Lucky stones

Four hundred and some years after the Reformation, the religious function of icons and relics is a distant and slightly queasy memory in England. The Tudors swept the whole paraphernalia of folksy religiosity into a bin labelled "Papist Nonsense", the lid of which was banged down firmly by the business-minded puritans of the Revolution (and then sat on by the puritanically-minded businessmen of the Industrial Revolution). The kissing of bones is now about as un-English as you can get, though some (like Ted Hughes) have alleged that we have been mourning the loss of Merry Old England ever since. Possibly; certainly, a few more public holidays would not go amiss.

Relics of the personal life are still sought after by some, however. Locks of Nelson's hair are popular, for some bizarre reason, and no visit to a stately home is complete without admiring the glass-topped cabinet of random curiosities (a shrivelled orange possessed but not eaten by Florence Nightingale sticks in my mind). Encounters with manuscripts can be seductive ("Behold the actual ink from the actual pen on the actual paper touched by yer actual Shakespeare!"): archivists have to be on the lookout for historians of impeccable credentials who might succumb to a sudden urge to get physical with a piece of vellum.



Personally, I have formed strong iconic bonds with certain bits of rock. Fossils, especially. The glaciers that ground across England came through the high chalk valley where I grew up, and dislodged flinty treasures into the soil. I made a collection, mainly sea urchins (known locally as shepherd's crowns and fairy loaves) and shells, particularly those gnarly ashtrays called Devil's toenails. One day, walking through the copse behind our house, I kicked a stone and it rolled over to reveal a fossil cockle shell, half revealed and half concealed. It was a text-book example: literally so, as it was precisely like the illustration in my book of fossils. I had rolled the dice and come up with two sixes, the sort of luck you can take for granted when you're nine years old. I still have it, forty five years later, though I no longer take any sort of luck for granted.

My father had a stone, too. It's a quartzite pebble, about the size and weight of a billiard ball, mottled with rusty reds and livid (blueish!) veins. It lived in our sideboard drawer, and always reminded me of the backs of his hands, in which slate-blue stone chippings were still milkily embedded from a war-time motorbike tumble in Egypt. The pebble was a war souvenir, too. One day in 1941, he had an encounter driving a lone truck as a Despatch Rider in the Western Desert. Here it is as he told it:

A few days later I was approaching a slope which was the only way up an escarpment which rose sheer from the desert, a few burnt-out vehicles scattered around should have warned me to keep a sharp look-out, but as I got close to the slope a Gerry fighter-plane buzzed me. I went into the Drill, hand brake on, ignition off and a running jump out and as much space as possible between me and the truck. The plane returned a few times and gave a few short bursts, but did no damage. I was tucked into the corner of the escarpment and as he came by I got off some shots with my revolver, till it was empty, he came back again and I was so angry that I picked up a stone to throw, but he turned and banked away and disappeared. For some reason I must have tucked the stone into my pocket, and later decided to keep it, which I have to this day. Much later I wondered how a polished stone shaped rather like a small hen's egg came to be in an area where everything was very hard and like slate (very difficult to dig through in a hurry, there were a few inches of sand on the surface, but underneath was a layer of hard packed shale, sometimes a pick would just rebound off it!). Near to this spot I found two graves with crosses and British steel helmets, they were two Hussars, I assume from a tank unit. The graves were well made and had large stones round the edges, with a note in German on each cross, so I assume that the Germans had carried out the burial.

I don't think anyone would have characterised my Dad's post-war life as lucky, though he was easy-going enough (and perhaps wise enough) to disagree. I doubt the stone acted as anything but a reminder. Which is why it was pretty much the only object I had to make absolutely sure that I rescued from his few residual belongings when he died last year.



The caption on the back of this photo, in my father's writing, reads "Convoy, Pyramids in back, That's me waving". I have always found this a picture of pure exhilaration: when I was small, I could imagine that my Dad could see me, and was waving to me. Somehow, knowing so much more now about the truth and the magic of photography, I can believe that again.