My Year Off Read Online Free Page B

fascination, remembered our last, and quite recent, conversation in the foyer of the Groucho Club, and brooded sadly on the vagaries of chance. As Donne puts it, ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’
    Meanwhile, in my immobilized state all I could do was lie in my sickbed, stare obsessively at the cracks inthe ceiling, or out of the window at the ‘little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky’, and think. My brain, which had just let me down so badly, was perhaps never so active. The paramedics’ question — for ever linked in my mind with that headache and the Ivy’s glass of champagne — was a fundamental one. Who are you? Yes indeed. Who am I?

[3]
In the Blood
1–2 August
    I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace,
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
    Thomas Hardy,
Heredity
    Who am I? is, of course, the ultimate question, a question that every one of us would be wise to face up to at some moment in our lives. In fact, I had begun to approach the issue in an oblique way some years before, in 1987, when I wrote and presented a BBC documentary film about my McCrum forebears, an exploration of the Scots-Irish settlement of Northern Ireland entitled
In the Blood
, a phrase that eerily foreshadowed, as it turned out, my stroke. During those helpless moments in the hallway of my Islington house, I had looked up at the portrait of my great-great-grandfather, Robert McCrum, an Ulster linen millionaire whose hard-earned fortune was squandered by his onlyson, on the wall above me and wondered what on earth he, for whom adversity was as natural as the remorseless northern weather, would have made of my bizarre predicament. Later, as I lay in the hospital, I began to wonder what, if anything, my family history could say to me in these new, and dramatically changed, circumstances.
    Whatever way you look at it, McCrum is a peculiar name. That’s what I discovered when I was five years old, at Newnham Croft primary school in Cambridge. McCrum-Crumbo-Crumble-Crummy was the usual declension. At least my classmates did not know that the authentic Scots derivation means ‘son of the bent one’ (which begins to make some sense when you inspect the bizarre fantasies of my namesake, the great American cartoonist R. Crumb).
    When my family looked for a past, they found it in the romantic Highlands. As children, my sister Elizabeth and I were often told that McCrum was a corruption of McCrimmon and that we were descended from ‘the pipers to the lords of Skye’. But on the one occasion I actually went to Skye I found the appealing McCrimmon connection to be utterly fanciful. If my unusual name was a corruption of anything, it was MacIlchrum (alternative spellings: MacGilliechrum, Cromb, Crum, McCrumb, MacCrum) and belonged to lowly peons of the Clan MacDonald, scattered through the Western Isles and across the rough green pastures of Northern Ireland. These McCrums were the ‘sons of the bent one’, with clear implications of bastardy. The Ulster Scots’ ancestry is full of blood, mystery and confusion. In short, I’m from a people who do not know exactly who they are or where they come from, a scarecrow lineage, patched together from the flotsam and jetsam ofplanter history. I confess I have come to identify with this ragamuffin ancestral collage.
    I was born at home on 7 July 1953, in Cambridge, at 8 King’s Parade, opposite the King’s College Chapel, in a little white room that now sits above an antique shop. The world I came into was quite severely academic, professional, meritocratic and, on the face of it, as fortunate and privileged as you could wish for. It was also a world recovering from the traumas of the Second World War — hunger, separation and loss — a world in which the frank acknowledgement and discussion of emotion was seen as needlessly self-indulgent. My mother, Christine, is the daughter of