Sometimes the calmest part of my working day is the train journey. I try to sit on the side of sunrise/sunset, so I can read and glance up at the colours of the sky, and see what wildlife is in the fields. Last week these pleasant activities were augmented by the reading of Alan Garner’s Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life. Like many people, I started reading Garner’s novels in my childhood, and loved them. But despite his recent novel Treacle Walker, I hadn’t returned to him for a while, but after reading this I will definitely be digging out my old books.
Garner is unusual in the modern world as someone who grew up and continues to live very close to where his ancestors lived and worked. As he points out, ‘My family of craftsmen and labourers have inhabited, worked and served the same small Cheshire hillside since at least 1592, and their lives have been part of its shaping.’ For most of us that continuity feels like something out of a novel, and perhaps it explains the deep sense of the land, its history and folklore, that pervade Garner’s novels (mostly set in and around Alderley Edge). This sense of continuity and belonging is just one of the threads in this book; it is a collection of assorted essays, some given as lectures, and the cryptic title is explained in the introduction, with reference to his grandfather and other family members who were weavers:
Handloom weaving produced snippets of cloth which the weaver kept for his own use. These oddments were known as ‘powsels and thrums’; and Joseph’s and William’s families would have been clad with the bits that skill had brought together to make something whole and new. As with weaving, so with writing.
The book is collected from ‘pieces of thought’, offcuts from his writing life, and this idea of threads, tapestry, weaving provides a beautiful metaphor to consider the strands of ideas that make up not only this book but also Garner’s life and work. His non-fiction prose is straightforward and compelling, even though he talks about some complex ideas in the essays. They are broadly chronological, starting with childhood memories of his granddad, a blacksmith, and the young Garner’s entrance to grammar school, particularly writing fondly of his teachers and of learning Latin and Middle English as well as his athletic skill. There’s ‘First Love’, digressions by mathematics and poems, but it feels to me that the book really gets going once Garner starts to write about his house and the landscape in which it is situated. In ‘Up them fields and what was found there’, he describes his hasty purchase in 1957 of a medieval hall-house, in a bit of a state, and where he still lives and which he clearly loves deeply, along with the people who live nearby. Garner is, it strikes me, a part of the landscape himself. ‘Landscape spoke to me before I knew what it was, but I heard,’ he says.
His descriptions of the land and how its history, echoes and wildness call to him and draw him in feel familiar to me. I don’t have the same long family association with one place, but I feel the landscape of places I know and love in my bones: the brick-and-flint cottages and beech woods of Buckinghamshire; the holloways and oaks and sheltering hills in Worcestershire; the wild granite-bound seascapes of the far west of Cornwall. And so the specificity with which Garner writes of his landscape is thrilling, because it is both specifically there and also everywhere. In later essays in the book he traces myth in landscape and the etymology of place names, using imagination to trace a myth into the landscape around him. I can’t possibly do this justice here, but in the essay ‘By Seven Firs and Goldenstone’ he begins with a local legend, told him by his grandfather, and determines the difference between legend (which people believe(d), and myth or folk tales, which they don’t. Then he takes the startling precision of the journey in the legend of Alderley Edge and traces it, place by place, using Old English to decipher the place names, historical records, and the evidence of his own eyes as he walks the myth into being.
Garner is a man who loves words, and languages, which he uses creatively in all kinds of ways. One essay discusses the ways in which English differs from other languages, pointing out the obvious which had never struck me before: that in English we are wary of repetition, trying to avoid it except for particular effects, and this is because, in English, we can, because the multilingual roots of the language mean we have multiple words for things and thus have an extraordinary choice of words. There are also essays on his association with the Jodrell Bank telescope, and on scientific, philosophical topics, too; on creativity and finding the ‘powsels and thrums’ which one day come together to make a work of fiction. The threads in this tapestry are many and brightly coloured, and the book is one I will return to.