Roots and Brass Plates

 

 

 

 

 

The Liverpool bus stop near our house

 

A friend recently expressed surprise when I said I hated the idea of moving, re-locating, setting up house somewhere else. She pointed out how, over a long and happy life I’ve been to so many places, and I travel still though perhaps less adventurously when money allows.

In reality, a reluctance to move and a love of travel complement rather than contradict the other. Travelling is a joy (airports being the exception) when you have somewhere to come home to.  Re-locating on the other hand—except when you’re young—removes the powerful but largely unseen contentment that comes with having roots. 

In Liverpool, I was nurtured in a post war community with a family history rooted in the area. Leaving was initially exciting, moves to Swansea, Aberystwyth, Newport – and America, flitting from bedsit to bedsit, a Jackson Heights condominium, and then a lovely Edwardian house in Newport where, over a period of twenty years or so, new roots were established, to the extent I thought we would be there forever. 

Ribblesdale Avenue where I grew up (no cars then)

Manley road. Behind that top window, my first bed sit in Newport

Our family house in Newport

Two Newport views, the Civic Centre and the iconic Transporter Bridge

And now we’ve been in Monmouth for twenty years and new roots established.

                                                                      Monmouth in mist

But what do roots mean? It’s an easily understood metaphor until you try to explain it. 

For me it's walking into town down a country lane recognising faces, exchanging smiles and a greetings with strangers, because it comes so easily when people are happy and feel they’re in the right place. It’s recognising familiar patterns, the same couple walking the lane, the man with the distinctive fedora, the lady walking her three dogs, attending the same church, observing friends ageing slowly, attending funerals knowing others will attend yours. Above all knowing you’re immersed in goodwill. You may never need nor ask for help but there’s a powerful sense of it being there if or when needed.

Monmouth is pretty, but roots are independent of aesthetics. I enjoyed the same sense of ‘place’  in Liverpool and Newport where roots were inherited or developed.  Anthony Trollope understood roots. For him, every individual was indissolubly bound in an intense, self-perpetuating set of relationships. He expresses it most pithily in his wonderful A Small House in Allington, where every Sunday  ‘One walked over the brass plates of dead Dales in the village church.’ I shall start saving for my brass plate—assuming I don’t move again.