Blood and Coal
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Blood and Coal, Sue Harper, DB Publishing, 2024, 129 pages, £9.99.
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One might expect that a family history memoir from a mining town-raised Emeritus Professor whose long academic career specialising in film history would not be standard nostalgic-leaning nor melancholic fare; that it might be illustrated, cinematic in places, assembling a diverse, eccentric, memorable cast, that chapters might be played in acts and scenes.
Blood and Coal executes all of this and more.
It incites the discussion of fundamental questions, asking ‘how are traits passed on, how are feelings transmitted? How are habits of resilience established?’ And, simply put, how do we get from there to here?
Cleverly interweaving the micro and the macro into a reticulation, Harper, in her last-of-the-line position, writes in a way that closely observes both her intimate family dynamic and its legacy amid the wider societal implications. The forebears are long dead but are brought to life vividly under a physician’s careful scalpel or the forensic tools of an archeologist performing a meticulous reconstruction. In addition, in an ingenious twist, Harper gives these resurrected family members an afterword; a riposte awakening from a place of repose: their responses to her unearthing of them. To do so is brave, even brutal, but it weaves in another thread to the narrative and adds weight and emotional gravitas.
The first two chapters focus on the two core families, dating back to the late-nineteenth century: Harper’s maternal lineage the Rockleys, and the patriarchal Harpers, mostly originating from Nottingham and its surrounding areas, mainly coal mines and agricultural land during industrialisation and throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Harper introduces her great-grandmother Hannah Rockley, husband Joe, the children who were usually addressed by the nicknames bestowed on them: ‘Kid’, ‘Chum’, ‘Tough’, ‘Rabbit’. Hannah is a tough, unsentimental woman, yet she grew up with a kitchen full of herbs, which, as Harper points out, along with being an abortionist, would have provoked accusations of witchcraft in a time not so long ago. It’s often said that people use gallows humour to deal with the trauma of dealing with bodies or death regularly. Hannah was no different, yet, as Harper writes, ‘she had a softer side. Once she brought home a twin baby, since its mother could not afford to take care of the two of them. She tended it carefully but the pretty little thing died.’
In Chum, Harper’s grandfather, we see, in his eventful life, the first stirrings of aspiration towards social mobility. Chum is ambitious; he seeks a meaningful life beyond the dark confines of the coalpit: ‘Chum was encouraged to feel that he was destined for great things and could do anything, and this extended to the world of high culture, from which he and all his kin were excluded.’
Chum is drawn to adventure, to the what else is out there, but ultimately becomes trapped by his bonds. He tries his hand at more trades, but they all come to nothing. Eventually, he is left, ageing, homeless, alone, having no option but to return to Josie, Harper’s mother, who he had once rejected; perennially destined to be returned to his working-class mining roots despite his quest to escape them.
We see through this resurrected lineage, how the tethers of family, of class, can be loosened, bent out of shape, yet remain stubbornly intact, how patterns of events and behaviour repeat themselves over decades. Chum’s wife Florence experiences isolation and alienation through circumstances from her parents, then her young daughter, finally rejected by Chum himself. This sense of not fitting, being unwanted, thus is passed down to Josie herself, who struggles to find her place in the world, not really doing so until her husband, Harper’s father, dies, when she begins to paint. Images, landscapes ‘poured out of her like blood’ – as though Josie’s psyche had been so long dammed up, and eventually the banks burst, releasing a tsunami.
The next chapter focuses on the Harpers. As though descendants of an ancient tribe, there are common physical, psychological traits common to their line: ‘agricultural labourers within family memory… The men all looked very similar: red-haired, big-boned… large hands and feet… The women… were quiet and biddable’.
But amid all of this, there is an undercurrent of something other. Almost running parallel to the highly intuitive, prophetic Rockley women, having ‘the sight’ was a Harper idiosyncrasy too. Yet, this trait was somewhat at odds with their firmly-embedded identity as staunch working-class manual labourers: strong, no-nonsense, not given to the whimsical.
Harper’s father Freddie does well at school but father Bill’s aversion to the intellectual puts paid to staying on, and instead he is pressurised into working in the pit which he despises. Enlisting in the Navy during the Second World War, he becomes a coder. But death haunts him; after witnessing his mother’s death at the hands of Bill, in wartime it is a constant hiss which sees him lose fellow shipmates time and time again. Freddie becomes cynical, taking solace in the numbing qualities of alcohol. Later, in his civvy street role as a clerk, he channels his frustration and fury onto working women, perceiving them as a threat. He is violently opposed to Josie working and to his daughter’s ambitions to study at university: ‘It was though all his previous trials and anxieties became focused on the issue of female autonomy.’
Having reached the end of the line, Harper reveals a snapshot of her own life, an autobiographical flash of how she got from there to here, reflecting upon the legacies of her forebears; how they have both shaped her early experiences and spurred her to waymark a previously-unforged path. Like her father, grandmother and aunts before, she has always had a strong intuition and precognition but has used this, along with her relentless yearning for knowledge, to map these new pathways, taking her ghost-clan to the alien land of academia, despite the many obstacles along the way: the deeply-ingrained class elitism, being female, having a regional accent.
A pilgrimage can be lonely, beset with spectral or Faustian figures who whisper death in your ear and tell you what you’ve sacrificed: that you’ll always be alone, that you’ve rejected your heritage, left your kin behind. Harper is acutely aware of this, despite her achievements: ‘It was hard to be happy. To live cut off from your tribe… I wished I had a real tribe, and hearthstone to sit at.’
The penultimate section carries forward these imagined conversations into further unchartered territory. The pit gallery, long-sealed, is reopened for exchanges between the miners, generations apart, via a portal which distorts linear, chronological time; where dialogue is created between the family members who never met, where unspoken questions and silent anxieties are voiced for the first time. An alternate world is created, one that allows the perennial what-ifs to be brought into the open, a resolution to endless rumination, bringing a hint of hope and closure.
These imaginary conversations, darkly comic, stoic, tender, reconciliatory, carry a sucker punch in their succinctness and authenticity. The hauntological strands that run through the canopy are brought to the forefront in the dialogue between Harper and her father, in the brief but poignant, philosophical exchange between the ghost-figures of Ernest and Andrew who never met, but both died on the cusp of adulthood. In the conflicted silence between Josie and Freddie.
This section is so compelling because the sense of time and place is strongly evoked by Harper’s prose. These scenes feel dreamlike, so clear is the invocation of these exchanges. The cloying claustrophobic darkness of the pit. The sensory illusion of Josie and Susan’s Garden colloquy, with its miscellany of scents, sounds and sweetmeats. The laundry heat and humidity where the women coalesce.
The book concludes with the aptly-titled chapter Mycelium, where Harper consolidates her rigorous research with the scraps of custom, lore and memory passed down through the generations of both families, infusing them with her lived experiences.
Like hyphae, the spread of the fine fungi threading through forest soil in deep-time, the family as a mycelium is a mass of this extensive, far-reaching network; this collection of stories, of conversations real and imagined, an intricately interwoven mosaic.
In these final meditations, there is a sense of catharsis along with a process of rationalisation to understand and reconcile with the past, to lay the ghost to rest – yet also a place of reflection – on the authentic characters in this saga who we’ve come to know intimately, if fleetingly – and of our own roots, how we may still be bound to them, however afar from the Mother Tree. We are invited to ruminate, recover, rebel. As Harper writes, ‘I feel I owe my ancestors everything… But only to a certain extent… My kin stand behind me, they are anterior to me. Perhaps they expected my rebellion… silently waiting for it, in the darkness of the past.’
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Sue Harper was a Professor of Film History, and has written many books on British cinema. Her book of short stories, The Dark Nest, was published by Egaeus Press in 2020. She comes from Nottingham, and Blood and Coal is based on her family.
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