As a confirmed atheist without children or any possibility of having them, I was surprised to discover a religion that appealed to me. At the risk of sounding like a psychiatrist's dummy, I blame my mum. She's discovered a passion for genealogy and has excavated, dusted off and illuminated the lives of our forebears. I feel vaguely ashamed that despite my willingness to read up on the monstrous demagogues and sweeping calamities that monopolise History, I've never looked too closely at the workaday, family history that created me and mine.
To paraphrase Stalin, whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. My mum's newly fleshed out tales of poverty, struggle and strife, of fragile flesh and dreams mauled by those monsters and calamities, take on new reality when you know they happened to individuals with your DNA, your chin shape, your skin condition, perhaps even shades of your personality. They cease to be just ink on a census form, chiselled marks on the Menin Gate or a fraction of a percentile in the Beveridge Report.
The religion I was thinking of is ancestor worship. It's not that I believe my forebears have an indefinite tenure on some astral plain from which they observe, gossip and occasionally reach out to deflect me from bad relationships or distracted bus drivers. Nor am I likely to turn the alcove housing my HD TV and XBox360 into a shrine to anything other than louche living. I simply like the aspect of ancestor worship that isn't about prostrating yourself before the supernatural, but rather giving those who preceded you filial respect and understanding.
My maternal great-grandfather, despite being the ripe old age of 36, enlisted in 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The direct hit on his communications trench left no remains fit to be interred or posted home. Although conscription was in full swing at the time, this relatively old man volunteered because with the khaki came food, accommodation and steady pay, all in limited supply at home.
His son always maintained that the wrong one was taken, as he and his siblings were left with a mother whose cruelty was equalled only by her fondness for the bottle. At an age when I'd have been playing with Action Man, granddad was picking coals from slagheaps while his dad was marching to the shambles. At an age when I'd have been contemplating 'O' levels and deciding whether to 'Choose Life', granddad was hacking at a coal face a thousand feet under Lancashire.
His experience moulded him. As a child, I was aware of a fidgety tension in him if we were toying with food or bickering. Only later did I learn of his passionate conviction that being spoiled was better then being beaten, and being wasteful was better than being hungry.
Snatching these moments from the clutches of oblivion isn't a question of becoming the next Catherine Cookson. It helps us to know who we are and how we came to be this way. It also shows us that our culture will seem as strange and remote to our descendants as it would to our long extinct ancestors. Keeping in touch with them can only make the transition easier.
