He then tells me about a good friend of his, now living and working in New Zealand. This man had been involved in a horrific mining disaster there a couple of years ago, in which more than twenty of his colleagues had been killed, but he’d survived. Gwyn visited him recently and was astonished when this friend, who’d never written anything in his life before, showed him a powerful poem that he’d penned immediately after the tragedy. And Gwyn had also experienced something similar. He’d grown up in the next village, he tells me, and was extremely close to his aunt, who lived on a farm just ‘up there’ (he gestures to a wooded hillside we’re driving past). After she died, quite suddenly, in those days when he was overcome with grief, he found himself writing a poem as well. He’d never been any good at languages or literature or anything like that at school. To this day he has no idea where the words came from. But he read it at the funeral, and everyone was intensely moved, and asked him for the name of the poet. When he told them that he’d written it himself nobody believed him.
After I get out to open the second gate, a few hundred yards further down the track, I tell Gwyn that his experience has just reminded me of something I once heard the playwright Dennis Potter say. He’d been describing the lives of many in the working-class community where he’d grown up in the Forest of Dean, and the paradox that it was only through illness and being in hospital that he witnessed people finding a kind of liberation:
Many of these people never had a chance to be, to concentrate on the shape of their own lives – you know they’d been at work, they’d got mortgages, kids, marriages, toil, activity, habit – all making you think that what you are is defined by other people – whereas we’re all sovereign, separate, human beings.3 And most of the time life is telling us that we’re not … [it’s only] in war or a personal crisis that people find they’re far more heroic than they ever give themselves credit for … and they can begin to assemble something like a perception of the shape of their own lives.
The power we all have inside. We wait for others to give it to us. Sometimes we wait all our lives, and yet it’s there all the time. The creativity we are all born with is mind-blowing. The fact that so many people never really see what they have, or don’t feel it’s valued in any way, and that so many others lose sight of this flame altogether, is deeply disturbing. This reality has always shocked me – the way that our instinctive creativity as young children is abused and trammelled and disfigured and mocked through later childhood and adolescence. The funnelling, the narrowing towards employment or university – how few of us survive this process. Perhaps only a tiny minority.
I think of one of the most painful, and important, pieces of writing that I’ve ever come across, given to me long ago by a friend who was training to be a volunteer for the Samaritans. It was written by a teenage boy who had committed suicide, but left this single trace of who he was behind – on a piece of paper. A boy whose spirit had been destroyed by the society he’d grown up in:
He always wanted to explain things, but no one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he just drew and it wasn’t anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it up in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would
be only the sky and the things inside him that needed saying.
And it was after that that he drew the picture.
It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would
let no one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it.
Even when it was dark and his eyes were closed he could see it
still.
And it was all of him and he loved it.
When he started school he brought it with him,
Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.
It was funny about school.
He sat at a square brown desk like all the other square brown desks,
and he thought it would be red.
And his room was a square brown room like all the other square
rooms.
And it was tight and close. And stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk with his arm still and his
feet flat on the floor, still, with the teacher watching and
watching.
The teacher came and spoke to him,
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys.
He said he didn’t like them and she said it didn’t matter.
After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way
he felt about the morning. And it was beautiful.
The teacher came and smiled at him. ‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?’
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew
aeroplanes and rocket-ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue
and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.
He was square and brown inside and his hands were stiff.
And he was like everyone else. And all of the things inside him that
needed saying didn’t need it anymore.
It had stopped pushing. Crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.
*
The rain is still falling. Just the sound of the windscreen wipers in the van now, both of us lost in thought. In the distance the lights of a village come into view, in the lee of a hill. Grey chapel, grey roofs, no shop or pub that I can see. Gwyn pulls up outside his little workshop. I wait in the van while he goes to see whether he’s got the right kind of main fuse, and I think about what Gwyn’s just told me, and also about the boy who died. And why it is in our society that some people’s voices are never heard, or are only heard too late. And others feel they have a God-given right to speak. I’ve always felt this most acutely walking the leafy squares of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia and seeing the preponderence of blue plaques. Initially you might wonder at all the creativity and intellectual achievement that has occurred in these fine houses, but, if you reflect further, surely you have to examine the structures of class and privilege that underlie such creativity. All the unacknowledged labour, the army of cooks and nannies and servants, the cushion of wealth which enabled the Leslie Stephens and Virginia Woolfs and Duncan Grants to breathe the pure air of literature and art. Creative expression has very little to do with genius or genes, and a great deal to do with the environment surrounding you as a child.
This doesn’t mean that great art or ideas cannot come from those born into privilege, but it does mean that we should look more closely at the reality of that privilege. And the corollary of this is even more important – and disturbing: what happens to creative expression, beauty, passion, music, poetry and art when it never finds the ability to breathe or to speak? The millions of lost voices who have never been heard. Casualties of class, race, misogyny, homophobia, intolerance. The incalculable loss of that creativity, for the people themselves but also for the evolution of our societies. And I’m not thinking only about formal creative expression here – the creation of books or art or music – I’m also thinking about how human beings create themselves, shape themselves, and what it means to live a fully expressed life. And then how such a life can spark other lives. That sense of risk and experimentation.