A story of a place and the tale of Aiken-Drum

‘Surely my own story is also contained in this pattern of cards, my past, present, and future, but I can no longer distinguish it from the others.  The forest, the castle, the tarots have brought me to this point, where I have lost my story, confused it in the dust of  the tales …’

 

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969

 

 

I have been thinking about a story about my own family and a home town, a small story of industrial transfer and place building, with much in common with the many similar stories.  A town built rapidly out of a village to support iron and steel works, and which saw thousands of people leave Scotland to travel to a barely built place in the middle of England.  Growing from 1500 people to 30,000 in only a few decades and then to 50,000 a few decades later and then more again.  Many  still from Scotland. But not only. Many of those from Scotland in those first years, walking, hitch-hiking, cycling the 300 plus miles.  Doing what needed to be done to arrive for the chance of work and home.

 

The mythical figure of Aiken Drum looms large in this story for me. A figure who on one telling, in a children’s song, is a travelling musician who lives in the moon and wears food for clothing – haggis, beef, bread and cheese. An old Scottish song of uncertain origins, but perhaps a song of old rivalries between England and Scotland but also of a rougey rougey piper.  In this story I’m thinking of he travelled in this cheerful song to this home town.  And perhaps the rougey piper joined him too. My sister would say definitely so.

 

Yet in another telling Aiken-Drum is a ghostly figure with a ghastly appearance, and who only wants to work for the most meagre of pay; and I wonder if he also came like this to this same town and worked in filth of the iron and steel works.  Maybe his claws and long arms were the very same as the mighty draglines that smashed and grabbed the earth for the iron for all those years; until the works were all shut down and the draglines slowly moved off to labour again elsewhere. Did Aiken-Drum leave ever so slowly with those great draglines, as the town was left to start over.  Maybe he did.  And yet perhaps he is also here now, as this story is being told.

 

Adapted from a talk given March 2024