Felicity Davis
www.finestquotes.com
The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity. ~ Victor Hugo.
Reflecting as I always do in these lovely teacher holidays – Hugo’s quote above has really got me thinking. I’ve been all three but now I need to be solely courageous and seek out those opportunities. I didn’t go through the journey of self-discovery for nothing. Exciting times. Not knowing what’s next.
The illicit smokers club
Barnby Furnace
Epilogue
GETTING IT RIGHT
Thinking back to that strange summer when Mum was
slipping away from me and I was coming to terms with
my family’s past, one moment stands out clearly.
I decided to visit Barnby Furnace, the small hamlet
where my great-great-grandparents Hannah and John
started their married life nearly a hundred years ago. In
their time it would have been a hive of industry – clanging
and heat and dirt and dust all competing with the beautiful
Yorkshire countryside. Now it is a place of calm. Lying at
the bottom of a soft green lane lined with berry-laden
hedgerows, the only sound that disturbs the air is a distant
hum from the M1 as it charges through the Pennine
foothills towards Leeds, and even that is muffled by long
lines of mature trees and the rushing of the lively little
beck alongside the single track road. It is a beautiful spot.
What would Hannah and John have made of it – young
newlyweds with their lives ahead of them, and a revolution
going on that they must have thought could only change
things for the better?
As I stood on the old Waggonway embankment studying my
Emily Swann in the dock
old Ordnance Survey map, I realized that the
cottages the workers had lived in – the place where my
great-grandmother Emily Swann had been born – were
long gone. Not a stick or stone was left to show where
they had once stood in a long row. I could see how my
ancestors had worked, how they had lived, even, but it
seemed as if the people they were, their thoughts, hopes
and fears, had all been blown away like coal dust.
Yet these were the people that I had come to find. For
me, this was the place where it all began; the last place that
my family had actually seemed happy and prosperous.
Once they moved to Barnsley, the Oaks Colliery disaster
cast a dark shadow over four generations of my family,
from which I was only just beginning to emerge. When
that mine exploded it tore a gaping hole. Charles and
Henry were an unthinkable loss, one that poisoned not
only the rest of Hannah’s and John’s lives, but those of
their other children too.
Retracing their steps, I expected to feel a sense of
recognition in these places. Instead, as I looked at the scars
of industry that are still traced on the landscape, I realized
that it was not just my family that had been affected. That
day there had been hundreds of disasters, and probably
thousands of lives torn apart. Who knows how their stories
turned out?
If Emily Swann had been given a chance to break free
of her abusive marriage, I like to think she would have
taken it. If she had been given one last chance to see her
youngest daughter Elsie, perhaps in some tiny way Gran’s
pain would have been lessened. But the legacy she left
behind her proved to be one of bitterness.
My Gran - Elsie Swann (Holling)
Much of what
happened to my gran after her mother’s death remains a
mystery, but it can’t have been pleasant. Misery breeds
misery, and too often abuse breeds abuse.
Still, all of us have choices. During my childhood, my
gran never made the choice to be anything but cruel to
me. She wasn’t well, and it would have been incredibly
difficult for her to rise above it, but there were options
nonetheless. The problems start when you think there
aren’t.
As I looked into our ancestry, I thought I would discover
tragedy upon tragedy raining down on each family member.
Instead, what I found was generations oppressed by
circumstance; children convinced that they couldn’t do any
better than their parents, and adults convinced they
couldn’t change their lives from one day to the next. When
I was a teenager, I would have thought that this was
weakness. Now I know that it is a tragedy in itself.
This book is for Granddad, and for my mum. It’s for
Emily and Hannah, though I never knew them. But in this
way it is for Gran, too.
The reading I chose for Mum’s funeral was the wonderful
letter from Eccesiastes about the nature of love. I’d
gone to Bradford to find the church where Gran and 
Granddad had married, and the Bible on the lectern had
been open at this passage. ‘To every thing there is a season
. . . a time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn,
and a time to dance . . . a time to love and a time to hate;
a time of war and a time of peace.’
I liked the idea of it helping to put things straight again,
reminding us all of what really mattered in life instead of
lingering over the mess that Elsie and Albert had made of
much of their daughter’s life and of my childhood and of
their own marriage. It fitted the occasion perfectly for me,
especially the part about seeing through a glass darkly now,
but having faith that one day it would all be made clear.
As I threw my handful of dust on to Mum’s coffin, I
felt like I was saying goodbye to all of them – Hannah,
Emily, Elsie, Marjorie. ‘I’ve done the best I can for you
all,’ I told them. ‘I have tried to put things right, and now
let’s lay it all to rest.’
And what of me? For a long time it looked like I would
fall into the patterns of the rest of my family. I spent my
whole childhood plotting escape, yet when it came I didn’t
know how to deal with it. I was too trapped by my past to
be free. But after decades of struggle, I feel I’m finally
coming to terms with myself. If this story has taught me
anything, it is that while the past needs to be known and
understood, it also needs to be put in its place.
I will always be marked by the past. It is a part of me,
in the same way that the Waggonway will always be a part
of Barnby Furnace. But through experience, through education,
and through love, I am different from how I could
have been.
- Stephen Joseph launch for Guard a Silver Sixpence
I have three wonderful sons, and a job I love. We can
make our own history now.
This is my place to share my hopes and dreams, my aspirations to write and be read and to share my journey of self-discovery. 
