Sun, shade and statues – McSherry’s Musing’s

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” That sentence is from The Go-Between, a novel by LP Hartley first published in 1953. I can’t say I’ve read it, or even seen the 1971 film adaptation starring Julie Christie, but I’ve been aware of that single line from the book for years now and there’s much truth in it.

It is easy for us to look back at our own recent past and be amazed at what used to pass for normal behaviour. When I was a child in the ‘60s, it was not unusual, as we made our way home from school, for an adult to ask, “Well, did you get many slaps today?” Corporal punishment was the norm, and abuses were not uncommon. Some kids were in a constant state of fear.

I heard one horror story about a nun who took a nine-year-old girl by the hand and walked her to a field next to the school where some men were working at hay. She called one of them over and asked him to slap the child a couple of times on the backside. The man obliged and this ‘bold girl’, now bawling, was led back to the classroom, having been well-punished for whatever heinous crime she had committed.

Now we see the barbarity of such behaviour, but then it was nothing out of the ordinary. Most kids who got slapped tended not to tell their parents, as they’d most likely side with the teacher and dole out even more slaps.

It is also strange how ‘Godly people’ can comfortably go along with systems that are so obviously ungodly. In Steve McQueen’s harrowing film ‘12 Years a Slave’, based on Solomon Northup’s memoir, pious Christians have no trouble owning slaves. But as Northup writes with startling restraint, “It is not the fault of the slave holder that he is cruel… taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears, that the rod is for the slave’s back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years”.

Usually, those who live comfortably within a class society will support the status quo. Sometimes they may even believe that God ordained things to be that way. As the traditional hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ puts it, ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate’.

Of course, it is wrong to collude with an evil system such as the slave trade. Recently, slavery was in the news again, with the case of the four people in Bristol who removed a statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth and threw it in the river. They were later found not guilty of causing criminal damage. For them, the far greater crime was the statue being up in the first place. However, who decides which statues are removed? I’m not sure if it’s always a good idea to start ‘no platforming’ certain statues. It could set a dangerous precedent. There’s a statue of Oliver Cromwell in Westminster. What if a gung-ho group of historically aware Irish activists removed it and threw Cromwell in the Thames? Their defence could be that it’s payback for Wexford, Drogheda and a host of other atrocities committed during his time in Ireland. It is unlikely an English jury would acquit them.

Without doubt there are times when a statue just does not belong. Look at the explosive removal of Nelson from O’Connell Street in March 1966, just before the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. There was no move to reinstate the bold Horatio on his pillar afterwards, and I’m sure the same fate will befall the Colston statue.

For the most part, though, I am inclined to think our national and indeed our personal histories are things that we must learn to live with, since it’s part of our past, whether we like it or not.

Many years ago I saw a mind-bending movie called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. It was about an intense love affair between Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Winslet). At first they seemed to be made for each other, but the relationship breaks down.

Joel is distraught, especially when Clementine begins to ignore him. Later we realise that she has undergone a special treatment that can erase unhappy memories from a person’s mind, because she too had been distraught.

Still in an anguished state, Joel decides to undergo the same treatment, but then realises that he wants to keep his memories of Clem, even the painful ones. They are a part of who he is, so it would be wrong to erase them.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind indeed! Where there’s sun, there is usually shade as well, and our histories, both national and personal, are always going to be a spotted mixture of light and shade.

Here’s an illuminating story about the great Irish writer James Joyce (a life-sized statue is just off O’Connell Street), who lived most of his life in exile. Apparently, he was walking down a street in Paris one day when a man stopped him and said, “Please, let me kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses.”

“No,” said Joyce. “It’s done a lot of other things as well.”