The house that’s on our nose

My friend Governor’s Bay Jay has made a short-term house swap and is currently ensconced in Yorkshire, where she is venturing satisfyingly far and wide and chronicling her adventures.  I recommend her prose.

Her most recently-recorded visit was to Whitby, whose charms merited multiple posts.  I delighted in the images accompanying the narrative, since they reminded me anew of my own journey to Whitby — like GB Jay, from York — in the northern summer of 2000.  Since I was travelling in high sunshine rather than rain and snow, this made something of a difference to my experiences, but many things were the same.  I too headed straight for the Abbey and marvelled both at the ruins and the view, the former set in motion during the dissolution of the monasteries, and, like other northern monuments, given a general gutting-for-resources (in this case, stone) by locals in subsequent years.

On the day I was there, the churchyard surrounding the Abbey was being excavated, as a number of Anglo-Saxon graves had been discovered beneath the medieval burial site.  Excited archaeologists and their students were working hard in the sun, and although the graves themselves were sectioned off from the public, a temporary exhibit had been put up explaining what they were doing and what had already been learned about burial customs from an earlier time as a result of these excavations.  In town, later, I looked at relics of a more recent age: Victorian mourning jewellery carved in jet.  One large brooch bore the legend “Ethel”, but sadly, at forty-eight pounds, was beyond my student means.  I talked to the shop owner for some time too.  Like the guides at the Cook Museum, he was kindly disposed towards New Zealanders, particularly in his case since a young man from the East Coast, with experience carving bone and pounamu, had worked with him in jet carving for a while.

Perhaps a month or so later I was home from my first significant voyage abroad, distracted from my re-entry to winter and the hard yards at the end of my thesis by my new puppy.  One day we were sitting on the bed when Arthur leaned over and, with the most delicate of movements and the sharpest of teeth, first nosed and then severed from its silver casing the small jet pendant with which I had departed Whitby.  I was disappointed, but not inconsolably so; I loved my dog more than my jewellery.

I was fortunate on those travels to have had the opportunity to explore the east coast of England at some of its wilder points: not only at Whitby but also in Suffolk further south, where midsummer beach-goers still sat with their backs to the sea because of the wind, and my aunt and uncle pointed out to me along the route various spaces of sky and sea where cliffs and sometimes whole villages had once stood.  They lived just north of the county border in Caister-on-Sea, where a digger had just finished the work of transporting back up the North Sea coast the sand that gets blown south every winter, and whose presence raised the shoreline an easy five metres or more.

The wildness of these littoral places seemed to be wilfully nullifed by the seaside kitsch that surrounded them, which in turn was surrounded by what in New Zealand we might call “history”.  This history could be physically intact — cathedrals, homes, pubs even — or in ruin.  Either way, it required an act of imagination that seemed of a different kind from the one people spending their everyday lives in these places might routinely make, although this too is an assumption, and perhaps a bogus one.  The privilege of living somewhere for a long time might be the privilege of taking its material culture for granted.