Wednesday Whimsy: Your Place, My Town, The Land

Beckenham Road (a long time a go)


Listening to the poignant evocation of Cornwall, “Cousin Jack”, I had something of an epiphany – recognition of why the spirit of place is so important to us. And why its emotion so often trumps rationality. I’m not from Cornwall, have no Cornish heritage and no Cornish connection of note – but the emotion of the song gets to me just as do the feelings in Springsteen’s “My Hometown” or even Billy Bragg’s take on Essex in “A13”.

If you write, speak or sing with passion about your town, your country, your hills or even your street, you will bring out those emotions – the associations with place, with roots, with where we belong. These are some of the most powerful ties and we never lose them even when thousands of miles from that place. The ties that make tough old New York cops stream with tears at “Kathleen” or “Danny Boy”. The ties that make me stop, catch my breath and think a little about the things that really matter.

For me Kipling is the great poet of this feeling and in “The Land” he summed it up about his native Sussex. Here are the last couple of stanzas:

“His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.”


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