To Heidi
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Hunger
2 Pestilence
3 Exposure
4 Trauma
5 Breathlessness
6 Heart Problems
7 Necrosis
Epilogue
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
So who are we, finally? What does our little life mean when measured against the vast ocean swells of life and death that come before us, and roll on through the centuries after we’re gone? In what ways are we bonded in time to those people who share our surname or our DNA – the people we call our family? Are we simply the sum of the individual properties that describe us, or do our actions and choices in response to life’s events form a wider story of kinship and identity?
I think they do. I guess this book is my way of finding out if I’m right.
My name is Stephen McGann. That’s what my birth certificate tells me. I was born the fourth son of Joseph McGann and Clare McGann in Liverpool, England, in 1963. I’m fifty-four years old and 180 centimetres tall. My passport photograph reveals dark hair and pale skin. I have a driver’s licence listing minor traffic convictions. Classified forms residing on government databases record my religious agnosticism and my declared occupation. I’m an actor – someone whose name might be found in theatrical programme collections or dusty television archives. I married a woman called Heidi Thomas in a church in Liverpool in 1990. Heidi gave birth to our son Dominic in Cambridge in 1996, and my scrawled signature can be seen on his official registration document.
That’s me as data. Facts. Knowledge items, preserved in text or image or on hard drive. Features of an individual, rather than an individual’s character. It’s an X-ray skeleton – essential structure, without the softening subtleties of muscle, vein and flesh. What would someone living 200 years from now be able to learn about me from those facts? Can those items ever coalesce into a recognisable personality – the beat of an embodied soul?
Flesh and Blood is a book about people in my family tree – some still alive, most of them long dead. It’s also a book about me (alive, last time I checked). Flesh and Blood is a family history that begins at a key point in my family’s past – the mid-nineteenth century – and then traces its conflicted progress through the subsequent century and a half to the present day.
It’s also, I hope, more than a chronicle – more than simply a sequence of events. I don’t believe history is ever just a record of something. I think it’s also a drama. History is about how people responded to recorded events and how they were changed by them; how they grew, shrank, laughed, fought, or fell into despair. History isn’t politics or power or the cold clash of steel in ancient quarrels. History is people. Through each human action and response to events we tell a mutating story of our mortal selves. And, through the loves and loyalties that bind us as a family, we tell our own small part in the shifting tale of immortal humanity.
I guess it’s not difficult for me to reflect on mortality given my current place of residence. You see, I live in a graveyard. Well, not exactly in a graveyard, but surrounded by one. My home is a former chapel, and the grounds include the graves of the Victorian parishioners who helped fund and build it. To get to my front door, you take a small tree-dappled path past crooked gravestones, each bearing faded dedications to the people buried there. It’s all very picturesque, but not to everyone’s taste. The occasional parcel courier takes my signature with startled haste before scarpering back down the path like the fleeing victim in a horror movie. But I love it.
The gravestones are plain, in the nonconformist style. They display simple epitaphs like, ‘Thy will be done’ or, ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’. There’s modesty to them – the marking of a life lived but willingly surrendered; a family moved to express love, but not persuaded by the need for excessive detail. The people lying in the ground beneath my courier’s fleeing feet seemed to be the recipients of a love that required no hyperbole to make it meaningful. What’s left is the minimum testament to a life: the age of the deceased and the names of their remaining close family. Love as data.
Their modesty made me curious to know more about them. When I perused the original deeds to the chapel, I found that many of the same names on those graves were listed there. These people had funded the chapel between themselves although many were simple rural folk: the deed signed with a single ‘x’ denoting their illiteracy. They were buried together in its vicinity – snuggled in the soil like a single family. These were people who’d built a life out of the strength of a faith they shared, and were happy for their lives to be defined by it. They were also content to suffer their harsher moments with quiet restraint.
Mary Jane Bassett. Died in 1933, aged only three years.
Her tiny grave sits close to our door, warmed by the porch light. A child’s death is the oldest of those answerless questions – an ancient outrage longing for explanation. I wondered if little Mary’s life was larger than the miniature plot that now swaddled her, if the unvisited silence of her grave had once been attended by the voices and hands of those who loved her.
Then, one day, a middle-aged lady called by our house. The previous owners had told us she might. Her mother was buried in our garden, and she had attended the chapel as a young girl. She asked if it was possible to continue her occasional visits to tend her mother’s grave. We were very pleased to oblige. When the lady saw little Mary’s plot, a memory returned. She recalled her mother speaking of this girl, and of her moving funeral. She said that the other children of the chapel had carried Mary’s tiny coffin on their little shoulders to its final resting place.
I loved that. A single beautiful scene. History as drama. A child so loved and cherished she was carried to her grave by her fellow innocents. Mary’s face had suddenly been summoned into the porch light of a narrated memory. She breathed again. She lived.
Who was Mary, finally? She was a story woven by those who still carried her memory through time. By hearing this story, and now relating it to you, I’ve taken my place as one of Mary’s bearers. And so she lives on, carried by us all in this tiny story fragment. The lesson of little Mary is that we are only recorded data in the absence of a better insight. We are always more. Always more human. Always more meaningful than facts. Data is just the starting place. The beginning of the journey, not its end. We are a story, not a stone.
And so it is with my family in this book. Flesh and Blood is a book about relatives to whom things happened, but also not really a book about those things. It’s more about the way those people responded to events that afflicted them, and how those responses came to define the people they were, and the lives of the family that succeeded them. To tell this story, I’ve combined three separate lifelong preoccupations. First is my interest in genealogy – the study of my family history through the public records. The second is my life spent as an actor portraying the mechanics of human motivation in drama. The third is my academic interest in the relationship between medical health and the complex society that it helps to sustain. This book is therefore a single family’s story refracted into three primary colours of experience: health, family history and the drama of human testimony.
I first started tracing my family tree when I was seventeen – a gauche teenager on the cusp of an adulthood I didn’t yet understand. My search for a wider context to my life made me curious about the people who’d come before me – the McGann family, the ones who’d given me my surname. Who were they? What did they do with their lives, and how did that end up with me? I knew nothing about them, and my father knew very little more than I did. His dad had died when he was just five years
old, and the children who remained were left with only second-hand scraps of stories from their mother. McGann was an Irish name, and Liverpool, I knew, was a famous embarkation point for Irish emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century. I assumed they were Irish, but didn’t know for sure. So one day I plucked up courage and ventured into my local records office in Liverpool to see if I could find out. I began, piece by piece, to build up a data skeleton of my ancestry from records held in our public archives. It was the beginning of a genealogical journey that has taken me my entire life, and is still a work in progress.
Like with those graveyard parishioners, I wanted to know more about the people I’d found as people. What did they think and feel? Why did they do the things that history recorded? To do that I had to turn the bare bones of history into a living narrative. I had to turn data into drama.
The famous drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky believed that there was a strong link between representations of human relationships in drama and the way that humans behaved in real life. Drama is an ancient way for us to understand who we are by projecting human experiences onto dramatic characters in a story. A good story isn’t just defined by stuff that happens – illness, murder, flood, famine – but by the desires and emotions of the characters that initiate and respond to those things, and then make key choices based on those responses. Stanislavsky said: ‘Real life, like life on the stage, is made up of continuously arising desires, aspirations, inner challenges to action and their consummation in internal and external actions.’ Our real life is a constant state of responding to things that happen to us – to challenges we face or the wants we feel – and then taking actions. Events aren’t drama; they’re just the ‘challenges to action’ – the antagonist in a hero’s journey. The drama is in what we do about it, and who we become as a result.
All genealogy is drama in disguise. Disguise, because human motivation doesn’t show up amongst the X-ray bones of recorded facts. Drama, because history is the exploration of humanity in response to internal or external events. To bring a human’s data to life we have to find those things that motivated their actions. Yet in order to identify the source of their motivations, we also have to identify the antagonist that drove them to act.
Antagonist: one who opposes the hero in a story. An adversary. An enemy, but not always a person. Sometimes an affliction. Sometimes an emotion. Sometimes an enemy within, not without. So who was this adversary in the saga of my own family? Was there any single force that – more than any other – pushed and challenged and harried my ancestors to move and change their lives, to grow or shrink as people? I think there was. As I discovered more about my family over the years, I found the fingerprints of this particular felon all over the historical documents in my possession. I came to the conclusion that no story concerning my kin would be complete without reference to the constant villain that stalked them, and by whose challenges they were constantly tested and defined. That villain was not human, yet belonged totally to humanity. It was the shadow thrown by our mortality – the dark twin that we all carry through our lives on earth. Teaching us. Taunting us. The furnace in which we’re incinerated, or from which we emerge newly forged. That antagonist is health.
Human health haunts all genealogy. It’s there at the recorded birth with the ancient perils of labour and its resultant high mortality. It’s there on every death certificate as medical terminology, coldly documenting the causes of expiry. It stalks a soldier’s military record. It stares mute from every census form recording the hovels of a city and its inhabitants. It squats in the columns of Victorian newspapers and in the public records of local authorities. Poor health is the shadow that our ancestors cast onto the lives of their descendants – a lesson from history, and an indication of our progress: the wintry fever that drives our own green age but ultimately extinguishes it.
Health can’t be untangled from the family that experiences it. An illness is never a singular medical event – never just the clawed breath in a single chest. It’s the collective hope of the sanatorium ward, the enforced bonhomie of an anxious family at the bed of a patient, the tears of a lover for their ailing partner. Health is a human force: a motivator for wider human drama. It has the power to change our identities, mould our characters and the nature of our relationships.
In fact, so deep and complex is the relationship between humans and their health that the metaphors we use to describe our reality are peppered with references to healthiness, vitality or wellbeing – and their opposites: sickness, malady and death. We describe relationships as ‘healthy’, or love as ‘sickness’; we describe an economy as ‘in robust health’, or a terrorist ideology as ‘a cancer’. We give health a metaphorical altitude to correspond to human mood, like when we describe someone as being at the ‘peak’ of health, or ‘laid low’ by disease. Illness can assume metaphors far beyond the inanimate – as when cancer is ‘the enemy’, or when cold and fever become things we must ‘feed’ or ‘starve’. In this way, health shows itself as sentient: a character in the drama of our lives. An antagonist, not just a diagnosis – as meaningful to our happiness as our own family.
As I looked back over my family tree, I started to see this character again and again, influencing every twist and turn of fate and choice that my forebears made on their way to the present day. Not simply in the terse death-certificate Latin of medical cause, but in the wider context of their social privations and their thwarted prosperity. I spied this character hiding in my family’s embattled courage, in their religious consolation or their hard-bitten hopes. It was the antagonist that pushed, pressed and harried them into a constant restless action through time – an enforced growth that required them to bloom or perish. I realised that the story I wanted to tell was a family history of health – the story of my family’s relationship with wellness and disease in the last 150 years, and how it had made us who we are now.
Health presents many faces to human experience – some physical, some metaphorical, but never simply medical. I felt another word was needed – a word that could give health a more motivational breadth. The word that suggested itself was ‘malady’. A malady is more than just an illness. It suggests a wider disorder – one that can be ascribed to a situation as well as an individual. It can describe the spiritual distemper of nations, of families, or the self. It’s a flaw of human character as well as of human physiology. A malady is a disturbance of the norm, a state that offers a narrative turning point and a crossroads on the road of life. The story of my family is a story of maladies: confronted, conquered, surrendered to.
This book is a history of my family in seven maladies – each malady a particular chapter in my family’s story. These maladies are hunger, pestilence, exposure, trauma, breathlessness, heart trouble and necrosis – seven maladies for seven ages of growth that have taken my penniless clan from their blighted Irish potato fields to our relative comfort as British media professionals in the space of a century and a half. These maladies aren’t confined to an explanation of medical illness, but embrace wider human emotions and endeavour, often more positive and motivational. They’re the teachers, life companions and crossroads in a story. Each chapter has three interconnecting elements addressing each malady: a medical exploration of the disease or ailment, an account of a period in my family’s history connected with it, and the personal testimony of people in my family that this malady influenced.
Although these seven maladies map broad periods of consecutive history, the testimony within them makes departures from strict chronology. Human experience has a natural resistance to being defined linearly. We edit our lives constantly – jumble the pieces round until they mean what we need them to. We order life by significance, not by date. We piece together what we know of our forebears and fuse it with what see of ourselves: what we need to feel or hear. We drop the incidental or the mundane, and select from the collage of oral rumour, faded images, scavenged text, terse documents, hidden feelings and unspoken pa
ins. We search for sense, for a lesson in the love given or the blood spilt by those who went before us.
Humans live as long as the stories they tell about each other. A family history is the greatest and most intimate of these mythologies. It’s the flesh and blood hanging on the lifeless skeleton of time. The immortal aspect of our mortal selves. A love poem to our own quiet creators, and a parting song to those who follow – those loving infants who will one day carry us to our graves.
1
HUNGER
Hunger n.
1. A very great need for food, or a severe lack of it.
2. A strong desire for something.
MEDICINE
The human body is a remarkable family of processes. Like any good family, it can unite in a crisis, organising itself with remarkable sophistication when faced with unexpected privation. Like the best families, it will sacrifice all it can to preserve the most valuable parts of itself. Yet there are limits to its ingenuity. Essential needs can’t be deferred forever. A body and its mind must eventually be supplied with the things it can’t do without. Starved of the essentials, even the most resilient family must eventually perish.
Human starvation is not a singular event, but a process – a ticking clock that begins only hours after the last morsel’s been consumed. It’s the body’s management of a slowly mounting crisis, against which strategies are adopted and altered according to the length of time malnourished, and the changing priorities this entails. The body’s response to hunger is to buy time by managing energy resources, trusting in the mind’s ability to relieve the body’s siege with new sustenance. It is, like humanity itself, fundamentally optimistic.
Food gives the human body two basic things: essential nutrients, like protein, vitamins and minerals, and energy, in the form of calories. Remove specific nutrients and we can quickly succumb to disease. Yet remove the energy to power our brains and bodies, and soon there won’t be any system left to suffer. Preservation of energy is therefore the most pressing of our hungry body’s needs.
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