Carla Carlisle is homesick for the olden days, when we didn’t know we had it so good.
‘It’s in vain to recall the past unless it works some influence upon the present’ Charles Dickens in ‘David Copperfield’
That morsel of wisdom is delivered by Aunt Betsey in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Not that I remember it from the book. It is the epigraph that appears on the creamy blank page in the front of novel Demon Copperhead, the contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver.
An epigraph is a little token, a hint of the writer’s intentions. I like the clean space, the nugget of truth, the pause before tackling the single-spaced pages that follow. Demon Copperhead is a long and remarkable book and I spent weeks thinking about the writer’s intentions. By the time I reached page 546, I was pretty sure that recalling the past rarely has any lasting influence upon the present in real life. It’s more likely in the written word.
These days, it’s hard not to look at the past with a kind of wistfulness. Not a sentimental glance back, but with an astonished eye: we didn’t realise that we had it so good. For a start, we weren’t setting the planet on fire. Admittedly, we created a hole in the ozone layer (remember that?), but when we learnt that it was deadly serious and manmade, the countries of the world came together and agreed to stop producing hydrofluorocarbons — or at least reduce them. It seems that they are still used in refrigeration and air conditioning and, as the planet gets hotter and hotter, air conditioning is needed for survival. We probably need to look into that again.
It may be vain to think that the past was a cleaner, quieter and kinder place, but it felt pretty decent when you knew your GP and your GP knew you, milk in glass bottles was delivered every morning and children walked to school. Our village still has a post office, two churches, a village hall, a surgery, a village shop, a fish-and-chip shop, a pub, two hairdressers and a primary school, although there are more children than places. There’s also a new Co-op that’s open until 10pm. It’s in the centre of the village where Tripp Batt’s used to be and we all miss that farm-machinery repair shop and hardware store.
The current political turmoil does make me feel homesick for the past. The election in America is ‘too close to call’ and my days begin with reports from swing states, poll numbers, electoral-college reviews from a divided land where half the country believes everything is at stake and the other half believes it, too. The war in Ukraine goes on, the war in Gaza goes on and a new war in Lebanon is changing the landscape as I write. Floods and wildfires are far away and they are next door. Over-crowded boats with their desperate cargo cross the Channel daily and everyone knows someone with a broken hip who waited five hours for the ambulance to get them to the hospital, where there was no bed.
Most of us believe we would save the earth if we could. Our new government tells us that we live in the motherland of Democracy, but we can’t talk back. We can’t say ‘NO’ to pylons that will ravage the countryside and destroy precious habitat, say ‘NO’ to a vast prison on land that is home to ancient woodlands, say ‘NO’ to the 1,000 more houses added to the 1,000 in the village where there is no surgery.
We wouldn’t mind a nanny state that persuaded us to modify our lives, turn off computers and televisions from standby, switch off lights and use drying racks instead of tumble dryers. We would be grateful for a democratic government that championed the smaller nuclear reactors being developed by Rolls-Royce and called a halt to Sizewell C, for which even the French investors admit the design is already out of date. We’d welcome identity cards that would solve far more problems than they would create, make ‘stop and search’ a smoother process and help get knives and other weapons off the streets.
We tend to be balanced observers of the dramas in our world. We don’t stand on platforms, but we think it is unkind to raise the price of a first-class stamp to £1.65 six months after the previous increase. Ditto the looming threat to do away with telephone landlines, the life raft of the old. We feel lucky to live in a country where we have the right to speak our minds, but we wonder if we have a government that cares what we say.
Studies show that the human attention span has shrunk to the size of a broad bean. Smartphones, texts, SnapChat, Amazon, Paypal, apps, apps and more apps, Elon Musk — it’s a handheld cyclone out there and we are now warned daily about something called Artificial Intelligence. We are told that if it doesn’t destroy us, it will save us. Fingers crossed on that one.
I am truly sorry if I have added to the gloom of your day. I was raised with the epigraph ‘If you can’t say something nice, at least be plucky’. So that you know this writer’s intentions, I’ll close with a handful of epigraphs. Take your pick:
‘The realm has gone to wrack’ (Tennyson said of Camelot).
‘Live or die. Live or die, But don’t poison everything’ (Herzog by Saul Bellow).
‘Only a person who is congenitally self-centred has the effrontery and the stamina to write columns’ (E. B. White).
Jason Goodwin: The dark, chilly undercurrents in the seemingly-idyllic life of the English village
Jason Goodwin was feeling decidedly nostalgic for village life — until he had a run-in with one of its discontents.
