Me, Me, Me? by Jon Lawrence

Author:Jon Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Place and belonging

Cummings had lived in the same house for over twenty years. Most of his immediate neighbours had moved in at the same time, when the houses were newly built, but he insisted that there was very little sense of community among them. Seeing himself as naturally gregarious, Cummings blamed his neighbours, arguing ‘the people round here, they are not really the sort you get, you know, in a really close-knit community where they all mix. You’ve got a job to make people mix like that round here’; although, in keeping with his rogue persona, he then conceded ‘I might be the awkward one. It depends on how people look at me.’53 Born on the island, paradoxically Cummings was convinced that this was part of the problem: people knew each other too well, making people anxious to guard their privacy; ‘if you are an islander, you’ve either gone to school with them or one of their sisters or brothers, and I know the biggest bulk of her family next door’. He claimed that even within families, local people often kept their distance: ‘on the island you have got to be forced really to make friends, to make actual friends. […] I’ve got aunts and uncles and I only see them for funerals and weddings. Well, some of me own children don’t even know their own cousins, yet they are all on the island. It’s just that you don’t mix somehow.’54

According to Cummings it was often easier for incomers to mix and make friends: ‘you get your people come down here from the north or something, and they don’t want to leave the island. They get on so well with the people here, it’s surprising, really.’55 Perhaps predictably not everyone agreed. Mrs Spillett, the midwife from Derbyshire, was convinced that she would have found it very difficult to be accepted on the island if she had not married a local man. She told Wallace, ‘if you came here on your own and you didn’t know anybody, then you were going to be pretty much on your own – probably forever’. In response her husband conceded that islanders were stand-offish and always knew who was an ‘outsider’, but he insisted that once ‘they realise that you’re quite human’ you are accepted for who you are (it was this discussion which prompted him to argue that, by contrast, in his wife’s mining village to be different in any way was to be ‘an outcast’).56 Rob Birch, who had come to the Island as a 10-year-old, spoke warmly about the friendliness of ‘local people’. He told Wallace, ‘since I’ve been on the Island […] I’ve made a hell of a lot of friends. I mean, I’ve got a hell of a lot of friends.’57 Similarly, the Chittendens, who had moved to the island shortly after the birth of their daughter in the early 1970s, liked living there, and found it hard to imagine leaving. Mr Chittenden, the professional musician, compared the island to

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