“The passing of time and all of its crimes, is making me sad again...”
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So said Morrissey and the wonderful ‘Smiths’, articulating poignantly the universal human angst about time, memory and loss. And the line remains potent for those of us old enough to understand, to feel.
My mum often told me that when she was young she felt that she couldn’t ever grow old. In her youth, in the splendour of a life in lovely Morpeth, it was as if nothing would ever change – how could, she thought, such a time move by her?
And I remember this idea, this knowledge she shared with me – and I often wonder about it, remembering my own gone days as a kid in the river-town …
Riding my bike along a Maitland after-school-street, the greenness of the grass, of a camphor-laurel, the sweetness of the sun, the truth of the moment, the smell of burning leaves from the St John’s incinerator - every school had one - the easy dreaming routine of children. I thought those days could not leave me, thought they could not possibly go ...
As a twelve-year old at sixth class farewell camp – Murrurundi House - I remember the overwhelming feeling that our class was ending, that this was a momentous occasion. Time was uncoiling and history rushing toward me; I touched every bed and said to myself that I will remember this … and I did, I do.
I began to understand something about Morrissey’s ‘crimes of time’. That even our most impassioned moments are ephemeral, they retreat from us all too quickly.
And others too have captured the emotion: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” – W.B.Yeats lamented it, perhaps in the madness and brutality of the Great War he saw time’s savagery, saw that men could forget that they were, in fact, brothers. ..
And perhaps there is the most wicked of time’s crimes – the loss of our memory, the disappearance of such a gift …
In a town like Maitland it’s hard to forget though. We have, thanks to the good foresight of wiser souls, kept many of our buildings, we celebrate our past, we hang on to our history and thus, we keep at bay, the forgetting – the worst of crimes.
With our stories too we can stave off and hold on. With our mothers, our fathers, our nans, pops, and brothers and sisters, we can repel the vagaries of time’s cruel passage. on sunny verandahs, over a cup of tea, we can take them back down High Street, back down to the bend, to Morpeth, back to the children ...
And our institutions are pillars which hold up our mutual interest in this endeavour – our schools, our governance, our clubs, our newspaper, our societies: friends of Brough House, friends of the Repertory, Maitland Library, The Historical Society and of course the brilliant ‘Louth Park Mob’, Mick Fairleigh and Paul Doherty - these are the people who do things to keep us remembering, to keep us from forgetting ...
They hold the metaphorical torch against the darkness and fill the holes which are left when time marches on.
Yes, I understand it now, understand what mum felt when she was young and free, a black-haired girl, growing up with her beautiful sisters and brother in the frontier river-port of Morpeth and the way she felt it would never go.
Well it never really has mum, and it never really will ...
And so it goes.
Goodnight.
