewsbury, where my school was.
For the field trip, we were asked to wear period clothing; we were to live a day as WWII evacuees, making the journey from city (or town) to the country. I wore a mauve knee-length dress with small beige flowers on it, buttoned all the way to the neck, then a blue beret atop my new short, boyish haircut.
We arrived at Attingham, and were taken first to the Regency-era servant’s kitchen, where, amongst copper pots and pans, on an enormous wooden table, we made white bread jam and butter sandwiches with a woman dressed in a ¾-sleeve linen dress, a white cotton apron tied at her waist, and a white cap covering her hair. There was an old grey metal food cloche on the far side of the table, and on various sizes of old stained wooden chopping boards lay large hunks of plastic meat and cheese and bread. A deep iron fireplace sat inside the mantelpiece on the other side of the table, next to the huge black iron stove and ovens. I was in heaven.
The day continued on, but I remember little about the rest of it, save for the end, where, in the green beside the stables, the whole class of us were sorted into singles and pairs, and sent to our ‘new families’ – ie., the people we’d be staying with until the war ended. These included: the strict headmaster and his wife; the farmer from the village nearby; the railway driver and his family; and others, which I cannot remember. I don’t remember which family I was allocated to, but I remember feeling that it was real, that all of it was real. I remember the fsensation of my cotton mauve dress resting just below my knees, the feel of my new short hair, how it no longer touched my shoulders, and the smell of the kitchen, musty and cool, and the taste of the jam and butter sandwiches. It was like magic.
Then, we went home.
This was a new history, for me. A history of the individual, the day-to-day, the mundanity that is anything but. We are taught history in a sequence of great moments; great men making big decisions, great men discovering things. We see it all through a lens of highlights, and in doing so we miss the greatness of the smaller moments, the toil of life, the highs and lows of people forgotten by history. The way that we learn history, and the methods with which it is taught, still harken back to the ‘scientific’ methodology of John Dalberg Acton, though these methods seem to lack Acton’s liberal stance and his vocal resistance to the state, as well as seeming to brush off his argument against the ‘sanctifying of success’ by continuing to teach the World Wars in a manner which excuses British and allied violence and murder.
Acton was vital in developing a rigorous historical discipline which rejected the previously ‘nationalist’ and literary approach to the subject. He was a firm believer in the necessity of historians to act as moral judges towards the events of history. Facilitated by the use of primary sources, Acton sought to produce an objective, non-biased chronicle of the events of the past, and to ‘avenge the innocent’ through the teaching of such a history. [It bears noting that Acton wasn’t an unproblematic figure: he was a supporter of Robert E Lee and the Confederate cause, so, while his approach to the subject of history is certainly worthy of note, we might take some of his assertions with a grain of salt.]
Though I maintain that the study of history that I followed through to the age of 18 was, indeed, rigorous, I believe that it lacked the humanity which Acton propounded, and which thrilled me so on that day as an evacuee. ‘Social History’, (or ‘history from the bottom-up’), which was advocated for by Marxist Georges Lefebvre during the late 19th and early 20th centures, was what excited me most; the idea that people had always lived, as I was doing, all of them, they’d lived lives behind doors and windows and history had passed through them, had been a part of them. But the history I learned in the classrooms of my childhood implied that the stars (the ‘great men’) were more important than the masses (the people). These people were dismissed, forgotten, when, in fact, without the masses, there would be no sky in which the ‘stars’ could shine.
E. P. Thompson, the great British historian of the postwar period, advocated fervently for the study and consequent interest in working-class history, particularly with his most famous book, The Making of the English Working-Class, and asserted that the down-and-outs, the downtrodden, of history should not be seen as helpless or passive objects of history. Local history, folk history, food history, the history of long-held traditions; these are what colour life! It is the memories and escapades of people in villages far from the capital, it is the upholding of old traditions and the bringing in of the new – these are what life is! And even the people we consider to be ‘great’; the only way they became great is through collective appreciation of them by ‘normal’ people, like you or I. The ‘great’ do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced, sometimes mentored, or at least interract with people we no longer remember – a newspaper seller who sold a paper to a novelist which gave him an idea for a book which sold in its millions; the stage hand who helped Dickens get ready for a reading at a theatre; the schoolteacher who encouraged the burgeoning scientist to keep on studying. We are creatures created by our environments, and it seems wrong that the history we are taught willingly chooses to forget this, chooses to forget the way the days flow by until the moment, the moment it all changes and a ‘great’ name is printed in permanent ink onto history.
Because it is never a single moment, the single moment we learn about; it is always an accumulation of tiny decisions, seemingly inconsequential conversations, kind words by a stranger, the hard-working hands of a farmer, the laughter of a bartender, the smooth touch of a barber on a bearded chin – which lead, eventually, to the strange harmony between sky and earth that mean that a name be immortalised forevermore.
I never stopped being interested in Social History. My family and I would sometimes visit gardens around the countryside where I grew up, and I always pushed for us to visit the stately homes situated on the grounds of such places. I wanted to see the kitchens, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the stables – the places where the people worked, the people who lived and died nameless. And part of why I loved the TV series Doctor Who was because of its emphasis on the impact of regular people on history, on how a single person’s decision can change the course of time.
All of this still fascinates me today: when I was told that I had been offered the role of Nicole Marsaud, a farmgirl in Nazi-occupied Belgium, in a feature film, the first thing I did was research the way that a girl like her would have lived back then. I learned my lines back-to-front, of course, but I didn’t busy myself with trying to interpret hidden meanings behind her words, or doing a literary analysis of the text; instead, I spent my time implementing Nicole’s way of life into my own. I ate a lot of potatoes and carrots, and I washed myself with a jug of cold water in the bathtub, and I sewed up holes in my clothes, and I spent a lot of my time outside in the green. I took much inspiration for my preparation from the story of Mrs. Jozefina A. J. Eastham nee Vedts, who was 13-years-old when war broke out, and living in a small village called Haacht:
Life continued along very strange terms dictated by the Nazi Regime […] In that they came and measured our land that we farmed, told us what crops we would, not should reap and how much […] we were allowed to keep for ourselves. […]
As you can imagine, we often had shortfalls from their estimation; in these circumstances my father had to make up the difference from the ‘Black Market’. […] We always used to keep two pigs, one to fatten up whilst the other was butchered and any excess to our own needs, sold. My memory is that we managed to hide one […] The family cow kept both the Regime and us in order with the quota of milk. Many an evening was spent rocking the butter churn by the stove, [and] although I can’t remember keeping much of the butter, the remaining buttermilk was very much welcomed by us youngsters.
The family farm […] was [s]et in quite a large garden, all put to growing vegetables, fruit, etc. My father […] was a very clever man, making many of his own tools, including wheelbarrows, carts [and] his own and the family’s wooden clogs […] we had an outhouse that housed two huge coppers with wood burners under, these heated the water for all our washing needs. As these had to be filled by hand from a well in the garden, they were obviously used sparingly. Cold water washes daily and one hot bath […] once a week […] Attached to this outhouse was also a brick baking oven, in which my mother baked all the bread for the family.
This is the history I care for: the churning of butter, the pig hidden in the house, the cold water baths, the love of a mother and father working tooth and nail to care for their children. This is the history I yearn for; the sense of community, the secret family traditions, the food on the table, the stained apron of a mother at the stove, the taste of buttermilk, the fruit in the garden, the boundless creativity and kindness and optimism of humans throughout time.
Isn’t it beautiful?
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This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.org
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT org
Other articles by Hazel include Changeling, Medshare, and Film Posters.
An older Carl Kruse Blog is located at https://carlkruseofficial.blogspot.com/