Some Of Our Records Are Missing

One thing leads to another.

Seeing that mysterious ghost ship trapped in the ice on the Staff Club pond the other day immediately called to mind the ballad "Lord Franklin", as rendered by Pentangle on the album Cruel Sister.  Forty-odd years ago, in that icy winter of 1970/71, that album was probably my favourite, and that track in particular -- with its wistful, understated yearning for an explorer of the heroic age, missing presumed lost among the ice-floes of the Northwest Passage -- embedded itself deep in my psyche.  I learned the chords and the words, and at Easter 1971 -- I had forgotten this -- a friend and I performed it before an audience of 100 or so.

How easy it is to forget our past selves.  Once upon a time, I was possessed by the folk music of the British Isles in the way some are possessed by football or fashion.  The revival of that music by groups like Pentangle was old news by the time my teenage interest was aroused, but its transformation by way of electrification by the likes of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span happened before my very eyes.  For me, the excitement of those first folk-rock albums such as Liege and Lief, and Hark! The Village Wait exceeded even that of acts like Led Zeppelin, exciting as they were.  This was truly my music.

But, we change.  Within a few years, other musics had exercised their charms on me, and those folk albums went to the back of the box, and went unplayed literally for decades.  Even when the mood for nostalgia hit me, it would be Countdown to Ecstasy or Black Market I would reach for.  But that frozen ship in the pond awoke an urge to listen to Pentangle, so I resolved to dig out those albums.

Easier said than done.  For many years, my small collection of vinyl has lived on a shelf at the bottom of a bookcase which is wedged against a wall behind a large oak table.  The only way to access them is to crawl under the table with a torch.  It's dirty and dusty down there, and it is booby-trapped with tangled computer cables, power-plug extensions and stacked boxes of God-knows-what.  But, like Howard Carter penetrating the tomb of Tutankhamun, I crawled through, hoping to discover "wonderful things, wonderful things".

But, it turns out, the tomb had been robbed.  Plenty of LPs remained -- my torch revealed The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Steely Dan, even a double album BBC Russian course -- but the folkie gold I was seeking had gone.  Not a single Pentangle album remained.  Both early Steeleye Span albums had gone.  Full House (first pressing with blacked out track listing) was missing.

I have no idea where they are now, but they will have gone missing thirty or more years ago.  I have my suspicions.  I suppose I may have loaned them to someone.  Or I may even have given them away or sold them in the 1980s.  It hardly matters now and, in a way, I rather enjoy not being able to scratch that particular itch: some nostalgic longings are far sweeter unfulfilled.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
    Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

And that is exactly the appeal of the story of "Lord Franklin", of course:  "The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell".  It's a tale about all tales without closure, adrift somewhere on the spectrum of mystery between the Marie Celeste and a few missing LPs.  It's an oddly unanchored song, too, neither wholly Lady Franklin's lament nor simply a sailor's dream.

One day (and it may be quite soon) the remains of the real Sir John Franklin, his ship and his crew will turn up, and the yarn will finally be fully told.  Of course, the historic expedition (as opposed to the imagined one) is already exemplary.  That is, exemplary of the magnificent folly of British self-belief.  Britain might have ruled the waves in 1845, but had more of a problem with pack-ice.

Whether the discovery of some cold, gnawed bones, a few buttons and a heap of shivered ship's timbers will capsize the song's appeal remains to be seen, but I doubt it.  It certainly won't make any difference to Lady Jane Franklin, who offered large rewards and sponsored seven expeditions to find news of her husband, refusing to the end to believe the tales of catastrophe and cannibalism that were whispered back from the Arctic wastes. Too late, too late: she died in 1875.

Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To know on earth, that my Franklin do live.