The following of familial footsteps
‘To name them is to remember them.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
As a burst of late summer heat swells in the air, I arrive at the top of a village where, 121 years earlier, almost to the day, my great-grandfather was born.
I had planned to come here last March. A trip cancelled in those tumultuous days as the world turned on its head. To be here now, however, imbues the trip with a new significance, a different light.
From this village, my great-grandfather – my Pop – travelled to the other side of the world, in search of more opportunities; a better life. He got married, had two kids – the eldest, my Gramps, who carried his father’s name in the middle of his – four grandkids, and three great-grandchildren; the youngest of which is me – born near the tail end of the century he was born at the beginning of.
To be here now, all these years later, before I, too, travel to Australia, is something most profound.
‘Then comes the sun. A golden wash over everything. Like the flashback or plot twist that makes you realise you are only just now seeing things the right way, this colour makes a mockery of all the light that has come before it.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
I’m on the train, heading out of Paddington, west towards Reading, further west towards Devon.
As the train moves through the North Wessex Downs, and continues on through Somerset, the view opens up. Fields of late summer yellow splash across the windows. The train runs close to the coast – sunshine glitters across the water from Exeter to Newtown Abbott.
I leave the train at Totnes and walk across a field, a main road, and through narrow streets towards the town, seeking shade and a way to pass the time before my bus arrives to carry me forward. I pull The Grassling (Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, 2019) out of my bag and read it in the dappled light of a hill-top park as a breeze ripples by. The nature memoir follows the author as she comes to terms with her father’s terminal illness, while tracing his local history of the South Devon hills of her youth. I follow the narrator as they pass through Exeter; our two paths intertwined, each tracing family history through the villages of Devon. Her – Ide; Me – Kingsbridge.
I continue on my way. Rolling fields lined with hedges spread out before me in an endless patchwork of green, before the bus pulls to a sudden halt.
I am here.
The village is bedecked in bunting – strips of it criss-crossing up and down the length of the high street. The day is warm, summer heady in the air. I walk down the swiftly sloping hill to find the cottage, tucked away in a hidden laneway, that will be my home for the next week.
As the edges of sunset begin to arrive, I walk a looping lap of the estuary - children running down the pier and jumping off, again and again and again, into the cool water below - and continue walking up the hills of the village, admiring gardens filled with pink hydrangea, bright against the white-painted walls.
‘Morning opens. The most delicate. The depth and the light.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
The next day, the caws of seagulls wake me, and I take the bus to the closest town. It’s bigger and closer to the ocean; fresh salt air hits as soon as I step off the bus.
I walk through the narrow, pastel-lined streets of the town as rolling green hills and fields of freshly cut crops - corn, most likely - expand across the horizon. The sea breeze rustles my hair, billows through my shirt; it’s easy to feel connected to nature here.
I keep walking further along the coastline, in a gently curving path. The road is tight and narrow, fellow walkers picking up their dogs and holding onto them as cars pass by. Slowly, the estuary opens up to the ocean – rolling hills leading to cliffs, leading to rocky outcrops, leading to the sea. Blue to the horizon.
I tuck my bag behind – and within – a collection of rocks, the base of it grazing a small triangle of sand below. I untie my shoes and walk quickly to the shoreline, rejoicing in the feel of the wet sand between my toes, the coolness of the ocean as it pools in small dips and rivulets across the stretch of the low tide.
I dip my feet in, properly, at the shoreline. Seaweed washes against the sand, drifting in the ebb and flow of the waves. It’s cool – only two hardy swimmers float by, the rest of us stay, legs deep, at the shore. The sun beams down: warms our faces, our necks, our arms, our knees.
Sated, replenished, I return to the rocks and collect my belongings. Barefoot, I walk across the thin stretch of road to the park opposite. It feels freeing to walk with sand-encrusted feet across a stretch of bitumen. I’d forgotten that.
I wonder as I wander of what it must have been like to grow up here in the early 1900s. Did my great-grandfather visit Salcombe much? Swim at the beach I sank my feet into? What did Kingsbridge look like the last time he visited – was the chip shop where it is now, were the pubs the same, was the ice creamery still pastel pink on the corner?
I’m glad I’ve made it. To see where one of my relatives, who migrated from England to Australia, lived before he moved. To visit before I make the same move, too – albeit by plane, not by boat. Albeit as a return journey, knowing (mostly – for change, as they say, is the only constant) what to expect.
Did he feel the same giddy anticipation I feel? The same sadness too? Did he imagine he’d stay forever?
So much unknown about the past, so much of it projected.
‘Not for the first time, I think of how my travels into the soil, the past, my father’s imprints, are opening up new kinds of living to me, are making me live a wider life.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
Back when travel was more frequent, I found that trips – long weekends and weeks away – often coincided with ‘an event’ or ‘a moment’ or ‘a dilemma’ in my life. The time away tended to give me more than just a new place to observe and get to know. It gave me space to process, to recalibrate, to look at things anew. I’d return to London with a different perspective, or a surer understanding, and would carry that forward over the following months.
In the past year and a half, I’ve felt the absence of it, the lack of it, the hunger for it; missed the perspective that only distance can provide. I’ve felt the need for a new outlook, a change of scenery to shake things up. Perhaps, though, I haven’t understood the extent to which I need it until I’ve returned, now, to this state of Being Away.
Through Being Away, I can see my life – the day-to-day of it – from a new angle. In Being Away I can challenge myself to new modes of thinking. Being Away allows me to ask ‘what if …?’ and open myself up to the possibilities that float in to the space between question and answer.
Maybe it is the visiting of a familial place, maybe it is the taking leave of London; I find myself steeped in nostalgia. While on this holiday, other holidays seem to crash against it so that a South Devon walk reminds me of a North Italy hike. A lunch break in a historic town reminds of other picnic lunches in towns throughout eastern Germany. Painted pubs reminding me of painted pubs in the south and west of Ireland.
It’s as if this act of being away, this change of scenery, has opened up a portal – a place to draw connections and comparisons, a symmetry of feeling across space and time. In a way, it forces me to reflect on the difference in how I was then, and who I am now.
‘But those who did may have known my family. What if they brushed past them in the street, in the pub? I wonder how this hollowed space affects others; if it’s only me that sees bygone people.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
On the third day and second morning, I’m woken by cracks of thunder, strikes of lightning, rain heaving against the skylight. It grows heavier and steadier until it finally peters out. I throw on a jacket, my shoes, and race to the local bakery and grocer’s – buying fresh bread, jammy figs, and other supplies to tide me over until the rain passes.
I return, just in time, before the heavens open once again. I curl up on the sofa and spend the day writing and reading as the rain beats down, my thoughts softened by the endless tapping of drops against glass.
The rain stops. I turn the last page of The Grassling, both deeply moved and restored by it. By the lyrical writing of the land I’m getting to know, by the exploration of what belonging and connection to a place means. By the hope within the sadness.
With a dry spell for an afternoon, I decide to explore more of the town and investigate it, to see what family connections I can find, hidden in plain sight. I stop at the nearest church and walk through its brick-tiled side to the wet grass, sloping hill of the graveyard. I wind my way through headstones trying to find the family name. No luck. I grow more discouraged when I turn around and see tombstones piled up against one another, stacked along a buddleia-covered shale fence.
I walk further – on to the neighbouring village, and make my way through to the bigger, more spacious churchyard. Again, no luck.
I turn back, walk down ivy-lined laneways, rich emerald from the torrent of rain that morning. I walk up and down hills and back through the main town, back towards the estuary – through a park, past the bowling club, climbing over the gooey remnants of fallen apples; the first of the season.
‘I acclimatise, but I am not the same as before.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
Many of the flowers here – drifting over in a late summer haze – are unfamiliar. After years of getting to know London’s seasons and flowers – the bluebells, the magnolias, the daffodils / the cow parsley, the lupins, the foxgloves / the hollyhocks, the delphiniums, the dahlias – I find myself with new colours and textures of English summer gardens in other parts of the country.
I think, too, of my great-grandfather, coming to terms with the different timing of the seasons, the unfamiliar flora and fauna, of the other side of the world – the snow gums, the vibrant wattle, the warble of a magpie – that feel so familiar to me.
But – after years of acclimatising to the northern hemisphere, will they strike me as otherworldly too? The waratahs – striking, bold, magenta – are in bloom now and I hope to return as the lilac petals of jacaranda fill city streets and line suburban footpaths. Will it feel foreign or familiar?
And, did I always take the banksia, the frangipani, the lilly pilly for granted in a way my great-grandfather might have taken the hydrangeas and sweet peas of an English garden for granted? It’s hard to see what we have always seen, our eyes glazing over with familiarity.
‘Though it is not fear that holds me fixed, immovable, but the suddenness of history stepping out in front of me.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
The next morning, as the rain gathers on the windows and roof once again, I look up census details on my phone. There, from the comfort of my bed, I find the address of the house my Pop grew up in. To visit it becomes my plan for the day. I open Google Maps to work out the directions – up or down the hill – only to find that it is opposite the street from where I’m staying. Some things are meant to be.
The house he was born in now has a florist shop on the ground floor. The bell above the door rings as I step inside. A customer is asking for ideas for her daughter’s wedding bouquet. She pulls some stems out of a bucket - “Ooh I like these! Something like this, maybe?”.
The florist nods. “Kangaroo paw, it makes for nice foliage.” What are the chances – a flower native, as the name suggests, to Australia.
‘By being here, I become part of his story. Through a shared space and shared narrative, I write myself into him.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
I begin to see myself differently. Here, I am a contemporary descendant of a one-time resident. But he moved to make a different life for himself. Soon, I will too.
In seeing myself as a smaller part of a broader picture, I’m able to see my worries and hopes in a new light. Things I’ve thought about pursuing for a while now, feel suddenly urgent, somewhat prescient.
For life is long and varied, but it is short too. And one day a relative of yours might stand in the place you grew up in, spent your childhood and adolescence in, and will wonder – what were your hopes, your dreams, your ambitions? Did you follow them as you ought to have, or did The Fear hold you back?
‘Just as a bird feels the moment to fly, to set off across country, continents, to new ground, I feel the time when I must leave what I am doing and come [home].’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
Over the next few days, as I return to London, my parents back home do some further digging.
My great-grandfather emigrated to Australia with his family – not alone as I’d originally thought, or presumed, or projected onto the past.
What was in his parent’s minds, then? To move a family – two parents, three children – to the other side of the world the year before the outbreak of World War I. Were they encouraged to leave, welcomed upon arrival?
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And – does that change how I see my great-grandfather? Not as a noble explorer, an intrepid adventurer heading off, abroad alone. Was he simply a young lad following his father’s lead in search of a better life?
Did I project onto him a wilfully independent role because that’s the light I want to see myself, and want others to see me in?
A colleague called it a ‘bold and decisive leap’ when I told him of my plans. Have I clung onto that image, projected it onto my great-grandfather too, because the thought of ‘retreating’ home still carries a burden of – self-inflicted, perhaps – shame with it?
We discover that his father, my great-great-grandfather, was a photographer in South Devon in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before they emigrated to Australia.
This discovery only raises more questions. Did he keep up his photography? What did he photograph in his new home?
Tasmania, like Devon, is full of rich and varied landscapes. Did he photograph those? Or capture the familiar that had been transplanted from his home years before his arrival – the rose bushes filling the gardens of Hobart cottages, the dairy farms, the colonial architecture, the rolling hills, lined with green?
‘You gleam, serene, from the morning grass. Don’t be scared to leave, you tell me. All things pass.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
I get the bus back to Totnes, the train back to Paddington, the tube back home. Soon, I will get on a plane and head back to Australia, ready and willing for new opportunities.
I will carry Kingsbridge with me, just as my great-grandfather did, with a boldness in my heart.
'There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.'
– The Naked City, 1948