ON THE MEND
Madame Vuillard sewing, painting by Edouard Vuillard
Even in a throw-away world some things are just too precious to be cast aside.
back
to top
WHILE THE GRASS grows and the soil is pliable, our thoughts turn to mending.
Time was when everything usable was also repairable: chairs, sofas, hats,
accordions, wheelbarrows, carpets - all were in a state of flux, as new
defects were discovered and new patches stuck over them.
Repair was a need, a habit and an honoured custom, with its times, its
rituals, and its moments of celebration. People respected the past of
damaged things, restored them as though healing a child and looked on
their handiwork with satisfaction. In the act of repair the object was
made anew, to occupy the social position of the broken one. Worn shoes
went to the anvil, holed socks and unravelled sleeves to the darning last
- that peculiar mushroom-shaped object that stood always ready on my mother's
mantelpiece.
The custom of repair was not confined to the home. Every town, every
village, had its cobbler, its carpenter, its wheelwright and its smith.
In each community people supported repairers, who in turn supported things.
And our surnames testify to the honour in which their occupations were
held. But now we live in a throw-away culture: goods are cheap but shoddy,
and it is no longer economical to repair them. For a decade or two - until
the world clogs up with plastic - we shall go on treating objects as dispensable,
without claims on our goodwill and without durable personalities.
In repairing an object you endow it with character; and when repair is the normal response to breakages, the final discarding is like a funeral. We still feel this about shoes, since they are shaped by our use of them, become friendlier with the years and are never seen as quite replaceable. Hence we still have cobblers - a few at least.
Ours, in Malmesbury, is a lover of shoes, who sees the soul in the sole,
and the wearer in the worn. Shoes, for Mustafa, are the middle terms in
human relations, objects of respect and signs of his own social value.
He takes them from you with an intent, preoccupied smile, examines them
and then lovingly describes first their defects, then the very great virtues
- apparent to his expert eye - which justify the cost of mending them.
And because he can live from his skills, and at the same time express
himself through them, Mustafa is happy, as comfortable in an English farming
community as he was in his Turkish village.
Repair, as a custom and a way of life, survives on the farm. Now is the
time to mend fences, clear ditches and reinforce walls. It is the time
to re-hang gates and doors, to stitch the stable rugs, to patch the roofs
and sheds. Farmers, like sailors, spend half their day repairing things
and, like sailors, they have a life-and-death relationship with the things
they mend. Each year requires you to heal the wounds of the last one,
and this year things are particularly bad, the incessant winter rain having
made the fields impassable to tractors. Only now can we embark upon the
fencing that should have been completed before the cows came out; only
now have we been able to dig out the field drain that has been leaking
slurry for weeks.
The thing about mending, said our neighbour Harry, who was busy repairing
his trailer, is it's no good being in a hurry. Trailers, like tractors,
are survivors from the world before plastic. They are designed to last
and to shape themselves over time to the lives that are wrapped in them.
Harry's trailer is a case in point. "He's in better shape now nor
he was when he come," is Harry's verdict. The trailer has acquired
alloy edging along the walls and tailgate, a new axle behind, deep-cut
tyres that can get through all but the worst of the mud, and assorted
hardwood slats in place of its splintered boards of pine. Each spring
the trailer is repainted, its moving parts greased, and its bottom inspected
for cracks or loose fixings.
Of course, repairs don't always work: it was a faulty coupling that led
to disaster when the trailer crushed Harry's foot. But Harry puts this
down to temperament on the trailer's part, and in no way revised his obdurate
attachment to a vehicle to which he is wedded till death them do part.
The only question is, whose death? The trailer's, or Harry's?
It is one of the joys of country life that you are immersed in a culture
of mending and bending. There is something ungrateful in the habit of
throwing things away. You also feel more at home when you support the
world that supports you and tend to the needs of the things that you need.
This friendly relation with things underlies the appeal of Thomas the
Tank Engine and Bob the Builder. Little boys identify with the heroic
achievements of steam engines, cement-mixers, diggers and trailers. They
recognize these tools as comrades, bound to them in a reciprocity of need.
Story-book characters like Thomas and Bob invoke a primordial experience
of bonding, and one which is being driven from the adult culture to our
cost.
As Harry says, however, mending cannot be hurried and farmers, like the rest of us, are swept along on winds of change. In place of the post and rail comes the electric fence with plastic stakes; in place of the laid hedge come the barbed-wire strings from stump to stump, and in place of the roof comes the ubiquitous plastic sheeting. We leave larger and larger footprints on the earth; and soon even our shoes will cease to be mended.
Roger Scruton is a philosopher.This article is reprinted with permission from The Financial Times.
Subscribe
to Resurgence