Ian Jack, ‘The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. Writings 1989-2009’

Jack is a writer with a coherent vision, a commitment to the values of a lost world, the Great Britain of the late Victorian era and the first half of the early 20^th century. He identifies these values in the small coin of everyday life, he teases them out of major events, and he recognises them when he finds them lingering in India, just as much as in reminiscences of his mother.

The essay ‘The 12.10 to Leeds’ is typical of his approach. Exploring the background to a series of fatal rail crashes in the late 1990s, he immerses himself in the history of the railways, in the physics and engineering of the wheel on the track, in the politics and economics of the denationalisation, and in the work of the men whose job it is to inspect the rails. He emerges with a thorough understanding – which he communicates in clear, direct terms – of how all of these factors combined to produce the tragedy.

More than this, however, he expresses the tragedy of such failures being allowed to happen in the country that invented the passenger railway. He does not complain that we have lost the sense of “technological mission” exemplified by the Permanent Way Institution, “founded by a group of railwaymen in Nottingham in 1884”, whose publications acted “to inspire the institution’s membership of permanent-way inspectors with an idea of vocation, of historical mission, in their long, often lonely, days and nights spent walking along miles of track” (pp.43-44). It is enough to point to this high-mindedness to show how different their time was from our own.

In ‘Women and children first’ he sets out to find the truth about the final tune (was it the hymn ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ and if so to what melody) played on the deck of the sinking Titanic by the band, led by Wallace Hartley. He doesn’t find out, and it doesn’t matter, because this is just the warp on which to weave his thoughts about the Titanic generation, who went on to fight the First World War. He notes that Hartley came from the middle class. “It may have been a heroic class or a foolish one” – it was this class on the Titanic where the difference between the male survival rate and that of the women and children was greatest. Although these men had access to the boat deck, they behaved “nobly and stoically” and only 8% of them survived.

I wish he had been able to give a reference for the observation of “somebody” that the First World War was when “God died in Scotland” (p.31). This is something worth following up. I’ve been very aware since working on Tobar an Dualchais that the heart went out of communities after that.

Some of the reminiscence in the book is rather commonplace – the details of the past that we are invited to savour are often the same ones that anybody of a certain age would recall. There are moments, however – and it is worth reading the book to find these – when Jack writes with heart-stopping poignancy. (In some ways, the book is like a series of tremendously good funeral orations.)

I was particularly moved by his account of a dream in which he saw members of his family in a typical Scottish urban setting, to the repeated words, “These people and this scene are dead”. I’ve had dreams in which the dead have paid me a visit, and I’ve wakened, as he did, overwhelmed with emotion, which lasted for days. He writes, “I woke up in tears. I had lost my childhood, the people I loved, the kind of country I came from – there would be nobody else who knew me as these people had done, memories could no longer be exchanged, the sense of isolation from the past would be permanent and absolute.” (p.189)

The final words of the book sum it up: “Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.” (p.325)

For some reason, it made me think of Milton on his blindness:

Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.