Up to our eyeballs in true fictions
Imogen de la Bere
| 12 Sep 2008
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My father is a survivor of the sinking of the Wahine. Not in itself so remarkable, for so are hundreds of other people. But in our family chronicles, this event looms large, up there with great-grandfather Ochcraglynski fleeing across Russia from the wolves.
This year, as usual, my father has been sheltering from the New Zealand winter under the umbrella of an English summer. We’ve had several family gatherings, which means four generations of talkers in one house. The Wahine came up, metaphorically speaking, and with her, some fascinating discoveries.
On that fateful day, my father was with his colleague Alan Ramsay, another mathematician, who was proudly wearing a new pair of shoes in Spanish leather. As the storm grew outside, Ramsay and some others played bridge, while my father rehearsed in his head a verse from a Scots ballad about a shipwreck, Sir Patrick Spens, which he often recited to us at bedtime:
O laith, laith were the guid Scots lairds
To wet their cork-heeled shoon!
But long ere ere the play was played
They wet their hats aboon!
Translated: the Scottish lords didn’t want to get their nice shoes wet, but still ended up drowned. (Well, you probably figured by now I had an odd upbringing.)
When the order was given to abandon ship, Ramsay took off his precious shoes, as instructed, tied the laces together and set them on the deck. Then he and my father jumped overboard. After they landed in the water, a lifeboat, which had been stuck on its pulleys, suddenly came down, plunging them under the waves. My father struggled out, grabbed a rope on a lifeboat and bobbed about in the freezing water until he was finally pulled aboard.
Once they were blown ashore at Eastbourne, those who had obediently removed their shoes picked their way painfully across the mussel-studded rocks, while my father, who hadn’t, walked jauntily to safety.
This was the story as I knew it. But my father denied knowledge of most of it.
He didn’t recall the Scottish ballad, or Ramsay leaving his fine shoes on deck, or the lifeboat submerging them, or the water as freezing or the rocks as vicious.
After some hours of debate, we agreed that the ballad bit and the shoes bit were probably true, even if my father has no memory of them, because really, how could he make that up? Everything else, it seems, was embroidered by us from simple facts.
Do these fictions imply that the Wahine did not sink, or that my father did not survive it? Of course not.
But this simple exercise in remembering history has profound implications for our faith.
I pondered this recently when we celebrated St Alban’s Day (in the rain, naturally). A wonderful procession, with scores of children sporting banners, as monks, soldiers, angels and roses, with puppets 10 feet high, of Alban and other protagonists, lions, chariots, with drums, trumpets, the Dean and chapter in special copes, the High Sheriff in black velvet knee-breeches, more priests than an Irish wedding, vested in red stoles and multi-coloured umbrellas, and the St Albans Fire Brigade providing the sacred spring that sprung when Alban passed to his martyrdom on the very hill we walked up.
Actually, he didn’t die on that hill but on the next hill over, which is covered with council houses and litter, so it just won’t do.
My favourite item in the procession is the EYEBALLS. When Alban was to be executed, one of his executioners converted to Christianity, and from the other the eyeballs popped out. To commemorate, huge eyeballs on staves feature in the procession.
Do these fictions imply that Alban was not martyred or revered? Of course not.
You can see where I’m going with this…
Imogen de la Bere is a Kiwi writer living in London.
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